Silencing a Socrates

Chemist Robert Havemann is a tortured German intellectual who embraced Communism before 1933 as a way to oppose Nazism. Then a topflight scientist at Berlin's famed Kaiser-Wilhelm (now Max Planck) Institute, he was saved from a Nazi death sentence when the German army argued that he could be more useful with his head on than off. As a result, he did chemical research for the Wehrmacht during World War II while locked up in Brandenburg Prison. After the war Communist Havemann became one of East Germany's star scholars, won the Patriotic Order of Merit from Communist Boss Walter Ulbricht.

Last week Prizewinner Havemann, 54, was still describing himself as a "true Marxist." But for preaching some un-Marxist notions, he was abruptly silenced, faced with expulsion from the East German Communist Party, and denounced as a "Socrates who spoils our youth."

Educated to Lie. Havemann's heresy was obviously inspired by the liberalized intellectual climate that has spread through Eastern Europe, with the notable exception of Stalinist East Germany. Defying Ulbricht's regime, Havemann spoke out in a recent lecture series to students at East Berlin's Humboldt University on the explosive subject of freedom and morality. Under Stalinism, he declared, man is "educated to hypocrisy and dishonesty" by a police state that kills thought. "All this we must change completely." When dogma blocks the free exchange of ideas, he said, it "creates the conditions for a disastrous development" by blocking social progress. But then, "reactionary regimes have always striven to keep their people stupid."

Prisons, scoffed Havemann, are "the university of crime," and the death penalty (abolished in West Germany) "is upheld only so that people can kill their political opponents." He laughed off the party's "pitiful" distortion of Hegel's dictum that freedom is the acceptance of necessity. Said Havemann: "One cannot attain freedom by doing 'voluntarily' what one must do in order to stay out of jail." As for capitalism, Havemann said that new traits make it "by no means all negative," and called for comparable Communist freedom to encourage "dissatisfaction with things as they are."

Preaching Subversion. Young Communist intellectuals flocked to hear the daring professor. When Havemann boldly repeated his subversive opinions to a West German reporter, adding that "most Communist officials think as I do," the party's Central Committee condemned him as one of "those intellectuals who lay rotten eggs in the party's nest." But instead of denouncing him, the Humboldt University Communist Party cell voted to back Havemann. Finally, the government was forced into the embarrassing position of firing its eminent scholar. The regime dismissed the outspoken Havemann as a "degenerate thinker"--a favorite Nazi charge used for silencing dangerous opposition.

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