Rudolf Bahro (18 November 1935 – 5 December 1997)[1] was a dissident from East Germany who, since his death, has been recognized as a philosopher, political figure and author.

Until 1945, the family lived in Lower Silesia: first in the spa town of Bad Flinsberg and then in neighboring Gerlachsheim,[3] where Bahro attended the village school.

Towards the end of World War II Max Bahro was drafted into the Volkssturm,[dubious – discuss] and, after his capture, detained as a Polish prisoner.

Bahro lived with an aunt in Austria and Hesse, spending several months in each location and eventually reuniting with his father, who was managing a widow's farm in Rießen (now part of Siehdichum).

He followed the Polish October and the Hungarian Revolution with great interest, expressed his solidarity with the insurgents in a wall newspaper and openly criticized the restricted-information policy of the GDR leadership.

Seeing conditions in the factories soon brought him to the conclusion that the East German economy was in a crisis and the primary reason for this was that workers had little voice in the workplace.

He expressed this view in a December 1967 letter to the Chairman of the State Council, Walter Ulbricht, proposing a transfer of workplace responsibility to the workers with grassroots democracy.

In 1972 Bahro began part-time work on his dissertation on development conditions of high-school and technical-college groups in the VEBs (state-owned enterprises of the GDR).

Later in West Germany, Bahro said that the theoretical bases for The Alternative were Karl August Wittfogel's 1957 Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power and earlier Marxist works.

[citation needed] The Alternative is divided into three parts: The introduction begins with the premise that the Communist movement did not lead to the theoretically expected situation, but instead continued on the capitalist path with only superficial changes.

Bahro concludes that in the Soviet Union (and, consequently, also in countries such as the GDR) not the theoretically expected socialism but a form of proto-socialism had emerged.

For the reason, he posits that at the time of the October Revolution the Soviet Union was far from the stage of development presumed in Marx's theory of history.

On 22 August 1977, the West German magazine Der Spiegel published an extract from The Alternative[6] and an interview with Bahro, during which he admitted writing the book.

[10] Rudi Dutschke was critical, classifying Bahro as detached from Leninism with too little respect for human rights and calling his suggestions "totally unrealistic.

"[12] These analyses were accompanied by a broad wave of publicly expressed solidarity with Bahro, climaxing in a letter by Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass in The Times on 1 February 1978 that was also signed by Arthur Miller, Graham Greene, Carol Stern, Mikis Theodorakis and other celebrities.

[13] To write and publish a book was, in itself, legal in the GDR; however, Bahro was accused of working for the West German intelligence service (from whom he was thought to have obtained his information).

The depth of solidarity is illustrated by an appeal to the State Council of the GDR in the Frankfurter Rundschau of 11 May 1979, organized by Bahro Committee in 12 countries and signed by a number of celebrities.

[1] On 17 October he was deported with his former wife, their two children and his partner Ursula Beneke to the Federal Republic of Germany, in accordance with his July request.

He advocated a restructuring of society in economic, environmental and social-policy terms, which should be linked to a broad retreat from the world market and a move away from capitalist industry.

As part of a lecture tour of the United States in summer 1983, Bahro enjoyed several weeks at Rajneeshpuram with Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (Osho).

In his December 1984 "Hamburg speech," Bahro made a comparison with the political and social situation in the Weimar Republic: At that time, there had also been a broad movement in society that was dissatisfied with prevailing conditions and wanted change.

In the Weimar Republic, the "brown" pole of the political spectrum (the Nazis) overpowered the left with "nationalist mythology in disguise; therefore, resistance to capitalist development" could not begin.

Bahro's Hamburg speech ended with the allegation that Joschka Fischer's supporters had a lust for power, a situation that could lead to civil war and subsequent dictatorship.

Inspired by Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika, Bahro hoped for a "prince of environmental change" and suggested the establishment of a consensus-oriented body similar to the British House of Lords.

After reading out the names of all the people who had helped him with his book Die Alternative, he criticized the previous speaker, Minister President and Deputy Party Chairman Hans Modrow, as well as Karl Marx, Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin.

His radical environmental ideas, which were hardly known in the GDR at that time, were far removed from the problems that interested the delegates, and his polemical introduction provoked fierce resentment.

On 15 September, shortly before the end of the GDR, the Minister of Education and Science appointed him associate professor of social ecology at Humboldt University.

This accusation was made particularly aggressively by the Association for the Advancement of Psychological Knowledge of Human Nature [de], a right-wing organization founded in Zurich which, in a work titled The Fascism of the New Left, claimed that Bahro's real goal was an "eco-fascist dictatorship."

In 1992, a former party colleague of his, Jutta Ditfurth, joined the debate when, in her book Feuer in die Herzen [Putting Fire in the Hearts], she accused him of turning to esoteric, authoritarian and nationalist ideas.

A conversation with the Minister-President of Saxony, Kurt Biedenkopf, in the summer of 1991 led to the socio-ecological futurology project LebensGut in the village of Pommritz, near Bautzen.