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/or work:
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?”
—Bible: New Testament, Matthew 6:25.26.
Jesus.
“But it isn’t only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It’s more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying. They are refusing emotion because at the end of very emotion are property, money, power. They work and despise their work, and so freeze themselves. They love but know that it’s a half- love or a twisted love, and so they freeze themselves.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)