Life and Work
Fischer was born Elfriede Eisler in Leipzig in 1895, the daughter of Marie (née Fischer) and Rudolf Eisler, a professor of philosophy at Leipzig. Her father was Jewish and her mother was Lutheran.
She was the elder sister to noted film and concert composer Hanns Eisler and fellow communist activist Gerhart Eisler. She studied philosophy, economics and politics at the University of Vienna where her father was working. She moved to Berlin in 1919 and she was a leader of the Communist Party of Germany from 1924 to 1925. Espousing left-wing positions, she was a member of the Reichsrat from 1924 to 1928. She fled to Paris in 1933 and then to the United States in 1941. In the late 1940s, she testified before HUAC against her brother, Hanns, resulting in his blacklisting and deportation.
She also testified that another brother, Gerhart, was a major Communist agent. The Communist press denounced her as a "German Trotskyite". She propounded critical views of Stalinism and called for a rebirth of Communism after Stalin's death. Before this period of anti-Stalinism, she had reportedly been instrumental in the rise to power of the Triumvirs (Stalin, Grigory Zinoviev, and Lev Kamenev), viciously denouncing Trotsky at the fifth congress of the Communist International.
Isaac Deutscher, a biographer of Trotsky and Stalin, described her as a "young, trumpet-tongued woman, without any revolutionary experience or merit, yet idolized by the Communists of Berlin." In 1955, she returned to Paris and published her books Stalin and German Communism and Die Umformung der Sowjetgesellschaft. For eight years, Fischer, code-named "Alice Miller", was a key agent for "The Pond". She died in Paris in 1961, aged 65, from undisclosed causes.
Read more about this topic: Ruth Fischer
Famous quotes containing the words life and, life and/or work:
“Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night ... shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves.”
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“... married women work and neglect their children because the duties of the homemaker become so depreciated that women feel compelled to take a job in order to hold the respect of the community. It is one thing if women work, as many of them must, to help support the family. It is quite another thing—it is destructive of woman’s freedom—if society forces her out of the home and into the labor market in order that she may respect herself and gain the respect of others.”
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