by Peter Weiss
Bleary-eyed in the steam of the boilers, I said her name over and over again. Just as she had adorned her life for years with fantastical ornaments to overcome her lack of belonging, she was now weighed down by a dream which her parents had bestowed upon her, the dream of a name which quixotically encompassed everything that had been denied her father and mother during the volatile time after the end of the war, this name that like a blossom expressed the joy of her parents over their child, the hopes they had for her, their visions of relaxation and peace. The fact that they, in their harried, militant existence, named their daughter Rosalinde added a particular agony to the things that her father had to suffer through, and that her mother had to bear daily under the surveillance of the Gestapo; the agony of thwarted ambition, of utterly miscarried desire. And though she never said anything about it, I could imagine how being ruthlessly severed from a once-dreamt miracle could impact upon her and burden her with a sense of guilt; for she did get away, was spirited away, while her father and mother had been left behind in the torture chambers. My parents had also stayed behind, without leaving a trace. For Ossietzky’s daughter, as for me, it was now a matter of finding a way to outlast, to surmount the obstacles obstructing our intentions and desires. It was harder for her to free herself from her confinement. She, the nineteen-year-old, found herself in a conflicting position that could make her helpless, apathetic; for me, my year in the International Brigades had given me something to hold onto that continued to exist, even as Spain was now being subjected to such horrific mutilation. Time and again over the following weeks, questions arose about the events there, and about the factors that had led to the collapse. The way that political decay could affect individuals was reflected in Rosalinde’s being. On the twenty-third of May she found out about Toller’s death, through a news item that I had missed as I browsed the dominant news of the day. As she told me how he had hung from the belt of a bathrobe in the shower next to his room in the Mayflower Hotel the previous day, her voice failing, I initially thought she was speaking of something she’d dreamt, but for her this image was more real than the continuity that I, together with Rogeby, Bischoff, and Lindner, had been attempting to construct from fragmentary reports. The front pages of the newspapers had announced that England and France had accepted the Soviet Union’s suggestion of an alliance, and that they were now prepared to offer mutual military support in the event of any future assaults. It was expected that Poland and Romania would join the coalition. Yet, by the next day, reservations were tacked on to these headlines; we asked ourselves what the small suggested changes being considered by the British could mean. On the thirtieth of May, the signing of the agreement seemed imminent, an assertion that was then revoked on the first of June, with the explanation that insufficient assurances had been made by the Soviets regarding the Baltic states and Finland. We saw the state of affairs before us like an enormous, increasingly blurred network, in which here and there the course of individual threads could be made out. On the seventeenth of March, two days after the occupation of Prague, the Soviet government had called England, France, Poland, and Romania to an urgent conference to discuss issues related to a common plan of action. With the pressure of the territorial claims that Germany was asserting in Poland, after all their previous evasion, England and France’s obligations toward Poland forced them to begin to discuss protective measures. There was still no talk of an alliance, despite the fact that Germany was demanding the seizure of Danzig and the surrender of the Polish Corridor. The British scheming to delay the accord could be traced back to the fact that the Western powers, supported by the United States, continued to cling to the tactic of driving Germany into a one-sided war with the Soviet Union. With British approval, the German government, as we later learned, had suggested Poland receive compensation at the expense of the Soviets. During our discussions in Rogeby’s room, we lay a map beneath the tapestry of events, almost like a grid, to lend more solidity to the fluctuations and disruptions of the diplomatic games. In the wake of the annexation of the Memel Territory on the twenty-third of March and the escalating diatribes against Poland, the British refusal to provide aid in the event of an attack on the Baltic states was tantamount to a rejection of the alliance. Germany and the Soviet Union had no common border. A German assault would have to take place via Poland, Lithuania, or Latvia. From Finland, Leningrad was within range of artillery shelling. The Baltic border states, Poland, and Romania had reactionary, semifascist governments, which, though certainly concerned with retaining their national independence from Germany, were also reluctant to enter into a defensive alliance with the Soviet Union. Playing to these regimes, the Western powers rejected the Soviet request for right of passage through Polish and Baltic regions in the event of an eastward German advance. They wanted to avoid strengthening the Soviet state by acknowledging that Poland and the Baltic region belonged to its sphere of influence. From the political formulae and arabesques, it was possible to surmise that England and France were willing to enter into a military alliance in the event of a direct attack. Yet a direct attack was impossible. And in the event of an indirect attack, they completely ruled out providing support. The Soviet Union understood an indirect attack as the kind of infiltration that was currently being carried out in Danzig through the injection of German citizens. The only thing the British riddles implied was that the Soviet Union would have to defend their western and northwestern borders alone. Never completely rejecting the notion of an alliance, while simultaneously negotiating with the German government, England was trying to save its own skin. The British position was formulated unequivocally on the fifteenth of April in a demand to the Soviet Union to guarantee support to their neighboring countries in the event of war. With this cynical declaration, the prerequisites for further negotiations seemed to have been nullified. Two days later, though, England had received a renewed Soviet appeal to seal a military pact. The British response made it clear that the Western powers saw a direct attack on the Soviet Union’s neighboring states as merely an indirect threat, and could not consider themselves obliged to allow the pact to enter into force in such a situation. It was only when public opinion began to waver in England, when an opposition led by Churchill emerged, that the British government was forced in early May to give in to the pressure for an effective Eastern Front, or at least to elicit the appearance of giving in, in order to convey the impression they were acting on their own initiative. Political changes had also taken place in the Soviet Union, though their consequences would only become visible as June progressed. According to a tiny report on the back page of Pravda, Litvinov, the advocate of a democratic united front, was relieved of his office as people’s commissar for foreign affairs on the second of May and had been replaced by Molotov. The British maneuver in mid-May to resume the discussions was portrayed by the bourgeois press as a great feat in the effort to keep the peace, while the Soviet Union was described as dragging their feet. Henceforth England could bask in praise for its efforts at establishing an alliance, while the Soviet Union, through its intransigence, bore the blame for the delays. Just how uninterested the British government was in an alliance was revealed by the fact that they never engaged in the negotiations at the highest level. It was not, as the Soviets had demanded, the foreign secretary who traveled to Moscow on the eighth of June, but Strang, a subordinate civil servant, who stayed for several weeks without, as the press noted, arousing Molotov’s interest. Meanwhile, the German troops were carrying out exercises on the Siegfried Line, and Danzig, adorned with waving swastika flags, was in a festive fervor. On Sunday the eighteenth of July, the voice of Goebbels rang out in Danzig, announcing that the Führer would soon visit this German city, which belonged in the Reich. On top of the familiar barking issuing from the radios was the undeniable fact that Germany had become a coveted object at the center of this tug-of-war. Halifax had expressed his desire to reach an understanding between the people of Britain and Germany, English finance emissaries had tra
veled to Germany to draw up contracts, and as bait for an agreement, the government of the Reich had been offered access to colonies. And now, suddenly—or so it seemed to us, since we were only ever confronted with final outcomes—a shift became perceptible in the tone of the Soviet Union toward Germany. On the twenty-third of June, coinciding with Molotov’s rejection of the British offer, negotiations were initiated in Moscow with Schulenburg, the German ambassador. Initially, in the ongoing back and forth over the alliance, we thought that the Soviet rapprochement with Germany was a means to pressure the Western powers into a binding outcome. Then, as the summer progressed, and with an alliance not yet having been secured, a peculiar calm descended over Europe in early July, and we discovered that a ten-year Soviet-German trade agreement had been signed, amounting to sums in the billions. With a single blow, the power relations had shifted. England and France stood isolated. There was talk of a détente between the Soviet Union and Germany. For a long time we were left puzzled by this event, which was at odds with the previously unrelenting struggle against fascism. Still reeling from the mass murders of Republican prisoners in Spain, we asked ourselves what other price would have to be paid to maintain the peace. There was no reason, said Rogeby, for this commercial partnership between the Soviet state and Germany to cause us to curtail our political goals. The West’s animosity had forced the Soviet Union to take new measures for its protection. We were standing in front of an enormous picture. From afar, it resembled a world landscape, a battle painting by Patinir or Altdorfer, and yet it was composed of ciphers, of forms and figures that were foreign to us and which we were attempting to decipher, piecemeal, through perpetual study and comparison. After the rainy mid-summer, the streets of the city had emptied out, most people had headed to the countryside on vacation. With the ominous silence, we who had stayed behind fell into a kind of lethargy. Once again we could sense our isolation and lack of motivation, the terrible uniformity of our days. We often spoke about visiting Brecht, in the hope of finding explanations there about the origins of this spectral uneventfulness, but we always put it off. In the end it wasn’t through Hodann—who often visited Brecht at his home—that the encounter eventuated, but through a messenger, a vagabond, an enigmatic and questionable apparition, a true product of the age. Hodann had always evaded my pleading to allow me to accompany him to see Brecht, either because he had changed his mind about our earlier agreement or because Brecht had demanded total isolation. The messenger on horseback who turned up unexpectedly and delivered the invitation to us was Tombrock, the painter. Though I was always looking to avoid this scrawny man with the filthy, tousled hair and piercing gaze, he had grabbed hold of me, seized me. Like a demon who curses everyone who doesn’t want to listen to him, he had gotten close to Rosalinde as well, had dealings with Lindner, and even had the sober-minded Bischoff under his spell. For him, Sweden was not a foreign land but a hunting ground through which he stalked. The forty-five-year-old, who came from a working-class family from Westphalia, called Herring as a child due to his meager frame, had ended up in the pits at the age of sixteen, where small, slender people were needed. He led the draft horses below the ground, pushed carts of coal, lugged wooden sleepers about, then went to sea as a cabin boy. There, as he once told me and Rosalinde, who was carrying a bundle of his drawings for him, it was like in Benninghofen, near Hörde: you were jostled, shoved, kicked, you had to peel potatoes, wash the dishes, and scrub the decks. All things great and beautiful in this world, he said, belong to the rich. That this was nothing new to me provoked his wrath. He disdained the way that I hung about in the factory to create surplus value for the owners at a starvation wage, told me to throw in my job, become a vagabond, to beg, and to realize my desire to paint and write. Only then, he said, ranting and raving, do you have the right to call yourself a prole. He had done away with all self-deception once and for all before the World War, when he was hired to work on Braker’s fishing boat Gut Heil and used to take his intestines to market. Joined the revolution in the Ruhr, ended up in prison, in the correctional facility, then on the street. There, he said, among the poorest, is where you’ll find your school, never in the academies, that you can only get into if you bend over backward and sideward sucking up. He was self-taught, and his clumsy drawings with their dense lines, their distorted forms, and awkward perspective seemed convincing enough, though there was also junk among them, kitsch produced for quick sale. The women he reeled in took care of the sale of his wares. He was married, had a couple of kids, lived somewhere in Råsunda, but had a few other places where he could stop in for the night. He sent his wife, a seamstress, to the people’s houses, the workers’ clubs, and if she didn’t offload enough sheets, he’d tear and cut her sewing to pieces, lay into her, he would admit, not without a certain pride. What drove the daughter of Ossietzky, I asked myself, to use her name to help him out. Even more difficult for me to understand was that Bischoff, with bruised patches on her arms and face from his blows, continued looking for buyers for a collection of his pictures. This scrounger and bum was now rambling about his friendship with Brecht and invited us to participate in a get-together at Brecht’s house. We were to travel separately, at different times, from Humlegården along the Lidingö line, on foot or by bicycle, to Vasavägen station, and from there via Riddarvägen to number one Lövstigen. We were to enter the garden of a wooden house, painted dark red, from the forest side, and only if we didn’t see anyone on the way. His instructions sounded over the top, but the precautions were necessary, for not only was Brecht under surveillance and all of us forbidden to engage in meetings of a conspiratorial nature, but a number of Party functionaries, who were living in Sweden illegally, were also expected.