Sir Ralf Dahrendorf Interview:Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Sir Ralf, welcome to Berkeley. I thought we would walk through your distinguished career by starting in the beginning. Where and when were you born?
I was born in 1929 in Hamburg, Germany.
That was a very turbulent period, obviously, in Germany.
That was a particularly turbulent period in our family since my father was a Social Democratic politician, at the time a member of the Hamburg Diet, a little later a member of the German Parliament (the Reichstag) and thus among those who were in the middle of things, really, between the Nazis and the Communists, pre-1933, and then of course, immediately, or very soon, arrested and without a job. We moved to Berlin.
He was actually arrested twice. Was he sent to a concentration camp?
He was arrested, first of all, when most Social Democratic MPs were arrested in the summer of 1933, and came out again around Christmastime of that year. He was later in the Resistance and, after the 20th of July, '44, he was arrested, tried, and sentenced. He was fortunate, sentenced to seven years prison, of which -- well, he went to prison and then, after the war, he was released by the Russians.
What do you remember most about growing up, the discussion of politics around the dinner table, or worrying about imprisonment?
It's not as simple as that. What I remember the most is how public life, political life, impinged on one's private existence. I mean, my parents tried to make it possible for me to grow up relatively undisturbed. It didn't work very well, and, certainly by the age of eleven, I realized that there was a difference between the family view and the prevailing view, and a dangerous difference at that. Later on, I myself got involved in the opposition to the Nazi regime.
And you were, in fact, arrested.
I was, in fact, arrested. We had spread truthful information in school, in our own school and beyond, and had written rather incautious letters to each other (a friend of mine and myself) which the Gestapo got hold of, and I was arrested after my father had been arrested and put in a camp, yes.
You were arrested in '44?
What happened was, we were arrested in late November '44, kept in cells in a prison in the first instance, and then in a camp east of the river Oder, in what is now Poland, and then, on the day on which the Russians moved up to the Oder, which was the 29th of January, 1945, this friend of mine and myself were literally kicked out of the camp by one of the SS people, given a little document which said, "these boys must never attend a secondary school in Germany again," (nothing without documentation, even under the most horrible regime), and we just got away, whereas many of those with whom we'd been in the camp were killed subsequently by SS guards in the confusion when the Russians came. So, we were very fortunate to get out.
And then your father returned to politics?
My father returned to politics in the Soviet zone of occupation, and then ran into difficulties again because he was a leading Social Democrat, he was deputy chairman of the East German Social Democratic Party, and he resisted the attempt of the Russian occupation forces to force a merger between the Social Democrats, who were a democratic party, and the Communists into the so-called Socialist Unity Party, which still governs East Germany. He was against it. And there was a dramatic moment in February, 1946, when he voted against this merger, was asked by the Soviet officers in East Berlin to come and see them. He informed his British and American friends of this, and they came and said, "We'll protect you." We were then living in the American Sector of Berlin. "We will protect you." And they flew him and me out of Berlin almost immediately because incidents had happened of the Russians capturing people in the Western Sectors of Berlin and of Austria. So, as you can see, it was a childhood and youth which was very much under the influence of events -- of totalitarianism, to be exact. I mean really, my childhood and youth were an experience in totalitarianism. And it hasn't left me, that particular experience.
You chose to pursue higher education after the war, and chose to pursue sociology.
No. No, I chose classics and philosophy and did both subjects at the University of Hamburg. In 1952, I got my first doctorate in philosophy, with classics as the subsidiary subjects. It is only after that, that I went to London, to the London School of Economics, and did what was then, in Europe, the new and unknown territory of Sociology, and did another doctorate in that.
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