The Aesthetics of Resistance Volume 2

by Peter Weiss

  Three floors below street level in a cramped, stiflingly warm room, he was lying on an oilcloth sofa, his hands clasped beneath his head. Shelves full of files and medical preparations extended up to the pipes running along the ceiling, one wall was filled with cages in which rabbits were sniffing and scratching. At the basin, a woman was preparing coffee with laboratory equipment on an electric hot plate. He had not received a license to practice medicine in Sweden. He had been taken on by his colleague Ottesen-Jensen, whom he had known since his time in Berlin and whose sexology institute was located upstairs in the same building, to help her with patient consultations. As the woman, a refugee from Prague who had accompanied him from Oslo, poured the boiling water through the packed filter in the glass funnel, for a few moments, the aroma of the coffee shrouded the acrid odor of the rabbits, which were undergoing pregnancy tests and other examinations. This thing I’m lying on, said Hodann, reaching his hand out toward me, is our marital bed. The woman lifted his head a little, poured the drink into his mouth from a retort. He feigned contentment with a throaty hiss. The plan is, he said with a laugh, that I use my not inconsiderable experience to secretly build up a correspondence service, in violation of the decree from the Swedish medical association. The woman had walked over to a tall, metallic stool, where she sat motionless, alert. The whisper of the rabbits was emanating from the cages; they were pressing their rosy nostrils against the bars, their ears twitching, incisors glinting, holding little parcels of dried grass in their paws. The thing with Münzenberg, he said, propping himself up with his arms, was that his relationship with the Party had become untenable due to his ongoing clashes with Abusch, Eisler, and Dahlem. Pieck, Dimitrov, and Manuilsky had initially been favorably disposed toward him, while Ulbricht’s group in Moscow was working against him. Dogmatism, jealousy on the part of the exiled leaders. Eisler published the newspaper of the Central Committee, Die Internationale [The International]. Abusch was editor-in-chief of the Rote Fahne [Red Flag]. The newspapers were smuggled into Germany in order to convey the positions of the Party to the underground cells. For them, Münzenberg was the great rival. He had reproached them for overestimating the strength of the German working class. He didn’t believe that the masses would topple the fascist dictatorship of their own accord. You still haven’t learned anything from the errors of judgment from before thirty-three, Münzenberg would tell them. For this he was accused of Trotskyism, because, back then, Trotsky had been the only one to recognize the magnitude of the danger. They set about falsifying Münzenberg’s past. Having procured money for the Party like no other, he was declared an ally of capitalism. While the tactic of the Popular Front was being pursued, they tried to blame him for their setbacks, because he, with his adherence to the united proletarian front, was driving away the Social Democrats. And yet there was no one in the Party who would have been better positioned to attract and unite representatives from all strata. Münzenberg had urged them to establish a propaganda apparatus that could compete with that of Goebbels. He was overestimating fascism, he was told. By losing faith in the proletariat, he was assuming a petit-bourgeois standpoint. The arguments that were hurled at him were contradictory, confused, irrational. Time and again he warned against placing faith in the German workers’ capacities for struggle. It was clear that the actions of the workers were not founded upon class consciousness but were rather the result of propagandistic influences. Means had to be found to break the dullness and stubbornness, the reactionary poisoning that had been promoted in the people to prepare them for participation in the war. He believed he was capable of opening their eyes. He was accused of arrogance, of having designs on a leadership role. That was what mattered, the maintenance of the coterie favored by the Soviets. In their quest for survival, this group destroyed all who proposed a divergent opinion. You know, Hodann said to me, how we clung to the protection of the Soviet Union, knowing that without them we’d never be able to defeat fascism. To this day, Münzenberg has never allowed himself to stoop to anti-Soviet rhetoric, even though he has been subjected to the same condemnation that has been handed down to his comrades. His staunchest opponent in Paris was Dahlem, who gave him the ultimatum, late in the summer of thirty-eight, of either apologizing or being expelled. Münzenberg did not return compliantly to Moscow, like Bukharin, handing himself over to the Control Commission. He’d been under continual surveillance ever since. His post was intercepted. His previous colleagues were poisoned against him. Wehner was cold toward him, wary. He was ambitious, thirty-two years old. Ascending through the ranks was only possible through constant vigilance. He was the most silent of all. Katz too refused to fall in line. They tried to convince him that he was the one who had actually given these ideas to Münzenberg. Katz was too smart to believe that; he was all too familiar with Münzenberg’s achievements over the last two decades. But how strong does one have to be, said Hodann, sitting up, to withstand the systematic manipulation of the Party. And I saw that, in Hodann too, that which had begun to take form in Paris had now reached its fruition. I understood Katz, he said. In the end, he could either make a declaration of loyalty or get a bullet in the back of the skull. Münzenberg’s life, said Hodann, is in danger. Renegades had been murdered abroad. No reason to expect him to be spared. And now, he said, on the tenth of March, he had published an open letter in his newspaper announcing that he was leaving the Party. And as Hodann quoted Münzenberg, I could see him standing in front of me, stooped forward, his left hand laid flat on the tabletop, right hand raised, writing in the air with his finger, broad and powerful, his Thuringian dialect mixing with Hodann’s Berliner intonations. Hodann adopted Münzenberg’s explanation. My experiences over the past two years, he said, have convinced me that it is impossible to clarify and settle political differences of opinion within the Party in its current form. My conflict with the leadership can be traced back to issues relating to the Party program, the propaganda methods, the internal democracy of the Party, and of the conception of the relation of the Party to the individual members. We were all in agreement about the principle of democratic centralism, about the defense of the rights of all minorities and all loyal critique, about the autonomy of the different Party organizations, about the recognition of the right to elect and dismiss all representatives, to hold them accountable for their actions. Not until we find our way back to these principles can the correct relationship between the Party and its members be reconstructed. The Party is made up of the sum of all its individual members. The impending revolutionary war can only be won by individuals whose discipline is voluntary, not drummed in through regimentation and commands. Not the apparatus but the members—the individual man, the individual woman, the politically thinking human being, the growing, creative individual—they are the Party. If the many cannot be convinced that the strategy and tactics employed by the leadership are correct, then every attempt to instill discipline is doomed to remain a grotesque tale, a fiction. It is we who invented the Party, and who continue to do so; we are the Party, not the idol up there, the wrathful God, who presumes the right to determine our fate. I have separated myself from the leadership, from their apparatus, said Münzenberg, but not from the thousands who have been unjustly pushed out by anonymous forces, without due process, with no chance to defend themselves. Hodann bent forward, brushed his hand across his face. The woman jumped up from her seat, stood ready to hold Hodann, attempted to prevent him from continuing his discourse. Münzenberg, he said, had no intentions of renouncing the Soviet Union, nor of founding his own faction within the Party or confining his activity to a particular group; he will carry on working to create a large, all-encompassing unity party. But what was this voice now worth, I asked myself, as Hodann lay down, this isolated voice in Paris, with no organization behind it, which would never manage to divert the Party from its course, a voice that, regardless of how stubbornly it might express a conviction, could ultimately only speak of its isolation. Nevertheless I agreed with him. I could only judge
him as I had gotten to know him. I had heard dubious things about him, but I imagined that his perspective had been too broad to be reconciled with his comrades’ narrower thinking, which was founded upon an absolute adherence to centralist decrees. The position he expounded was meaningless in the face of the opinion of those with more power. This group had to maintain the Party in the face of existential threats. Whether he was selfish, or smug, as he was accused of being, I couldn’t judge; I also didn’t know if his nearest colleagues were simply careerists, as he would often claim. There had to be explanations for the situation somewhere. It’s just that they would remain locked up, forever inaccessible. For me, all of this had to recede into the background. I could not yet say anything about my own possibilities, could not yet prove that I possessed the aptitude for illegal political work; the only thing that I knew for sure was that, without my participation in the political struggle, there would be no future for me either. A few weeks ago, Rogeby had arranged for me to meet with Mewis. He had left his lodgings in Malmö for a few days to come to Stockholm. In the afternoon, we walked across the fields of Ladugård, on the edge of the functionalist neighborhood of Gärdet, which was still under construction. Actually, the only thing that came out of the meeting was the suggestion that later, perhaps in late summer, I might be put to use procuring materials for a newspaper that was being planned. The rest of the casual remarks resulted only in impulses, which didn’t began to sink in until a few days later, reigniting a sense of the enormous insulation and confinement of working in the political underground. As in our encounter at Villa Candida, I was set upon by a greenish, blueish gaze and a handful of questions; once again Mewis seemed like a stranger to me, utterly different from people like Hodann, Münzenberg, who revealed their personal character. Sitting behind Hodann, who was breathing heavily to combat an oncoming cramp, I thought about the hidden, conspiratorial world in which, every six weeks, carefully planned trips from Trelleborg to Sassnitz took place, with counterfeit Swedish passports, trips on which instructors visited their contacts in Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen, cities in which the cells inside the industries, the mass organizations, the urban districts were being built up, in which, in Berlin alone, there were still three thousand Communists carrying out their daily, painstaking work, in which messages were exchanged between groups that never numbered more than three to four members, reports were obtained, pamphlets produced and distributed. The world in which Coppi and Heilmann lived moved closer to me, a world in which, through furtive actions, the membrane in an instrument or the thread in a motor would be positioned incorrectly, in which the wrong parts would be installed in locomotives and planes, grenades and artillery. Back from their trip to Germany, the representatives of the Party disappeared again into their Swedish hideouts, nobody asked after their names, they were put up by workers, sailors, down below, solidarity remained intact, down below, in primitive workshops, changes were made to identity papers, photos swapped, stamps transferred using peeled boiled eggs, cooked not too hard, down below, no single word was uttered in vain in the industrious battle against the monstrous structures of the enemy. Hodann too continued with what he had begun, even if he, like Münzenberg, had ended up in an inopportune position. As an opponent of fascism he still found himself on the same front that had been occupied by the Communist Party, and for this front, despite all the antagonism, unity remained a necessity. At the conference in Paris at the end of January there had been talk of a form of unity from above. Perhaps this was linked to the realization that the fissures were too deep for them to close organically, that this unity could be produced only through an exercise of power by the person who had won the upper hand. For me, not yet having solid forms in front of me, not even able to see a section of my own path before me, orienting myself toward some kind of commonality was the only thing I could hold onto. As in Cueva la Potita and in the field hospital near Denia, in his Stockholm catacomb Hodann sought to overcome worries and depression through activity. Of all the forms of pity that he disdained as hangovers from Christendom, the one he most loathed was self-pity. No one could be helped by any kind of empathy for their own suffering, and, what’s more, it merely became a means of excusing one’s failure to intervene. An emotional response was worth nothing unless it led to direct practical assistance, and once this had been set in motion, all emotions ought to fall away. The strength and endurance that he demanded from himself had to exceed all normal dimensions because a significant portion of his strength was expended in combating his illness. While fear plagued him in the form of asthma attacks, outwardly he radiated nothing but confidence. He had always refused to speak about the cause of his distress. His insightfulness about the psychological backgrounds of the illnesses of others was matched only by his coolness and stoicism in the face of the pressure that burdened him. Whenever he tried to hide something from himself, when a conflict—usually of a political nature—remained unresolved, he would be overcome by respiratory distress. Often, while we were together in Spain, I had wished he would surrender some of his self-control and ask for help, but he continued to show nothing but equanimity. His throat was full of rattling. He spat into a paper bag that the woman had handed him. And though just a moment ago his features had borne the stamp of terror, his eyes staring blackly, he was now smiling once more, looking at me, filled with self-deprecation, as the woman washed and dried off his face. I sensed her jealousy toward me; a possessiveness emanated from her, just as it had from Lindbaek, his previous partner, but with Lindbaek it had been demanding, almost violent, while with her it was protective, full of self-sacrifice. With the sniffing and chewing from the cages around me in my ears like a ceaseless rustling, I asked myself what could have led Hodann, who always spoke so disparagingly about the couple form of marriage, to this woman. Perhaps his isolation had become so overwhelming that he craved the sense of security that this woman conjured up. Soon, she said, they would move, they had been offered a small apartment out in Kristineberg, she had already been to look at furniture, at the emigrants’ welfare center, she spoke of tables, chairs, crockery, curtains, calculated how much of Hodann’s wage would be left over once the rent was taken out, and Hodann, forging ahead from his meager new beginnings in exile to the hope of expanded professional opportunities, said that progressive Swedish doctors would surely be willing to work with him, the renowned specialist; swatting away the weakness that sought to take root once more, making a show of his energy, he pulled himself up, pointed upward, where the city we had almost forgotten now placed itself on top of us like a cauldron; then, out of nowhere, he brought up Kautsky, the son of the patriarch, he was a friend from his school days, also mentioned Brecht, both lived in the suburb of Viggbyholm as guests at the boarding school; Kautsky was a doctor as well, also affected by the Swedish ban on employing foreigners; Brecht had come from Denmark with his family while they waited for a visa to enter the United States, he was to be provided with a house soon. Hodann suggested that we visit them that same day, the woman wanted to object, but he was already walking past her through the scraping and snapping, and, by managing to set his own vitality in motion, he also transformed the room in which I had found him: it no longer resembled a dungeon as much as a random, makeshift hideout, one in which it was possible to take shelter and make plans.