The Aesthetics of Resistance Volume 2

by Peter Weiss

  Then the streets broke into a flutter of red. We filed into the rows of the marchers. We were a thousand, five thousand, eight thousand. There was no fire that descended upon the city, it was the source of a blaze that had begun to form. This march was a beginning. We were survivors from the previous demonstrations. We pushed forward through narrow channels. To our sides stood the heavily armed security forces. Our footsteps evoked the memory of the processions which had been streaming through the cities for two decades. Once, these footsteps had borne the power of a class, everything else had been drowned out by the chanting. Now the voices rung hollow in the fortified city; each one could be singled out and counted. From the side streets came the piercing cries of the members of the Croix-de-Feu. The police gave the nationalists free reign. Though we might have been few, we knew we formed part of great armies. The many were isolated from us, tied up, numbed, regaining their energy. Many were also waging struggles far away, in China, in Southeast Asia, just a few hundred of us would have sufficed to show that we wouldn’t give up. The cohort of those who had returned from Spain walked in a dense pack. Here and there, their tattered flags were met with cries of belonging. We could sense the discrepancy in the fact that we were commemorating the Spanish advance while we ourselves were in retreat. Every beginning, every conclusion of these mass protests was present in the movement in the rows, from childhood we knew these slogans to come together, passed from street to street, this resolve that emerged through walking together, this violence, which was imbued in our demands, and the dissolution as well, which we couldn’t evade, the separation that forced everyone to maintain their endurance. For a few hours, we disregarded the ban on the expression of opinions, on agitation. Under the cover of internationalism, individually, anonymously, we belonged to those who were making calls to resist the swindlers and profiteers. Peace could not yet be forced to conform to the conditions of the workers. We had been set back a long way. During the last great war, the idea of this peace had penetrated the atmosphere of enmity. Our fathers had fought for it. In one country, though, the idea had prevailed. For us, this one country was the guarantee that it would not be possible to smother the idea here either. We parted ways in Clignancourt. Armored cars were sitting in the courtyard of the barracks on the boulevard. Only at us, always at us, would the barrels of the cannons be aimed. The faces of our fellow travelers were gray and exhausted. They had begun to resemble the miserable, filthy façades of the district. Just a moment ago, as we were streaming through the streets, a brightness had shone upon them. This brightness belonged to the city as well, and could be won back. A sense of confidence prevailed over the trepidation that had emerged as the small groups had dissipated in the streets. Impressions of the city that I had taken in over the past few days were unfurling their force. I thought I could find somewhere to stay here. Forget about Paris, said Katz. You’ve reached that point where the city teases us with the possibility of an unscathed life. It flatters us with its famous light, it entices us with its airy expanses, only to repudiate us once more; it is so close, and yet always out of reach. But I had been offered a job in La Brévière, the home for orphaned Spanish children set up by Aschberg in the Forest of Compiègne. For us, said Katz, at the Porte des Poissonniers, among the racket making its way over from the freight yard, other homes are being planned. If there is a war, and perhaps even under this rotten peace, they will take us in, unless they decide to deliver us into German care instead. But where should I go, I asked, should I attempt to make it to Oslo, like Hodann, or head back to Prague. The trip into Czechoslovakia, which was also the country for which he was responsible, could be fatal, said Katz. Germany would not be satisfied with devouring the Sudetenland, but rather, with the consent of the West, would quickly swallow the entire state. He advised me to summon all my cunning and guile to get to Sweden. The entry of a group of Czechoslovakian metalworkers was planned, set up by the Swedish union; he wanted to speak with Aschberg and Branting and ask them to help me to join them. But the invitation had stirred up the discord within the workers’ movement again; it was only open to Social Democrats, and the fact that I had been in Spain would make it even more difficult for me to get in. It’s good that you don’t belong to a party, he said. Your father is a Social Democrat. For your parents, who are in immediate danger, emigration to Sweden should be facilitated. You are an antifascist without party affiliations; everything else about your life, he said, as we walked down Rue des Poissonniers, you should now keep quiet. Your task is to reach terra firma, so that you can continue your education and prepare yourself for the work that you are destined for. Today, surrounded by snitches, cheats, and agitators, we need to be able to dissimulate, to conceal our true intentions. Keep yourself in check. Travel to Sweden via legal channels. Find yourself some kind of livelihood. Be careful when making contacts. Get to know the situation in the country. Make up your mind later. The street that ran beside the railway line grew narrower, the paving came to an end, to the left were a few sheds and abandoned workshops which backed onto the wall of a cemetery. The ancient Rue des Poissonniers, who used to transport their catch here from the northern bends of the river to the markets, had become a bumpy trail, lined by heaps of trash. Behind the short, crumbling wall, the gravestones could be seen, grown over with scrub; to the right, freight trains rattled past the wooden fence. We got to talking about the divisions in the Party, which affected all the work we did, and then I mentioned Münzenberg, with whom Katz had been close for years. Changing the topic, he initially replied that nowadays, in anticipation of major confrontations, all political organizations were investigating and measuring the scope of their potency, that the focus of the parties at the moment was to strengthen the positions from which developments could then be steered, and that the reshuffling and purges would produce the concentration necessary for drawing out the battle lines. Asked about the events of the autumn of thirty-six, he hinted at a number of things relating to the differences of opinion and misunderstandings that had led to the break with Münzenberg. In nineteen thirty-five, he said, as the Comintern decided on the policy of the Popular Front, Münzenberg was still among the advocates of the united proletarian front. It was to be built from the ground up, against the Social Democratic leadership. In the eyes of the Comintern as well, the proletarian front represented the foundations for a broad antifascist alliance. Without the unity of the working class, alliances with other groupings were impossible. Proletarian unity was supposed to prevent the front from becoming an instrument of reactionary forces. But proletarian leadership could also be identical with the leadership of the Communist Party. This allowed the oppositional relationship to Social Democracy to be maintained. With their unity of action, the French parties had gotten further than anyone else. After the victory of the Popular Front in France, in May of thirty-six, the attempts to overcome the contradictions between the two German parties were desperately needed. But there was no mass organization standing behind the German party leaders. Their internal conflicts could not take place in public, carried out by the working class. They had to be carried out in the secrecy of exile. Initially, efforts toward a common front could only be tactical, maintaining clear and constant divisions between the parties. With his emphasis on the priority of the proletariat, said Katz, Münzenberg gave sustenance to the argument that the Communist Party just wanted to place the Front in the service of their hegemonic designs. Even though the only goal was to establish contacts between isolated cadres, splintered groups, people of indeterminate number from all social classes, so long as it could be assumed that they were opponents of the war, of National Socialism, the antagonisms surrounding perspectives on the future formation of a state began to grow apparent. There was also disagreement on the question of illegal collaboration. In his memorandum from September concerning the situation in Germany, although Münzenberg did emphasize that the key struggles had to occur in the country itself, he argued that, given the paralysis of the opposition, the ideological and
propagandistic activity could only be led from abroad. At this time, the Central Committee too had decided to expand the underground cells, despite also claiming that the progressive groups were growing. Thus, Münzenberg suddenly ended up in the vicinity of the Social Democratic position, according to which (admittedly for reasons of self-preservation) the parties ought to limit themselves to activities outside of the country. The Communist Party had also regularly altered its evaluations and assessments of the news issuing from Germany: at times, a prevailing passivity and lethargy could be observed, and then, as in the fall of thirty-six, there was a belief that unrest was brewing among the populace. In principle, then, Münzenberg’s shifting views were not inconsistent with the behavior of the Central Committee; it was just that their resolutions were made in consultation with the Comintern, while Münzenberg’s decisions were made according to his own judgment. Now that the need to strictly follow Party lines was greater than ever, this unpredictability posed a threat to the Party, and would also end up having fateful effects for him personally. In September, said Katz, Münzenberg’s suggestion to intensify activities abroad had not signified a turn toward the Social Democratic position; it had only been after his return from Moscow that he came into close contact with Social Democrats and liberals. Back then, he said, in response to my question, Wehner was likely in touch with leading Social Democrats such as Breitscheid, Herz, Grzesinsky, Braun, and Kuttner, but that was largely carried out in accordance with the Party’s intention of driving a wedge between the executive committee and a number of individuals who seemed willing to cooperate. Up until this trip, Münzenberg too had acted in accordance with the plan of winning over a group of oppositional Social Democrats for the Communist front policy. But why, I asked, was Wehner hostile toward him, when he too had fallen under suspicion from the Comintern. If he was now, as we knew, being subjected to the same kind of interrogations as the Control Commission now had in store for Münzenberg, then the reason must have been that he was accused of maintaining relations with the Social Democratic camp that were of an all-too-intimate nature. It was only in July of this year that the investigations had come to a conclusion, recommending Wehner’s rehabilitation. He had been required to answer forty-two questions in writing, elaborating verbally, questions about his social background, about people he knew, about conversations he had had with Social Democratic functionaries, trips he had made, and party and union activities in which he had previously engaged. Katz remained silent for a while. With the extreme tension of these times, this kind of evidence, based on secondhand accounts, formed part of a reality that we couldn’t evade. Since it was connected with our own existence, we took note of it and would sometimes bring it up among our closest friends. The disagreements within the Party leadership, said Katz, may have appeared minimal; however, they contained profound differences, which in the context of the re-forming of the Central Committee and the Politburo were now becoming more pointed. Unlike with Münzenberg, Wehner did not want demonstrative declarations but rather patient, silent action in order to establish some initial form of mutual trust. I recalled a remark of Hodann’s concerning the rivalry between Ackermann and Merker, Münzenberg and Wehner, and between them and the group around Ulbricht. Officially, Thälmann, who was in a German prison, was still the leader of the Party. Once Schehr, who was acting as his proxy, had been murdered, Pieck took over the leadership. The young Politburo candidate Wehner was not just interested in enjoying their support but also in proving his independence from the Soviet Party, to whom Pieck was beholden. It might have been the case that the conflicts now taking place, which had ensnarled the remaining members of the Central Committee—Dahlem, Florin, Dengel, Abusch, and Eisler—and aspirants to leadership posts, such as Mewis, Kowalski, and Knöchel, were brought about by the continually intensifying fear of being found wanting in the eyes of the supreme arbiters of the Party and being liquidated, just as their comrades Remmele, Flieg, Neumann, Kippenberger, and Eberlein had been. Or was it rather that, I asked, in the never-ending wrestle for primacy between the Communist and Social Democratic parties, the character of those who brought about this policy was also necessarily marked by the urge to exercise power. I don’t want to speak about power, said Katz, but rather of toughness, of a toughness toward each other and toward oneself, without which there is no survival. Wehner had to prove his party loyalty. Münzenberg also continued to stress his loyalty to the Party in thirty-seven. It was he, said Katz, who provided the Comintern with the lion’s share of the incriminating material against Wehner. Yet while he still purported to be in agreement with the Soviet Party, the contradictions in his work were growing. Münzenberg had always been headstrong, he said, inclined to make decisions under his own steam, but now he was acting out of an isolation which seemed to be deeply rooted in his nature. As long as the Party possessed a solid form, he could fulfill his duties; his inventiveness served him well in all posts. As the organization collapsed and we had to contract, said Katz, that which we had come to know in him as generous, expansive, became unclear, utopian. During this conversation, I didn’t manage to get a sense of the antagonisms within the Party. And again, the solution of viewing the Party as something absolute pressed upon me, that we had to look past all of its controversies: a solution that could never fit with my endeavors. The arduous work that was now being carried out in order to make the Party functional again demanded a particularly clear and unambiguous course. I touched upon another problem, one that I had wondered about for a long time, by asking Katz how he had been able to break off contact with Münzenberg, with whom he had been close for a decade. His reply was brief and referred only to the meaninglessness of personal friendships if they could no longer be reconciled with the interests of the Party. Besides, he said, his interaction with Münzenberg is no breach of discipline. He and Šmeral, the founder of the Czechoslovakian Party, had indeed taken over Münzenberg’s duties, but Šmeral had not yet been hit by the thunderbolt, as they used to say. With the rapid changes now facing us, the dissatisfaction with him might be quickly set aside. At the end of the cemetery wall, the path—a vestige of a medieval trading route—opened out into a garbage dump, whose swollen lumps and clumpy excrescences let off isolated threads of smoke. People lived in the burrows, in the shacks made of planks of wood, cardboard, corrugated iron, washing hung on strings, women approached from the river with buckets, a group of workers, thermos flasks and lunchboxes under their arms, trudged over between the hills, children played in the rubble and rubbish on the railway embankment. The tracks and rows of line poles became lost in the haze at the height of Saint-Denis. Katz continued on, as if he were headed somewhere in particular. Attack, attack, he said, that was always Münzenberg’s motto. But this posture of the eternal warrior was the result not of an excess of strength but rather of a weakness, a fear. Father is coming: that was the first danger he had known. His father’s room was a sacred site; the children were never permitted to enter it. Often drunk, his father, who was an innkeeper, would tear his shotgun from the wall and threaten to shoot his family dead, the whole lot of them. I’ll shoot you up, this cry followed him into the night, he didn’t dare fall asleep, for fear of being set upon by his father. Often he was ordered into the tavern to clean glasses and bottles. Münzenberg often described to me, said Katz, how, while being bullied and manhandled, he would be forced to wash a glass four or five times, with his father still finding a smudge on it. Go and hang yourself, you bum, his father would cry, throwing him a rope. I see him in that primeval world, said Katz. Standing there, rope in hand, in the smoke-filled bar in a village by the name of Friemar, on the banks of the Nesse, a kerosene lamp swinging above the bar, the deer antlers on the wall casting large shadows. Farmers sitting around the tables, wrapped up in winter clothing, with froth in their moustaches. A wan, gaunt woman plods up the steps, turns around once more to check on the boy. Upstairs in her room, she gets into bed, to die. Then the five-year-old climbs up the steps with the rope. He crawls into th
e attic. Nobody comes after him. This life is worth nothing, that is his first lesson; for a man who later dedicated his whole life to making the lives of others worth living. To understand Münzenberg, he said, you have to understand this mix of regions that he comes from, between the Harz and the Thuringian Forest, between the Saale and the Werra, this area which produced rulers with names like Ludwig the Bearded and Ludwig the Iron, Heinrich the Illustrious and Albrecht the Degenerate, Friedrich the Brave and Friedrich the Serious, Friedrich the Simple and Friedrich the Strict, these godforsaken estates, where Waltershausen also lies, where poor Hölderlin found work as a tutor, but which is also not far from Weimar and Jena, and where Gotha and Erfurt emerged as emblems of social democracy. In a few early sketches, said Katz, Münzenberg described the tavern in which he grew up. Back then he stayed close to the truth, though over the course of the years he sought to reconcile himself with this milieu, even showed a certain affection and esteem for his father. Münzenberg was slight as a child, like his mother. His sister and two brothers resembled their robust father. His father had once shot at his eldest brother, who fled through the window, never came back. From that point on, the youngest child too was gripped by the desire to get away. As an eleven-year-old, with a sack full of hunks of bread over his shoulder, he stole out of the house one morning. He want to go to Africa, to enlist with the Boers in the war against the English. The gendarmes picked him up outside Eisenach and brought him back to his father. Two more years of abuse came to a sudden end when his father fired a load of lead shot into his head. Münzenberg had always refused to see it as a suicide, said Katz. The old man had only wanted to clean his shotgun and, as usual, had been drunk. But the torment did not end with the conclusion of his childhood suffering. He received his first apprenticeship in Gotha, and now the master possessed the paternal right to corporal punishment. He was to be trained as a barber. In the opinion of his siblings, this occupation was suited to his feeble frame. The workday lasted from five thirty in the morning until nine at night, Sundays from seven till one. There were no days off or breaks during the day. That was nineteen hundred four. In the village schools in Friemar and Eberstadt he had learned to read and write a little. He was still unaware of the association of apprentices and young workers that had just been founded in Berlin, neither had he heard of Bernstein’s appeal to the youth to defend themselves against the assaults of the masters. The fact that it took a few more years before he dared to join meetings might have been related to the fact that he’d had a heavy stutter hammered into him. He bore this muteness, this reticence within himself. He was also confused by the city, after his time in the drab countryside, in the watering hole for poachers and petty thieves. Back then, Gotha had thirty thousand inhabitants. It was a workers’ city, with an iron foundry and machine works, a steam-powered dairy, porcelain production, and a meat industry. His Gotha program, Münzenberg always used to say, consisted of scoldings and slaps, of frothing shaving cream and sweeping floors. Every Saturday there was barber practice on live models. The apprentices had to shave the inmates of the home for the elderly, about a hundred men. For a few hours, they, the downtrodden, were for once allowed to be the strong. The old men would run away from them, be overpowered, held to the floor. The stubble was hard as the ends of wires, the blades dull, tearing off shreds of skin as they scraped across it. Five pennies is what the city of Gotha paid the master for every pensioner treated in this manner. Münzenberg’s Erfurt program began in a shoe factory, in nineteen hundred six, when he arrived in the city on the banks of the Gera. During the twelve-hour working day sorting lasts in the stretching section, amid the screeching of the machines, the hammering, he schooled himself in speaking; no one could hear him there, and he wanted to prepare himself for participating in discussions. Something had occurred: he had joined an association, the workers’ education association named Propaganda; he didn’t yet know what that was, propaganda, he just sensed that in this gathering of young workers his life was going to change. Not only did the big city—home to some seventy-five thousand people—reveal itself to him, he also began to count himself among the masses of the working people, he was no longer an isolated individual, he belonged to the people who worked in the shoe factories, the breweries and railway workshops, in clothes manufacturing, the yarn bleaching plants, the wool dying works, in the production of locomotives, turbines, and agricultural machines; soon enough he was able to utter the word propaganda, he took part—every now and then interrupted by the choking and sputtering of his speech impediment—in political education, in the dissemination of social demands. Anybody who knows him, said Katz, can still recognize that tendency toward stammering today, above all when it came to his interaction with the authorities in the Party. He overcame his inhibition with his cry: attack, attack. Soon enough he was a well-known speaker and agitator, head of the Free Youth, leader of discussions, campaigns, demonstrations, and yet he retained his independence, hated the lords and masters, took no part in the factional conflict in the Party, struggled against everything that sought to box him in, set off on his journeyman years in the summer, came back to Zurich in nineteen ten, where he immediately joined the youth organization. When I was working for Piscator, said Katz, we looked at the play that Münzenberg had written as a twenty-five-year-old, by which time he had long been a member of the central committee of the Socialist Youth. The preparations for the Zimmerwald Conference, the efforts to create a new International was one thing, but the turmoil that continued within him, this nightmare of violence and foul screaming, was another thing entirely. Katz had stopped on a patch of compacted earth on which a few tents were pitched. A dancing bear was chained to a post, with a nose ring, flies swarming around it; gypsies were sat by the bonfire. Katz demonstrated the roles of the play, in which Münzenberg expressed the things that had burdened him at the time of his activity with Lenin. The roar of his father was still blaring in his ears. I’ll gun down the lot of them, yelled Katz, not concerning himself with the fact that the gypsies were looking over at him. He played the father, waved his fist. Silence, you dog, he yelled toward the son, who wanted to protest. Good luck with that big mouth of yours. The gypsies stepped closer to listen to the stranger. Come, father, said the mother, supper is ready. Scoff your slop yourself, answered the father. I’m gonna bring some order into this rabble. You should be ashamed of yourself, said the son softly, for threatening Mother and your children. Then the father started up again. I wish I were strong and brutish enough to fight you with your own means, said the son. I’d strangle you. From the cowed stance of the son, Katz sprung up into the enormousness of the father. The gypsies looked on in amazement. Rascal, miserable, screamed the father, I’ll beat you until you can’t even crawl anymore. No beating, no beating, begged the son. Katz intimated how the son attempted to defend himself. No, I can’t, you planted cowardice in my blood. At this, the father: I’ll beat in your skull, beat you to death. Katz pantomimed reaching for the shotgun. One shot. God Almighty, cried the mother. Right in the head. Schund [Trash] is what Münzenberg titled this piece, which Piscator had given him to revise. He wanted nothing more to do with it. Said he’d purged it from his body when he wrote it, that ought to be enough. Immediately went back to defending his father—who had been similar to him, in his restlessness, his ferocity. And yet his entire childhood could be found in this drama, and an indication of the unspeakable effort that he must have had to make to work his way out of the dullness of the backwoods to a conception of the world. But Katz had not led me to this barren neighborhood on the edge of Saint-Ouen in order to perform Münzenberg’s juvenilia for me against a fitting backdrop. His intention was, as now became clear, to visit the gypsies. He told me to wait. A young woman in a long, thick, puffy skirt walked toward him, took him by the hand, and walked with him through the swirling swarm of blowflies. The family members retreated to the fire. The bear grunted by the post. Katz disappeared inside the tent with the woman.