Early years Walter Max Fabian was born in
Berlin. Richard Fabian, his father, was a self-employed interior architect who would have much preferred to be a musician. Visitors to the house included
Bruno Walter. Powerfully progressive political currents in the family home came primarily from his mother, born Else Hosch. The Fabians' social circle also included leftwing intellectual heavyweights such as
Hugo Haase and
Kurt Rosenfeld. He attended what was then the
Mommsen Gymnasium (secondary school) in Berlin's
Charlottenburg quarter. He was not quite twelve when
war broke out, and by the time he left school he was already a vocal backer of those calling for peace. would be over by the time of Dora's death in London, under circumstances that have never been entirely clear, during the early summer of 1935. In 1924 he also became an editor at the Ernst-Oldenburg Verlag (publisher) at Leipzig, supporting the
party's educational work. The next year he took on the responsibilities of political editor with the party newspaper, "Chemnitzer Volksstimme". Unlike Dresden, the home of the Royal Saxon Court and Saxony's traditional administrative capital, he saw
Chemnitz as a workers' city, without the liberal intellectual pretensions of
Leipzig, but rather Saxony's equivalent to the
Manchester of a few decades earlier, when
Engels undertook his socio-political researches in England's
cotton capital. He perceived Chemnitz as a more appropriate fulcrum for his own interests in the promotion of the labour movement and pacificst politics. In Chemnitz Fabian also became a member of the SPD's regional party executive. Additionally, from 1928 he was producing two Dresden based SPD opposition news sheets, "Sachsendienst" and "Sozialistische Information". He used these "pulpits" to attack the Coalition Chancellor,
Hermann Müller, over the government re-armament programme, producing slogans such as "school meals before battle ships" (
"Schulspeisung statt Panzerkreuzer"). set about creating a party newspaper: the "Sozialistischen Arbeiter-Zeitung" (SAZ) was launched in September 1932 with Walter Fabian its
editor-in-chief. It not clear why Walter Fabian suffered the same sanction only on 5 August 1937.
Sanctuary in Switzerland Through his international journalistic contacts Walter Fabian already had contacts in Switzerland. Nevertheless, it is possible that he was only on account of his daughter that he was permitted to cross the frontier into the country. According to a rule provided by the Swiss Justice and Police department and dated 18 June 1940, "fleeing civilians [were] to be turned back with the exception of women and children up to 16". Nevertheless, all three of them were able to cross the border, and after brief internment in a transit camp near
Geneva they were placed in a refugee camp at
Adliswil, just outside
Zurich. Conditions in the refugee camp were poor, and it was only with help from the local religious community that Fabian was able to extricate his family from the place, after he had written a letter pleading for help to the Swiss education reformer,
Elisabeth Rotten. It was in Adliswil that the marriage between Walter and Ruth Fabian broke apart. Walter Fabian relocated up the road to Zurich at the start of 1943 and relaunched his journalistic career. He and Ruth would remain lifelong friends. Since returning in 1957 Walter Fabian had engaged in the West German peace movement. He spoke out against the
Viet Nam War, in support of rapprochement with
Poland and in opposition to the various
Emergency Powers Acts. After his work on the
GMH ended he became a leading figure in the
German Humanist Union, which he chaired from 1969 till 1973, and of the
West German German-Polish Society (of which he became honorary president in 1977). In 1966 he also accepted an honorary professorship in
Pedagogy from
Frankfurt University. == Awards and honours ==