Iring Fetscher

Iring Fetscher (1922–2014) was a German political scientist and researcher on Hegel and Marxism.

Biography Fetscher was born on 4 March 1922 at Marbach am Neckar as the son of social hygienist and Claire née Müller, and was brought up in Dresden. He attended a Volksschule there from 1928 to 1932, took his Abitur at the , and graduated from an interpreter school (Dolmetscherschule) during the World War II in 1940. He applied to join the Nazi Party in May 1940 and was admitted in September of the same year. When the archival record of his membership emerged in 2011, he denied having joined the party of his own initiative.

Later in 1940, he enlisted as an officer candidate in a field artillery regiment of the Wehrmacht in Altenburg. Except for occupation duty breaks in Belgium and the Netherlands, including with the 4th Army in the Heiligenbeil Pocket during the Red Army's East Prussian offensive until the end of March 1945. In late April 1945, he was evacuated from the Vistula Spit on the steamer of the Hamburg–Africa Line to Copenhagen. In 1950, he joined the Evangelical Study Group's Commission on Marxism launched in Heidelberg by on behalf of the World Council of Churches. He achieved habilitation in 1959 with a dissertation on the political philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Fetscher taught political science at Tübingen from 1960 to 1963. Leszek Kołakowski, while taking Fetscher to be a distinguished historian of Marxism with a critical but positive attitude, did not see him as of the Frankfurt School more than notionally.

In 1976, he published his own version of The Wolf and the Seven Young Goats by the Brothers Grimm, ('The Goat and the Seven Young Wolves '), as part of the children's book Update on Rumpelstiltskin and other Fairy Tales by 43 Authors compiled by Hans-Joachim Gelberg, illustrated by Willi Glasauer, and published by Beltz & Gelberg. In 1993, Fetscher was honored with induction into the French Ordre des Palmes académiques. Fetscher died on 19 July 2014.

Major works Von Marx zur Sowjetideologie. Wiesbaden 1956. (22 editions until 1987.) Rousseaus politische Philosophie. Zur Geschichte des demokratischen Freiheitsbegriffs. Neuwied, Berlin 1960. Der Marxismus. Seine Geschichte in Dokumenten, 3 vols., München 1963–1965. Marx and Marxism. New York: Herder & Herder, 1971. (Translation of Karl Marx und der Marxismus, 1967.) Die Geiß und die sieben Wölflein (The Goat and the Seven Young Wolves) in Update on Rumpelstiltskin and other Fairy Tales by 43 Authors, compiled by Hans-Joachim Gelberg, illustrated by Willi Glasauer, published by Beltz & Gelberg, Weinheim 1976. Neugier und Furcht. Versuch, mein Leben zu verstehen. Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1995. (Autobiography)