Ruth Fischer - Life and Work

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.