Georges Haupt

Georges Haupt, born Gheorghe Mathe Haupt, also known as George or György Máthé Haupt (January 18, 1928 – March 14, 1978), was Romanian and French historian of socialism, publisher and journalist, politically active in the Romanian Communist Party until 1958. Of Hungarian- and Romanian-Jewish extraction, he was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust—deported by the Nazified Hungarian Kingdom in May 1944, he was held in extermination camps, and finally integrated with the Buchenwald resistance network. He chose to settle in the Kingdom of Romania, which was then under a Soviet occupation, and which became a communized country in early 1948. As an affiliate of the governing party (known as the "Workers' Party" for much of his career), Haupt was involved in the transition to Marxist historiography and contributed to official propaganda, writing mostly in Romanian. After a stint at Bolyai University, he completed his studies at Leningrad State University, and published some of his research in the Soviet Union; his writings were generally focused on political, literary and labor history, evidencing the civilizational ties between the Russian Empire and the Balkans. While confirming to the normative requirements of Stalinism, and working under official historians such as Petre Constantinescu-Iași, Haupt thus began exploring his own interest in the "geography of socialism".

After 1954, Haupt rallied with Constantinescu-Iași and Andrei Oțetea, in curbing the influence exercised in academia by Mihail Roller. While he initially opposed Roller from a Marxist-Leninist position, he soon became supportive of De-Stalinization and "national Marxism" throughout the Eastern Bloc. Though he became a suspect for his presence in Budapest during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and his prolonged contacts with the anti-Stalinist left, he was still allowed to climb through the Romanian political hierarchy; upon ousting Roller, the communist apparatus had embraced a Romanian national-communism, which discovered Haupt as a contextual ally. Haupt himself preferred liberal Marxism with a focus on proletarian internationalism, and was therefore pushed into an ideological conflict with the national-communists.