Harry Nick was a 57-year-old professor and department head at the Central Committee Academy for Social Sciences in Berlin when street protesters broke through the Berlin Wall in November 1989, after which many of his contemporaries rapidly disappeared into obscurity.
17 Facts About Harry Nick
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Harry Nick emerged as a robust exponent of "economic literacy".
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Harry Nick 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.
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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.
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Harry Nick received his doctorate in 1959 for work on the accumulation of investment capital for livestock accommodation in large agricultural co-operatives.
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Harry Nick remained in charge of research in respect of "Economic and Social Problems resulting from Academic and Technical Advances" at the Institute for Political Economy till 1990.
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Harry Nick engaged with commitment in the debates surrounding the New Economic System, and what it should mean in terms of economic planning and management of the national economy.
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Harry Nick saw and articulated an acute need for "economic reform in the context of genuine socialism".
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Harry Nick remained engaged both politically and as a journalist.
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Harry Nick joined a series of working groups set up within the new Party of Democratic Socialism, producing reports for the party executive on economic policy.
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Harry Nick became a member of the "Economy and Democracy" forum and for many years participated in the party's Marxist Forum.
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Post-unification Harry Nick was, in addition, a respected member of the Leibnitz Society.
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Between 1997 and 2012 Harry Nick contributed regularly to Neues Deutschland on various economics topics.
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Harry Nick lived through the timid economic reforms of the early 1960s and their abrupt abandonment by the leadership.
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In 2012 Harry Nick spelled out his verdict that the "socialist attempt [had] not passed its historical acid test".
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Harry Nick was married with, by December 1967 six children, of whom four were boys.
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Harry Nick did not enjoy travel privileges, and made his first foreign trip - to Austria - only in 1989.