Wolfgang Harich - Literary Work

Literary Work

Harich became accomplished and created a name for himself at a very young age. He followed in his father’s footsteps and became a Jean Paul scholar, writing two books dealing with Paul’s epistemology and poetic vision, which are arguably his finest scholarship. In 1946, he worked for the newspaper of the soviet occupation regime, Tagliche Rundshau; and he was also a journalist for the French-licensed daily Der Kurier. He had become editor-in-chief of the journal Deutsche Zeitschrift fur Philosophie with Arthur Baumgarten, Ernst Bloch, and Karl Schroter in 1953. In the same year, Harich also received the prestigious Heinrich Mann Prize for editing and journalism, conferred by the DDR Academy of Fine Arts. In somewhat accordance with his arrest, Der Spiegel wrote its cover story to Harich in 1956, stating that West German intellectuals regarded him highly and saying, "despite his youth, probably the only DDR intellectual capable of calling into question the current foundation of the communistic state, the doctrine of ice-hard Stalinism." They even called him "an intellectual phenomenon" and "a pure intellect on two feet." In the 1970s, Harich published Communism without Growth: Babeuf and the Club of Rome with Rowohlt Verlag, which argued that a neo-Stalinist state with dictatorial authority to enforce environmental standards could avert an ecological catastrophe.