Ethos of European Socialism

Ernst Fischer is best known to English-speaking readers for his brilliant study in Marxist aesthetics­ The Necessity of Art. This book, an autobiography covering the first forty-five years of his life, is con­cerned mainly with his political activities. But the book is much more than an autobiography. It is an absorbing and often lyrical description of the ethos of European Socialism in the period between the two world wars, a period when it had to fight fiercely for survival.