Abstract

Wolfgang Harich wrote the document published below immediately after the workers’ uprising of 1953 which the proclamation of the “New Course” by the SED had been unable to prevent. For Harich, however, the “New Course” seemed retrospectively to confirm the orientation of the Deutsche Zeitschriftfür Philosophie. The document epitomises the two attitudes that were to shape the journal in the years to come: the desire for a free discourse based on Marxism on the one hand, the fear that this expectation could be illusory on the other