Walter Fabian

Walter Fabian (24 August 1902 – 15 February 1992) was a German socialist politician, journalist and translator.

During the Nazi years he became a resistance activist and political exile.

Walter Max Fabian was born in Berlin.

Richard Fabian, his father, was a self-employed interior architect who would have much preferred to be a musician.

Visitors to the house included Bruno Walter.

Powerfully progressive political currents in the family home came primarily from his mother, born Else Hosch.

The Fabians' social circle also included leftwing intellectual heavyweights such as Hugo Haase and Kurt Rosenfeld.

He attended what was then the Mommsen Gymnasium (secondary school) in Berlin's Charlottenburg quarter.

He was not quite twelve when war broke out, and by the time he left school he was already a vocal backer of those calling for peace.

After leaving school he went on to study Philosophy, Pedagogy, History and Economics at Berlin, Freiburg iB., Gießen and Leipzig.

He had been contributing to SPD newspapers since 1920.

After receiving his doctorate he became a committed member of the German Peace Society ("Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft" / DFG) and of the Association of Committed School Reformers ("Bund Entschiedener Schulreformer" /BESch).

In addition he joined the Saxony branch of the Social Democratic Party ("Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands" / SPD) itself.

Both the Communist Party and the SPD had, by the later 1920s, become increasingly shrill in their mutual antagonism and contempt, to the point where by 1931 both party leaderships had expelled large numbers of their "extremist" members.

Meanwhile, the seemingly unstoppable rise of populism persuaded many of the expelled party members, (as well as some of the more thoughtful party activists who had not been expelled) that the only way to avert a Nazi government was for the political left to unite in opposition to the Nazi tide.

The SAPD was born of that conviction even though, with the benefit of hindsight, its emergence is frequently seen simply as a further example of the way the Nazis were able to encourage and exacerbate fragmentation of Germany's political left during the run-up to their own successful power-grab.

Within the SAPD Walter Fabian was elected regional chair for East Saxony.

In 1924 he concluded his studies with a doctoral dissertation on the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster, entitled "Das Problem der Autorität bei Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster".

It was also in 1924 that he married the author-journalist Dora Fabian.

In 1924 he also became an editor at the Ernst-Oldenburg Verlag (publisher) at Leipzig, supporting the party's educational work.

The next year he took on the responsibilities of political editor with the party newspaper, "Chemnitzer Volksstimme".

Unlike Dresden, the home of the Royal Saxon Court and Saxony's traditional administrative capital, he saw Chemnitz as a workers' city, without the liberal intellectual pretensions of Leipzig, but rather Saxony's equivalent to the Manchester of a few decades earlier, when Engels undertook his socio-political researches in England's cotton capital.

He perceived Chemnitz as a more appropriate fulcrum for his own interests in the promotion of the labour movement and pacificst politics.

In Chemnitz Fabian also became a member of the SPD's regional party executive.

Additionally, from 1928 he was producing two Dresden based SPD opposition news sheets, "Sachsendienst" and "Sozialistische Information".

He used these "pulpits" to attack the Coalition Chancellor, Hermann Müller, over the government re-armament programme, producing slogans such as "school meals before battle ships" ("Schulspeisung statt Panzerkreuzer").

(Hermann Müller was, like Fabian a member of the SPD.)

Fabian had relocated to Dresden in 1928.

There he was increasingly in demand as a lecturer and speaker, notably among the city's Young Socialists.

His uncompromising pacifism and his talent for public speaking meant he was always seen as a leftwing comrade within the party, and viewed with suspicion by many in the party hierarchy.

He also attracted a growing band of mostly young leftwing followers from inside the party.

In the end the leadership lost patience.

He was subjected to a "speaking ban" at the end of 1930, and in September 1931 he was excluded from the SPD.

Along with around 1,000 Young Socialists in Saxony, Walter Fabian now joined the Socialist Workers' Party ("Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands" / SAPD) launched, formally, shortly afterwards.

Then, in March 1932 at the party's launch conference in Berlin, he was elected to the party national executive.

Despite being set up as a national party, the SAPD in reality depended on two regional power bases.

Due in part to the reputation and actions of Walter Fabian, one of these was East Saxony.

The other, also a major industrial region (and also an area where the Nazis enjoyed strong support), was in the western part of Silesia, in and around Bresalau (as Wrocław was then known).

Fabain and August Enderle set about creating a party newspaper: the "Sozialistischen Arbeiter-Zeitung" (SAZ) was launched in September 1932 with Walter Fabian its editor-in-chief.

The marriage, described by one thoughtful writer as "brief but friendly", would be over by the time of Dora's death in London, under circumstances that have never been entirely clear, during the early summer of 1935.