The Aesthetics of Resistance Volume 2

by Peter Weiss

  II

  BLINDINGLY empty, the path along the waterfront stretched out ahead of her, the water of Lake Mälaren lay still as glass, with the skiffs, barges, and small steamers huddling around the docks. The sun, having just risen above Kastellholmen, shone onto the tower of the townhouse, the cupola of the town hall, and the façades of the buildings on the northern side of the bay, which were broken up by black channels. Behind the railway embankment, the old town was shrouded in misty shade. Bischoff had headed off early, had taken the tram to the Västerbron, then gone down to Pålsundet, through the park, past the dockyard, the sheds, and the warehouses toward the sluice. On the hillside to the right extended the brick buildings of the Münchenbryggeriet, with stepped gables, balconies, and merlons, with the cathedral of the boiler house and its enormous chimney. On the left, between white piles of sand, the cranes stood on tracks, legs splayed, their necks stretched skyward. Hawsers were pulled taut between the iron bolts on the edge of the wall and the bows and sterns of the ships. As on every Thursday morning, today, the twenty-fourth of August, she would be going over to the construction sites on Kungsklippan during the breakfast break to collect for the Red Aid. She didn’t yet know how she should answer the questions that would be directed at her—she herself was searching for explanations—but she didn’t want to avoid an encounter with the workers. It is important, she thought, that I face up to them, especially today. Rising up steeply on her right was the cliff face—moist here and there from the groundwater—into which was cut the Maria Elevator building, which was also adorned with ogive windows, arcades, bay windows, and turrets. Up above, the castle-like building that crowned the old town on the southern slope protruded from the green of the hilltop. Bischoff read the inscriptions on the façades. The words Machine Workshop, on the gable wall from the top of which the beam of a hoist protruded, was difficult to decipher, for traces of letters indicated that there had previously been a blacksmith and wagon factory here, and an even earlier, almost invisible layer of lettering adverted to Stockholm’s Electric Boiler Cleaning Company. The building of the construction materials firm Ernström and Company adjoined a narrow wooden stairwell leading to a series of forecourts; farther back, among hard shadows and snatches of glinting walls on the sides, behind the parapet of a balcony, she could see the dog-legged firewall of the laundry and shower block. She felt as if the interpretation of all these inscriptions allowed her to attain something like stability. She lingered in front of the wooden shed with the large letters ZEMENT on it. The blocks of freight goods on the dock, under the sharply sun-chiseled tarpaulin, resembled sarcophagi. Ramparts made from the rubble of torn-down walls climbed up toward Hornsgatan, from which the first groups of dockworkers were approaching along sloping paths. Just now, a train emerged from the tunnel, emitting its high-pitched signal, and rolled down from the hill and across the bridge. The traffic on the winding roads around the sluice grew heavier, the arms of the clock on the tower of the Maria Magdalena Church edged toward six o’clock. Everything was inexorable. Soon, Bischoff would approach the path along the sluice, reach the marketplace where the fishmongers and the greengrocers were setting up their stands, and enter the office on Mälartorget, where she would be briefed about the situation that had emerged. Three hours later she found herself in front of the carpenters and bricklayers. The old foreman, who had always welcomed her warmly, stood there in silence, his arms crossed. A few of the young workers were already picking up stones. Nazi-Communist, one of them yelled at her. She stepped closer to them. The earlier discussion in the Red Aid offices had led to conflicting opinions. Someone had invoked Lenin’s principle that Communist politics should always be carried out in a way that everybody could understand. But the situation was now so complicated, so menacing, that all available chances for protection had to be seized, even if they could not be immediately explained. Yesterday, the Party newspaper had designated the signing of the nonaggression pact between the Soviet Union and Germany as a victory of Soviet diplomacy. For more than a year, all suggestions of entering into an alliance against fascism had been rejected by England and France. What’s more, Chamberlain and Daladier had pursued the tactic of pushing Germany into a war with the Soviet state; and now, the moment of self-preservation had arrived. The accord meant the dissolution of the Anti-Comintern Pact. Yet it remained unclear what would happen with Poland. Why, people asked, did the agreement not contain the otherwise normal proviso that the mutual assurances would be nullified in the event of an attack on a third country. Though it was still possible to read the pact as a final means of compelling an alliance with the Western powers, there was no justification for the declarations of friendship toward the German Reich. You’ve allied yourselves with the fascists, yelled one of them at Bischoff, and pointed to a newspaper picture showing the delegates making a toast at the gala dinner in Moscow. Walrus moustache, trimmed moustache, pince-nez, monocle, smiles frozen in the corners of their mouths. A nonaggression pact, she said, was no alliance. The fact that they had managed to force Germany to cooperate could be part of the struggle against fascism. The pact had driven a wedge into the conspiracy for the capitalist redistribution of the world. Don’t try to lie your way out of it, cried the worker holding the newspaper, it says in here something about an unbreakable agreement between the partners. The pact served to maintain the peace, said Bischoff; to divide up Poland, answered another, coiling his arm back to hurl the stone at her. You’d better go, said the foreman, I can no longer guarantee your safety. The Soviet Union, said Bischoff, had to choose between the risks of being exposed to German aggression or of being misunderstood in the process of preventing war; it chose the lesser evil. Just look, she said, at how England and France had allowed the German war machine to grow, how they had consented to the conquest of Austria, Czechoslovakia, and the Memel Territory, to the crushing of the Spanish Republic, how all their actions were calculated to ensure they remained unscathed. The stone hit her in the head, and blood ran across her brow; the bloody lump was still clearly visible when she took part in the afternoon meeting that Tombrock had organized at Brecht’s house. Once again we sat among the tables in the smoke, but this time the attentiveness of the group was shot through with an uneasy suspense. Brecht asked what effect the pact would have on the Communists in France and on the German opposition. Mewis was present, as was Warnke. They talked to each other in whispers. In order to avoid jeopardizing the pact, said Warnke, our Party organizations had to exercise restraint. We have to assume that the Germans want peace. Though fascism never provides guarantees for the cessation of its advances, the Soviet Union must have received assurances that its spheres of interest would remain untouched. Hodann, who was in attendance this time, asked how the division into spheres of interest was reconcilable with the internationalism propounded by the Soviet Union. Whether, in taking a step that seemed right at this point in time, they might not be abandoning the workers of all countries in the longer term, robbing them of their most basic tenets and leaving them bereft of new guiding principles. Mewis reacted angrily. The new guiding principles were given by the pact, he said. They could be found in the attempt to achieve a rapprochement between the Soviet people and the German working class. This was a great gain for socialism. Let’s suppose, said Brecht, that Germany were to attack Poland and the Baltic states: that would necessarily provoke an invasion by the Red Army. How, he asked, could such a step be justified to the global proletariat. If it came to that, said Mewis, then the decision would be justified because it would be purely in the service of containing the war. Why, it was asked, had the Soviet Union not resisted the previous German land grabs. How could they have done that, cried Mewis, when the Western powers were just waiting for them to expose themselves. No, he said, when it comes to combating the injustice of Versailles, we have to side with Germany. Cries of outrage could be heard. The Soviet Union is on its own, said Mewis. The threats against it have not been neutralized. To consolidate its security, borders might have to be
shifted. But we mustn’t see our main foe in Germany but in the governments of England and France, for it is they who are seeking to provoke war. It was clear that Brecht harbored skepticism toward these explanations. The Social Democrats, he said, can now offer a combative position. Look, they’ll cry, how the Communists have cast aside the Popular Front. If the Social Democrats are getting indignant about Soviet policies, said Warnke, then it’s because things have not conformed to their expectations. They had never uttered a word of approval regarding the Soviet efforts to enter into an alliance with the Western powers. On the contrary, they bought the British fabrication that it was impossible to fulfill Moscow’s wishes. Having contributed to the rejection of a joint security program, they now paint themselves as upstanding socialists, and under the guise of their liberal democracy the bourgeoisie is standing right there beside them. An atmosphere of distrust, of mutual surveillance, had developed. The studio, with the figures sitting crouched over, the blurring shelving, resembled a kind of interrogation room. Brecht pressed again for information about the situation of the French Communists and the antifascists in the German underground. As far as France goes, said Mewis, in a slightly reprimanding tone, there was no talk of an agreement between the Party and the reactionary forces. There, the nonaggression pact was being seen as a matter of military policy and not as an ideological provision. In Germany as well, not a single Communist had reconciled themselves with fascism. Yet we had to follow the directive, he said, of assuming a posture toward the regime that mirrored that of the Chinese Communists under the dictatorship of Chiang Kai-shek, and work toward winning back our legality. It is too early, he responded to another of Brecht’s questions, to expect an immediate release of prisoners, but the growing embitterment in the country, the decay of morale in the army and the mass organizations have certainly benefited us. Since Ribbentrop’s visit to Moscow, the impression of Germany’s invincibility had faded. Intelligence suggested that the food shortages and the fear of war could provoke revolts. In the group by the door to the hallway, a heated discussion had broken out. The pact, yelled a woman, will only deepen fascism’s corruption of the German workers. Then Lindner’s voice could be heard. She spoke of the weakening, the disempowerment, of the French Party. It won’t be of much help to the French Communists, she said, if the agreement is framed as a sign of the German desire for peace. Their forced neutrality toward fascism is robbing them of their last remnants of strength. Not only are they made to look despicable in light of the steadfastness and patriotism of France and England; their Party, beholden to the Soviet Union, is also threatened with being banned. The dark-haired woman in the background, Weigel, yelled that the working class, confused by the Soviet directives, are laying down their weapons. Assuaging her, Mewis countered that a rebirth of proletarian cooperation was imminent, but in an altered form. In the shadow cast by the back of his chair, Brecht’s narrow face displayed a mask-like astonishment. We couldn’t get past the clash of opinions. Only the spokespeople of the Party were convinced that the Soviet Union’s decision, in this cutthroat climate, was the only valid one. Even if others were willing to consent to this perspective, there was still a lack of clarity evoked by the conflict between the wishful thinking that the logic of the decision might reveal itself and the attempt to fall into line with these contradictions out of discipline. We felt ourselves to be at the mercy of a politics that could not be influenced and that crushed all individual considerations. The nightmarishness of it resided in the fact that a seemingly unreal entity was claiming to be the sole representative of reality. What was really engulfing us at that moment was the renewed realization of how divorced we were from everything that made up the affairs of the state. We had become accustomed to accepting the deformities that were nothing but a reflection of our own insignificance and mental weakness. The Party functionaries were prepared to view the combination of irreconcilable elements as a necessity; they accepted the skewed, fragile constructions as a makeshift means of finding any kind of stability at all in an environment which threatened to erode all understanding. The destructive forces were so strong that they could only be circumvented via secret paths, with cunning; anybody who wanted to withstand them had to become tough, callous. A system that we wanted to call ludicrous had to be considered normal. Toasts were made with revolvers pressed against one another’s chests. Contemplation could only be a sign of deviousness. This left its mark on the faces of the delegates. Their features had drawn narrow, their gazes suspicious, their mouths clenched. Once there had been faces like those of Bebel, Liebknecht, Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky, Antonov-Ovseyenko, Bukharin, Schlyapnikov, and Tretyakov—but how, we asked ourselves, could such faces show themselves today, among this scratching and burrowing. Crawling through the morass, we were happy if we managed to arrive at even a hint of a path. None of what was accessible to us could be compared to the plans of the masters. We were invertebrate animals, washed onto the sand by the breaking waves, floundering among alien formations: even the smallest forward motion between logs and jagged edges was a triumph. Brecht sat in his deep armchair, his hand cupped behind his ear. The brown Venetian leather of his jacket, full of black, horizontal creases, melted into the contours of the dark red leather of the recliner. His face glowed ivory from the cavity, shielded by a flat cap. His shoulders fell away steeply. Head held by a thin neck. Off to the side, his colleague Steffin leaned against the wall, askew and stiff like a chess piece. Guests next to one another on stools, elbows propped on their knees. Others, a clump with nubs against the glowing depths of the adjoining room. Brecht abstained from taking a position. Just posed questions. I tried to divine something about what he was thinking. During my earlier encounter with Grieg I had gained a mere intimation of the clash between politics and literature. Now I was being subjected to a shock, and becoming aware of this collision led me to long to exit my anonymity as well. But I had nothing to show that might arouse the interest of others. Behind me the tabletops were floating and laden with papers, columns and pedestals shooting up between them. The mechanism of the production that was taking place here was still unfamiliar to me. The fact that Brecht withdrew into a sheath of coldness was irrelevant; the only thing that mattered were the works, which right down to the smallest poem spoke of an involvement with the events that were related to my own existence. Calling together experts, lurking as if inside a giant listening device, rushing to absorb information, recasting impulses—all seemed to constitute elements of his working method. The collective knowledge that he absorbed like a sponge lent everything that he put on paper a universal, political significance. Yet the political was to be understood here as something that drew its impact from the field of human coexistence. He absorbed the oscillations in perspective with seeming arrogance, and it was as if I could hear the hammering with which he manufactured a chain of congruousness out of the contradictory. But how, I asked myself, was it possible to transfer this political capacity to the medium of literature so completely that it seemed to be embedded entirely in the present while simultaneously asserting a sense of total autonomy. We tended to agree that politics, which determined the fates of nations, had to force everything that belonged to artistic language into the background. Considering forms of expression other than those that directly referred to current problems would almost have been tantamount to turning our backs on the enormous struggle to maintain peace. And yet, after all this preparation, I was edging closer to that which I saw as my vocation. Professional writer: that sounded like professional revolutionary. And just as the many who carried out the revolution stood behind the latter, so too they stood behind the writer, examining what he had dreamt up in isolation; and it was only through their mental concentration that his words finally received their true life. We were all planners, inventors. We had to seek out the tool that we were best able to wield. Had I been alone with Brecht, I would have told him that the clash of two instruments that had previously seemed to me of equal value had suddenly forced me to choose
one of them, the artistic one. In making this choice, I was not distancing myself from my political path, the bonds I had formed, my fundamental convictions; all of that continued to exist. Nevertheless, I recognized that I had been seized by the desire to become a student of my own experiences, to stop repressing them and to attempt to articulate them as precisely as possible. I stood up; eyes turned toward me, and a moment later, because I said nothing, away from me again. I found myself in a large workshop; or, since the effort of acquainting myself with the instruments and machines here nearly caused me to pass out, in a torture chamber. Brecht was at home among these menacing structures and workbenches. He sat there slyly in his leather trench, his bony hands clasped together. He was able to find his way through the web of language that glimmered out against the decay we were unable to halt. Unable to say anything that would confront the tortures, I could offer little more than deranged screams. Prognoses for the next stages of development swept over the manuscripts, notes, stage models. In the same way as the possible became a gushing wave of vowels and consonants that surged toward me and hammered into me, everything I had carried within me through the endless days in the factories and workshops was washed together and pounded into each other. The answers that I wanted to give had to free themselves from pressure that had been building over my entire life. The machinery thrummed in the room. Mewis, Warnke, and a few others whose names I didn’t know were building a structure to place in front of the decay, the catastrophe. Time and again they were able to contrive new forms of defense. Brecht too, in a different way, was grappling with permanence. Light reflecting on the lenses of his glasses gave the impression of two glowing pupils. His nose tapered to a point. The corners of his mouth were tinted brown from the sap of his chewed-up cigar. A girl, about eight years old, Brecht’s daughter, walked among the people sitting in the room, stepping on their feet. Brecht scolded her. Everything on the ground, said the child in Danish, is there to be stepped on. The conversation suddenly dissipated. Final phrases evaporated. Only here and there a whispered, mumbled word. A figure rose up from the shadows, presenting himself as a poet-prince, strapping, with a long mane, dramatically set yet deliquescent facial features, and bent over Brecht, cooing to him. Brecht turned away from him, dodging the spraying saliva. Greid, like the two Swedish writers Matthis and Ljungdal, was a member of his staff of aids and advisers. Not only had Greid secured himself an overblown position among the emigrants through his marriage to the sister of the banker Aschberg; his training as an actor also enabled him to lend his every word a significance and solemnity. Some of his remarks implied that he had inspired Brecht to produce a collection of aphorisms. His Swedish friends too had approached him; he sat slumped, listened tiredly to reports related to literary plans. I saw Rosalinde’s face, yellowish in the doorway to the hall. Weigel, in a washed-out, blue apron, waited impatiently for the guests to depart. Bischoff and Lindner headed off. Other groups stood up slowly, weaving between the tables and chests, their legs lost in dark trenches. Outside, the reflection of the setting sun lay red on the trunks of the pine trees. I tried to remember what had swept through me earlier, like a presentiment of new possibilities, but found only emptiness. It was no longer possible to approach Brecht. Nobody said goodbye. One by one, at long intervals, the visitors stole out of the garden. Mewis waved me over to him and his companions. Before we went our separate ways I had received an assignment from him. As I walked through the door Steffin came over to me. She placed her hand gently on my arm. One day later this week, she said, I could come by in the afternoon.