43 Facts About Walter Fabian

Walter Fabian was a German socialist politician, journalist and translator.

Walter Fabian attended what was then the Mommsen Gymnasium in Berlin's Charlottenburg quarter.

Walter Fabian 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.

Walter Fabian had been contributing to SPD newspapers since 1920.

Walter Fabian perceived Chemnitz as a more appropriate fulcrum for his own interests in the promotion of the labour movement and pacificst politics.

In Chemnitz Walter Fabian became a member of the SPD's regional party executive.

Walter Fabian used these "pulpits" to attack the Coalition Chancellor, Hermann Muller, over the government re-armament programme, producing slogans such as "school meals before battle ships".

Walter Fabian was an outstanding speaker, in terms both of his presentation and the substance of his arguments.

Walter Fabian spoke quietly and persuasively, like a good teacher or lecturer.

Walter Fabian attracted a growing band of mostly young leftwing followers from inside the party.

Walter Fabian was subjected to a "speaking ban" at the end of 1930, and in September 1931 he was excluded from the SPD.

However, Walter Fabian calculated that it would be foolish to place much confidence in the prospect of a rapid collapse of the Nazi regime.

Walter Fabian moved from Breslau to Berlin where, using the name Kurt Sachs, he managed to live in "relative anonymity" and continue with his political activities.

Walter Fabian was arrested in Berlin in March 1933, but released a few days later.

At a clandestine "party conference" in March 1933 Walter Fabian was re-elected to the SAPD party executive.

Walter Fabian succeeded in continuing to live in anonymity, as far as the authorities were concerned, and during that year he travelled regularly between Berlin and Paris which, together with Moscow, was becoming the destination of choice for Germany's exiled opposition politicians.

In January 1935 Walter Fabian was lucky to avoid arrest after a party comrade passed him a message that, under torture, the comrade had found himself unable to remain silent as to Walter Fabian's whereabouts and false identity.

Walter Fabian was still contributing as a journalist in the German language news publications produced in Paris, and as stories seeped out about the developments in Moscow he was disinclined to avoid reporting them.

Walter Fabian did form a "resistance group" under the title "Neuer Weg", and devoted himself to producing the movement's eponymous news-magazine.

Walter Fabian was able to use his time here to read Nausea, a prescient and subsequently well regarded novel by a then little known novelist called Jean-Paul Sartre.

Walter Fabian was able to produce a few articles for newspapers in Switzerland.

Walter Fabian then headed back south with her baby and settled in the "Free zone", administered from Vichy by a puppet government and still, at this stage, permitted a significant measure of autonomy by the Germans.

Walter Fabian found time to record the highlights of his time in the French Foreign Legion in a diary which, many decades later, his daughter discovered:.

Walter Fabian wrote - according to his own recollections 40 years later - "hundreds of letters to Ruth and to his friends", and kept a diary.

However, his unsuitability for military service having been conclusively demonstrated, Ruth Walter Fabian was able to extract her husband from the French Foreign Legion by the end of the year.

Walter Fabian returned from North Africa, disembarking at Marseilles on 8 December 1940.

Many, like Walter Fabian himself, were both, but those charged with prioritising whom to help first always insisted that the only criterion was the extent of the danger which each individual would be in so long as he or she remained in Europe.

From his own diary it appears that as early as December 1940 Walter Fabian received notification that the family's own tickets from Lisbon to New York were "paid for", but in February 1941, still in Marseilles, he received a letter from his father's old friend, Kurt Rosenfeld now in New York, warning that there was hardly any work for German emigrants arriving stateside.

Walter Fabian combined journalism with his other activities but money was short.

Walter Fabian undertook writing and translating contracts for publishers in the US and in Switzerland.

Conditions in the refugee camp were poor, and it was only with help from the local religious community that Walter 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.

Walter Fabian relocated up the road to Zurich at the start of 1943 and relaunched his journalistic career.

Walter Fabian was initially banned from writing for the Swiss press as the authorities in Bern sought to avoid antagonising the northern neighbour.

Walter Fabian embarked on a parallel career as a translator of French literature, with translations of works by Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, Romain Rolland, Francois Mauriac and Eugen Tarle to his credit.

Walter Fabian was an active member of the exiled German PEN International group and of the Society of the protection of German authors.

However, Walter Fabian was by this time well settled in Switzerland, and not at all convinced that democracy imposed by "the bayonets of occupying armies" or the events unfolding in the Soviet occupation zone were taking his home country in a positive direction.

Walter Fabian received and repeatedly turned down a succession of apparently attractive job offers from Germany.

Walter Fabian turned down an offer from the US occupation zone to take over the editorship of the Frankfurter Rundschau from Emil Carlebach whose publisher's license was revoked by the US military administration for what were described at the time as unexplained reasons.

Walter Fabian's first visit to postwar Germany took place only on 10 October 1949.

In 1957, at the instigation of Otto Brenner, Walter Fabian was appointed editor in chief of the DGB's Gewerkschaftliche Monatshefte publication, a role which he held till 1970.

Walter Fabian remained true to his left wing "Luxemburgisch" convictions and rejected union attempts to pressure the "Gewerkschaftliche Monatshefte" into always backing the union line.

Since returning in 1957 Walter Fabian had engaged in the West German peace movement.

Walter Fabian spoke out against the Viet Nam War, in support of rapprochement with Poland and in opposition to the various Emergency Powers Acts.