Death of a Patriot

Many titles are associated with his name: literary giant, dissident, fighter for human rights, prophet, moral authority. Around the world, many admired him for his courage to brave the Soviet Union's communist dictators. No threat, no prison sentence, not even exile could keep him from saying the truth and writing about what happened in the former Eastern Bloc. Now Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the author of "The Gulag Archipelago," has died at the age of 89.

Solzhenitsyn was mainly interested in values. He hated lies and fought them in this own way -- with written words. Communists lied about the so-called October Revolution. Solzhenitsyn disenchanted the myth by truthfully calling the takeover of power by Lenin's and Trotsky's henchmen a coup d'etat. For a long time, Kremlin rulers pretended that the so-called first workers' and farmer's state was paradise on earth. In "The First Circle," "The Gulag Archipelago" and other works, Solzhenitsyn told the truth about the lives of millions of innocent people in the prison camps of the red empire.

After the end of the Soviet Union, Moscow's new rulers bathed in self-content. Solzhenitsyn spoke up yet again. He criticized the inability to stabilize the country's economy, he castigated the predatory capitalism, which destroyed Russia's treasures.

But Solzhenitsyn also wasn't an easy partner for the West. He was a democrat, but he also criticized the negative side of a party system. He warned his countrymen to imitate the West. Solzhenitsyn was a staunch Christian, a member of the Russian Orthodox Church. Many in the West could not understand this as the church stood for a moral rigor that did not fit the relativist zeitgeist of the present. The bearded writer with the serious expression has been defamed throughout his life. He endured this with patience and concentrated on his work with admirable discipline. But he increasingly avoided television and newspapers as he got older.

With Solzhenitsyn's death, Russia has lost a patriot and Germany has lost a friend. It won't be forgotten that the communists deported Solzhenitsyn to the Federal Republic of Germany of all places in 1974, where he first found refuge with his friend and man of letters, Heinrich Boell.

Solzhenitsyn loved and knew German culture. He tried to familiarize his children with it as much as he could. As a member of a generation that had participated in World War II, he was an advocate of reconciliation between the two great nations throughout his life.

"Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart," he wrote.

Miodrag Soric is DW-RADIO's editor-in-chief (win)