In Memoriam
Eckstein, George
We mourn the death of our friend and comrade, former Dissent editor George Eckstein. George's long political and intellectual career was marked by a steady fidelity to the most generous ideals of...
...In 1939 he moved to New York, becoming associated with Dwight Macdonald's iconoclastic magazine Politics, and, later, with Dissent...
...Despite the horrors he witnessed in his youth, he remained a lifelong member—sober, ironic, articulate—of the party of hope...
...On his release, though he remained under police surveillance, he managed to escape to Paris, where he became active in left-wing anti-Stalinist political circles...
...A leader of a socialist youth party in Germany, George was arrested by the Nazis in 1933...
...George's long political and intellectual career was marked by a steady fidelity to the most generous ideals of democratic socialism...
...The phrase captures the spirit of Eckstein's own writing...
...His writings about the youth movements of the 1960s and 1970s, in both West Germany and the United States, were marked by a complex point of view: he was wary of the fanaticism of some of the young militants and dryly critical of what he called "Pop Politics" ("You can't always be sure where a movie ends and a demonstration begins," he wrote in 1968), but he sympathized deeply with the intensity of the New Left's response to social injustice...
...THE EDITORS 546 • DISSENT...
...Until the 1980s, when ill health forced him to retire from the editorial board, George wrote regularly for Dissent, on topics as diverse as West German politics, black theater in the United States, European film, and the New Left...
...In a review of the memoirs of Czeslaw Milosz—another exile from totalitarianism who remained a critic of capitalism's inequities—Eckstein spoke of Milosz's "tragic knowledge and somber hope...
Vol. 42 • September 1995 • No. 4
