Communism - For and Against. The Political Itinaries of Ruth Fischer (1895-1961)

Ruth Fischer once ranked among Germany and Europe's most prominent women. Right after the end of WWI, she co-founded the Communist Party of Austria, became famous as the chair of the Communist Party of Germany in the Weimar Republic and, after 1945, was associated with the anti-communist crusade in the United States where she authored the best-selling book Stalin and German Communism. At the end of her life she vainly hoped that the Soviet Union under Nikita Khrushchev would move towards a more democratic variant of communism. Ruth Fischer was the sister of two other prominent Austrian-German communists: the composer Hanns Eisler (1898-1962), a disciple and friend of Arnold Schönberg, and the journalist Gerhart Eisler (1897-1968) whom she would denounce as Moscow's most dangerous communist agent in the United States. To explain why Ruth Fischer's political itinerary went to such extremes - astonishing even in the 'Age of Extremes,' to mention Eric Hobsbawm - is the purpose of the following remarks.