Rudolf Bahro was born in 1935 in Bad Flinsberg (now Świeradów-Zdrój) in Silesia, where his parents worked in the agriculture sector. After completing secondary school in Fürstenberg (by the Oder river) in 1954, he studied philosophy at Humboldt-Universität in Berlin until 1959. Though a fervent Communist who joined the SED in 1954, he protested against the SED’s disinformation policy during the *Hungarian Revolution of 1956. This drew the attention of the Ministry for State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, MfS), which put him under observation. After completing his Diplom degree, Bahro worked as a journalist/editor, first at village newspaper in the district of Seelow (Oderbruch) and then at the University party newspaper in Greifswald. He then took a position as a policy officer at the central governing body of the Union of Academic Research (Gewerkschaft Wissenschaft) in Berlin. He was appointed deputy editor-in-chief of the weekly “Forum” in 1965, but lost that position after his decision to print Volker Braun’s play “Kipper” raised cultural-policy concerns. From 1967 until his arrest in 1977, he worked as head of the department for works organisation at a rubber-manufacturing VEB (publicly owned enterprise) based in Berlin’s Weißensee district.

Bahro’s protest against the *invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops in 1968 led the Stasi to put him under observation again, this time around, they kept a close watch on him. A research assistantship (“extraordinary academic Aspirantur”) at the Technical University Leuna-Merseburg enabled him to write a dissertation about the effectiveness of the programme deploying university and technical school graduates in industry and impediments to it. Bahro conducted unauthorised interview-style surveys in the context of this research. Despite initially receiving favourable assessments, his dissertation was rejected due to the negative assessments issued by reviewers brought in for this purpose after MfS intervention. His dissertation was not rejected because the MfS objected to its content, but because of the fundamental critique of real socialism that he had been writing in secret all the while. This would later become the basis for his widely read book “The Alternative”. Bahro’s ex-wife Gundula gave a copy of the first draft of this critique of socialism to the State Security service, which had been monitoring all of Bahro’s activities since 1974, but it was unable to prevent him from completing his work and getting the finished manuscript to West Germany.

After the book went to press under the title “Die Alternative. Zur Kritik des real existierenden Sozialismus” (The Alternative. On the critique of really existing socialism; English Edition: The Alternative in Eastern Europe) and some carefully prepared media appearances, Bahro was arrested on 23 August 1977. He received an eight-year prison sentence on 30 June 1978 and was sent to the Bautzen II prison. Thanks to international pressure, he served only a fraction of his sentence before being freed under an amnesty granted on the 30th anniversary of the GDR in October of 1979 and allowed to leave East Germany together with his children, ex-wife and current partner.

Individual copies of or excerpts from the “The Alternative”, smuggled into the GDR and copied over by hand, were read by many of the country’s intellectuals in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the work significantly influenced the understanding of real socialism in the country, even among SED members. However, its influence had waned by the time of the revolution in the autumn of 1989, and it did not play a significant role in either that or the ensuing political transformation of the GDR. 

From the time of his arrival in 1979, Bahro was politically active in the FRG, where he advocated the integration of socialist (and social democratic) forces and alternative forces. He was a founding member of the Green Party and was elected to its national executive body in 1982. He left the party due to political differences in 1985. After earning a doctorate, he was awarded the post-doctoral “Habilitation” degree for “The Alternative”. He spent several weeks in Rajneeshpuram in Oregon, USA, with Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (known later as Osho) and his disciples, an experience Bahro described as a “journey inwards”. He later became involved in several alternative projects and in the foundation of a “learning workshop” in Niederstadtfeld in the Eifel mountains. After leaving the Green Party, he became a fervent supporter of Mikhail Gorbachev, whom he saw as the person who would bring his “alternative” into being.

During the Peaceful Revolution in late 1989, Bahro returned to East Berlin, where he gave a little-understood and controversial speech at the special SED party congress. In it, he called for economic transformation and the adoption of an ecological way of life, among other things. In September of 1990, he was appointed to a professorship and founded the Department of Social Ecology at Berlin’s Humboldt-Universität. His regular lectures there, starting in the 1990/91 winter term, met with great interest among students and a non-student public as well. He also led a smaller group, the “Community for Social Ecology”, which engaged in spiritual exercises and retreats.

Bahro’s second major work was “Logik der Rettung” (a revised English-language version of which was published under the title “Avoiding Social and Ecological Disaster” in 1994). In it, he sets out a fundamental critique of industrial economic model and its destruction of the environment. He contrasts this with the “subjectivity of salvation”, which would begin with self-renewal through meditation and evolve from there to a refined subjectivity and the transformation of lifestyles through to the practical reconstruction of society. By the 1990s, he no longer saw communism as a system whose advantages should be weighed against those of other systems, understanding it instead as “a phenomenon accompanying any spiritually sound society”.

In the final years of his life, Bahro worked on a new understanding of politics that borrowed from Plato (the wise shall lead and rule), Joachim di Fiore (a kind of divine state in which love and equality reign) and Jean Gebser (idea of “homo integralis”). He was diagnosed with cancer in 1995 and, after a temporary improvement, succumbed to the disease in Berlin on 5 December 1997.