Harry Nick

Harry Nick (15 August 1932 – 7 December 2014) was an East German Marxist economist.

He was a 57-year-old professor and department head at the Central Committee Academy for Social Sciences ("Akademie für Gesellschaftswissenschaften beim ZK der SED") in Berlin when street protesters broke through the Berlin Wall in November 1989, after which many of his contemporaries rapidly disappeared into obscurity. Harry Nick emerged as a robust exponent of "economic literacy". He had always been prepared to argue his case, even when his evaluations were out of harmony with some party dogma of the moment: he spent the final decades of his life as a controversialist and media pundit, happy to explain what went wrong with the "socialist experiment" that was East Germany, but trenchant in his advocacy of core economic principals such as the central importance of shared "public" ownership of the means of production.

Life Provenance and early years Harry Nick was born in Borowo, a short distance outside Łódź. The region had reverted to Polish control after 1918 but remained multi-ethnic throughout the 1930s. Nevertheless, even as a small child Harry Nick was, during 1939, intensely aware of the seemingly sudden erupting tensions between ethnic German speakers and ethnic Polish speakers. Harry Nick was from the ethnic German community, and would never forget the time when two friends from the Polish side of the growing ethnic divide told him, "You are a Schwob. Also, our parents have forbidden us from playing with you." On leaving school he worked for four months at the steel mill in Hettstedt as a "rod puller". By 1962, he was also delivering lectures.

Changes and reunification The Central Committee Academy for Social Sciences closed in 1990 at around the same time as the one-party dictatorship collapsed. For Harry Nick, still aged only 58, this triggered both enforced retirement and the start of a new career. Post-unification Nick was, in addition, a respected member of the Leibnitz Society.

Output (selection) Technische Revolution und Ökonomie der Produktionsfonds. Dietz, Berlin 1967. Gesellschaft und Betrieb im Sozialismus. Die Wirtschaft, Berlin 1970. Ökonomische und soziale Wirksamkeit des wissenschaftlich-technischen Fortschritts. (As head of the author-collective) Akademie für Gesellschaftswissenschaften beim ZK der SED, 1986. Die Marxsche Lehre im Lichte des sozialistischen Desasters sowie der globalen Revolution. GNN, Schkeuditz 1997. Veränderungen in der Arbeitswelt. (= Pankower Vorträge 45), Helle Panke, Berlin 2002. Gemeinwesen DDR. Erinnerungen und Überlegungen eines Politökonomen.VSA, Hamburg 2003.