Harry Nick
German university teacher (1932-2014)
Harry Nick (15 August 1932 – 7 December 2014) was an East German Marxist economist.
He was a 57-year-old professor and department head at the Central Committee Academy for Social Sciences ("Akademie für Gesellschaftswissenschaften beim ZK der SED") in Berlin when street protesters broke through the Berlin Wall in November 1989, after which many of his contemporaries rapidly disappeared into obscurity. Harry Nick emerged as a robust exponent of "economic literacy". He had always been prepared to argue his case, even when his evaluations were out of harmony with some party dogma of the moment: he spent the final decades of his life as a controversialist and media pundit, happy to explain what went wrong with the "socialist experiment" that was East Germany, but trenchant in his advocacy of core economic principals such as the central importance of shared "public" ownership of the means of production.
Life
Provenance and early years
Harry Nick was born in Borowo, a short distance outside Łódź. The region had reverted to Polish control after 1918 but remained multi-ethnic throughout the 1930s. Nevertheless, even as a small child Harry Nick was, during 1939, intensely aware of the seemingly sudden erupting tensions between ethnic German speakers and ethnic Polish speakers. Harry Nick was from the ethnic German community, and would never forget the time when two friends from the Polish side of the growing ethnic divide told him, "You are a Schwob. Also, our parents have forbidden us from playing with you." His father was a forestry worker. In January/February 1945 the family were driven west by the ethnic cleansing of the time, settling in Sylda, a village in the rural Mansfelder mountain region south of Magdeburg.
The public source identifies “Harry Nick” as german university teacher (1932-2014). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Harry, Nick and German.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1542240. VIAF identifies the subject as 201869361. The Library of Congress control number is n82113193. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1932, 2014, 1989 and 1918.
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This entry incorporates text from “Harry Nick” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.