Rudolf Bahro-An Introduction

Abstract

"I have always believed in the power of the idea and the word, and that it matters whether one is convinced of oneself and one's cause and doesn't shrink back deep down inside when the decision has to be made." When, after ten years of work on his book The Alternative. A Critique of Socialism as it Actually Exists, Rudolf Bahro made his decision to come out into the open by having his work published in West Germany, his belief in the power of the idea and the word was immediately confirmed by his arrest-on the rather ludicrous charge of "espionage-and imprisonment in the German Democratic Republic.