After being released from jail, Harich was allowed to resume his previous literary work and became an editor of "Akademie Verlag" in Berlin in 1965, even though it took 33 years for the court to pronounce him "rehabilitated" in April 1990. Having spent most of his time in jail in solitary confinement, Harich emerged in 1964 as a hard-line Stalinist and enthusiastic critic of all modernist experimentation, even labeling Friedrich Nietzsche as a "Nazi worshipper." and insisting that his legacy was nothing but "a giant trash bin." Harich focused on more environmental political problems in the 1970s. In 1975 he undertook an impractical campaign for a state communism in the service of environmental protection, in hopes of making some change. Also, after the "Wende" (change) in Germany in 1989, he became the chairman of the "Alternative Enquete Komission" (AEK) which conducted research on the history of the GDR, and aligned himself with the self-proclaimed Mikhail Gorbachev reform communists after 1990.