A passionate anti -fascist and committed leftist: Antonin Dick
Photo: private
The majority of his family were murdered in German concentration camps. Others are considered missing. Antonin Dick searched for them for years. “So far without success,” he had to state over twenty years ago, in an essay in the “ND”.
Antonin Dick was born in 1941 in the English emigrant city of Royal Leamington Spa in the County Warwickshire. He was one of the co -founders of the Free German Youth in Great Britain. After the military defeat of the Nazi Empire, it was one of the many anti-fascination that wanted to build a new anti-fascist Germany. She was friends with the painter Oskar Kokoschka, but also with the later GDR diplomat Horst Brie.
The young Antonin Dick studied theater science in Leipzig, was dramaturge at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin and director at the theater in Gera. But early on, he bothered the authoritarian structures in the GDR, rebelled and received performance ban in 1982 because of the staging of a pacifist piece. Five years later, he founded the GDR working group with like -minded people, which dealt with the legal questions of an departure from the country. He fell in disputes with other GDR oppositions that wanted to change the GDR from the inside. Dick moved to Berlin-West, but above all because he wanted to help his mother, who has now lived there. She died in 2012 at the age of 101. After her death it was important to him Your anti -fascist legacy to preserve from forgetting.
Dick was also involved in artistic means against racism and the strengthening fascism. At the beginning of the 1990s, he founded the Jakob van Hoddis Theater, named after a Jewish writer. With other artists, he wanted to build on the traditions of Jewish cultural life, which were violent by the Nazis. As a freelance theater director, Dick experienced the precarious life of a left -wing artist on his own body. In 2004 he participated in the powerful demonstrations against Hartz IV and the agenda 2010 by the social democratic chancellor Gerhard Schröder, also in the hope that this could result in a new emancipatory movement. With his call for the formation of unemployment councils, he launched a contribution that was much discussed at the time.
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Dick himself had to apply for basic security after 2005 and experienced the harassment and congestion of a Hartz IV recipient. He also wrote various texts about it, also for the »ND«. With horror, he reacted to increasing anti -Semitism, also in parts of the social left, which he felt to the last. The Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 filled him with grief. He was afraid that the action was even celebrated as a liberation in some parts of the left movement.
For health reasons, Dick has had to withdraw from the public in recent years. But until the end, he consciously perceived the political conditions as a decisive anti -fascist. He could no longer experience the 80th anniversary of unconditional surrender of the Nazi regime. As has only now been known, he died quietly and quietly at the end of April at the age of 84. With him there is no smart and passionate voice against injustice, oppression and fascist incongruity.