Ruth Fischer

Ruth Fischer
Born	Elfriede Eisler 1895 Leipzig
Died	1961 Paris
Alma mater	University of Vienna
Occupation	politician, member of Reichsrat (1924–1928)
Years active	1919–1961
Known for	charter member of the Austrian Communist Party, anti-communism
Parent(s)	Rudolph Eisler (father), Marie Edith Fischer (mother)
Relatives	Gerhart Eisler and Hanns Eisler (brothers)

Ruth Fischer (11 December 1895 – 13 March 1961) was a German Communist, a co-founder of the Austrian Communist Party in 1918. She later became a staunch anti-Communist activist and, according to secret information declassified in 2010, was a key agent of the American intelligence service known as "The Pond".

Background

Fischer was born Elfriede Eisler in Leipzig in 1895, the daughter of Marie Edith Fischer and Rudolf Eisler, a professor of philosophy at Leipzig but of Austrian nationality. Her father was Jewish and her mother was Lutheran.

She was the elder sister to noted film and concert composer Hanns Eisler and fellow communist activist Gerhart Eisler. She studied philosophy, economics and politics at University of Vienna, where her father was working.

At an undisclosed time, she adopted her mother's maiden name as part of her writer's name, "Ruth Fischer."

Communism

Fischer moved to Berlin in 1919 and was a leader of the Communist Party of Germany from 1924 to 1925.

Heinrich Brandler was the leader of the Communist Party of Germany. In the early months of 1923, Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow urged Brandler to organize an uprising on the model provided by the Bolsheviks in 1917. Together they developed the "theory of the offensive". Fischer denounced the leadership for "making concessions to social democracy", for "opportunism" and for "ideological liquidationism and theoretical revisionism". Chris Harman, the author of The Lost Revolution (1982) has pointed out: "Articulate and energetic, they were able to gather around them many of the new workers who had joined the party."

In 1923, Fischer appealed to a group of Nazi students, proclaiming that "Those who call for a struggle against Jewish capital are already, gentlemen, class strugglers, even if they don’t know it. You are against Jewish capital and want to fight the speculators. Very good. Throw down the Jewish capitalists, hang them from the lamp-post, stamp on them."

Ruth Fischer argued that the Communist Party of Germany leaders were saying: "In no circumstances must we proclaim the general strike. The bourgeoisie will discover our plans and destroy us before we have moved. On the contrary, we must calm the masses, hold back our people in the factories and the unemployed committees until the government thinks the moment of danger has passed." Joseph Stalin arranged for her to be expelled from the party in 1926.

Espousing left-wing positions, she was a member of the Reichsrat from 1924 to 1928. She fled to Paris in 1933.

Anti-Communism

In 1941, Fischer left France for the United States.

In 1947, she testified before HUAC against her brothers Gerhart and Hanns. Her testimony against Hanns resulted in his blacklisting and deportation. She testified that Gerhart was an important Comintern agent.

Communist press denounced her as a "German Trotskyite". She propounded critical views of Stalinism and called for a rebirth of Communism after Stalin's death. Before this period of anti-Stalinism, she had supported the rise to power of the Triumvirs (Stalin, Grigory Zinoviev, and Lev Kamenev), denouncing Trotsky at the fifth congress of the Communist International.

Isaac Deutscher, a biographer of Trotsky and Stalin, described her as a "young, trumpet-tongued woman, without any revolutionary experience or merit, yet idolized by the Communists of Berlin."

In 1955, Fischer returned to Paris and published her books Stalin and German Communism and Die Umformung der Sowjetgesellschaft.

The Pond

From eight years after the second World War, Fischer, code-named "Alice Miller", was a key agent for "The Pond".

Death and afterwards

Fischer died in Paris in 1961, aged 65, from undisclosed causes.

She had one child, Ger(h)ard Friedländer, a mathematician, who died in the United Kingdom in 2001.

The International Institute of Social History has an archive of her papers.

See also

• Hotel Lux

Further reading

• Ruth Fischer Papers, (International Institute of Social History)
• Deutscher, Isaac, "The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky 1921–1929", Oxford University Press, 1980, ISBN 0-19-281065-0