Wolfgang Schröder

Wolfgang Schröder was born in Dresden in 1935.^{[citation needed]}

He passed his school final exams (Abitur) in 1953. He studied history at the Karl Marx University 1953 and 1957. After which he worked as a secondary school teacher.^{[citation needed]}

In 1958 he became a research assistant at the "1871–1917 department" at the Leipzig branch of the Institute for History of the German Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He received his doctorate in July 1963, supervised by Ernst Engelberg and Lothar Mosler. His subject was the German Trades Union movement in the 1890s. A peculiar feature of the East German university system - taking a lead from the Soviet system - was the Promotion B (loosely "Doctorate B"), which in terms of building an academic career (though not, protagonists insist, in other respects) took the place of a Habilitation qualification. Schröder received his Promotion B in 1972 for work on the Labour Movement in the final third of the nineteenth century.^{[citation needed]}

Between 1969 and 1990 he was employed as editor responsible for the Jahrbuch für Geschichte ([East German] History Yearbook). From 1973 he was also a member of its editorial college. In 1976 he relocated from Leipzig to East Berlin when he switched to working as a researcher at the Central/National Historical Institute at the German Academy of Sciences and Humanities. It was here, in 1986, that he received the title of "professor".^{[citation needed]}

Following the changes of 1989/1990, from 1992 till 1996 Schröder worked as an assistant at the Bonn-based Commission for the history of parliamentarianism and political parties [in Germany].^[4]

Schröder's main research area was the history of the later nineteenth century, with a particular focus on the German labour movement. After publishing a book on Ernestine Liebknecht (1897, 2nd ed., 1989) and an essay on Nathalie Liebknecht (1990),^[1] his crowning academic achievement was to have been his biography of Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826-1900), a pioneer of the SPD, and the father of Karl Liebknecht (1871 - 1919). Unfortunately, when Wolfgang Schröder died at Taucha in 2010,^[3] the biography remained unfinished. However, the project was well progressed, and three years later his widow, Renate Dreßler-Schröder and the historian Klaus Kinner were able to publish a version of it in 2013 as part of Schröder's literary legacy. No attempt was made to gloss over the fragmentary nature of the work, but it nevertheless contained a large amount of new research involving hitherto overlooked sources.^[3]