Helga Zepp-LaRouche
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Helga Zepp-LaRouche (born August 25, 1948, Trier) is a German journalist, scholar, and politician.
In 1971 she became one of the first European journalists to visit China during the Cultural Revolution, travelling extensively throughout the country.
Returning to Germany, she became active in the European branch of the nascent political movement of the controversial American fringe political figure, Lyndon LaRouche.
She became head of this movement for Europe, and married LaRouche on December 29, 1977. She went on to run for political office numerous times in Germany, representing small parties founded by the LaRouche movement, with little success. She also travelled extensively with her husband, promoting his proposals for monetary reform and large-scale infrastructural development.
In this capacity, she met with world leaders such as Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, and Mexican President José López Portillo. It is claimed by her supporters that it was her address to a conference in China in May 1996, promoting the concept of the Eurasian Land Bridge in a debate format with British member of the European Commission, Sir Leon Brittan (who opposed it), which led to the adoption of the Landbridge proposal by the Chinese government.
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Zepp-LaRouche is also considered by her supporters to be one of the world's leading authorities on Friedrich Schiller and Cardinal Nicolaus of Cusa.
In 1984, she founded the Schiller Institute, which has as its stated aim the application of Schiller's ideas on the relationship between aesthetics and politics to what the Institute calls the "contemporary world crisis."
In October 2004, a British inquest heard that the Schiller Institute was a "dangerous anti-Semitic cult" that may have used mind-control techniques on a British Jewish student, Jeremiah Duggan, who subsequently died after running across a busy road in Wiesbaden. The Institute strongly denies the allegations. The family has hired a Berlin lawyer to press for a second German police investigation, after the first investigation found that the Institute had no involvement in Duggan's death.
In Dancing on My Grave (1986), ballerina Gelsey Kirkland describes her encounter with Zepp-LaRouche's ideas, as she was battling her drug addiction:
"A critical answer was provided by Helga Zepp LaRouche, German-born founder of the Schiller Institute. Her polemical writings contained a moving study of Schiller. In spite of her extreme point of view, her unyielding radicalism, this woman provided a crucial turning point for me. Her zealous devotion to the classics and her political war against drugs emboldened me to act, yet in my own way. Her scathing criticism of modern art gave me a clue about the relation between imitation and addiction. She wrote in the June 1980 issue of the Campaigner:
- If art were merely imitation and both the artist and the audience became whatever they imagined themselves to be, then all lawfulness in art would disappear, and absolutely anyone could simply set down on paper, canvas or score whatever his state of mind happened to be at the time, and that would be art.
- Had not I been taught during my early years that the best dancer was the one who offered the best imitation?"