Wolfgang Schröder

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Wolfgang Schröder (9 July 1935 – 18 November 2010) was a German historian and educator. He was born in Dresden and studied history at Karl Marx University in Leipzig from 1953 to 1957. After teaching at a secondary school, he became a research assistant in 1958 at the Leipzig branch of the German Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He earned his doctorate in 1963, supervised by Ernst Engelberg and Lothar Mosler, on the German trades union movement in the 1890s. In East Germany, he completed a Promotion B in 1972.

From 1969 to 1990 Schröder edited the History Yearbook (Jahrbuch für Geschichte) and was part of its editorial board from 1973. In 1976 he moved to East Berlin to work at the Central/National Historical Institute of the German Academy of Sciences and Humanities, where he became a professor in 1986. After German reunification, he worked from 1992 to 1996 as an assistant at Bonn’s Commission for the History of Parliamentarianism and the political parties in Germany.

Schröder’s main research focused on the late 19th century, especially the German labor movement. He wrote about Ernestine Liebknecht and Nathalie Liebknecht, and his major achievement was a biography of Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900), a founder of the SPD and the father of Karl Liebknecht. When Schröder died in Taucha in 2010, the biography was unfinished; three years later his widow Renate Dreßler-Schröder and Klaus Kinner published a version in 2013, incorporating new research from previously overlooked sources.

He was married to Renate Dreßler-Schröder. Schröder’s career bridged East Germany and reunified Germany, leaving a lasting mark on the study of the German labor movement and the SPD.