Obituaries 2010

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Wednesday December 29, 2010 04:39

by r.i.p.

R.I.P Thomas (Tomi) Schwaetzer. alias "Max Watts" 1928 - 2010

Activist scribe struck from the left

Pen is mighty ... Max Watts travelled the world, immersing himself in political activism and journalism.
Max Watts, 1928 - 2010
It was a life and a half. From fleeing Nazi persecution to looking after himself from the age of 10 to fighting the US's presence in Vietnam to arriving in Australia and making a living as a freelance journalist, Max Watts did it all.
Watts was born Thomas (Tomi) Schwaetzer into a secular middle-class Jewish family in Vienna, Austria, on June 13, 1928. His father, Emil, was a doctor and wrote a medical column for a local progressive paper. His mother, Giza, worked as a journalist on the paper until it was closed down by the Austrian fascists in 1934.
After the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938, the family went to France, where they were separated. The British government would not give visas to whole families, just one adult and a child. So Tomi went with Emil to England and Giza and his sister Kitty to the US, where Giza became a psychoanalyst in New York.

A few months after Emil and Tomi arrived in England, Emil committed suicide after getting a letter saying his application for an extension of their visas had been refused. Tomi was sent to a succession of foster homes and supported the war effort by plane-spotting and earned pocket money gathering mortar shells. After the war, he found out the letter his father received had been a clerical error.
At 12, he joined the Young Communist League in Britain and six months later was a district organiser in Slough. The Communist Party paid for him to stay at school to complete his secondary education after the funds from the refugee agency ceased when he turned 14.
In 1944, Tomi raised his age and worked his passage to the US, where he was reunited with Giza and Kitty. He studied political science, economics and aeronautical engineering and completed a BA, then qualified as a proof-press operator. He was active in the International Typographical Union and an organiser for the electrical workers' union. He was also a member of the American Communist Party. However, Watts was always his own man.
He later described himself as a ''Maxist'' and rejected all dogmatism and sectarianism.
He travelled the US by motorbike, then, to avoid fighting in Korea, wound up in Israel, the one place he could go without a passport. Then, to avoid fighting in the Israeli Defence Forces, he went to France, where he studied and eventually graduated as a geophysicist.
In the mid-1950s, he was employed for several months in Cuba and was offered a permanent job but declined with thanks and returned to work in France. He visited much of socialist eastern Europe.
In the mid-1960s in Paris, he became involved in supporting US GI resistance to the Vietnam war. Around this time, Tomi became Max Watts, most probably from Watts in Los Angeles because of the 1965 rioting and Max from ''maximum wattage''.
At its height, more than 400 GI anti-war newspapers were issued in Europe and the US. Watts's book Left Face (1991), co-written with American fellow-activist and close friend David Cortwright, was a comprehensive study of soldier unions and resistance movements in modern armies.
At one point, Watts was kidnapped by the French security forces and transported to Corsica. He got away with the help of Danish supporters and, after further arrests and deportation from France, moved to Heidelberg, where the US Army headquarters in Europe was based. He supported soldiers on court martial for offences from refusal to cut their hair to refusing to serve in Vietnam.
During this time, he was also a freelance journalist and wrote for leading publications such as Der Spiegel and Stern, as well as left-wing papers. He reported extensively on the Baader-Meinhof Group and other political actions and movements.
He maintained his life as a totally engaged left political activist in Australia when he arrived (illegally) in the late 1970s.
During the war on Bougainville in the early 1990s, Watts relayed Waratah Rose Gillespie's dispatches from the heart of the conflict. He was a consultant to the lawyers bringing cases for the people of Bougainville and Papua New Guinea against mining companies.
Watts most recently wrote for Reporteurs sans Frontieres as its representative in Australia, Ossietzky (Berlin), Junge Welt (Berlin), Wochen-Zeitung (Zurich), Akin (Vienna) and Overland (Australia).
Watts rejected monogamy but nonetheless had extended relationships with women who, despite his insistent maintenance of a male chauvinist image, generally remained his friends.
Max Watts is survived by his daughter, Katinka, his cousin, Susie, as well as friends Rosie, Lydia, Vivienne and Liz.

-Vivienne Porzsol

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Obituaries 2010