Walter Fabian (24 August 1902 – 15 February 1992) was a German socialist politician, journalist and translator. During the Nazi years he became a resistance activist and political exile.
Life Early years Walter Max Fabian was born in Berlin. Richard Fabian, his father, was a self-employed interior architect who would have much preferred to be a musician. Visitors to the house included Bruno Walter. Powerfully progressive political currents in the family home came primarily from his mother, born Else Hosch. The Fabians' social circle also included leftwing intellectual heavyweights such as Hugo Haase and Kurt Rosenfeld. He attended what was then the Mommsen Gymnasium (secondary school) in Berlin's Charlottenburg quarter. He was not quite twelve when war broke out, and by the time he left school he was already a vocal backer of those calling for peace.
Weimar Germany After leaving school he went on to study Philosophy, Pedagogy, History and Economics at Berlin, Freiburg iB., Gießen and Leipzig. In 1924 he concluded his studies with a doctoral dissertation on the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster, entitled "Das Problem der Autorität bei Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster". He had been contributing to SPD newspapers since 1920. After receiving his doctorate he became a committed member of the German Peace Society ("Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft" / DFG) and of the Association of Committed School Reformers ("Bund Entschiedener Schulreformer" /BESch). In addition he joined the Saxony branch of the Social Democratic Party ("Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands" / SPD) itself.
It was also in 1924 that he married the author-journalist Dora Fabian. The marriage, described by one thoughtful writer as "brief but friendly", would be over by the time of Dora's death in London, under circumstances that have never been entirely clear, during the early summer of 1935.
In 1924 he also became an editor at the Ernst-Oldenburg Verlag (publisher) at Leipzig, supporting the party's educational work. The next year he took on the responsibilities of political editor with the party newspaper, "Chemnitzer Volksstimme". Unlike Dresden, the home of the Royal Saxon Court and Saxony's traditional administrative capital, he saw Chemnitz as a workers' city, without the liberal intellectual pretensions of Leipzig, but rather Saxony's equivalent to the Manchester of a few decades earlier, when Engels undertook his socio-political researches in England's cotton capital. He perceived Chemnitz as a more appropriate fulcrum for his own interests in the promotion of the labour movement and pacificst politics. In Chemnitz Fabian also became a member of the SPD's regional party executive. Additionally, from 1928 he was producing two Dresden based SPD opposition news sheets, "Sachsendienst" and "Sozialistische Information". He used these "pulpits" to attack the Coalition Chancellor, Hermann Müller, over the government re-armament programme, producing slogans such as "school meals before battle ships" ("Schulspeisung statt Panzerkreuzer"). (Hermann Müller was, like Fabian a member of the SPD.)
Fabian had relocated to Dresden in 1928. There he was increasingly in demand as a lecturer and speaker, notably among the city's Young Socialists. His uncompromising pacifism and his talent for public speaking meant he was always seen as a leftwing comrade within the party, and viewed with suspicion by many in the party hierarchy. He also attracted a growing band of mostly young leftwing followers from inside the party. In the end the leadership lost patience. He was subjected to a "speaking ban" at the end of 1930, and in September 1931 he was excluded from the SPD.
Along with around 1,000 Young Socialists in Saxony, Walter Fabian now joined the Socialist Workers' Party ("Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands" / SAPD) launched, formally, shortly afterwards. Both the Communist Party and the SPD had, by the later 1920s, become increasingly shrill in their mutual antagonism and contempt, to the point where by 1931 both party leaderships had expelled large numbers of their "extremist" members. Meanwhile, the seemingly unstoppable rise of populism persuaded many of the expelled party members, (as well as some of the more thoughtful party activists who had not been expelled) that the only way to avert a Nazi government was for the political left to unite in opposition to the Nazi tide. The SAPD was born of that conviction even though, with the benefit of hindsight, its emergence is frequently seen simply as a further example of the way the Nazis were able to encourage and exacerbate fragmentation of Germany's political left during the run-up to their own successful power-grab. Within the SAPD Walter Fabian was elected regional chair for East Saxony. Then, in March 1932 at the party's launch conference in Berlin, he was elected to the party national executive. Despite being set up as a national party, the SAPD in reality depended on two regional power bases. Due in part to the reputation and actions of Walter Fabian, one of these was East Saxony. The other, also a major industrial region (and also an area where the Nazis enjoyed strong support), was in the western part of Silesia, in and around Breslau (as Wrocław was then known). Fabain and August Enderle set about creating a party newspaper: the "Sozialistischen Arbeiter-Zeitung" (SAZ) was launched in September 1932 with Walter Fabian its editor-in-chief. The first few editions were produced in Berlin after which the SAZ operation was transferred to Breslau.
Nazi Germany At the second general election of 1932, in November, the Nazi vote share fell back from 37% to 33% suggesting that, under the democratic procedures then in place, the Nazi wave might have peaked. Nevertheless, the combined vote share of the Nazis and Communists ensured that the Reichstag remained deadlocked, with no obvious way that any coalition could emerge with sufficient parliamentary backing to support a stable government. Despite the parliamentary stalemate, however, following deft political machinations the Nazis, with the conditional agreement of President Hindenburg, took power at the end of January 1933 and lost no time in transforming Germany into a one-party dictatorship. Many on the left remained confident that the "terrorist government" launched at the end of January 1933, though tolerated or in some cases supported by other "conservative" forces, would be short-lived. However, Fabian calculated that it would be foolish to place much confidence in the prospect of a rapid collapse of the Nazi régime. Although political activity was not actually banned until March 1933, the broad ground rules for the government's approach to political opposition were already on display by the end of January. He moved from Breslau to Berlin where, using the name Kurt Sachs, he managed to live in "relative anonymity" and continue with his (now illegal) political activities. Meanwhile, Dora Fabian, who had been campaigning alongside her husband for a united left to confront the Nazi menace since at least as far back as 1931, despaired of the continuing bickering between the leftwing political forces and resigned from the SAPD during the first few weeks of 1933. She was arrested in Berlin in March 1933, but released a few days later. Her belief that plans existed for her imminent re-arrest was almost certainly correct, and her decision to forestall re-arrest by escaping to Prague well founded. By September 1933 she had ended up in London.
At a clandestine "party conference" in March 1933 Walter Fabian was re-elected to the SAPD party executive. By 1934, many party comrades, having been arrested, he had emerged as leader in Germany of the underground party. He succeeded in continuing to live in anonymity, as far as the authorities were concerned, and during that year he travelled regularly between Berlin and Paris which, together with Moscow, was becoming the destination of choice for Germany's exiled opposition politicians. It was also during this period that Fabian began a long period of political cooperation with the man who later became the SAPD's most famous member, Willy Brandt.
Paris exile In January 1935 Fabian was lucky to avoid arrest after a party comrade passed him a message that, under torture, the comrade had found himself unable to remain silent as to Fabian's whereabouts and false identity. Unable to return to his own apartment, he managed to avoid the Gestapo and a few days later crossed the snow-covered mountains into Czechoslovakia, still, at this point, an independent country. He was accompanied by his second wife, Ruth. They made their way to Prague and from there, via Austria and Switzerland, to Paris, where by now the SAPD had established their exiled leadership team which Walter joined. Ruth also worked with the party and during 1935 was deprived, in her absence, of her German citizenship by the government back in Berlin. It not clear why Walter Fabian suffered the same sanction only on 5 August 1937. In Paris he was involved, above all, in the party's press section. As part of this he set up the SAPD's "Documentation Office" which gathered, collated and collected helpful cuttings from newspapers.
As a member of the leadership of an illegal (in Germany) opposition party exiled in Paris, Walter Fabian was also part of the antifascist "Lutatia Circle" (named after the Paris hotel where they held their meetings). This was the context within which, in 1936, he was one of a number of prominent socialists, inspired by the French prime minister Léon Blum, who tried to put together a German Popular Front (in exile) in order more effectively to oppose the Nazis. Others involved included Heinrich Mann, Rudolf Breitscheid and Willi Münzenberg. The idea came to nothing, however. Meanwhile, the exiled leadership of the SAPD, by now headed up by Jacob Walcher, was moving decisively to the political left and, possibly more importantly, to a pro-Stalin line, taking their lead from the Soviet Communist Party in Moscow where Stalin was embarking on an industrial scale purge of his political opponents, whether actual, potential or merely suspected. Walter Fabian was still contributing as a journalist in the German language news publications produced in Paris, and as stories seeped out about the developments in Moscow he was disinclined to avoid reporting them. He also wrote critically about Moscow's attacks on the POUM ("Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista"), a Spanish Marxist party and quasi-military movement that came to prominence in the Spanish Civil War and, having fallen foul of Stalin, saw several of its leaders tortured and/or killed by emissaries sent from Moscow. Because of his criticism, in 1937 Fabian was expelled from the SAPD. It was the second time in five years that he had been expelled from a political party, and for the rest of his life he avoided further membership of any party.
He did, however, form a "resistance group" under the title "Neuer Weg" ("New Way"), and devoted himself to producing the movement's eponymous news-magazine. Others involved in "Neuer Weg" included Peter Blachstein and Erwin Ackerknecht, two former SAPD comrades who had been expelled from the party at the same time as Fabian.
War years