The Politics of Culture: Rudolf Bahro and Opposition in the GDR

Abstract

The arrest last year of 41 year old party official Rudolf Bahro for the publication in the West of The Alternativel marks a turning point in the process of dissent in the German Democratic Republic. For the first time a major voice of opposition comes not from the artistic or scientific-academic communities, but directly out of the ranks of the party apparatus. Whereas the poet Wolf Biermann or the professor Robert Havemann speak for sectors of an intelligentsia which have traditionally found occasion to oppose the strictures of government policy, Rudolf Bahro is a product of that policy's own socialization. A comparison with the maverick Wolf Biermann is instructive. Born within the same year, both men began their formal political education as totally committed communists studying philosophy at the Humboldt University in the construction years between 1953 and 1960. Here, however, the similarities end almost as they begin. Biermann's rapidly growing reputation in the early 1960s as a poet enfant terrible openly critical of government political and cultural policy soon brought him public censure for his concerts, rejection from party candidacy and finally Berufsverbot from 1965 until his forced exile in the fall of 1976. More than any other figure, Wolf Biermann represents that segment of the younger generation which refused to allow their political commitments to conform to the version of socialism represented by the SED hierarchy. Rudolf Bahro is the reverse side of that coin of commitment. At 16 a