Beaten But Not Defeated

by Merilyn Moos

  Now outside the ‘Communist’ movement, Siegi raised a number of issues about a new basis for socialism. These are mainly based on questions rather than answers and try to combine a sort of ethical socialism with a rather economistic interpretation of Marxism but end up simply putting the two next to each other without any real integration. Though striving for something ‘new’, his articles instead are woolly - Siegi has lost his political bearings. He is finding developing an alternative position to that of the KPD difficult.

  Siegi refers to the ideas of ‘Wintrinham and co’. (The reference to ‘Wintrinham and co.’ is probably to the ‘1941 Committee’, one of the predecessors of the CommonWealth Party).183 Tom Wintrinham was a founder member of the CPGB, an officer in the International Brigade in Spain who was then expelled from the Communist Party for marrying a ‘Trotskyist spy’ (Purcell, 2004, quoting from the head of the Comintern in Spain).184 Like Siegi, Wintrinham never became a Trotskyist although he may have had some sympathies for the POUM, instead seeing himself, somewhat like Siegi, as a loyal Communist who had been forced out by a party that was going astray. Siegi’s awareness of this figure shows how seriously he was still taking the debates on the left.

  But Siegi shows no inclination to join him, despite some significant similarities in history and outlook. His disagreement with Wintrinham, who had become the most significant non-Trotskyite figure to the left of the CP, could have a variety of ostensible causes (see endnote) but the main one was probably Wintrinham’s rejection of morality as a basis for politics, maybe but less likely Wintrinham’s willingness to include the CP in a popular front. Nevertheless, Siegi’s unwillingness to align himself with Wintrinham may have just as much had to do with Siegi’s insecurity in Britain, both psychologically and legally - Siegi was not yet naturalised, than with Siegi’s differences with him.

  The most remarkable of the documents however was Siegi’s analysis of the Political Economy of the Nazis. This appears in more than one version and it evidently kept on being rewritten between its inception in about 1936/7, when it was written almost entirely in German, and the final version in 1940/1, written in English. (The absence of reference to the Hitler/Stalin pact of 1940 suggests that Siegi gave up before then, or maybe because of the pact.)

  The lengthy document covers in extraordinary econometric detail, which must have required an amazing level of statistical research into wages, prices, production, etc in Germany, the changing situation of the many classes and class fractions in Nazi Germany, from the small farmer, through the artisan and shop keeper, the worker and layers of the bourgeoisie, and how their class position was affected by Nazism. There is very little on the position of Jews, though Siegi does end by arguing that the Nazis will not exterminate them because of their economic usefulness. The document’s emphasis is on the failure of the Nazis to fulfil the promises to their own voters, their links with big business and some suggestion towards the end that the regime remains unstable, an analysis, I suggest, as much a product of his Marxism as his statistics. But he did not appear optimistic that the Nazi regime would be replaced, suggesting at one point that some sort of right-wing coalition might be formed.

  This unpublished book is unique - nothing of the sort, as far as one knows, was being produced in this sort of depth or detail at the time it was written, though other exiles and ‘friends of anti-Nazis’ were doing some work and writing more ‘journalistic’ articles. It may also be the case, though this is conjecture, that Siegi’s analysis of the economic situation in Germany could have contributed to an Allied war plan. Siegi’s favourable internment rating indicates the importance of his research, which may well have included his economic analysis of Germany.

  There is an intriguing letter from Orwell to Siegi, dated 16th November 1943, in Peter Davison’s ‘The Complete Works of George Orwell’ which is a response to a letter from Siegi that is now lost. That Siegi should write to Orwell at all is itself of interest as it suggests Siegi’s sense that Orwell was worth communicating with. Orwell starts my saying that what Siegi says is very interesting, but continues with criticisms, first, that Siegi underestimates the importance of communication in order to bring about change. Orwell writes: ‘The greatest problem before intellectuals now is the conquest of power.’ Orwell continues: ‘You speak of forming a new elite…’ and continues how problematic it is to do such a thing ‘inside [Orwell’s italics] the powerful modern State which is controlled by people whose interest is to prevent any such thing.’ Orwell’s second criticism of Siegi’s letter is that Siegi ‘overestimates the danger of ‘Brave New World’-‘i.e. a completely materialist vulgar civilisation based on hedonism’. Instead Orwell posits the likelihood of the ‘centralised slave state, ruled over by a small clique and in effect a new ruling class’, whose dynamic would be ‘rabid nationalism and hero worship kept going by literally continuous wars.’ The suggestion here, even though implicit, is that Siegi was reaching the conclusion that change would occur through the creation of a new, apparently intellectual, elite, suggesting a profound pessimism on Siegi’s part.

  These political musings and analysis mark the end of the period of Siegi’s life in which he was attempting to develop some alternative vision to that of the KPD. There is no evidence of any political writing after around 1942/43. Very likely, the near death of Lotte, followed soon after by the birth of his child, would have provided distraction. But the break is more fundamental than that.

  After the War, probably after 1944, Siegi seems to have stopped speculating, at least in writing, about the possibilities for and possible nature of socialism and disappeared completely into his economic work, though he did return to these ideas, finally, in the late 1960s. But Siegi has entered a period of life where his politics are expressed in less visible or active form

  The Holocaust and its shadow

  I want to finally focus in this section on the years immediately after the end of World War Two. Soon after the end of the war, Siegi and Lotte started the terrible process of trying to find out who was still alive. This occurred initially in Oxford, indeed even before the war had ended, but continued briefly after their move to Durham. This search was not known to me till I recently acquired my mother’s and father’s heart-breaking papers.

  There I found that my mother believed she had found her father, whom she had been trying to trace since 1942, only to discover it was a different Samuel Jacoby, also from Charlottenburg, Berlin, with the same year of birth. Her father had not died of a heart attack, as she had informed me, but of his time at Theriesenstadt.

  My father, I was to discover, had lost his beloved uncle, Hermann. Hermann had met a terrible death, which Siegi found out about within weeks of my birth (something I am now convinced must have affected his joy). Siegi’s only cousin and family were captured in Yugoslavia and almost all murdered. Lotte’s father, sister and Lotte believed, mother, had all been murdered. Indeed, of the families Siegi and Lotte had left behind in Germany, almost none were still alive by the end of 1945.

  In her last years, Lotte, as her inhibitions at speaking of the past became consumed by dementia and she released the odd memory and word, would regularly repeat to me: ‘I should have died too.’ She had failed to save her family’s skins while saving her own. She could not bear it. My father trod more lightly over the loss of so much, but he, like Lotte, also could not face that past and was therefore unable to speak of it.

  There were other deaths, less personal but also pressing. Exile and the process of flight contributed to the suicides of literary and artistic figures, some of whom Siegi would have known or known of. Ernest Kirchner killed himself in 1938, Eric Toller, the playwright, whom my father may well have known, in 1939, Walter Benjamin and Stefan Zweig in 1940. And there were of course many others who were less illustrious. Exile ‘de-roots‘ a person, turns them into an ‘other’, an ‘outsider’ who has not just lost their country but their language, their comrades and friends. Siegi was not alone in sometimes wondering abo
ut whether life was worth the candle.

  As I grew up, I knew that both my parents wanted nothing to do with Germany, though now I suspect this was more Lotte’s than Siegi’s position. Somehow, aged only five or six, I knew that one of the hymns we sang at the services held for our Church of England primary school which had the same musical refrain as ‘Deutschland Über Alles’ was ‘verboten’, and I, who was such a good little girl, would clamp my mouth tight shut and refuse to sing. Indeed, unlike almost all the ‘Jewish’ exiled community, including Lotte’s living sister, Siegi and Lotte even had refused reparations because it was ‘blood money’. As the British Government files record, they were one of a mere handful to refuse. (They were later to accept their German pension which they saw as their – earned – right.185 )

  The explanation Siegi gave for his job at the Institute ending in 1947 was that the policy was to give the jobs back to returning soldiers. Durham also had the advantage of offering him permanent tenure. Whatever, the underlying cause, his contract at the Institute finished in October 1947 and, after spending three months ‘commuting’, he moved into his first ever privately owned house in the ‘bracing’ and hilly university city of Durham in December 1947 where he had finally, aged forty-three, got his first established university lecturing post in economics at St Cuthberts College.

  Amongst the letters my father kept (now in my possession) recounting who amongst the comrades had lived, and the many who had died, there is correspondence, in German, with somebody who survived. In a touching and illuminating letter from Harry Schulze-Wilde from Munich in 1947, who had founded the German journal ‘Echo der Woche’, based in Munich, Harry explains that he was doing OK, having survived nine concentration camps.

  I thought I could not trace Harry till an entry popped up on Wikipedia just before I sent off this manuscript which provided other openings. Harry Schulze-Wilde’s original name was Harry Paul Schulze, his other pseudonym being Harry Schulze-Hegner. In the 1920’s, Harry had worked with Piscator and become a member of the KPD and a left-wing journalist, left the KPD in 1932, was arrested straight after the Reichstag fire and then somehow escaping, got into Czechoslovakia, where, it appears, that although he was mot apparently a member of the KPD, he coordinated with Johannes Becher and Willi Münzenberg, who were acting on behalf of the Comintern.186

  It is not surprising that Siegi and Harry knew each other as their worlds evidently overlapped considerably. Originally a youth worker in the 1920s, Harry had been in Berlin from around 1928 when he was a member of the KPD, and, also, like Siegi, was a cultural activist and a journalist. As we know from Siegi’s letter, they were involved in agit-prop together in Berlin. Harry’s departure from the KPD in 1932 suggests some level of dissidence from the KPD though his working for the Comintern a year or two after that - and after the Nazis have taken over - shows his willingness to work for the Comintern. Although Siegi was probably more ‘on line’ than Harry, Siegi may well have shared some of Harry’s reservations. We also know from Siegi’s letter that they met up again in Paris in late 1933/early 1934.

  The following is drawn from Siegi’s reply, dated 28th June 1947, to Harry’s first letter. Siegi wrote: ‘The fact that I write immediately is the best expression of my joy in being able to write to you [i.e. that Harry was still alive]. We [Siegi and Lotte] often thought and talked of you. You had no small part in our meeting and we think back to our time in the theatre with unadulterated joy and there aren’t many times I can say that about.

  How are you? When did you become Editor of ‘Echo der Woche’? I don’t remember it from my Munich days.

  Politically we have completely withdrawn since 1937…

  We were worried you didn’t get out of France in time. Paris was the last time we saw each other. We never heard from Ernst again. Otto was still alive in 1942 but we don’t know after that. Berthe was involved in sabotage and ‘committed suicide.’

  Harry had invited Siegi to the Second International Youth Congress in 1948 in Munich. It is still unclear what this Congress was or was supposed to be. It may have been a planned Congress of the World Federation of Democratic Youth. The Federation was founded in London 1945 and dominated by Communist-led groups. It had held its first International Youth and Student Festival in Prague in 1947 and was to hold its second in Budapest in 1949. Was the Munich gathering some sort of Congress planned for 1948 but cancelled under Cold War pressures? We know of one example of such a cancellation or maybe postponement: on 8th October and then again on the 12 November 1947, any activities of the Cultural Union, suspected of being a Communist front, were forbidden by the U.S and British military governments in their sectors. Germany, it has to be remembered, only finally ‘divides’ into West and East Germany in 1949. In 1947, it was still possible for the left in Germany to hope to build a united socialist Germany and cultural activities which embraced the revolutionary left.

  We have a proposed schedule for a June Youth Congress (from correspondence between Farish and Graham Greene, who had also been invited to speak in the Catherine Walstron archive in Georgetown University). According to Farish, “the meeting will not have any political or propagandistic tendency. Its only stated purpose …is to further the spirit of understanding between Germany and the world.“ But there does not appear to be any other record of this Congress, which strongly suggests it never took place.

  Siegi was enthusiastic about the invitation. He might, he wrote, give a lecture on economic/social questions or the relationship between ethics and economics or the problems of planning. Siegi appears to have been trying to build an alternative ethical socialism to the Stalinist model. Although it is impossible to know how to interpret Siegi’s proposed involvement, one of the attractions of Harry’s invitation may well have been that Harry came out of a Christian revolutionary tradition, for whom, therefore, ethics would have had greater priority than for the average comrade.187

  In response to Harry’s suggestion that they may have gone separate ways politically, Siegi writes: ‘A whole world separates me from the line. When I hear the line, then I realise a whole world separates me.’ ‘The line’, one assumes, refers to the position of the KPD/CP.

  The letter is full of the contradictions of a past that could never be undone. Siegi warns Harry that he would need to sort out passport difficulties (although by then he is naturalised). He writes ‘I have lost more than an essential part of my past but there is nothing to be done about it.’ Siegi shows an enthusiasm for returning to Munich as the place of his birth. The people who had bound him to Munich had been murdered but it seems that returning to some sort of political profile in Germany could outweigh this. Siegi was willing or even keen to return to Germany given the right circumstances.

  But, for whatever reasons, nothing came of the plan. The Cold War was already looming. In 1948, in the ‘Russian domain’, there had been a ‘communist coup’ in Czechoslovakia, and the removal of non-communist elements across ‘coalition’ governments in Eastern Europe. The Berlin blockade had started in mid-1948. In the ‘West’ the expulsion of Communists from Italian and French coalition governments was already taking place. Harry’s initiative may have been timed out-what was possible in 1947 was no longer feasible in 1948. One element in Siegi’s decision was likely to have been the descent of the Iron Curtain.

  Intriguingly, there is no further correspondence between Harry and Siegi, although both lived on for at least thirty years (or at least none that Siegi preserved). Although we do not know whether the Congress ever occurred or Siegi decided not to attend (or both), I suggest this moment marked a key break for Siegi from his former comrades (those still alive) but also with his aim, since he had left the exile group and the KPD, to develop some sort of alternative basis for socialism. Siegi has for now been defeated. He has not just lost ‘more than an essential part of my past’, he has lost the intention and probably desire to rethink the basis of socialism. It also symbolises Siegi and Lotte’s decision that they would never return to th
eir former ‘homeland’ and were now facing a future in the UK.

  End-notes

  169. My thanks to Paul Weindling for sending me his article: ‘The Impact of German medical scientists on British medicine: A Case-study of Oxford 1933-45’ from Forced Migration and Scientific change, ed M Ash and A Sollneer, German Historical institute, 1996, CUP.

  170. Marschak failed to ‘get’ Lowe. Lowe, whose economics was also influenced by Marxism, a Jew and an architect of the Weimar Republic, also had to flee Germany in 1933, but escaped to Manchester, not the Institute, and, after internment, left for the USA.

  171. I remember how, when I got into Oxford University, my father proudly gave me his long flowing Oxford university gown. But I had no use for it: the undergraduate gown was of course of a different - and shorter - cut to that of the don. Siegi kept the gown till his dying day and I sadly threw it out when I cleared my parents’ home; it had become the living quarters for a million moths.

  172. De Gaulle, who was recognised as leader of the Free French on 28.6.40, is often now seen as the accepted leader of the ‘legitimate’ French resistance but this was far from the case at the time. Churchill, and even more so Roosevelt, were not enamoured of him and tried to build up a couple of figures with more Petainist tendencies, but they failed. Siegi’s work for the Free French was more politically partisan and less illustrious than it might seem now.

  173. Brinson (2003): ‘In the Exile of Internment’ or ‘Von Versuchen, aus einer Not eine Tugent zu machen; German -speaking women interned by the British during the Second World War.

  174. Kushner (1989): The persistence of prejudice: antisemitism in British society during the Second World War.

  175. Calder: The Myth of 1940

  176. Internment experiences were highly mixed. The Isle of Man, where many were detained, had its compensations: with so many distinguished intellectuals present, a rich cultural life emerged: musicians had time to practise, artists improvised paintings and sculptures (Calder, 1980). The Dadaist Kurt Schwitters, after years of neglect, relished his captive audience: ‘His pièces de résistance, …were made out of the remnants of porridge,…collected from breakfast tables but the mice soon got them’ (Calder, 1980).