Rudolf Bahro - Childhood and Education

Childhood and Education

Bahro was the eldest of three children, parented by Max Bahro, a livestock industry consultant, and Irmgard Bahro (born Irmgard Conrad). Until 1945, the family lived in Lower Silesia, at first in the spa town of Bad Flinsberg, and then in Gerlach Lauban, where Bahro attended the village school. Towards the end of World War II, Max Bahro was drafted into the Volkssturm, and, after his capture, detained as a Polish prisoner. As the Eastern Front approached, the family was evacuated and Bahro was separated from his mother and siblings during the flight (the rest of Bahro's family, with the exception of his father, died of typhoid soon afterwards). Bahro lived with an aunt in Austria and Hesse, spending several months in each location, and eventually re-connected with his father, who was managing a widow's farm in Rieß (as of June 2012, a part of Siehdichum.)(Max Bahro later married the widowed Frieda Reiter Fürstenberg, in 1951).

From 1950 to 1954, Bahro attended high school in Furstenberg. Since it was assumed that all highschoolers there would join the Free German Youth (FDJ), Bahro joined in 1950, albeit reluctantly. This was, as he later commented, the only time he did something under pressure against his will. In 1952 he applied for membership to the SED, which he entered in 1954. Bahro was regarded as extremely intelligent and graduated from high school with honors. He attended Humboldt University in Berlin from 1954 to 1959 and studied philosophy. Among his teachers were Kurt Hager (who later became the ideologist of the SED), Georg Klaus and Wolfgang Heise. The topic of his thesis was "Johannes R. Becher and the relationship of the German working class and its party on the national question of our people."

Until 1956, Bahro was an ardent admirer of Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin. The revisionist policy shift of Nikita Khrushchev at the 20th Congress of the CPSU in February 1956, changed Bahro's views. He followed the imminent unrest in Poland and Hungary with great interest, and he suggested a protest statement against the wall newspaper in which he expressed his solidarity with the insurgents and openly criticized the restrictive information policy of the GDR leadership. As a result of this statement, national security spied on him for two years.