Rudolf Bahro obituary

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

December 11, 1997

Rudolf Bahro, 62, Dissident in Both Germanys

By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

FRANKFURT, Germany -- Rudolf Bahro, who wrote a book that instantly made
him one of East Germany's most prominent dissidents, and later became an
equally iconoclastic figure in West German politics, died on Friday in
Berlin after a long battle with cancer. He was 62.

A dedicated Marxist who believed socialist practices should be reformed but
not discarded, Bahro was imprisoned by the East German government and later
released after an international outcry on his behalf. He was exiled to the
West in 1980, became an early leader in West Germany's Green Party and then
quit in 1985 after he concluded that the Greens were too entangled in the
status quo to push through fundamental changes.

Born in 1935 in the resort town of Bad Flinsberg, in eastern Germany, Bahro
became a member of the East German Communist Party at 16, then went on to
become a journalist.

His ideological shift began in 1968, when Russia invaded Czechoslovakia to
reverse the "Prague Spring" liberalizations. When the East German
government refused to condemn the Russian invasion, Bahro quietly began an
intellectual odyssey that eventually led him toward heretical questions
about the legitimacy of his government.

He kept those views largely to himself, pretending to occupy himself
through much of the 1970s with a dissertation. In reality, he began writing
a systematic and scathing book about the East German system and allowed the
book to be smuggled to the West in 1977. The book was titled "The
Alternative: A Criticism of the Real Socialism" and soon became a best
seller in West Germany.

Bahro was arrested and sentenced to eight years in prison. After being
released in October 1979 he was allowed to resettle in West Germany in 1980.

Bahro arrived on the other side of the Berlin wall full of hope, still
driven by Marxist philosophy and his goal of promoting a new way in West
Germany. He quickly became active in the fledgling Green Party, which was
at that time devoted almost exclusively to environmental causes, and was a
member of the party's executive board from 1982 to 1984.

But even though the Greens were decidedly to the left of Germany's two main
parties, the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats, Bahro quit in
1985 on the ground that they had already sold out.

"The Greens are almost worse than useless," he said. "They have become so
much a part of the system that capitalism would have had to invent them if
they weren't here already."

Bahro spent most of the years after that as a professor at Humbolt
University in Berlin, drawing less and less attention with each passing year.

He is survived by his wife, Marina Lehnert, and four children.

Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company