A deserter from the German army in World War II and a member of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, Harich became a professor of philosophy at Humboldt University in 1949.

Before his final studies at Humboldt, he had entered the Kammer Der Kunst Schaffenden, Department of Creative Artists, in June 1945 as Paul Wegener's personal assistant.

He pushed for free elections, the admission of legal opposition groups, and the dissolution of the Stasi, the secret police of General Erich Mielke, leading others to often look at his ideas as Utopian, but was granted the title of "most brilliant head in the SED.

"[4] Agreeing with Bloch and Lukács, Harich criticized Stalinism and believed in renewing Marxism from a humanist and naturalist point of view.

Harich produced a manifesto and presented his ideas in October–November 1956 to Georgy Pushkin, the Soviet ambassador and to Walter Ulbricht, the first secretary of the Socialist Unity Party, himself.

This presentation and his notorious loose tongue led him to being convicted of "counterrevolutionary plotting," indicted with "formation of an enemy group" on behalf of the West German SPD, and branded a revisionist.

After being released from jail, Harich was allowed to resume his previous literary work and became an editor of Akademie Verlag in Berlin in 1965, even though it took 33 years for the court to pronounce him "rehabilitated" in April 1990.

[6] Having spent most of his time in jail in solitary confinement, Harich emerged in 1964 as a hard-line Stalinist and enthusiastic critic of all modernist experimentation, even labeling Friedrich Nietzsche as a "Nazi worshipper.

Also, after the Wende (change) in Germany in 1989, he became the chairman of the Alternative Enquete Komission (AEK) which conducted research on the history of the GDR, and aligned himself with the self-proclaimed Mikhail Gorbachev reform communists after 1990.

[3] In the same year, Harich also received the prestigious Heinrich Mann Prize for editing and journalism, conferred by the GDR Academy of Fine Arts.

In the 1970s, Harich published Communism without Growth: Babeuf and the Club of Rome with Rowohlt Verlag,[3] which argued that a neo-Stalinist state with dictatorial authority to enforce environmental standards could avert an ecological catastrophe.