Culture – philosopher André Glucksmann dies at 78 years – Berliner Morgenpost

André Glucksmann, a leading French philosopher of the present, is dead. He died at the age of 78 years in the Monday night. Glucksmann was a convinced Marxist and Maoist militant before he struggled in his polemics against dictators and totalitarian regimes. With André Glucksmann, France has lost one of its most important and controversial philosophers.

French President Francois Hollande praised Glucksmann as the defender of the oppressed. He had always denounced the suffering of the peoples, he shared via Twitter. His first and best friend was no longer shared his son Raphaël with on Facebook. He had the incredible good fortune to laugh with an equally good and ingenious man, to discuss, to play and to travel, the journalist and film director wrote about his father. The 36-year-old had been the death of Gluck’s known.

Already in his first book “Discours de la guerre” (discourse about the war) castigated Glucksmann 1968 war and the policy of nuclear deterrence. As anti-militarist and a convinced communist, he took the same year participated in the big May Day demonstrations, which were directed also against the Vietnam War. Side by side with Jean-Paul Sartre, he went into the street before the mid-70s joined the New Philosophers. Under their influence, he returned to communism radically the back. Trigger was Solzhenitsyn’s book “Gulag Archipelago” was that his eyes had opened, as he admitted at the time. With his book “cook and cannibals” he reckoned 1976 Stalinist and Marxist systems from.

From now fought Glucksmann in his works against all forms of totalitarianism. He made himself the defender of human rights and democracy. He criticized Europe’s policy of nonintervention. With Germany he went particularly harshly. He accused the government to accept the power of human butchers, because Germany had kept out of the Libya mission against Moammar Gadhafi.

Glucksmann supported the war in Iraq, the independence the Czech Republic and 2007, the conservative politician Nicolas Sarkozy as a presidential candidate. An error to which he, however, four years later in his book “La République, la pantoufle et les petits lapins” (about: Republic, slippers and small bunnies) known

Glucksmann. came from a Jewish family with roots in Eastern Europe, who emigrated to France. He was born on June 19, 1937 in Paris, shortly after fleeing his parents from Germany. His father came to the invasion of German troops killed. André and his mother were taken to a camp in Vichy, but they were allowed to leave again.

 (dpa)