Rudolf Bahro

Rudolf Bahro (18 November 1935 – 5 December 1997) was a dissident from East Germany who, since his death, has been recognised as a philosopher, political figure and author.

Bahro was a leader of the West German party The Greens, but became disenchanted with its political organization, left the party and explored spiritual approaches to sustainability.

Bahro was the eldest of three children of Max Bahro, a livestock-industry consultant, and Irmgard Bahro (née Conrad).

Until 1945, the family lived in Lower Silesia: first in the spa town of Bad Flinsberg and then in neighboring Gerlachsheim, where Bahro attended the village school.

Towards the end of World War II Max Bahro was drafted into the Volkssturm, and, after his capture, detained as a Polish prisoner.

As the Eastern Front approached, the family was evacuated and Bahro was separated from his mother and siblings during the flight (the rest of Bahro's family, with the exception of his father, died of typhoid soon afterwards).

Bahro lived with an aunt in Austria and Hesse, spending several months in each location and eventually reuniting with his father, who was managing a widow's farm in Rießen (now part of Siehdichum).

From 1950 to 1954, Bahro attended high school in Fürstenberg (now part of Eisenhüttenstadt).

Since it was assumed that all high-school students would join the Free German Youth (FDJ), Bahro reluctantly joined in 1950.

This was, as he later commented, the only time he did something against his will under pressure.

In 1952 he applied for membership in the Socialist Unity Party (SED), which he joined in 1954.

Bahro was regarded as intelligent, and graduated from high school with honors.

He attended Humboldt University in Berlin from 1954 to 1959 and studied philosophy.

Among his teachers were Kurt Hager (who later became the philosopher of the SED), Georg Klaus and Wolfgang Heise.

The topic of his thesis was "Johannes R. Becher and the relationship of the German working class and its party to the national question of our people".

Until 1956, Bahro was an admirer of Lenin and Stalin; Khrushchev's leaked "secret speech" in February 1956 changed his views.

He followed the Polish October and the Hungarian Revolution with great interest, expressed his solidarity with the insurgents in a wall newspaper and openly criticized the restricted-information policy of the GDR leadership.

As a result of his views, national security spied on him for two years.

After passing the government licensing examination, the SED sent Bahro to Sachsendorf (a part of Lindendorf).

He edited a local newspaper, Die Linie (The Line) and encouraged the area's farmers to join the LPG agricultural cooperative.

In 1959 Bahro married Gundula Lambke, a Russian language teacher.

The couple had two daughters (one of whom died at birth) and a son, in addition to Gundula's daughter.

In 1960 Bahro was appointed to the party leadership of the University of Greifswald, where he founded the Unsere Universität ("Our University") newspaper and served as editor-in-chief.

The same year saw the publication of his first book, a collection of poems entitled In dieser Richtung (In This Direction).

Beginning in 1962, Bahro worked as a consultant for the Corporate Executive Committee of the Union of Science (one of the divisions of the Free German Trade Union Federation) in Berlin; in 1965 he was appointed deputy chief of the Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ) student magazine, Forum.

During Bahro's tenure with the FDJ he was hampered by conflict with the increasingly restrictive policies of the SED, which made him a target of criticism.

Due to the unauthorized publication of an article by Volker Braun, Bahro was dismissed as deputy chief in 1967.

From 1967 to 1977 Bahro worked for a number of companies in the rubber and plastics industry as an organization development specialist.

Seeing conditions in the factories soon brought him to the conclusion that the East German economy was in a crisis and the primary reason for this was that workers had little voice in the workplace.

He expressed this view in a December 1967 letter to the Chairman of the State Council, Walter Ulbricht, proposing a transfer of workplace responsibility to the workers with grassroots democracy.

A few weeks later, the Prague Spring began; Bahro took a lively interest, supported the movement.

In May 1968 he was interviewed by a member of the Central Committee, who made it clear that his solidarity with the "counter-revolution" was no longer tolerated.

This led Bahro to develop his ideas systematically, and to publish them.

His decision was reinforced by the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia on 21 August.

This was, as Bahro later said, "the blackest day" of his life and the reason for his final break with the SED.

He decided not to make the break publicly, to protect his book project.

In 1972 Bahro began part-time work on his dissertation on development conditions of high-school and technical-college groups in the VEBs (state-owned enterprises of the GDR).

At the same time, he secretly wrote a thematically broader manuscript which later became The Alternative.

In 1973, Gundula filed for divorce; both spouses said later this was as a precautionary measure to protect the children against government reprisals.

However, in 1974 Gundula informed state security about the secret book project and handed over a copy of the manuscript; after that, Bahro was under surveillance.