On 9 January 2024, we received the sad news that Götz Langkau had passed away. Although many people knew that he had not been doing well in recent years, the news came as a shock. Götz belonged to a generation of IISH staff that restored the profile of the Institute, especially through his contributions to scholarly source publications.
He exemplified reliable historical scholarship combined with social commitment. In 1953, Götz fled the GDR at age 17. In 1956, he enrolled at West Berlin's Freie Universität. Majoring in German studies, history, philosophy, and sociology, the young student pursued a broad intellectual scope. During this period, interest in Marx resumed at universities in the West, including Götz's mentor, the philosopher and sociologist Hans-Joachim Lieber. In the late 1950s, initial signs appeared of what culminated in student revolts in all major university cities in the world a decade later in 1968. West-German students were of course specifically affected by the German partition. As this issue was not only military but above all ideological, socialism was a crucial issue for this group. Götz became active in the Sozialistische Deutsche Studentenbund (SDS). This organization gradually drifted away from the encompassing SPD, leading to a rift in 1961. Götz was active precisely during these years and knew many of the activists who later became prominent in the German student movement and in left-wing politics.
In 1963, Götz was working as a student assistant at the Eastern Europe Institute of the Freie Universität, when A.J.C. Rüter, director of the IISH from 1953 until his death in 1965, contacted Lieber to enquire whether he knew of a candidate for a vacancy at the German department of the IISH. This department managed one of the original core collections at the IISH, the Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels archive. Due to the rapid growth of the collection before the war, the removal of the archives to Germany during the German occupation, the messy restitution after 1945, and, moreover, a severe lack of funds, access to all these collections and thus also the Marx-Engels collections was deeply inadequate. In one of his most important achievements, Rüter obtained a grant from the Ford Foundation, making it possible to catch up, thereby ensuring the accessibility this world heritage merited. Götz accepted the offer from Rüter to come work at the IISH, becoming one of the last to work in Amsterdam with Ford project funding. He later said that he was struck by the patriarchal ambience that prevailed under Rüter at the IISH. He had not experienced this at the Freie Universität. In 2013, he wrote an article in Beiträge zur Marx-Engels-Forschung. Neue Folge about the Ford project and its remarkable meanderings at times.
Text: Huub Sanders, 10 January 2024