Harold Hurwitz remembers
Lowenthal, Richard
"Rix" (as he was known to his friends) died this past August in Berlin after a prolonged illness. An early and frequent contributor to Dissent, he was social democracy's major theorist in...
...Afterward he was concerned about the uncertain fate of western culture and looked for signs in the winds of history by which Europe might again play a major role in world affairs...
...Though he had left the German Communists in 1929, many years passed before he could get a visa for the United States...
...While he had abandoned Marxism's idea of WINTER • 1992 • 113 In Memoriam the inevitability of progress, he remained fervent in his hope that the perversions and destructiveness of capitalism could be overcome...
...I first met him in 1940...
...When I went to see him he had just published Jenseits des Kapitalismus (Beyond Capitalism), which had received wide attention...
...Examining Keynes and the welfare states, from the New Deal to Scandinavian socialism, he presented a long-range perspective for the SPD...
...After the untimely death of Ernst Reuter, mayor of Berlin during the blockade crisis, Rix and Willy Brandt hired me to help with research of a biography of that remarkable man...
...Though some attacked him as a "moderate outsider," the fact is that, unlike many other Social Democrats, he never ceased calling himself a democratic socialist...
...However, shortly before the erection of the Berlin Wall, he accepted a chair at the Free University in Berlin, and he soon began helping Brandt design an East European policy that could ultimately turn the cold war into peaceful coexistence...
...If western culture was to be revitalized there remained a need for "democratic decisions in all spheres of society...
...His conversation was extraordinarily rational, very witty, and seemed to take everything into account, defining each context—a considerate interrogator and gentle listener...
...But he remembered the rift...
...He worked out of Frankfurt as foreign correspondent for Reuters and the London Observer...
...When Charlotte Lowenthal called to say that Rix was in the hospital and she wanted to clear his paper-littered study so she could put him up at home, she wasn't sure he would recognize me...
...As a policy adviser to the SPD he urged better relations with communist governments, without ceasing to combat communism...
...Although he criticized the student revolts of the late sixties and early seventies, and considered the ecology movement excessively romantic, he recognized that both had raised the very issues that made it clear that a market economy required public direction...
...Quite a few social democrats (mostly German) were aware that Richard Lowenthal was also Paul Sering, a pseudonym he had used in the underground and in exile as a member of a small but illustrious anti-Nazi resistance group, "Neu Beginnen" (New Beginnings...
...We had our differences (as on the student revolts...
...He was also a master of the spoken word, which made his limited ability to speak during his illness all the more painful...
...For him the book seemed a good way to sum up his preoccupation with democratic socialism in Germany...
...When the cold war compelled a choice, he chose the Atlantic Defense Community...
...In it he offered direction to the social-democratic labor movement, which had been shattered in 1933...
...At the Free University he characteristically did not look for assistants but sought tenure for academic "outsiders" who could expand the range of the university, thereby encouraging my work and that of many others...
...An early and frequent contributor to Dissent, he was social democracy's major theorist in postwar Germany, an acknowledged authority on international communism, and a highly regarded analyst of totalitarianism...
...He also warned that by seeking coalitions with the Greens, the SPD was cutting itself off from its traditional anchorage in the unions, the common working people...
...For Brandt it was preparation to pursue Reuter's path, and he went on to become Berlin's mayor and West Germany's chancellor...
...I'd come seeking his advice about a U.S.-sponsored antiStalinist propaganda campaign, "Talk Back...
...HAROLD HURWITZ 114 • DISSENT...
...Rix wrote his chapters in London, where he was working for the Observer...
...With open arms, struggling for words, he said, "We were .. . but now . . . harmony...
Vol. 39 • January 1992 • No. 1
