Walter Fischer (politician)

Walter Fischer (6 January 1901 – 28 April 1978) was an Austrian medical doctor, journalist, radio broadcaster, translator, poet, anti-fascist resistance fighter and Communist Party official.

[4] In 1920 he joined the Social Democratic Workers Party and the local Association of Socialist Students in Graz (of which he was chairman 1921-1923).

[4] During 1923-1924 he worked for the Austrian Association of Settlement and Small Gardens, and educated at summer camps of Reichsverein Kinderfreunde [de].

[4] During the 1934 February Uprising, Fischer led the Schutzbund forces at Laaer Berg [de] along with Josef Brüll.

[2] Fischer and his family travelled with a small group of other Austrian communists from Czechoslovakia towards the Soviet Union via Poland.

[4] Following the German attack on the Soviet Union, Fischer was evacuated to Sverdlovsk in August 1941, where he set up German-language radio broadcast.

[1][2] In Moscow Fischer translated an unpublished section of Maxim Gorky's My Universities and Mikhail Lermontov's poem The Novice.

[1] Fischer returned to Austria in October 1945, after the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union gave him permission to leave the country.

[2][8] At the time the Styria party organization was undergoing an profound internal crisis in the wake of the Soviet intervention in Hungary.

[8] On 8 December 1958 Franz Leitner was elected as the new Styria state chairman of the Communist Party, as Fischer didn't run for re-election for health reasons.

[1] Fischer reached out to Stephan Hermlin, after which his translations were published in the East German magazine Sinn und Form in 1964.

[2] In 1986 an autobiographical work, Kurze Geschichten aus einem langen Leben ('Short stories from a long life'), was published posthumously.