Nick, Harry

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.