During nights when I lay in the darkness, waiting in vain to fall asleep, I have imagined the sleepless hours of Willi Münzenberg, the insomniac who couldn’t sleep when he began to understand that the time of his power and pride had come to an end, and that all he had before him was running without hope of respite or possibility of safe harbor and finally dying like a dog, a hunted and sacrificed animal, just as so many friends of his friends had died, former comrades, Bolshevik heroes transformed overnight into criminals and traitors, into insects that must be crushed, according to the harangues of the drunken and demented prosecutors of the Moscow trials. Executed like a dog, like Zinoviev or Bukharin, like his friend and brother-in-law Heinz Neumann, director of the German Communist Party, who was living as a refugee or trapped in Moscow and who died in 1937, perhaps shot in the head, as unarmed and surprised before his executioners as another accused man, Josef K., whom Franz Kafka invented during the feverish insomnia of tuberculosis, unaware how prophetic he was. But it has never been ascertained exactly how Neumann died, how many weeks or months he was tortured, or where his body was buried.
In the death camp of Ravensbrück, Neumann’s widow listened to stories her friend Milena Jesenska told her about Kafka. During many sleepless nights, Babette Gross lived minute by minute the torture of not knowing whether her husband was dead or in one of Stalin’s prisons or in a German concentration camp. Years later, when she finally was told the truth, she imagined his hanged body in a forest, swinging from a tree branch, swaying back and forth until the branch or the rope broke and his body fell to the ground to rot without anyone’s finding it, and all that long time she couldn’t sleep, wondering whether she should or shouldn’t think of him as a dead man. With autumn, falling leaves began to cover him.
You were sleeping beside me, and I was imagining Willi Münzenberg smoking in the dark as he listened to the quiet breathing of his wife, Babette, a stylish bourgeois blond, daughter of a Prussian beer magnate, an undoubting Communist in the early twenties, who lived much longer—nearly half a century—than he, an ancient woman who on the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall received an American historian and whispered into a tape recorder stories of a vanished time and world, images of the night the Reichstag burned, of the first parades of the Brownshirts through German cities, and of Moscow in November 1936, when she and her husband waited for days in a hotel room for someone to come for them, waited to be called and given a day and an hour for an appointment with Stalin, a call that never came, until they heard pounding at the door: the men who had come to arrest them.
There are people who have seen these things: none of it has sunk into the absolute oblivion that claims events and human beings when the last person to witness them, the last person to hear a certain voice or meet a certain pair of eyes, dies.
I know a woman who wandered lost through Moscow the morning Stalin’s death was announced. Eight months pregnant, she went back home because she was afraid that in the throng of people in the streets the creature kicking in her womb would be crushed. As I speak with her, I feel the vertigo I would feel crossing a soaring bridge of time, almost as if I were experiencing the reality she has seen, a reality that would be no more than a description in a book for me if I hadn’t met her. I know a man who won an Iron Cross in the battle of Leningrad, and when I was very young I shook the hand of another whose pale, skinny forearm bore the tattooed identification number of a prisoner in Dachau. I have spoken with someone who at the age of six clung to his mother in a cellar in Madrid, terrified of the air-raid sirens, and of the airplanes and exploding bombs, and at ten he was interned in a barracks in Mauthausen. That man was small, polite, and detached; his name was half Spanish, half French, though he didn’t really belong to either country. The black hair, combed straight back, the strong features and coppery face were Spanish, but his behavior and language were as French as those of any of the writers talking and drinking at that literary cocktail party in Paris where we met briefly, the beginning of my friendship with Michel del Castillo.
By chance, the way you meet a stranger at a party, I met Willi Münzenberg in a book I’d been sent. Begun half-heartedly, it turned into my insomnia. At some moment in the reading, without my knowing, there came a shift in attitude, and the person who had been nothing more than a name, an obscure and minor character, struck me as a powerful presence, someone intimately related to me, to the things that matter most to me, to my deepest being. You are in large part what others know, or think they know, about you, what they see when they look at you; but who are you when you’re alone in the dark and can’t sleep and your inert body is anchored to the bed and your untrammeled imagination confronts the intolerably slow pace of time? You don’t know the hour but don’t want to turn on the light and wake the person sleeping beside you; it might be the middle of the night or near the first light of dawn.
FROM AMONG THE GHOSTS of the living and the dead rises the specter of Münzenberg. He was with me that sleepless night, and he has returned often since; unexpectedly, over the years, I find him in the pages of other books, or he comes to me in my thoughts. All his life was a game between show and invisibility, between veiled power and the weightless splendor of appearances, and in the end he was invisible, erased from history by the same powerful people he served so well, the ones who in early June of 1940 hanged him from a tree in a forest in France.
Just yesterday I discovered that I had an excellent photograph of him. I found it in the second volume of Arthur Koestler’s autobiography, Invisible Writing, published in London in 1954. Coincidences suddenly fall into place: I had bought that volume with the red binding and coarse yellow paper in a secondhand bookstore in Charlottesville, Virginia, one winter day in 1993. The store was in a red wooden building that reminded me a little of a cabin or a barn, at the edge of a snowy woods. One day as I flipped through the book, looking for the publication date, I saw something I’d never noticed: on the inside cover was an illegible signature, and beside that a place and date: Oslo, January 1959.
I hadn’t remembered the photograph either, which has that chiaroscuro of portraits from the thirties. Münzenberg looks directly into the viewer’s eyes, with arrogance and firmness, perhaps with a hint of loss and anticipated desperation, and with the sadness witnesses to some terrible truth exhibit in photographs. He is a strong man, rough, but not vulgar, with a thick, strong neck and broad shoulders, slightly lifted chin, shrewd eyes ringed with fatigue, broad brow, carelessly combed hair, a sign either of constant activity or the beginnings of neglect. He is dressed in a formal but very modern mode: suit jacket with a fountain pen in the upper pocket, vest, tie, and a shirt with an attached collar. Koestler says his face had the solid simplicity of a wood sculpture, but was lightened by an open and friendly expression. Koestler worked on behalf of Münzenberg in Paris during the period the photograph was taken: a short man, squarely built, robust, with the look of a small-town cobbler, but one who nevertheless projected such an hypnotic air of authority that Koestler saw bankers, diplomats, and Austrian dukes bow before him with the obedience of schoolboys.
Münzenberg was born in 1889 to a poor family in a proletarian suburb of Berlin. His father was a brutal, drunken tavern keeper who blew his head off while cleaning his shotgun. At sixteen Münzenberg was working in a shoe factory and taking advantage of the educational activities of the unions. He had always shown intelligence and had a talent for organization as well as an energy that instead of being depleted by controversy and hard work seemed to thrive on them. To avoid serving in an army involved in a war whose internationalist principles he repudiated, he escaped to Switzerland, where in the refugee circles of Bern he met Trotsky, who was immediately taken with his intelligence, his revolutionary passion, and his organizational skills. Trotsky introduced him to Lenin, and soon Münzenberg was part of Lenin’s most loyal inner circle. One author reports that he was one of the Bolsheviks who traveled to Russia with Lenin in a sealed railroad car on the eve of the October Revolution.
Dear friend, it’s said he told Lenin, you will die of your convictions.
But he was always a little different from his Communist comrades. There was something excessive about him, even when he was most orthodox. He liked the good life, and having been born into and lived in poverty, he had an appetite for grand hotels, expensive suits, and luxury automobiles. He was made of the same stuff as the great American plutocrats who rose out of nothing, energetic impresarios of railroads or coal mines or steel who had grown rich because of their clear vision and villainy, but especially because of the compelling force of a practical intelligence joined with a resolute and merciless will. Those who knew Münzenberg say that had he chosen to serve capitalism instead of communism, he would have been a Hearst, a Morgan, or a Frick, one of those colossal entrepreneurs never satisfied by any possession, no matter how excessive, and who never lose their rough edges; age or power or wealth do not slow their ardor for acquiring, and despite boundless wealth, they remain jovial boors.
During the first years of the Soviet Revolution, when Lenin, hallucinating on the country estates of the Kremlin, intoxicated by his own fanaticism, surrounded with telephones and lackeys, still imagined that at any minute all Europe would explode in the flames of proletarian uprisings, Münzenberg understood that world revolution would not happen immediately, if ever, and that communism would spread in the West only in an oblique and gradual way—not with the loud, crude, and monotonous propaganda that pleased the Soviets but, rather, through seemingly neutral and apolitical causes and with the complicity, in great part unwitting, of intellectuals of great prestige, unaffiliated celebrities who would sign manifestos promoting peace, culture, and goodwill among nations.
Münzenberg invented the political technique of enlisting wealthy intellectuals with flattery, of using their self-idolatry and their minimal interest in reality to manipulate them. Not without scorn, he referred to them as the Club of Innocents. He sought out moderates with humanitarian inclinations and bourgeois solidity, if possible with the added virtue of a patina of money and cosmopolitanism: André Gide, H. G. Wells, Romain Rolland, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Einstein. Lenin would have shot such intellectuals immediately, or consigned them to a dark cell in Lubyanka Prison or to Siberia. Münzenberg discovered how enormously useful they could be in making attractive a system that to him, in the incorruptible inner core of his intelligence, must have seemed frightening in its incompetence and cruelty, even in the years he considered it legitimate.
Little by little he was becoming the impresario of the Comintern, its secret ambassador in the bourgeois Europe he was so fond of, the same bourgeoisie to whose destruction he had dedicated his life. He founded companies and newspapers that served as covers for handling the propaganda funds sent from Russia, but he had such an innate talent for business that each of those ventures prospered, multiplying clandestine investments into rivers of money with which he then financed new projects of revolutionary conspiracy. His audacious business ventures ceased to be covers and became true capitalist successes.
He was a director of the Third International, but he drove through Berlin, and later Paris, in a large Lincoln, always accompanied by his blond wife swathed in furs. He invented grand and noble causes that no one of goodwill could fail to support. The measure of his triumph is equaled only by that of his anonymity: no one knew that the international movements of solidarity and the international congresses of writers and artists promoting peace and culture were the brainchildren of Willi Münzenberg. From his own experience, he knew that hard-nosed Bolsheviks like Stalin, or Lenin himself, would rouse very little public affection in the West, so to attract a Nobel laureate in literature or a Hollywood actress to the cause was a formidable coup in public relations. He discovered that radicalism and distant revolutions were irresistibly attractive to intellectuals of a certain social position.
His first success in large-scale organization and propaganda was the world campaign to ship foodstuffs to the regions of Russia devastated by the great famines of 1921. The international fund for aid to workers, which he directed, was responsible for delivering dozens of shiploads of food to Russia and also for creating a powerful current of humanitarian sympathy around the world for the suffering and heroism of the Soviet people. The indifferent charity of other times was transmuted into vigorous political solidarity in which a benefactor could always feel he was a comfortable step away from active militancy. Münzenberg contrived seals, insignias, and propaganda fliers illustrated with photographs of life in the USSR, color prints, paperweights with busts of Marx and Lenin, postcards of workers and soldiers, anything that could be sold at a low price and would allow the buyer to feel that his few coins were a gesture of solidarity, not charity, a practical and comfortable form of revolutionary action.
In 1925, with countless committees, publications, marches, and images in movie newsreels, he plotted and created the great wave of support for Sacco and Vanzetti. In the terrible years of inflation in Germany, the Japan earthquake of 1923, the general strike in England in 1926, he filled the coffers of resistance and organized soup kitchens, schools, and shelters for orphan children. It was the need to print and distribute massive numbers of political pamphlets that awakened his interest in publishing. In 1926 he owned two mass-circulation dailies in Germany, an illustrated weekly magazine that had a circulation of a million—and was, says Koestler, the Communist counterpart to Life—as well as a series of publications that included technical journals for photographers and magazines for radio and movie fans. In Japan, directly or indirectly, his organization controlled nineteen newspapers and magazines. In the Soviet Union he produced films on Eisenstein and Pudovkin, and in Germany he organized the distribution of Soviet films and financed the vanguardist spectacles of Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht. All around the world, film clubs, sports clubs, reading clubs, touring societies, and groups of activists in favor of peace became unimpeachable branches of the Club of Innocents.
With Hitler’s arrival in the chancellery, Münzenberg lost everything he possessed or controlled in Germany. But he was like those American magnates who suffer horrific bankruptcies only to claw their way up out of nothing and create new fortunes with the same invincible energy. As soon as he arrived in Paris, he bought a newspaper and organized financial support for the underground in Germany. The German Communist Party had believed up to the last hour that the Nazis were minor adversaries and that the true enemies of the working class were the Social Democrats. The disaster of January 1933 convinced Münzenberg that the suicidal sectarianism of his fellow party members had to be abandoned in favor of a great alliance among all democratic forces prepared to resist the sinister tidal wave of fascism. Within a few months, he had published one of the best-selling books of the twentieth century, The Brown Book of Nazi Terror, and achieved his greatest success, the masterpiece of his instinct for mass propaganda, the international campaign on behalf of Dimitrov and others arrested and put on trial for the fire at the Reichstag.
Just as the blackest period of Stalin’s terror and extermination was drawing near, Münzenberg’s flair for publicity ensured that in the eyes of the world’s progressives the Soviet Union was the great adversary of totalitarianism, more valiant and resolute than any corrupt bourgeois democracy.
He never paused, the flow of schemes and proposals never slowed, ideas for books and articles, for new forms of political activism, clubs and committees and campaigns, lists of prestigious names needed for each new cause, aid to workers in the Asturias uprising of 1934 and the protest against the Italian invasion of Abyssinia. He stormed into his offices in Paris like a cyclone, yelled over the telephone at the top of his lungs, smoked his excellent cigars while absentmindedly sprinkling the ash over the broad lapels of his expensive suits, dictated memorandums until three or four in the morning, sent telegrams to Moscow or New York or Tokyo, checked the sales figures for books and print runs of newspapers, improvised the rules for the World Committee for the Relief of the Victims of
German Fascism, drew up the list of foods and medicines to go on a ship leased by his organization in Marseilles and destined for striking workers in the port of Shanghai.
He is everywhere, directing a prodigious variety of tasks, feared and obeyed by people working in several countries, and yet he’s invisible, hidden in shadow. Both conspirator and a deputy in the Reichstag, both entrepreneur fond of expensive cigars and chauffeured cars and a militant Communist, a man of the world who enters salons on the arm of a woman taller and more distinguished than he and a critic of the idiocies and depravities of the rich, whom at the same time he admires with the fascination of the poor boy who watches the dazzling lives of the powerful from a distance, who smells the perfumes of women swathed in fur stoles and desires them with a passion fed by social outrage.
IN OCTOBER OF 1936, an emissary presented himself in Münzenberg’s Paris offices, a man whom he had never seen and whom he disliked because of his surliness and obvious air of an informer or jailer. When the man entered, he examined the office out of the corner of his eye, disapproving of the luxury of the carpet, the curtains and paintings, the solid, bold shapes of the furniture, the tubular chairs, the art deco table at which Münzenberg was seated, leaning on his elbows, surrounded with documents and telephones. Without preamble or ceremony, the man told Münzenberg that his presence was required in Moscow.
There is also a traitor in the story, a shadow at Münzenberg’s side, the rancorous and docile, cultivated and polyglot subordinate—Münzenberg spoke only German, and that with a strong lower-class accent—Otto Katz, also called André Simon. Slim, elusive, an old friend of Franz Kafka, Katz was the organizer of the congress of antifascist intellectuals of Valencia, Münzenberg’s and the Comintern’s representative among the intellectuals of New York and the actors and screenwriters of Hollywood, a perpetual spy, the fawning adulator of Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett, Lillian Hellman, all fervent and cynical Stalinists. The éminence grise behind Münzenberg’s grand machinations, he also reported on his superior’s every action and word to the new hierarchs of Moscow.
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