Rudolf Bahro

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Rudolf Bahro (18 November 1935 – 5 December 1997) was born in 1935 in Bad Flinsberg (now in Poland). He joined the East German Socialist Unity Party in 1954 as a student of philosophy at the Berlin Humboldt University.

From 1959-1960 he took part in the campaign to collectivise agriculture in the Oderbruch region; then, after a period as editor of a university paper at Greifswald he became an official of the Union of Scientific Employees in Berlin. He was also deputy editor of the Free German Youth magazine Forum. In 1967 he published an article by Volker Braun which the party regarded as slanderous, leading to his dismissal. Bahro spent the next 10 years working on labour organisation in a rubber factory, during which time he completed his PhD (on training of specialists in state enterprises) and wrote the book for which he is best known.

On 25 August 1977 he published Die Alternative. Zur Kritik des real existierenden Sozialismus in West Germany (later translated as The Alternative in Eastern Europe). His work is credited as being crucial in the development of Eco-socialism. As a result of his work he was charged with being a West German spy and on 30 June 1978 he was imprisoned for eight years. He was released under an amnesty in October 1979 and deported to West Germany. In West Germany he was one of the founders of the German Green Party and was elected to the Federal Executive in 1980. After disagreements with the party he resigned in 1985. He remained an increasingly fundamentalist ecologist and eco-socialist.

In November 1989 he returned to East Germany and in December spoke at the congress which founded the Party of Democratic Socialism. He was cleared of all wrong-doing in June 1990.

Bahro is seen by many as a pioneer of the democracy movement. However, others have accused him of being too uncritical of the far right during the last period of his life.

1 Publications in English
2 Additional literature
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] Publications in English

The Alternative In Eastern Europe, 1977 (German), 1978 (English)
Socialism and Survival, 1982
From Red To Green, 1984
Building The Green Movement, 1986
Avoiding Social & Ecological Disaster: The Politics of World Transformation, 1987 (German) and 1994 (English)

[edit] Additional literature

Ulf Wolter (ed), Critical Responses, 1980, (1978 in German: Ulf Wolter (ed.) "Antworten auf Bahro"), with contributions by Helmut Fleischer, Herbert Marcuse, Heinz Brandt, Rudi Dutschke, Lucio Lombardo Radice, Jiri Pelikan, and Pierre Frank. (Editions of "Antworten auf Bahro" also appeared in Yugoslavia "Pogledi Na Realni Socijalizam" and Turkey)