Horst Brand, 1919–2012

Horst Brand, 1919–2012

Horst Brand, a longtime editor and contributing editor of Dissent, died on August 25. At the time of his death, he was at work on what would have been his fifty-seventh article for Dissent. His first article appeared in our first issue in winter 1954; his last in fall 2009. Up to the end, his pieces arrived by U.S. mail, typed on an old machine, with corrections in black ink. He was an old-fashioned man, but his political and economic analysis was always up to date, cogent, and tough-minded.

Horst came to the United States from Frankfurt, Germany in 1938; he was eighteen. His family pooled its resources to get him out of Germany, and he worked hard to bring them over after him, but was unable to do that; they were murdered by the Nazis. Horst worked on farms and in factories around the United States until he was drafted. In the army, he was trained as an x-ray technician, which enabled him to earn a living after the war, while he went to school at night—first to City College, then to New York University, where he studied economics.

He met his future wife, Ruth, in Hashomer Hatzair (the Young Guard), a left-wing Zionist organization. They were married in 1944. He did not remain a Zionist; the marriage endured. He and Ruth joined the Socialist Workers Party, a Trotskyist organization, and then, after several splits, allied themselves with the Shachtmanites, the most ideologically creative of the SWP factions. Horst wrote for Labor Action, the Shachtmanite magazine, which was edited by Irving Howe. Together with Howe, after many ideological arguments, he turned away from sectarian politics and helped to found Dissent. Over the years, he wrote often about European politics (on Germany, Russia, Poland, and Sweden, among other countries). But the greater number of his articles for Dissent (he also wrote for New Politics) dealt with the U.S. economy, with which he was professionally involved.

Horst worked for many years at the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the U.S. Labor Department, and he came to know pretty much everything that one could know about the condition of the American working class. His articles were driven by his socialist commitment but shaped by his vast knowledge.

He came regularly to Dissent board meetings, and that is where I met him and where we talked, though mostly briefly. I knew him best from our correspondence (always by U.S. mail) about his articles. I edited them only for style; Horst always knew what he wanted to say and what needed to be said. In recent years, he wrote a lot about the declining political strength of American workers and their unions. These articles were marked by what I can only call an unflinching sadness. He knew all the statistics, and they didn’t bode well.

We will remember him as he would want to be remembered, as a faithful comrade in all our work.