by ULRICH RIPPERT & CHRISTOPH VANDREIER
In the early hours of November 16, Wolfgang Weber, a longtime leader of the German section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, died at the age of 75 after five years of serious illness.
Wolfgang devoted over 50 years of his life to building the Trotskyist party and fought tirelessly politically and theoretically for the independence of the working class.
A political appreciation of Wolfgang’s life leads to an assessment of the fundamental historical questions and tasks facing his entire generation. This was above all the struggle for the continuity of revolutionary Marxism. This had been attacked by Stalinism, fascism and Pabloism to such an extent that, historically speaking, it hung by a thread. It was defended and further developed, in the years in which Wolfgang became politically conscious, only by the International Committee of the Fourth International, whose leading section at that time was the British Socialist Labour League under the leadership of Gerry Healy.
Wolfgang’s life is inextricably linked to the construction of the ICFI and its German section, which had been destroyed by Pabloism. As a child of the postwar period, he drew the conclusion from Nazi rule that the working class had to be freed from the crippling influence of the Stalinist and social democratic bureaucracies in order to prevent another catastrophe. He dedicated his life—and his enormous intellectual capacity—to this task.
Youth in postwar Germany
Wolfgang was born on June 6, 1949 in Schliersee, south of Munich, where his parents, grandparents and two older brothers lived together in a cramped summer house where they had fled from bombed-out Munich after the war. Two years after his birth, the family moved to Munich and four years later to Würzburg, where Wolfgang spent his entire schooling. The soon to be six-member family could not significantly climb the social ladder on the salary of his father, who was an insurance agent, and later rose to become branch manager.
His school years were marked by the unbearable misery of the postwar period. Old Nazi teachers who wanted to prepare the students for a new war of revenge, a church in which nothing had changed since the end of the war, and an omnipresent anti-communism in petty-bourgeois layers shaped his childhood and youth. Wolfgang looked for the contrast in classical literature, reading in particular Friedrich Schiller and Theodor Storm and enjoying the programs on these authors on the radio from East Germany (GDR), where he also had family ties.
He was attracted to classical humanism, and as social conflicts intensified and May 1968 approached, Schiller and Storm were increasingly supplemented by Bertolt Brecht and Franz Kafka. Wolfgang turned away from the church and became a conscious atheist. Like so many of his generation, he was increasingly driven by the question of how, in the land of poets and thinkers, the catastrophe of fascism was possible, which was now being swept under the carpet by the ruling elites.
In particular, the French documentary film Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog), which brought together original shots from several concentration camps, made a deep impression on Wolfgang. As one of his first political experiences, he followed the Eichmann trial in Israel and later the Auschwitz trials in Germany on the radio, at the age of 12. But he found no answer to his questions in school and in the politically cleansed libraries. He found the countless misanthropic or social-psychological explanatory models that prevailed to be totally inadequate.
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