Beaten But Not Defeated
Page 16
Yet Siegi was unusual in ending up in the UK. Though the figures are contested, it has been suggested that only about twelve ‘Communists’ were given the temporary right to stay in the UK in these early years. These figures come from a later E German source but even if an underestimate, the number is unlikely to exceed 100. Certainly, most German political refugees did not aim for the UK. 9000 had arrived in France by 1936; another 5000 went to fight in the Spanish Civil War. As late as 1940, only 5000 had arrived in Britain, and many of them had come via France, like Siegi, or from Spain (Reiter, 2011).124 The total numbers of all refugees who arrived in the UK before Kristallnacht in 1938 was only about 10,000. Outside the scope of this book, but these early – and mostly known anti-Nazi-German exiles are too often made invisible by the far larger exodus after ‘Kristallnacht’.
Many of the decisions about where to try to settle must have been emotionally and politically difficult for Siegi. London, reputedly wreathed in mist and smog, was far more on the edge of the world than Paris, especially before the days of fast trains and the tunnel, requiring crossing the Channel in a ferry. London, unlike Paris, was not a European city. Paris, unlike London, had a political tradition which embraced a revolutionary left. Unlike Lotte, Siegi, moreover, did not have relations in or real ties to the UK, nor did he, like Lotte, have a burning desire to attend the LSE.
But neither Siegi nor Lotte expected the UK to become their home. Neither of them appreciated that they had become exiles for the rest of their lives. Neither of them understood that by the time the Nazi regime finally collapsed, they would never want to walk on German soil again.
Lotte told me she thought the Nazis were such an idiotic bunch, they wouldn’t last. How could the established German ruling class, or at least significant fractions of it, allow the upstart Nazis to remain in power. She saw the Nazis as incompetent, and had expected the political class and military would soon dump them, a view more associated with the left SPD than the KPD with their emphasis on a popular revolt. It seems likely that Siegi will have held a less rosy view than these perspectives suggest.
Reducing Siegi’s life in these four turbulent years to the details of KPD policy and the intricacies of the where and whens, can obscure the meaning of such exile. My father had lost what for him made up his life: his political activities, a close connection to a political organisation, and his comrades from the Red Front, the RFB and agit-prop. He had failed to prevent Germany falling under the Nazi boot. He lost almost all his family, whom he was never to see again and who were mostly murdered. His relationship with his wife was profoundly damaged. Those four years framed him and though my father tended towards an optimism of the spirit, the scars were clear to see for the remaining fifty odd years of his life.
End-notes
63. May 1st also revealed the gulf between the KPD’s statements and propaganda, and its reluctance to organise; it was a portent of what was to come. After May 1st, KPD’s leaflets in the Saxon factories called for the arming of the proletariat and urged workers to demonstrate against Zoergiebel’s ‘social fascist police terror’, but it is clear that the CC had no intention of calling for a May Uprising (LaPorte, 2002: 271). They did call for a protest strike but ‘in Berlin itself the strike call was only taken up by a handful of building sites, a sweet meats factory and a few cigarette factories’ (LaPorte, 2002).
64. A subsequent leader, Willi Leow, fled to the USSR after the Reichstag fire and was judicially murdered there (Palmier 2006).
65. Unusually, in 1927, the strength of the left wing opposition in the KPD is revealed when a KPD membership meeting in Wurzen, W Saxony, voted to adopt a resolution in support of Trotsky and Zinoviev and expressed hostility to any move to expel them from the party. The chairman of the local RFB, Munkelt, stated that, ‘It would be outrageous to expel Trotsky and Zinoviev […because] there would also be expulsions in the KPD for representing a different point of view‘ (LaPorte, 2002). Again the RFB was criticised for ‘lacking discipline. ‘It [the RFB] had carried out a leftist political line throughout the period [even] when the ‘moderate’ united front had been official party policy’.
66. Drawn from W. Kaas, ‘Die soziale Struktur der KPD’, in, Die kommunistische Internationale, IX (19) (9.5.1928).
67. Merson, Communist Resistance in Nazi Germany
68. The KPD CC did set up its own military police. It gave orders in autumn 1930 to form a small illegal self-defence organisation of the party, made up of groups of ten, some of them with “handfeuerwaffen”(handguns), who underwent training: theoretically and in practice. Only the leader of the group knew who owned a weapon. The PSS had to guard the leaders and the party houses and were strictly controlled by the CC. Not stated in this source, is the suspicion that the Red Front must have been seen as too far outside Party discipline and too volatile to be trusted with this task. I owe this footnote entirely to the kindness of Harald Marpe, Berlin, who found the following in ‘revolutionäre militärpolitik gegen faschistische gefahr‘ (revolutionary military policy against fascist danger), an E German book of 1982.
69. Drawn from archives quoted in T. Weingarten Stalin und der Aufsteig Hitlers (1970).
70. Daycock, The KPD and the NSDAP: A Study in the Relationship between the Poltical Extremes in Weimar Germany 1923-1933 (Ph. D. thesis, LSE, 1980).
71. LaPorte (2002) highlights the ineffectiveness of this policy in relation to Saxony. There was not one Nazi delegate to the Regional Saxony Conference in 1931. LaPorte (2002) also uses the Nazi-led strike in the Leipzig textile factory Tittel and Kruger, in 1932, to illustrate the extent to which the KPD wanted to appeal to Nazi workers. When the strike broke out in late October there were only four Communists in the factory, 76 Nazi workers. The district KPD leadership instructed the KPD factory group to act jointly with the Nazis at strike meetings and on the picket line, using ‘ideological discussion’ to win them over.
72. Peterson tells a very similar story though he is referring to events immediately post the Reichstag fire.
73. Volker Berghahn, Europe in the Era of Two World Wars: From Militarism and Genocide to Civil Society, 1900-1950 (English translation, 2005)
74. Bodek, The Not so Golden 20’s: everyday life and Communist Agitprop in Weimar-era Berlin
75. Lotte once said that she had been arrested and kept briefly, one can assume, during this same swoop. The details were unfortunately thin. She cannot however have been held for long. She then received a notice that some library books were over-due and had to be returned immediately. ‘I was no fool,’ she told me. ‘I wasn’t going to fall into that trap.’ Genuinely unwell, she went to stay - and hide - with an aunt in the country after Siegi had disappeared. She seems to have known who to apply to to get the necessary papers, telling me that some of the police remained Social Democrats. She dressed up for the train journey as if she were going to a funeral, carrying a wreath of flowers, to decrease any chance of being questioned or arrested. Unlike Siegi, she travelled on a German passport, with the appropriate papers, probably leaving Germany in April 1933 for Paris. She said she thought she would be returning within a few years. It was not to be. She was never to see her mother or sister again.
76. Copper, Workers and athletes against fascism. The struggle for Community sporting red units in Leipzig from 1933 to 1935
77. Fomferra himself was arrested in March 1933, ‘for a separate matter’, in this case by the SA, with the whole of his family, although he was released after fourteen hours, and survived.
78. Lehmann, talk on The Worker Olympics, 29.07.2012 at Tate Modern, London
79. There is also no comparison in terms of support. In Germany, the Workers Cycling association in 1929 had a membership of 320,000 and maintained a bicycle cooperative factory!
80. Steinberg, D: The Workers’ Sport Internationals 1920-28, in Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 13, No. 2, Special Issue: Workers’ Culture
81. By 1930, the SPD dominated sports organisation encouraged join
t activities with the Stahlhelm, which were to soon join the SA. After the Nazis took over, the SPD sports leadership even informed the Nazis that they were as anti-Communist as the Nazis and that it was willing to subordinate itself to a strong i.e. Nazi, national leadership in sport. It called on its members to refrain from politics (Kruger, 1996).
82. Kruger, The German way of Worker Sport in A Kruger and J Riordan (eds) The Story of Worker Sport.
83. LaPorte’s (2002) analysis of the switch from ‘red’ to ‘brown’ in Saxony is telling and gives far greater prominence to cultural and sporting organisations than normal. LaPorte (2002) refers to Walter’s F. Walter’s ’sachsen – ein Stammland der Sozialdemokratie?’, in PVS 32 (2) (1991), a study of Saxony which argued that the primary obstacle in the path of the Nazis’ electoral rise was not the percentage of workers or the scale of unemployment, but the ‘milieu’ of cultural and sporting organisations (plus the attachment of workers to their Parties). Walter indicates that where the ‘milieu’ of left dominated sports clubs was strongest, the SPD was most stable and the vote held up at the polls against the Nazis.
84. Weber: Arbeiter Bühne und Film
85. The importance of some of these agit-prop groups is also revealed in Len Crome’s ‘Unbroken’. In the four weeks preceding the 1930 Reichstag elections, nineteen Berlin agitprop groups gave 650 performances in halls, courtyards, factories and in the open air.
86. Siegi is however taking a pro-USSR position in his writings at this point, even though even here, he is emphasising – even optimistic - about the possibility of working with the SPD (though note the absence of reference to the SPD’s leadership). Siegi’s articles in full are included in the Appendix. See for example, his article from February 1931. Just to highlight his ‘line’ in early 1931, here is an extract: ‘How dare such people (fascists, church etc) argue against the USSR. Here the incredible is coming true. They need 2m new workers. Compare this to the 50m unemployed in USA. The 5 year plan has been realised in 4 years. What an impressive achievement in the land of the proletariat dictatorship and the laws of Bolshevism ‘which destroy everything. Capitalism is conscious of the danger hence its feverish war preparations and the oppression of the revolutionary proletariat by means of fascism (sic). Our task is to start mass struggle against fascism…The election to the works Councils [in March] gives us a new opportunity to measure our revolutionary struggle against the opposition. We can witness now in the wider circles of the SPD a strong honest opposition against its politics, a strong need for unity against fascism. Never was the situation as favourable as today to build this front. It is up to us to use this situation with all our strength. It is not yet too late’.
87. Wolpe’s music is not easily pigeon-holed with styles ranging from jazz, folk and ethnic influences to sprechgesang and complex composition, evocative of a very particular place and time in history. He was forced to flee Berlin in March 1933, a short while after Siegi, making use of his Romanian passport, and eventually settling in New York after a time in Israel. Once in the US, he moved away from his left affiliations.
88. Haben Sie Kummer in the original German (by Siegfried Moos)
Haben sie Kummer, haben sie Sorgen,
Will Ihnen Lehmann nichts mehr borgen:
Bei uns finden Sie eine schönere Welt!
Drei Stunden Vergessen für wenig Geld,
Nach dem Sie sich, ach, schon so lange sehnen!
Bei uns gibt es Lachen, bei uns gibt es Tränen.
Immer ran, immer ran an die Kasse!
Unsre Ware ist prima Klasse!
Kommen Sie rein, kommen Sie rein, kommen Sie rein!
Das Theater soll Ihnen Ihr Himmel sein!
Besser als Kintopp, besser als Fusel
Gibt das Theater sel’gen Dusel.
Mit wenig Moneten verzagen Sie nie!
Die Bühnenstars begeistern auch Sie!
Gerade für Sie sind doch unsere Gaben.
Auch Bildung können Sie bei uns haben!
Immer ran, immer ran an die Kasse!
Unsre Ware ist prima Klasse!
Kommen Sie rein, kommen Sie rein, kommen Sie rein!
Das Theater soll Ihnen Ihr Himmel sein!
Unser Theater hat auch Moral,
Raubmord und Totschlag, Liebesqual,
Verletzt nie die staatliche Autorität.
Wir achten die Ordnung, die jetzt besteht.
Wir bieten Ihnen das Beste vom Guten. Nur heitere Stunden, ernste Minuten:
Immer ran, immer ran an die Kasse!
Unsre Ware ist prima Klasse!
Kommen Sie rein, kommen Sie rein, kommen Sie rein! Das Theater soll Ihnen Ihr Himmel sein!
89. I owe my thanks to Arnt Nitschke, Thomas Phleps and Peermusic for the publication in 2011 of a score by Stefan Wolpe from 1929 and 1932, which includes both Siegi’s accompanying lyrics for the 1932 work, and copious notes on the Sports Revue and other activities Siegi was involved in. It is both a cause for rejoicing but also a mark of a terrible cultural (and personal) loss and disjuncture that, after 80 years, this work has finally reappeared in the public domain and I want to here express my gratitude for Phleps and Nitschke’s endless work in bringing this about. Prior to my receiving this publication, I had thought it impossible to find out anything more about this period of Siegi’s work.
90. One of the stories by father did tell me was how he hid his documents under the floor boards where he and Lotte lived in Auguststrasse. These could well have included his lyrics and poetry. But the SA pulled up all the floorboards and ransacked what lay beneath. Anything that Siegi had not hidden, I gather, my mother’s sister, Kate, burned after Siegi and Lotte had fled. Her explanation was that she was safer that way but my parents never forgave her.
91. This was far from unique. Das Rote Sprachrohr (Red Megaphone), apparently the most popular agit-prop group and led by the famous Vallentin, regularly performed at large demonstrations and meetings before or after Thaelmann spoke (Crome, 1988).
92. The Großes Schauspielhaus, originally designed for Max Reinhardt, reopened in 1919, and contained seating for 3500 people. Max Reinhardt wanted to attract a working class audience. The Nazis took over the theatre in 1933 and changed the name to The Theatre of the People. In 1988, it was condemned and demolished.
93. Die Welte am Abend had originally been established by Münzenberg, in 1922, then head of the propaganda section of the KPD, though it seems to have had a more cultural viewpoint than Die Rote Fahne. It was closed down in September 1933 and its editor arrested.
94. lles an den roten Start!
Marie Schmidt war 20 Jahre
zur Fabrik sie täglich ging
und sie schaffte täglich Ware,
doch sie blieb ein armes Ding.
Wie sie es im Film gesehen,
lebt Marie und wartet, harrt,
bis das Wunder wird geschehen.
Zum Erfolg beginnt ihr Start!
Walter Vogel war ein kleiner
Angestellter im Konzern,
Ausgehungert lebt er seiner
Illusion vom großen Herrn.
Kommt er im Beruf nicht weiter
sucht er sich Ersatz beim Sport,
Al[l]es an den roten Start!
Das ist der Sport by Siegfried Moos (from Berlin: Arbeitersportverlag [1932])
Das ist der Sport der herrschenden Klasse,
das ist des Kapitalismus Sinn:
Der Einzelne löst sich von der Masse,
steigt empor zu eigenem Gewinn.
Und büßt er auch das Leben ein,
er will, er muß erfolgreich sein!
II
1. Gefährlich wird dem Kapital das Denken
der Massen, die für Hungerlöhne fronen.
Vom Kampf der Unterdrückten abzulenken
schreit Radio, Presse: Seht, die Sportkanonen!
2. Doch nicht genügt es den Profitinteressen
des Kapitals, die Massen abzulenken –
du sollst, wenn deine Klasse du ver
gessen,
im Amateursport in die Kriegsfront schwenken.
III
1. Sportler rufen: Nicht geschwiegen!
Achtung! Achtung! Nicht gewartet!
Sollt nicht mehr die Rücken biegen.
Jetzt heißt’s Achtung! Los! Gestartet!
Stählt die Muskeln! Schärft die Augen!
Schärft die Hirne! Übt die Lungen!
Müssen gut zum Kämpfen taugen,
Bis wir unser Ziel errungen.
Müssen gut zum Kämpfen taugen,
Bis wir unser Ziel errungen.
2. Heute werben, morgen streiken.
Heute kämpfen, diskutieren.
Keiner bringt uns mehr zum Schweigen,
Rote Sportler aufmarschieren.
Stählt die Muskeln!…
3. Rote Sportler kämpft für alle,
Für die Sache seiner Klasse.
PCH
Unversöhnlich gegen alle,
Die ein Feind der breiten Masse.
Stählt die Muskeln!…
4. Solidarität der Sportler
Aller Länder, aller Rassen.
Solidarität der Sportler
Im Entscheidungskampf der Klassen.
Stählt die Muskeln!…
IV
Rote Sportler glauben nicht daran,
daß der Sport allein befreien kann.
Reihn sich in die rote Kampffront ein,
wollen Klassenkampfsoldaten sein.
Stählt den Körper, werbt durch Tat und Wort;
stets bereit zum Kampf marschiert “Rot Sport”!
95. From: Berlin: Arbeitersportverlag [1932]
Fichte im Großen Schauspielhaus
Stählt die Muskeln! Schärft die Augen!