Erich Fried

Poetry and Politics: A Conversation

with Stuart Hood

Erich Fried was not only a distinguished and prolific poethe said once in a characteristic phrase that he wrote poems the way rabbits have babiesbut a novelist, essayist
and translator of Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas and Eliot. These achievements have
been recognized throughout Europe but are only now beginning to be appreciated in Britain. Fried was remarkable for the fact that as an emigr writer he contrived not to lose
his great command of his native language and not to be cut off from social and political
developments in Germany and Austria, where he made noteworthy interventions on the
Left and had a readership of a size few British poets could aspire to. His career as a
poet went through various stages, which included bold experiments with language, but
at all times he was essentially a political poet for the simple reason that he was a person
who thought and lived politically. Fried was born in Vienna in 1921 into a middleclass Jewish family. As remarkable a young boy as he was an adulthe was a childprodigy actorhe was precociously aware of the political events of the twenties and
thirties: Bloody Friday 1927, for instance, when the Viennese police shot down Socialist
demonstrators, the street-fighting under the right-wing regime of Chancellor Dolfuss,
and the Anschluss in 1938. It was with the events of 1927 that our conversation began.
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I first became politically aware in 1927. It was the year of the Schattendorf
murder trials in Viennatrials of proto-Nazis who had killed an invalid
and an apprentice on their way to take part in a Socialist demonstration.
The judge, who was much more in sympathy with the murderers than
with the victims, had acquitted them on two occasions and now the case
was coming up in the Palace of Justice, the highest instance. For their
part, the workers in Vienna said: If they acquit them again there will be
trouble, and they were acquitted again and next day there was a big
demonstration and the police intervened. There were fights between
police and demonstrators. Two or three policemen had their uniforms
taken off them and were sent away in their underpantsit was summer.
And then the fighting became serious. One policeman and 86 workers
were killed and the Palace of Justice went up in smoke. This was called in
Vienna blutiger Freitagbloody Fridayand I happened to be in town
with my mother. The streets were closed and we couldnt get away, so I
saw through the shop-window of acquaintances where we had taken
refuge a number of stretchers with dead and wounded. One also heard
some shooting and, I think, saw some smoke though we didnt know what
was burning at the time. I was tremendously excited by all this and of
course listened to the grown-ups speaking about the Nazis who had killed
these people and so on. Then Karl Kraus made a poster and put it on the
bill-boards addressed to the Viennese Chief of Police, Herr Schober: Ich
frdere Sie auf abzutretenI ask you to stand down or literally I call you
up (auf) to stand down (ab) and this auf and ab impressed me very
much, as it were, graphically; Id only shortly before learnt to read. At
Christmas when I had to recite a poem in the school-hall, which we shared
with two other schools, I heard someone say Dr Schober is among the
guests. So I stepped forward and said: Ladies and gentlemen, I cant
recite my Christmas poem because I have just heard that Dr Schober is
among the guests. I was there on Bloody Friday and saw the stretchers
with the dead and wounded and cant recite the poem in front of him. So
Schober jumped up and, followed by his entourage, left and banged the
door. My teacher, who was a left-wing Social Democrat, embraced me but
my father said: I wont have this. The boy is swimming about in the wake
of Communism! I didnt know what that meant. We had the luxury edition of Meyers Konversationslexikon but only the first six volumes, which
didnt have Geschlechtsorgane (sexual organs) far less Kommunismus. So I had
to wait till we went to an aunt of mine, who didnt have the luxury-edition
but at least had all the volumes. There I looked up Communism and
then, thanks to the frequent references: socialism, Marx, Engels, socialist
legislation etc. So I owed the basis of my political education to my father
and Meyers Konversationslexikon.
During the elections before Dolfuss came to power there had been antiSemitic propagandaa baby with a very bent Jewish nose reading Marx and
the Bible in its cradle and so on. I was thirteen in 1934. I was speaker for my
form and the democratic institution of the speaker was ruled out just like coeducation. First Communists were prohibited and then the Social Democrats
published a leaflet which said: There is a rumour that we wish to attack
democracy. The truth is that the workers fight nobody, attack nobody, but
when the old laws are broken and freedom is in danger then the workers will
take up arms. I thought there would be fighting, and there was a few days
later when Dolfuss shelled the Viennese workers settlements.
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Dolfuss paved the way for the Nazisalso among the youngsters
because the official line was Austria is the second German state; we must
march separately but strike together. Then why not go straight for ein
Reich, ein Fhrer? When the Nazis came my parents were arrested and I
tried to form a group among my Jewish school-fellows to collect books
from frightened Jewish friends who were burning their Marxist and antiNazi literature. We collected such books and brought them to workers
flats and to municipal housing where there were Socialists and Communists who would look after them for a couple of years. We also made mistakes, like bringing Trotsky on the 1905 revolution to a Communist, who
probably didnt like it very much. I was firmly resolved to do something
against the Nazis. What we did was extremely clumsy and childish. It
came from a good feeling of not just sitting down.
Many of my schoolfellows were Zionists and when the Nazis came I
admired the right-wing Zionist group, the Thal, because the Hitler Youth
always wanted to attack them but they fought back cleverly. But I didnt
agree with them. I thought the attitude of the Zionists to the Arabs or to
the Palestinians was absolutely hopeless. I was never attracted by that.
My father was killed by the Nazisnot for political reasons but because
my mother tried to ensure that money belonging to her boy-friends
cousin was smuggled out of the country. She and my father were arrested
and my father was kicked to death.
In 1938 Fried left Austria as a teenager and came to Britain. In London he turned
his immense energies to helping others escape from Nazi rule, supporting himself by
what employment he could find. He worked at various times in a factory and in a
dairy depot. It was inevitable that he should be drawn into left-wing emigr politics
and equally inevitable that he should find himself involved in the debates and tensions between the various tendencies of an emigr Left dominated by the Communist
Party. It was at this time that he began to feel his way as a writer, his first volume
Deutschland: Gedichteappearing in 1944. This is how he described his
political development in those war years.
At first I didnt do anything politically. I had generally left-wing sympathies. I tried to find out who was rightStalinists or Trotskyists. I had
read Stalins Short History of the Communist Party and came to the conclusion that it was faking history, so I tended to the Trotskyists. There was a
Trotskyist circle in West End Lane, but I found that when there were
more than two or three people together they used to split up. I thought
this was stupid because the Communists did very effective work among
the young refugees. I thought that obviously what they said about the
Trotskyists was lies, but that this was a childhood disorder of many revolutionary movements, a terrible over-simplification, so if I joined them I
could work against it. And I did try to work against it.
I left the CP in 1943 when a boy whom I had recruitedmy best friend
committed suicide because he had the same doubts that I had, as I discovered from a poem in his pocket when I had to identify his corpse. I later
found more traces in his writings. I never got over that really. A founding
member of the Austrian Communist Party was chucked out at this time.
The Party was wrong without question. So I asked for an assessment of
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my work and when that was very positive I said: Right, now I am leaving,
Ive had enough. Then they announced that I must be treated in a very
friendly way because I could be very useful as a poet but that I mustnt be
told secrets any more because I had gone mad.
By 1944 I had distanced myself from the Communists. Naturally I was for
Allied victory but I was very much disturbed by the question of collective
responsibility, because I thought that was a waiving of class differences.
Holding the Germans collectively responsible meant putting Socialists,
Communists and Nazis into one group and I was against that. Also collective guilt tended to be treated at the time as a juridical fact and not a
psychological symptom. I didnt like that either. At the very end of the
war I was very disappointed by the atom-bombs. I thought they were war
crimes.
By the end of the war Fried had begun to make his mark as a poet and, like many
people on the Left at that time, had to find his political bearings in the post-war
world. This meant in his case, as he explained, deciding whether to settle in Germany, and what attitude to take to Stalinist Communism, both politically and
aesthetically.
Some poems of mine had been published in Moscow during the war by
Johannes R. Becher in International Literature. Then one of them travelled
to a camp in Kazakhstan, to anti-fascists who had fallen into disgrace,
and from there it went to Vorkuta, was translated into Russian and became a
camp song. So I entered immediately after the war into direct contact
with Communist writers but I disagreed with some of their theories
particularly with socialist realism and with their lies and half-truths.
When I was offered a job as lecturer at the University in East Berlin I
wasnt over-enthusiastic and I wanted to make it a condition that they
publish my new book first. They said Nobecause it was a step backward in my literary development. It was a volume of poems with halfrhymes and word-plays. So I turned their offer down even though I was
working in a factory at the time. I didnt really do much political work. I
was involved in packing food and doing propaganda for sending food to
Germany. Later I didnt want to do anything against my old comrades
and yet I didnt want to work with them. Occasionally I published something in their paper in Austria which wasnt damaging for questions of
the day.
I was very disappointed with Stalinism and didnt believe at that moment
that there was any political activity I could do. I got roused when so-called
Titoists were persecutedamongst them some friends of mind, one of
whom, Otto Sling, was later hanged in Czechoslovakia. Then I decided I
had to attack Stalinism but more on a Titoist line. I wasnt in favour of
Western capitalism although I thought, wrongly, that it was less harmful
than Stalinism. This changed gradually in later years, particularly when
Khrushchev made his secret speech and the CP was banned in West Germany. The West German army was recreated, for which Nazi officers
were taken over with their ranks increased by one grade. I found that
hateful. I started writing against such things.
In the grim conditions of the post-war years in Germany writers and poets had to
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feel their way in a language which had altered radically and a society which was
struggling to reshape itself under foreign occupation. The most influential and prestigious literary circle was the Gruppe 47, to which practically all recognized writers
like Grass and Bll belonged. Fried had some difficulty in being accepted because of
his politics, as he explained.
They wanted to show each other their writings and to review them. Their
aim was to prevent a repetition of Hitlernot a very ambitious programme, not a very intelligent one, in a way. It was social-democratic, by
and large. Gnter Grass was a member, a convinced social-democrat, and
he was very good at teaching the Germans that its not below the dignity
of a writer to work for his political convictions. On the other hand, his
political conviction was that any criticism of the SPD from the Left was
most dangerous and had to be fought as hard as possible. So very soon
our friendship was overI was more of the opinion of Reinhardt Lettau,
later prominent in the student movement, who was also of the left wing.
The group had become very prestigious: publishers came to the meetings
and if your reading happened to go well, then several would surround you
and want to publish your work and have it read on the radio stations. On
my first evening I made a good impression and increased my chances of
publication.
The philospher Ernst Bloch, author of Das Prinzip Hoffnung, who is only now
becoming better known in Britain, was a figure to whom Fried was drawn as a
man of the Left who resisted the categories of Communist orthodoxy in considering
questions of politics and philosophy. At this timein the 1950sFried had found
an unlikely position as a commentator broadcasting to East Germany for the BBC
German Service. He only left it in 1968, when he found that his freedom as a commentatorthe kind of freedom which can sometimes be found and exploited even in
the most monolithic of organizationswas being restricted.
After the Berlin Wall was built Ernst Bloch came over and didnt go back.
He also came to England where he immediately rang me up and invited
me to see him. I was working for the BBC German Service at the time. I
was very pleased when Bloch told me that he had studied my broadcasts
together with his studentsI never knew whether or not I was a collaborator, for I had to make some compromises with the BBC. But Bloch was
reassuring; he said I was not a collaboratorand that was very good. The
BBC was comparatively generousfor example, I could publish my book
of poems Und Vietnam und and that would have been impossible in a West
German station.
To me Bloch was somebody who had been very close to the Communists
a heretic, as Deutscher put it, but not a renegadeand I was trying
very hard to be a heretic but not by any means a renegade. This was sometimes tricky. My job at the BBC at the time was to write programmes for
Eastern Europe. On the one hand, this was a wonderful opportunity to
tell people things I really had on my mindlike things about Havemann,
the East German scientistand later I was able to give long talks on the
writings of Che Guevara, which were unobtainable in East Germany, and
put them out in weekly instalments so that people in East Germany record
them on tape. But there are certain limitsthere are forms of censorship. One noticed more and more that bourgeois democracy was not a real
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democracy. I wrote a poem at the time where I asked if a democracy

where one cannot ask if it is a real democracy is really a democracy. I
found I could talk about nasty things that happened in the West only
when I also said nasty things about the East. I sometimes found ingenious
ways out of it. For example, I would include for the sake of balance things
about East Germany and Russia even if I didnt think there was anything
particularly bad happening. These were then passed for policy, but if the
broadcast was too longas was often the caseI had to cut it at the last
minute at my own discretion.
I was most interested in Blochs book Erbschaft dieser Zeit (The Legacy of this
Time), which is shorter than Das Prinzip Hoffnung. What I learned from him
was, first, that though social and political events, our social background,
shape our thinking, as Marx says, they dont always shape it immediately
but sometimes with a great time-lag; and secondly, that they dont always
shape it in a straightforward way but often follow a crooked thinkingprocess. As Adorno says, normal consciousness is usually false consciousnessparticularly in the case of intellectuals, on whom so many different
things impinge and who are torn between their fear of being declassed
and the possibility of having less directly alienated jobs than many factory
workers, who must produce for the enemy to live at all. I do not think
Bloch is a great original philosopher. I think that he pointed out some
things in the history of Socialism beautifully, that he drew on a wide field
of knowledge, although psychological knowledge was not his forte. The
idea of a many-layered dialectical materialism was most valuable to me,
because Marx himselfas a son of the Enlightenmenthad clearly overrated the directness of human rational reaction to circumstances. He
therefore thought that in a crisis people will always very quickly rally
round their interests. In actual fact it is not so. In a crisis, people tend to
fall into panic-thinking and they regress and seek a strong man, a fatherimage or something to hold on to against their fear. Anything that would
help to explain these discrepancies in less clumsy ways than Stalinism did
was therefore a great help.
Bloch thought it was necessary to form utopias in order to go forward at
all. I would not say today that it is the only possible way in which you can
make progress. But it is certainly, historically speaking, one way in which
humanity has operated and in whichat a time of comparative hopelessness when one is an anti-fascist rather than a pro-communistone can
always find hope by fighting against injustice, if one doesnt really know
where justice leads. Evidently there was something wrong with the organization of communism as I knew it. I tended to think that the answer lay
with Rosa Luxemburgs criticisms. Bloch would not let himself be nailed
down on this point. At various times in his life he tried to make a Burgfriedena temporary trucewith Stalinism. He did this, for example, in
his book Freedom and Order, where he made play with that very dangerous
Hegelian maxim: Freedom is the recognition of necessity.
Someone who had more to give Fried than Bloch was Herbert Marcuse, whose libertarian views and critique of consumerism had an immense influence on young
Germans active in the political groupings that eventually came together to form the
APOthe Extra-Parliamentary Oppositionand to be the motor-force behind the
events of 1968 in Germany. Fried explained Marcuses importance in these terms.
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Marcuse was a great influence on German students on the Left. I first met
him at the Dialectics of Liberation Conference in London in 1967. Marcuse was one of the first people I knew of who tried to demonstrate
particularly in his Eros and Civilizationhow Marxism and psychoanalysis
interlink, that psychoanalysis needs Marxism and not Marxism psychoanalysis. (Before him there had been one grand simplificateur, Wilhelm
Reich, who then went off the rails, and before that Otto Gross, who died
in 1920.) He also analysed and criticized Soviet Marxism as a reflection of
the reality of the Soviet Union, and showed how it deviated from the
intentions of original Marxism. He also underlined the deceptive nature
of bourgeois democracy. He thought that the workers had been as it were
gleichgeschaltet (assimilated) by bourgeois society in late capitalism owing
to the long boom period and he also thoughtbased on the American
experiencethat it is not so much up to the workers nowadays to uphold
the banner of revolution in the metropolis but to the Randgruppenthe
fringe groupsand the students. This observation also held good for Germany, where the working class had been utterly demoralized by Hitler, its
tradition had been largely destroyed, and new trade unions had been
formed on an American rather than a German modelnot without the
influence of the CIA. Marxism had, after all, a Eurocentric attitude to the
lumpenproletariat like the blacks of the Southern states of the USA, and
the same holds good for Central and Latin America. But the lumpenproletariat in these countries is infinitely better than what Marx had seen in his
life-time in Europealthough, of course, he couldnt know that at the
time. But I think the Randgruppen theory of Marcuse was a theory of despair. He wanted something to move. I remember that in 1968, when it
started to look as if the French workers were with the students, Marcuse
said with great enthusiasm: That proves that all my theories are wrong.
He would have loved to have his theories proved wrong. He was not more
in love with his theories than with the revolution.
Fried had never ceased to be intensely interested in politics but had not been politically active in the conventional sense of the term until the student movement began in
Germany. Although he belonged to an older generation, he won the respect and trust
of the student activists, being particularly close to that remarkable figure, Rudi
Dutschke. This is his account of the period which included the demonstrations in
Berlin against the Shah of Iran, in which a student was shot by the police, and the
great Vietnam demonstration. Fried was prominent in these events, as he was in the
lively student forums at the Free University of Berlin.
The leading Social Democrat at that time was Willy Brandt, whom I
liked, and whom I had met also at the Gruppe. I thought that it would be
absolutely necessary for the Social Democrats to rule Germanynot the
Adenauer people. What happened instead was the SPDCDU Great Coalition, and that wasnt the best possible development for German Social
Democracy. Left-wing students then founded the APO, which was centred
in Berlin but existed in almost every university. I got involved gradually
because friends of mine and my publisher, Klaus Wagenbach, took part
in various protests against German rearmament and so on. And I signed
these protests as well. Then people came from Germany to visit me in
London, and some of them I liked very much. My things began to be published in left-wing anthologies. I was also in touch with other left-wing
writers like Andersch, who published a periodical Texte und Zeichen, in
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which I also published. Finally there was the German Socialist Students
League, which was part of the Social Democratic student organization:
the SDS.
Things were comparatively peaceful until 1967 when the Six Day War
broke out. Che Guevara was shot, as was Benno Ohnesorg, a student, at
the time of the visit to Berlin of the Shah of Iran on 2 June 1967. Then
there were violent reactions against his death. I wrote strong poems
attacking the Vietnam war and was myself denounced on the grounds that
one cant write such poems any more, nowadayspseudo-aesthetics. The
death of Benno Ohnesorg and the freeing of the policeman who shot him
tended to radicalize me very much. It was clear that the people who were
most active in organizing the opposition were the libertarian socialists.
Leading figures were Rudi Dutschke and Krahl, the favourite student of
Adorno in Hamburg. The Vietnam demonstration early in 1968 was a
profound experience because it showed how the police would not permit
a perfectly legal demo and how the very fact that prominent people from
many countries came to it forced them to give way.
The obvious question is: What went wrong? How did this impressive political movement peter out leaving a legacy of sterile terrorism? Fried was clear about the
reasons for the failure of the student movement and why, although he knew and
respected people like Ulrike Meinhoff as human beings, he could not condone
terrorism.
Unfortunately Marcuses theories were not proved wrongas he would
have wished. The students did not make sufficient contact with the working class. Since the revolution was not on the order of the day, Dutschke
thought that one had to try by whatever means to keep possibilities open
in society; capitalism could not go on, or should not be allowed to go on,
for it was ecologically and morally and in every way impossible. Marx
thought that the colonies would be lifted to the level of the industrialized
countries. But we know now that unless a former colonial country has
special capital resources, like oil, the poor countries become poorer and
the rich richer, because not enough accumulation takes place. Rudi
thought that in the absence of a revolutionary situation, trying to make
reforms was not in itself criminal, but that it was bad when reformism
became convinced of itself and tried to ward off other solutions. Meanwhile the fringe-groups theory had led some people to think that one
could imitate the example of the South American Tupamaros in Europe.
That was the beginning of the BaaderMeinhoff Group.
I had written against imitations of the Tupamaros in something I offered
to a German publisher, but there were adherents of the Randgruppen there
who sabotaged itit always vanished. I eventually published it in Switzerland so that it should be there on the record. The BaaderMeinhoff
Group was very much an attempt to base itself on the Tupamaros and
the foco theory, which didnt even work with the Tupamaros in the
long run, let alone in Europe. And the Tupamaros had the passive
sympathy of the populationwhich was not the case with the Baader
Meinhoff Group.
The Red Army Fraction wanted to have the freedom which it was denied
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by the Communist Party. But it didnt allow its members more freedom,
as one can even see in their far from fraternal dealings with the rival
faction, the 2nd of June.
The Red Army Fraction came into being after Rudi was out of the picture
the victim of an assassination attemptand after the students revolt
had reached its maximum strength. Because the students couldnt make
their own alliance with the working class or with the broad group of German intellectuals, they tended to retreat like any movement without a
realistic strategy or tactics. People felt weak and therefore wanted to hold
on to something stronger. One group, the DKP Traditionalisten, held on to
Moscow again, particularly after Czechoslovakia was invaded. On the
other hand, Ulrike Meinhoff, who had for years been an illegal member of
the DKP, had grown more and more disillusioned and the invasion of
Czechoslovakia more or less put the final nail into the coffin of her DKP
allegiance. But already before that, for example at the Vietnam demonstration in 1966, she successfully countered the CP and East German line
by getting Peter Weisswhom they wanted desperately to keep away
from what they regarded as an adventureto come from East Berlin.
And she had done many other things. For example, she analysed the
Bartsch child-murders, tracing them back to his education and the complexes it had produced. This showed a great advance on DKP thinking,
which still claimed that Hitler Fascism had been essentially the dictatorship of the most reactionary groups of capital. After all, there had also
been the Fascist mass movement and the reification and alienation of the
Nazi party itself; otherwise the war would have ended two years earlier
when German heavy industry saw there was nothing more in it for them.
Nevertheless, Ulrike Meinhoff didnt have the knowledge that Rudi had,
and as long as he was there she constantly sought his advice in all her
political developments. That is why he said, when he was in England, that
had he known she was going to go in for all this armed struggle he could
have brought her out of that madness in an afternoon. He was not very
grandiloquent and wouldnt have said such a thing lightly. Anyway the
very undignified scramble for father figureswhether Mao or the Soviet
Uniondidnt attract the entire Left. Ulrike wanted something else. One
must see too that at the time Germany was supplying America with
chemicals for the Vietnam Warwhat they call today the Seveso poison.
(Agent Orange was not radically different from the so-called defoliants,
which also crippled lots of children, and did untold damage to the country.) Germany was also providing sophisticated electronic war-material.
And to sabotage such transports would have been a sound idea, in fact.
One had to form a special illegal gang for such a thing, which would
know how to pinch cars, break into premises and blow up something if
necessary. But to call that armed struggle, to believe according to the foco
theory that if one fights against it more and more people will see the barbarity of the government and therefore support the revolution was a ridiculous miscalculation. And that was their downfall. Primitive activism in a
moment of despair is very attractiveand one cant say that the Baader
Meinhoff Group didnt do anything useful. Thus they destroyed a computer
in Heidelberg whichaccording to US Army sourcescaused three
flights by B-52 bombers against the Vietnamese not to take place.
What then, I asked Fried, was the positive legacy of the sixties in Germany and of
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the involvement in political action and debate of a generation of students who today
must be middle-aged members of German society?
Unfortunately the student movement did not successfully reach out to the
mass of the German working class. Detractors said it was a complete failure. But a hell of a lot of teachers all over Germanyin what used to be
a nationalist, right-wing professionare products of 68, of the 68
generation. The universities, too, used to be a reserve of the Right
throughout the Weimar period but began moving to the Left in the Adenauer period and to some extent remain there today. Educational principles, demands for permissiveness and so on have emerged which would
not have done so without the students. Even the reactionary forces have
found that they have had to give up some of their sexually repressive attitudes, which were one of the bases for the production of an authoritarian
morality. These are profound after-effects of the student movement, and
Germany would look entirely different today if it had never existed.
Today the student movement is powerless as far as revolutionizing German society goes. However, our aim must still be to overthrow capitalism
or to overcome it at the very least, because as long as there is production
for the maximization of profit all the splendid achievements are only temporarylike the democratizaton of German Universities, which has been
taken back step by step in recent years. Now, the possibility of taking
over power at some future date has been increased by the reproduction in
Germany of a militant left-wing tradition. After the war the Frankfurt
School created a left-wing tradition for the first time and made Marxism
respectable, stupid as this sounds, for, of course, respectable Marxism
usually isnt Marxismnor was it. Adornos Marxism was a very uncombative Marxism. The student movement were the first people who not
only wantedlike the CPa future Communism but who also said: In
order to fight alienation, we must in our life-conditions prefigure the conditions of life in the future and prepare, if you like, islandsnot idyllic
islands, but what we might call Rckzugsgebiete, areas to fall back on, areas
of life where the circumstances are not those of capitalist competition.
The Wohngemeinschaften, or communes, made many ultra-left mistakes,
such as the idea that their first step should be to take the door out of the
lavatory so that people shouldnt experience shame, which is idiotic. But
a new life-form was created on the whole: doors arent taken out of
lavatories any more, but you find the new attitudes in the housing
cooperatives and cooperative enterprises and workshops for the
unemployed, which are self-initiative ventures of varying success. All this
wouldnt have happened without the left-wing tradition, and that
tradition didnt exist before the Frankfurt School.
What did he think then of more recent political developments in West Germanyof
the rise of the Green movement and the part played in it by a figure like the East
German refugee, Rudlof Bahro? What sympathy did he have for Bahros political
analysis and how far did it chime with his own?
I had become increasingly vexed with the substitutionist ideology of the
Communists. Rosa Luxemburg had already forecast the terrible consequences of democratic centralism. So I did not know what to make of
things. One attempt was Bahros Die Alternative, which tried to criticize
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so-called actually existing socialism by classically Marxist methods. He

came to the opinion that it didnt deserve to be called socialism but was
a transitional society, which contained the grains, the elements, for a transition to real socialism. To me it seemed that his analysis was qualitatively
convincing and quantitatively wrong in that it overrated these qualities.
Soon after he came to West Germany Bahro became a member of the
Greens, which Dutschke also joined at the end of his life. The necessity of
this ecological movement had already been forecast by Marcuse. Taking
to task that very crude 19th-century Marxist, Dietzgen, who said that once
we have socialist means of production then we have the whole of nature as
our field for exploitation, Marcuse said that that would mean exploiting
nature to the point that it would be ruined. To him socialism, the use of
the means of production for social necessity, was the precondition for a
new harmony with naturebecause obviously production for the maximization of profit is not a basis for that. I found this very convincing. I
also formed the opinion that the anarchists (particularly Bakunin, who
was a much more primitive thinker than Marx) had one positive thing
which only Rosa Luxemburg had after theman unbroken attitude to the
necessity of freedom. The others, by saying that we couldnt afford it, that
we had to be like a disciplined fighting army, took it upon themselves to
undergo the same procedures as those of a trained army. And once you
sacrifice the tradition of freedom, even for the best of purposes, it takes a
hell of a long time till you get it back. Without the student movement
there would have been no Green movement in Germany, or else it would
be a Blut und Boden, blood and soil movementa right-wing fantasy.
Originally there were struggles within the Green movement between a
Right and a Left. The Left won. The struggles today are between the absolutists, the fundamentalists, and the realists. To a certain extent they
need each other. The Fundis need to keep the Realos from becoming a
completely opportunist ginger-group of the Social Democrats, while the
Fundis by themselves would be a nonsense and end up as preachers
devoid of politics. I think the Greens are tremendously important,
because if there is a situation in Germanyand I hope there will be
when the Social Democrats get stronger, then it will be absolutely necessary to have the Greens to make the Social Democrats do things, not stew
in their own juice. That means encouraging all those people in the SPD
who really want to do something about ecology, who really want to do
something about getting rid of nuclear weapons. And it means encouraging all those within the SPD who are trying to fight against bureaucracy.
Both Marcuse and Rudi Dutschke had the idea of a synthesis between
Marxism and anarchism. German Social Democracy has gone far too far
away from Marxismmuch further even than the Austrian Social Democrats. But there are rather more Marxist elements among the Greens than
even among the left-wing Social Democrats. I think that, in a very rough
and ready preliminary form, certain tenets of Marxism and anarchism
could be united in a RedGreen coalition. That is why the German bourgeoisie is absolutely scared stiff of a RedGreen coalition. Theyd much
rather have a Social Democratic government. And when the bourgeoisie
is really scared about something thats always a useful sign, because by
and large they are much more informed and much more consequential
class-fighters than the vast majority, unfortunately, of the working class.
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Fried was remarkable for the fact that although he settled in London and had British citizenship, he made important interventions in German politics through his
poetrywhich was banned from schools in Bavaria and should, according to one
Christian Democrat politician, be burnedas well as by engaging in public debate
on German television and radio and in other forums. How successful did he think
he had been?
I have not intervened in Germany in a very focused way, but I have
always tried to point the way to a socialist revolutiona possibility
ruined by the situation, by the weakness of the German revolutionary
forces, and the aberrations of such forces as used to be revolutionary. I
could mainly fight against each injustice as it came up, whether it was the
Berufsverbot in Germany, or the Vietnam war, or the Zionist behaviour
against the Palestinians, or the Contras in Nicaragua, or the attack on the
student movement or the murder of the BaaderMeinhoff peoplewith
whom I did not agreein jail. My interventions were sometimes very
successful, but on the whole they were what Brecht called a series of glorified retreats and thats not good enough. Now for the first time I see the
chance for a direct advance, above all in Eastern Europe, an attempt to
make a genuine article out of the distorted articleSocialism. If that can
be achieved, if Gorbachev can be helped to achieve itand there is no
doubt he can be helped from the West and not just by spineless fellowtravelling, as in Stalins daythen I want to do that.

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