There are two strange things about this declaration. One is the bland statement that he had not just a happy childhood, but a very happy childhood. Later events in the Fuchs family point backwards to stresses that one would expect to have cast some shadows in the home, remembered or not. The other is the nature of this recollection: the one thing that stands out in this supposedly very happy childhood is not a memory of love, or warmth, or joyous occasions, but a moral example and a moral precept.
He grew up in the social and political turmoil in Germany that followed the 1918 defeat, which brought with it the downfall of the monarchy and its replacement by a republic. The defeat was traumatic for a nation confident of its own superiority. Then came attempted putsches by the Left and the Right, political assassinations, and a hyper-inflation which made money worthless for a while, turned many people who had comfortable savings into embittered paupers, and left Germans with little confidence in national institutions. Moral standards became as arbitrary as political ones. The sexual activities that were the dark secrets of the Kaiser’s court were flaunted. This was the Germany of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, and The Threepenny Opera, and Christopher Isherwood, and Cabaret. But Fuchs lived his life in prose.
When he was still young, the family moved from Rüsselsheim to Eisenach, a picturesque industrial town of some 50,000 people in Thuringia, in what is now East Germany. He was an outstandingly good student. In 1928, when Eisenach decided to mark the tenth anniversary of the founding of the German republic by awarding a prize for exemplary work to a single student in the local Gymnasium, or high school, it was won by Fuchs. After the Gymnasium, he went on to study mathematics and physics at the University of Leipzig. As a child he was left-handed, and he remained left-handed in most things, but he was taught to write with his right hand.
As a teenager he was unusually sure of himself, and self-contained. The Fuchs children came in for some unpleasant remarks at school because of their father’s unpopular political views; Emil noted that Gerhardt used to be upset by this, but Klaus was untroubled by the opinions of others. He did not confide in his father as much as Gerhardt did, although he admired him.
When Fuchs was nineteen, tragedy came to the family. His mother, Else, had often suffered from fits of depression. One day in October 1931, Emil came home to find her lying on the floor, dying. She had drunk hydrochloric acid, a particularly painful way of committing suicide. Her last words were, ‘Mother, I’m coming.’ Only after her death did Emil learn that her mother had also killed herself. Later, their eldest daughter would take her own life, making a third generation of suicides, and their other daughter would be a patient in a mental hospital in America. Klaus Fuchs hardly ever spoke of his mother in later life.
Emil Fuchs prided himself on being a liberal father and encouraging his children to form their own views, but in fact they all shared his social concerns and his left-wing orientation. They were known to some in Eisenach as ‘the red foxes’ — fuchs being the German word for ‘fox’.
At Leipzig University, Fuchs joined the student branch of the Social Democratic Party, the SPD, and also the Reichsbanner, an SPD paramilitary organization formed in opposition to the Nazis’ SA, the Brownshirts. In his own mind, this was a break with his father’s pacifist beliefs. Fuchs was slightly built, with thin arms and legs, and he wore glasses; he showed physical courage in joining the Reichsbanner, for they sometimes had to battle with the Brownshirts in the streets. He passed out leaflets for the SPD, and spoke at student meetings. He chose his friends only from among those who shared his political inclinations.
He talked to Communist students, and found that two things set him against the Communists. One was that these students would follow the party line strictly and uncritically, even though they might disagree with it privately on some points. The other was that while the Communist Party was calling continually for united action with the Social Democrats, it was at the same time denouncing the Social Democrat leaders in violent terms.
Politics took up a great deal of his time and energy during his student days. Politics in Germany at this time was intense, and there was a great deal at stake. A person’s political viewpoint was not a minor adjunct of his life, like a hobby; it was seen as central, and often determined his life-style and his friends. The issue was much more than what political party would govern. Political struggles were carried on not only within the framework of the constitution, but also around it.
Even after the post-1918 upheavals had subsided, the institutions of the German Republic that was established at Weimar did not receive anything like universal support. Several of the Republic’s founding fathers had been murdered as ‘traitors’ because they had accepted the surrender in 1918. One section of German society wanted simply to annul these past years and restore the monarchy. There was no common ground among all the contending political parties. The political questions that confronted the citizens were about the kind of state in which they would live, and the flag their children would salute: would it have the red, black and gold bars of the flag of the Republic, or the old Imperial insignia, or a hammer and sickle, or a swastika? The country was in a state of ideological civil war. Fuchs threw himself into this struggle vigorously.
The Fuchs family moved to North Germany, to the rainy Baltic seaport of Kiel. Emil Fuchs took up an academic post, as Professor of Theology at a teachers’ training college. Fuchs himself entered Kiel University.
There, he joined a student organization which included members of both the SPD and the Communist Party, and he was made Chairman. They approached Nazi students and tried to persuade them to change their ideas, for Nazism had an appeal for youthful idealism, despite its brutality, and it had an appeal also for radical social views which might otherwise find a natural outlet on the Left. The Nazi student organization at the University was campaigning for lower fees; Fuchs decided to take them at their word, and he proposed that the two groups organize jointly a student strike for reduced fees. He met the leader of the Nazi students several times in secret to negotiate on this, but the Nazi hedged.
Then he did something which earned him the bitter hostility of the Nazi student organization and gave him some private misgivings. He issued a leaflet giving an account of these discussions, and saying this showed that the Nazis were not serious in their demands for lower fees but were simply using the issue to try to gain popularity. He reflected later that it was not fair to publish an account of these secret talks without first warning the Nazis that he was going to do so, or at least giving them an ultimatum that he would go public unless they took some action. Many years later, when he wrote his autobiographical confession, this still troubled him and he wrote: ‘I had violated some standards of decent behaviour.’ Nobody taxed him with the morality of what he did. He raised the question himself within his own mind, and answered it within his own mind, as he was to work out other moral questions later.
He broke with the SPD over the party’s policy in the 1932 presidential election. The Social Democrats supported the old President, General von Hindenburg, as the alternative to Hitler, who was a rival candidate. The Communists wanted a united front of working-class parties, that is, with the Socialists, against both Hindenburg and Hitler, and Fuchs favoured this policy. When the Communist Party ran its leader, Ernst Thaelmann, as a presidential candidate, Fuchs offered to speak for him, and he was expelled from the SPD. Hindenburg won the election.