Wolfgang Harich - Political Views

Political Views

Harich was a Marxist, Stalinist, a convinced communist, and an environmentalist. He joined Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (KPD), the Communist Party of Germany, then later joined Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED), the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, which later became later the ruling party of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), in 1946.

As a twenty-year-old, Harich was drafted into the Wehrmacht, but left and joined an anti-Nazi group in 1944. He was a Stalinist until the early 1950s; he wrote in a memoir of recalling "crying an ocean of tears over Stalin’s death." Yet, after the removal of the Stalinists, he moved on to wanting a neutralized and united, democratic socialist Germany. His beliefs and principles were driven by self-transformation, and he was mostly interested in Marxist philosophy. Harich was looking for a "third way" between Stalinism and Capitalism, he wanted a "humanistic socialism" in a reunified Germany. He established and engaged his friends, opponents, and social democrats in controversy in West Germany to argue that the DDR should make reforms to motivate the reunion of Germany. His sweeping reform proposals represented the only Party attempt at the internal restructure of the DDR before it collapsed. He pushed for free elections, the admission of legal opposition groups, and the dissolution of the Stasi, the secret police of General Erich Mielke, leading others to often look at his ideas as Utopian, but was granted the title of "most brilliant head in the SED." Agreeing with Block and Lukacs, Harich criticized Stalinism and believed to renew Marxism from a humanist and naturalist point of view.

Harich produced a manifesto and presented his ideas in October–November 1956 to G. M. Pushkin, the soviet ambassador and to Walter Ulbricht, the East German Dictator, himself. This presentation and his notorious loose tongue led him to being convicted of "counterrevolutionary plotting," indicted with "formation of an enemy group" on behalf of the West German SPD, and branded a "revisionist." He was arrested on 29 November 1956 and indicted in March 1957 where he remained in jail until he was released in December 1964. Harich referred to his years in jail as his Rufmord, or reputation-murderer, and felt guiltless because all he did was "just talk." He actually thanked the Stasi for their vigilance in arresting him for without their attention, he would not have been given ten years in jail, instead he would be looking at the noose. This quote of Harich was recorded at his hearing,

I wish to deliver my thanks to the SSD … I’ve found that they are correct and decent … I had gotten completely out of control … I was a runaway horse, which no call could have stopped … If I hadn’t been taken into custody, I wouldn’t today be ready for 10 years, which the Herr Prosecutor has recommended, but only for the hangman, and therefore I thank the SSD for their alertness.

He had later testified against a former friend Walter Janka, head of Aufbau Publishing Company, creating a new "text book" characterized enemy. "Janka vs. Harich: the worldly older man vs. the young genius, the practical man vs. the classically educated intellectual, the tough working-class war hero vs. the bourgeois academic utopian." Janka refused to ever meet Harich again after the trial, insisting that Harich’s false testimony landed him three years in Bautzen, the most horrific jail for political criminals.

After being released from jail, Harich was allowed to resume his previous literary work and became an editor of Akademie Verlag in Berlin in 1965, even though it took 33 years for the court to pronounce him "rehabilitated" in April 1990. Having spent most of his time in jail in solitary confinement, Harich emerged in 1964 as a hard-line Stalinist and enthusiastic critic of all modernist experimentation, even labeling Friedrich Nietzsche as a "Nazi worshiper." and insisting that his legacy was nothing but "a giant trash bin." Harich focused on more environmental political problems in the 1970s. In 1975 he undertook a impractical campaign for a state communisms in the service of environmental protection, in hopes of making some change. Also, after the Wende (change) in Germany in 1989, he came the chairman of the Alternative Enquete Komission (AEK) which conducted research on the history of the German Domestic Republic, and aligned himself with the self-proclaimed Mikhail Gorbachev reform communists after 1990.