Walter Fabian

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. 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"). set about creating a party newspaper: the "Sozialistischen Arbeiter-Zeitung" (SAZ) was launched in September 1932 with Walter Fabian its editor-in-chief. It not clear why Walter Fabian suffered the same sanction only on 5 August 1937.

Sanctuary in Switzerland Through his international journalistic contacts Walter Fabian already had contacts in Switzerland. Nevertheless, it is possible that he was only on account of his daughter that he was permitted to cross the frontier into the country. According to a rule provided by the Swiss Justice and Police department and dated 18 June 1940, "fleeing civilians [were] to be turned back with the exception of women and children up to 16". Nevertheless, all three of them were able to cross the border, and after brief internment in a transit camp near Geneva they were placed in a refugee camp at Adliswil, just outside Zurich. Conditions in the refugee camp were poor, and it was only with help from the local religious community that Fabian was able to extricate his family from the place, after he had written a letter pleading for help to the Swiss education reformer, Elisabeth Rotten. It was in Adliswil that the marriage between Walter and Ruth Fabian broke apart. Walter Fabian relocated up the road to Zurich at the start of 1943 and relaunched his journalistic career. He and Ruth would remain lifelong friends.

Since returning in 1957 Walter Fabian had engaged in the West German peace movement. He spoke out against the Viet Nam War, in support of rapprochement with Poland and in opposition to the various Emergency Powers Acts. After his work on the GMH ended he became a leading figure in the German Humanist Union, which he chaired from 1969 till 1973, and of the West German German-Polish Society (of which he became honorary president in 1977). In 1966 he also accepted an honorary professorship in Pedagogy from Frankfurt University.

Awards and honours In 1970 Walter Fabian was a winner of the Carl von Ossietzky Medal from the International League for Human Rights. In 1991 he received a special honour from the prize committee of the Bert Donnep Prize, awarded by the Grimme Institute.