by Merilyn Moos
Once, already at Oxford, I enquired of my mother whether I was Jewish. I remember clearly that I assumed - correctly - that the answer would be ‘no’. Like many émigrés who had had to leave Germany because of their left-wing politics, my parents rejected any label of ‘Judaism’. My father defined himself in terms of a much broader political struggle, in which Judaism played no part. (Indeed, my mother, in her controversial way, always insisted that the German Jews had not fought back against the Nazis, so were no use to anybody.) In their desire to bring me up to be safe and integrated, they had left behind their pasts. It was left to me, already in late middle-age, to try to find and wonder how to remember our two families murdered dead.
Siegi and Lotte moved to London in 1966. This was made possible by the election, for the second time, of a Labour Government, under Harold Wilson. My father was invited to become a special advisor at the Board of Trade, a post he took up in 1966 and which lasted till Labour’s defeat in 1970. He had known Balogh at the Institute of Statistics in Oxford and stayed in contact with him ever since. (The last letter to Balogh in his records is from October 1962, commenting on how the Observer had chosen Balogh’s article over his (probably anti-) Common Market submission.) Moreover, he also knew Harold Wilson from the Institute. My father never boasted but once told me in his matter of fact way that he and Wilson (and a third person whose name I cannot remember) had worked together on a project for Beveridge. It seems likely that this combination of contacts put him in a good position to get the job at the Board of Trade and finally got him and Lotte their ticket out of Durham.
End-notes
188. Emil Klaus Fuchs joined the German Communist Party in the 1930s but was forced to flee to Britain in 1933 when the Nazis came to power. In 1939, when the Second World War broke out, he was detained on the Isle of Man and, as happened more frequently with Communist refugees, was sent to Canada. He was allowed to return (to Edinburgh) in 1941. His scientific expertise led to him being recruited to join the nuclear weapons programme and in 1946, he was offered a post at the UK Atomic Energy Research Establishment.
In late 1941, Fuchs contacted the German Communist, Jürgen Kuczynski (referred to earlier in this study, and who was a Soviet spy - although Special Branch appeared unaware of this). Fuchs offered the Russians information and subsequently passed on secret atomic research. Fuchs continued spying until he was finally exposed in 1949. Fuchs later stated that he had been motivated by a belief that the Soviets had a right to know about the atomic bomb project, not out of a desire for private gain. He was sentenced to fourteen years imprisonment and stripped off his British citizenship. Granted an amnesty after nine years, he spent the rest of his life in E. Germany.
189. It was not just Communists the Government were suspicious of. In 1950, MI5 recommended that “members of the Revolutionary Communist Party, a group to the left of the Communist Party: should not in general be permitted to acquire the citizenship…. The Home Office seems to have agreed the slightly more nuanced position that “applications from existing members of these parties or groups [RCP, Jehovah’s Witnesses etc.!] and from persons whose present or past associations with these parties or groups were such as to cast doubt on their loyalty, should be refused” From I Birchall, Tony Cliff: A Marxist for his Time (Bookmarks, London, 2011). Indeed, Tony Cliff who arrived in the UK from Palestine was consistently refused naturalisation, despite the support of the Michael Foot MP, and, for Cliff’s later application, the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, because of Cliff’s revolutionary beliefs.(My thanks to Ian Birchall for this point and source material.)
190. Gerhard Hinze was under constant surveillance by MI5 as a suspected communist and indeed had only been allowed to disembark at Harwich in 1938 after the intervention of the MP, Ellen Wilkinson, who agreed at the last moment to act as his guarantor. Hinze was one of the Communist refugees who was deported to Canada from their internment on the Isle of Man. Soon after, he was allowed to return to the UK. Appearing before an Aliens Tribunal, he denied being a member of the Communist Party. Disillusioned with the Communist Party, he was one of the very few ‘Communists’ who did not consider returning to Germany. He took his British acting career increasingly seriously and by 1950, MI5 opined he had become an anti-Communist (Brinson and Dove, 2014, and personal conversations with Hinze’s son).
191. In my extensive wanderings around the ‘second generation’ in the UK, i.e. people who were the children of the refugees from Nazism, I have not come across anybody else whose parents had, like mine, fled Nazism for the UK as committed political/Communist refugees, had stayed on the left and chose to stay in the UK. The one person where there some similarities is Hinze’s son, but his mother was British, his parents first fled to the USSR, and then, when they did ‘return’ to the UK, the father moved completely away from the left. Siegi and Lotte’s isolation must have been intense.
192. Lorre was not Jewish which may have helped her survive under fascism, although her husband, a diplomat, was a resistance fighter in the mountains in the North of Italy.
193. As late as 1959, MI5 were still concerned with some of the leading members of the British ‘literati’: Priestley, Pears, Britten, Dame Peggy Ashcroft, Stanley Spender and Michael Redgrave amongst others. (KV2/3215, 3822, Guardian ‘MI5 targeted JB Priestley, Peter Pears and Michael Redgrave, released papers show,’28th February 2014)
194. This is a position akin to Deutscher’s. See, for example, Isaac Deutscher Ideological Trends in the USSR (1967), April 8, 1967, at a conference on “The Soviet Union, 1917-1967” at the State University of New York. Binghampton. http://www.marxists.org/archive/deutscher/1967/ideologica l_trends_USSR.htm, accessed 12th January 2014.
195. Ralph Miliband is not just famous as the father of Ed and David but as the author of a couple of brilliant books critical of the parliamentary route: ‘Parliamentary Socialism’(1961), his best work, and ‘The State in Capitalist Society’ (1969). Miliband had been thinking about the possibility of building an independent socialist organisation since the days of the first New Left in the late 1950s, but it was not until the publication of “Moving On” in 1976 that he explicitly argued against the crippling effects of a belief in working within the Labour Party and argued for the formation of a separate party (Blackledge, 2011).
196. In the late 1970’s, early 1980’s, there was a more sustained attempt to establish a Socialist Society, in which many leading names who were to the left of Labour were initially involved e.g. Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Robin Blackburn, Perry Anderson, Tariq Ali, Hilary Wainwright, Mike Rustin and others. From the very beginning, there was an absence of consensus whether its purpose was to pressure the Labour Party or be an alternative to it, and it quickly evaporated (Newman, 2002). But Miliband was already thinking about such an organisation at least ten years earlier, when he would probably not have been so caught up by the Benn mystique.
Chapter 9
1966 - 1988 London. Beaten but not defeated
The Board of Trade and Harold Wilson
Through the good works of a very distant relative, my parents succeeded in renting a beautiful Crown estate maisonette, opposite Victoria Park in Hackney; Siegi was eligible as an official of the Crown. Siegi had an ‘office’ in the lower ground floor and here he stored all his old manuscripts and economic books (and a lot else besides which I was only to discover when I finally emptied their home). He decorated his desk with shells and bits of drift wood which the sea and sand had sculpted. He hung a picture of Mandelstam, a Russian poet sent to the camps under Stalin who consequently died, right by the door where it was impossible to miss.
I imagine that their home on the edges of the East End suited them, reminding them of the bohemian/working class areas Siegi had lived in Berlin, even if where they lived next to Victoria Park was a middle class enclave. But they would not have wanted to live in a bourgeois area such as Hampstead had become. But they did believe that their area would ‘come up’, that any moment now local s
hops selling their favourite coffee beans would appear - and they were right, but this did not happen till after their deaths. Being away from the conservative claustrophobia of Durham and back in an environment where ideas were important and debated suited them both well.
Till the fall of the Labour Government, Siegi continued to work at the Board of Trade, as an advisor to the Labour Government. The Board of Trade remained as a product of a ‘social-democratic’ perspective on the role of the state in the economy. Although this is not the place to go into the arguments about the beginning of the ‘social democratic decline’ or of the growing importance of the ‘world’ economy, the Wilson government had a commitment to trying to bring up the less developed regions and to limit the control of the multi-national. Wilson’s concerns were the importance of the ‘white heat of technology’, and that British economic innovation and production was being increasingly overtaken. Wilson committed the Government from 1964 to putting state resources into Research and Development (R and D), something Siegi was also strongly in favour of. Siegi contributed and wrote on a variety of Board of Trade anti-monopolisation papers, something which allowed him to combine his criticisms of capitalism and his belief that the role of the state included intervention to prevent industrial injustice and monopolisation. When the Conservatives were elected in 1970, Siegi, then 66, finally did retire, though I doubt if he had a choice.
The growth in the left particularly in the UK but also elsewhere, maybe the denunciation of Stalin, even if in limited terms, by Khrushchev in 1956, the convulsions of Europe in 1968, including the - thwarted - uprising in Czechoslovakia, left Siegi and Lotte feeling more able to go back onto the streets in support of the many demonstrations, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, against the Vietnam war. Even so, they would march on the pavement, alongside the demonstration. Come on, join us, I chided them, if we met. But their fear ran too deep. Later on, after 1979, both of my parents hated Thatcher, understanding her as a class warrior and both wrote excoriating poetry about her. After my father’s death, I remember my mother coming out in support of the Miners. By then, she marched with us and I was proud of her.
My father, somewhat to my surprise, did accept the copies of Labour Worker I arrived with, though my mother was probably the keener reader. I would discover, well concealed of course, copies he must have bought in public places, a sign that, by the early 1970s, he was no longer as terrified of the shadows in his past. I guess the founding of International Socialism in the early 1960s, with its politics of ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow’ will have felt like the lifting of a very dark cloud. I can imagine he was very aware of IS/SW increasingly becoming a rival to the influence, at least ideologically if not numerically, of the CP. Not that he ever agreed with the position of state capitalism or a more Trotskyist position more generally. Though his reasons were opaque, I suspect, he maintained an abiding hope that the USSR would turn out alright in the end. My suspicion is that, despite his awareness of the ‘disappearance’ of Brian, he continued to believe that the USSR had the potential to still become a socialist society if there were enough pressure and organisation from below.194
When I came to sort his piles and piles of old papers, I found hidden away copies of old Solidarity papers and a variety of shop stewards movement literature from the 1970’s. He had in other words maintained his interest in left debates. Despite his very real fears that political engagement could lead to his removal from the UK up till his naturalisation in 1948, despite his severe disillusionment with Stalinism, despite the political amnesia imposed by Cold War, he never left behind his youthful commitment to socialism or lost his interest in the debates amongst the revolutionary left, even if he could no longer place himself within them.
Sometime during the late 1960’s, he did finally return to some of his ideas from the period after he had left the KPD. Probably inspired by the New Left and the student revolts and mass strikes of the period, he wrote a major manuscript aimed at laying a new basis for Socialism, which was rejected by publishers -we know because in this case he kept the rejection slips. Siegi’s political writings represented a noble but failed attempt to make socialism relevant to the present day, not helped by his position on the USSR, a defining issue by the end of the 1960’s, which remained opaque, and his ambiguity about the possibility of left reformism which detracts from the usefulness of this work.
Around the same time, Siegi also had a brief political dalliance with Ralph Miliband195 who was looking around for comrades to help build a new socialist organisation, albeit one which Miliband increasingly saw as much as a pressure-group on the Labour Party, as acting outside it. Although I believe letters were exchanged, this project came to nothing at the time.196 Although initially excited by the prospect of working for a non-Communist/anti-Stalinist and non-Trotskyist/non-’ultra-left’ organisation committed to non-parliamentary as well as parliamentary activity to bring about change, Miliband’s failure to emphasise class as the fulcrum of change and his orientation towards working within the Labour Party may well have deterred Siegi. For all that, that Siegi was willing to think about re-entering the socialist fray, bears testimony to how far he was revisiting old political pastures.
Despite working as an advisor to the Labour Government, Siegi was never tempted by membership of the Labour Party. There is an apparent inconsistency here. But working within the state to limit capitalism’s excesses is a classically left-reformist position. Siegi’s refusal to align himself with the Labour Party is more significant given that the British Labour Party had never had the opportunity to betray the British working class as had the SPD, so Siegi’s non-involvement should not simply be taken for granted. After all, Siegi and Lotte’s first good friends in the UK, the Woods, were to become key Labour stalwarts. Their best friends in Oxford, the Worswicks, were also strongly committed to the Labour Party.197
But Siegi had seen the Social Democrats at work in Germany and would have remembered their betrayals in 1918/19, the murder of Liebknecht and Luxemburg by troops under a Social Democratic Government and, later, their refusal to collaborate in an anti-Nazi alliance. According to Sylvia Worswick (in private conversation), Siegi broke of all contact with David Worswick, his oldest living friend, who had run the then prestigious National Institute of Economic and Social Research for seventeen years, when Worswick accepted a CBE in 1981. Siegi did not believe in accepting honours from the State, particularly when it was the Conservatives, the class enemies, in government. Though David lived till 2001, twenty years after their political falling-out, Siegi refused to even send David Christmas cards after that. My father’s revolutionary instincts ran deep. Siegi had seen too much the deadly effects of reformism to ever countenance joining the Labour Party.194
The betrayal of the 1919 German revolution
Clearing his papers, I found an article, I presume written to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the defeat of the German uprising. It is illuminating in terms of how constant Siegi’s political concerns still were in the late 1960s as well as being a - limited - comment on the event itself.(Like so much of his political writings, these papers have no title, author or date or in this case, and virtually no referencing.)
The article’s purpose is to demonstrate a clear connection between 1919 and the coming to power of the Nazis. This seminal event in German and indeed European history followed the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm, as a result of Germany’s defeat in WWI, and the declaration of the Weimar Republic. Its defeat dented Lenin’s and the Bolsheviks hopes of the USSR not remaining isolated. It also ended with the murder of Luxemburg and Liebknecht and sowed many seeds of fundamental hostility towards the SPD by the KPD.
Siegi’s emphasis is on the betrayal of the Social Democratic leadership. He writes of what was happening in the ‘Councils’: ‘They were victorious, the ‘moderate left’. They had routed the left ‘extremists’. Proudly they formed a coalition government…with the premiership and the chief ministries in control of the army, polic
e…Less than fifteen years later, a national socialist [government] formed a ‘Government of National Concentration [on] January 30 1933. This is how the moderates victory over the extremists ended.’
The article continues by describing the start of the German revolution. The ‘flag of revolution’ was first raised in Kiel on November 5th, 1918. The first meeting of the Council of Workers and soldiers was ‘attended by some 3000 delegates, containing equal numbers of representatives from the majority Social Democrats and the USP. The ‘inner cabinet’ was similarly to be made up of 3 from each constituency. But, Siegi laments, the nominations for this Committee did not come from the deputies. Instead, the ‘Chairman of the Deputies meetings’ simply appointed them.198
The advisor to the ‘Council of Soldiers’ Deputies, was Noske199, the article reminds us, who was soon to become the ‘butcher of the radical left’. Always sympathetic towards the military, Noske was to actively encourage the Freikorps in its murder of the left. The Freikorps was effectively the old German Army, banned by the victorious Western allies but now operating as mercenaries under the command of rightist generals. Noske’s first pronouncement, in the name of the Soldiers Councils, was that ‘unauthorised persons’ (i.e. except the military and police) must immediately surrender their arms. Karl Liebknecht, the ‘leader’ of the extreme left, proposed that all executive, legislative and judicial power should be handed over to the Workers and Soldiers Councils’, a proposal rapidly scotched by the social-democratic majority on the Council.