[1][2][3][4] Auch ich träume manchmal davon dass es Deutschlands Bestimmung sein möge, den Abgrund zwischen Ost und West zu überbrücken, indem es die sozialistische Wirtschaftsbasis des Ostens mit der politischen Demokratie des Westens verbindet.
He used these "pulpits" to attack the Coalition Chancellor, Hermann Müller, over the government re-armament programme, producing slogans such as "school meals before battle ships" ("Schulspeisung statt Panzerkreuzer").
The SAPD was born of that conviction even though, with the benefit of hindsight, its emergence is frequently seen simply as a further example of the way the Nazis were able to encourage and exacerbate fragmentation of Germany's political left during the run-up to their own successful power-grab.
Fabain and August Enderle[8] set about creating a party newspaper: the "Sozialistischen Arbeiter-Zeitung" (SAZ) was launched in September 1932 with Walter Fabian its editor-in-chief.
Nevertheless, the combined vote share of the Nazis and Communists ensured that the Reichstag remained deadlocked, with no obvious way that any coalition could emerge with sufficient parliamentary backing to support a stable government.
Despite the parliamentary stalemate, however, following deft political machinations the Nazis, with the conditional agreement of President Hindenburg, took power at the end of January 1933 and lost no time in transforming Germany into a one-party dictatorship.
Many on the left remained confident that the "terrorist government" launched at the end of January 1933, though tolerated or in some cases supported by other "conservative" forces, would be short-lived.
He moved from Breslau to Berlin where, using the name Kurt Sachs, he managed to live in "relative anonymity" and continue with his (now illegal) political activities.
[1] Meanwhile, Dora Fabian, who had been campaigning alongside her husband for a united left to confront the Nazi menace since at least as far back as 1931, despaired of the continuing bickering between the leftwing political forces and resigned from the SAPD during the first few weeks of 1933.
He succeeded in continuing to live in anonymity, as far as the authorities were concerned, and during that year he travelled regularly between Berlin and Paris which, together with Moscow, was becoming the destination of choice for Germany's exiled opposition politicians.
Unable to return to his own apartment, he managed to avoid the Gestapo and a few days later crossed the snow-covered mountains into Czechoslovakia, still, at this point, an independent country.
This was the context within which, in 1936, he was one of a number of prominent socialists, inspired by the French prime minister Léon Blum, who tried to put together a German Popular Front (in exile) in order more effectively to oppose the Nazis.
Walter Fabian was still contributing as a journalist in the German language news publications produced in Paris, and as stories seeped out about the developments in Moscow he was disinclined to avoid reporting them.
Others involved in "Neuer Weg" included Peter Blachstein and Erwin Ackerknecht, two former SAPD comrades who had been expelled from the party at the same time as Fabian.
By that time thousands of people who had been forced to escape from Germany to Paris for reasons of political activism and/or race had been identified as enemy aliens and arrested.
Walter and Ruth Fabian were briefly held in Paris and then moved to a detention centre at Marolles, a run down village near Blois.
She then headed back south with her baby and settled in the "Free zone", administered from Vichy by a puppet government and still, at this stage, permitted a significant measure of autonomy by the Germans.
[5] However, his unsuitability for military service having been conclusively demonstrated, Ruth Fabian was able to extract her husband from the French Foreign Legion by the end of the year.
Many, like Walter Fabian himself, were both, but those charged with prioritising whom to help first always insisted that the only criterion was the extent of the danger which each individual would be in so long as he or she remained in Europe.
There was talk of taking a job selling lottery tickets in the local library and there were times when, reportedly, he seriously considered volunteering for a return to North Africa and service in the French army.
Acting on the instructions of the Gestapo, during the Summer of 1942 the French police closed down the escape programme operated by Varian Fry's Emergency Rescue Committee out of Marseilles.
According to a rule provided by the Swiss Justice and Police department and dated 18 June 1940, "fleeing civilians [were] to be turned back with the exception of women and children up to 16".
Walter Fabian was initially banned from writing for the Swiss press as the authorities in Bern sought to avoid antagonising the northern neighbour.
However, with the help of Walter Bösch, a senior editor at the Zürcher Tagesanzeiger (newspaper), he was able to work both as a translator and as an author under the pseudonym "Theo Prax" (a conscious contraction of the words "Theorie" and "Praxis").
Blachstein, as he later wrote, had always thought that Walter Fabian would return to Germany as soon as possible, and greatly regretted that his old friend chose to live in Switzerland till 1957.
[1] However, Fabian was by this time well settled in Switzerland, and not at all convinced that democracy imposed by "the bayonets of occupying armies"[5] or the events unfolding in the Soviet occupation zone were taking his home country in a positive direction.
On 8 October 1946 he rejected an offer from the former head of the socialist regional government in Saxony of 1923, Erich Zeigner, whom the Soviets had now appointed Lord Mayor of Leipzig.
Fabian also turned down an offer from the US occupation zone to take over the editorship of the Frankfurter Rundschau from Emil Carlebach whose publisher's license was revoked by the US military administration for what were described at the time as unexplained reasons.
In 1957, at the instigation of Otto Brenner, Walter Fabian was appointed editor in chief of the DGB's Gewerkschaftliche Monatshefte ("Trades Union Monthly"/ GMH) publication, a role which he held till 1970.
It was as a result of continuing differences of approach that in 1970 Heinz Oskar Vetter, recently elected to chair the DGB, relieved Fabian of his responsibilities at the journal after thirteen years.