Word: havemann
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Chemist Robert Havemann is a tortured German intellectual who embraced Communism before 1933 as a way to oppose Nazism. Then a topflight scientist at Berlin's famed Kaiser-Wilhelm (now Max Planck) Institute, he was saved from a Nazi death sentence when the German army argued that he could be more useful with his head on than off. As a result, he did chemical research for the Wehrmacht during World War II while locked up in Brandenburg Prison. After the war Communist Havemann became one of East Germany's star scholars, won the Patriotic Order of Merit from...
Last week Prizewinner Havemann, 54, was still describing himself as a "true Marxist." But for preaching some un-Marxist notions, he was abruptly silenced, faced with expulsion from the East German Communist Party, and denounced as a "Socrates who spoils our youth...
Educated to Lie. Havemann's heresy was obviously inspired by the liberalized intellectual climate that has spread through Eastern Europe, with the notable exception of Stalinist East Germany. Defying Ulbricht's regime, Havemann spoke out in a recent lecture series to students at East Berlin's Humboldt University on the explosive subject of freedom and morality. Under Stalinism, he declared, man is "educated to hypocrisy and dishonesty" by a police state that kills thought. "All this we must change completely." When dogma blocks the free exchange of ideas, he said, it "creates the conditions for a disastrous...
Improving the Breed. As a freelancer, Havemann is thoroughly atypical. His LIFE retainer, along with his articulate typewriter, shelters him from the premonitions of disaster that assail so many of his colleagues. So avid are magazine publishers for Havemann work that he does not even deal through an agent, except for his books...
Freelancers say that theirs is a spartan life. Havemann agrees. But by his own confession he spends half his life at the track, improving the breed and defending his self-endowed title of world's champion handicapper. Nor does he regard writing as a chore. "I write when I feel like it. I do a lot of gardening while thinking about the story. When I get an idea of the form or how to start, I go in the house and write." Then it comes quickly: he once produced 5,000 words for LIFE in just under seven hours...