The Aesthetics of Resistance Volume 2

by Peter Weiss

  Then came the crows. With the arrival of the evening frost they gathered together in flocks in Humlegården, flew screeching to Berzelii Park, hung in packs in the trees there, rose up out of the flurry of the yellowing foliage, hurled themselves, flapping black clouds, over to the palace, where they settled on the eaves in long, menacing rows. Every evening, for an hour after sundown, the birds stormed from spot to spot with shrill and bitter shrieks, returned from the façade of the palace on Strömmen, back into the thinning branches of the chestnut trees to spend the night. A package had been delivered to Rosalinde; inside, wrapped up in newspaper, with no accompanying note, lay the golden medallion of the Nobel Prize that had been awarded to her father. She had arranged the small table in her room with the coin resplendent on the brown, crumpled envelope, between the stamps of eagles with outspread wings. She ran out of the hot steam of the laundry and into the field, flung off her apron, shirt, and wooden shoes, lay down in the cold furrows in the earth. Every evening, after she had toiled at the tubs and the wringer to the praise of the mistress, she hurried into the darkness, and it amazed her that it took so long before she began to cough, to break into a fever. Talking to herself in the field, she noticed with a laugh that her father had bequeathed her a strong constitution, that she, just like him, wouldn’t be done in easily. She took on the task of wearing herself down on her own. Finally, nearly unconscious, lying outstretched, her teeth bared in a grin, she was able to stare up hopefully into a starry sky that provided her with a familiar sense of icy infinity. As she broke down at her workstation, spewing blood, the housekeeper initially accused her of faking; but then, after the school physician was summoned, she was taken to the hospital in Mörby, where I visited her at the end of October. I had not seen her for more than a month. Looking into her shrunken, yellow face, which now resembled that of her father in a terrifying way, it seemed pointless to tell her about the writing work that was occupying my time. It wasn’t estrangement that had developed between us; I could have easily found a way to relate to her reality, I understood the expression of pride etched in her features, but my political exile had eaten away at something in me—it was as if I had to extend the secretive silence that accompanied my illegal activities to all my personal relationships as well. I also had not met with Hodann for a long time, to avoid having to hide things from him. Confronted with Rosalinde’s haggard face, I could sense the renunciation into which I had entered but saw no way of breaking out of the structure that had been applied to my days. And even still, the task I had set myself was near impossible to realize. Rosalinde’s mouth remained closed, but in her eyes I read the question of whether the path I was taking might not lead me astray instead of giving me satisfaction. I too sometimes perceived the strictly regimented activities of my afternoons as a chore. Only my meetings with Rogeby and Bischoff afforded me brief spells of relief. With them, the absence of questions, our isolation from each other, was also a form of understanding. But accepting sole responsibility was the prerequisite for my work. I could not expect any support whatsoever, had to deny all connections to the Party. Continually feigning neutrality, I shifted between destinations that seemed to lie in a no-man’s-land. Now that parts of the separator plant had been incorporated into the arms industry, as a foreigner I had to expect to be let go. It was only the lack of labor power—with many reservists having been called up for military service—and perhaps also the low wage that explained the fact that I was still able to creep into a cavity on the lowest level of the production site, whose capital amounted to eighty-two million kronor and whose net profits that year came in at eight million. Thus, a faceless foreigner, despite being destined to be discarded, I was still of use as cheap unskilled labor down below in the tin workshop and was contributing to the economic growth of Sweden. Nevertheless, I preferred the dubiousness of my situation to the insecure life of the emigrants. If I was a collaborator, they were ejecta. Though my independence might have been illusory, they were condemned to passivity. Their days consisted of nothing but waiting, waiting to be issued subsidies, food stamps, and shabby items of clothing, waiting for a visa so they could continue on to some other place. They would sit in the International Foyer on Västerlånggatan, consuming the bread rolls that were handed out to them there, reading the newspapers that were placed on the tables, or they could be found in Café Ogo on Kungsgatan, or in the cellar of Brända Tomten on Stureplan, where they could kill a few hours chatting in small groups, over a cup of tea, a glass of water. On the streets, you could tell them from the inhabitants of the city by their sluggish gait, their aimless gaze, the way they would come to a sudden halt with extinguished faces. Perhaps I owed Brecht’s acceptance of me to Steffin, who may have recognized in me something of her own past as a child of working-class parents in Berlin. But this had not sparked personal questions, neither from her nor from Brecht; I was permitted to enter his studio, permitted to sit in a corner and listen, and the indifference that was shown to me intensified my timidity, I couldn’t understand why they had invited me in the first place. Stepping into his office always made me freeze at first. Despite Brecht’s restlessness, a peculiar despondency and paralysis could be sensed in the atmosphere. This might have been related to Weigel’s presence, who, cut off from her profession, scuffed and banged about upstairs, and whose facial features—which longed to express something other than sullenness and self-sacrifice—were sometimes, when she cropped up in the doorway to the hall, pierced by a bitter wrath. Brecht turned toward her with indignation, before flinching. Steffin, on the other hand, he wanted to have right next to him while he worked, with a sharpened pencil hovering over the paper; and he was most content when he could see Berlau, his elegant girlfriend, speeding off on her motorcycle, clad in leather. It wasn’t until Brecht suddenly demanded my opinion on a few dramaturgical questions that had arisen, and I, already resigned to the notion that I wouldn’t be tolerated here much longer, emphasized my lack of interest in the fable and suggested constructing the plot purely out of the clashes of historical forces, making the figures jump erratically into diametrically opposed positions, that I—with a slight sneer from Brecht, as this was precisely what he was thinking about doing—was incorporated into the planning process. I was instantly tasked with plowing through some source material, which would correspond to one working day for someone in Brecht’s situation but which I could only manage by working late into the night. I read between my stints operating the tin crucible, while riding my bike; I learned to pick out a usable sentence with a single glance at a page, learned to quickly connect a found image with a series of other fragments; and, even if Brecht assumed that everything that we uncovered belonged to him, this inventing, intertwining, and refining became my education. The things I wrote down I did for him, for the work that would have him as its author; but at the same time, I did it in order to be able to retain and pass on a few tiny pieces of documentation in the event of the arrival of the catastrophe that would violently disrupt our efforts. The fact that our work was broken off after the intensive process of sketching out the first section strengthened my resolve to bring as much as possible of what had been outlined to fruition, and while I was making my notes I often forgot that I had someone else’s work in front of me. And yet this too formed part of the conditions under which I lived—as a messenger, a medium, a servant—and I often indulged in the idea that these almost completely unrecognized efforts might yet one day lead me to tasks that I could call my own. I had been let go by Brecht for the moment, with a fleeting reference to resuming the work later; I was now no longer needed as a contributor on a project with which he had moodily, hectically, and violently experimented; he locked himself away again, moved on to other material, with only Steffin helping him, occasionally also Matthis and Ljungdal. I did not belong to his circle of friends. I was never a guest at his house like the Social Democratic politicians Branting and Ström, to whom he was indebted because they had procured his Swedish entry visa; like the doctors Hoda
nn and Goldschmidt, the writers Blomberg and Edfelt, the actors Greid and Wifstrand, the academics Steinitz, Scholz, and Ziedorn, the politicians Enderle and Plenikovski. I suspected that Brecht didn’t even know that I worked in a factory; I never had the opportunity to tell him about it. Regardless of what he might have made of my contributions to the discussion, I was one of the young refugees, who, due to their participation in the fight for the Spanish Republic, could presumably be viewed as reliable but who otherwise possessed none of the qualities which for him would have justified their participation in the gatherings of an intellectual elite whose tasks included the planning and founding of an antifascist alliance. Though I had heard Brecht speak disparagingly about intellectuals—we could place no faith in them, he would say—the acquaintances that he sought consisted primarily of academically educated or politically influential personalities. Once, when I met up with Matthis, he gave me a sense of the formation of this intellectual front, this Voltaire Club. Through the participation of Swedish professors, journalists, and liberally minded patrons, a committee was forming that was not only going to produce an encyclopedia of National Socialism, but was also going to confront the issue of exile, an undertaking that Brecht had been thinking about for many years and that aroused mistrust among the Party functionaries because it was closely related to a project of Münzenberg’s, which meant it could be assumed that Brecht and Münzenberg had exchanged ideas about it. The breadth of the project also impeded its organization and public presentation. Talking to Matthis about Mother Courage and Lucullus, I realized that he had worked elements from our conversations into these pieces. The depiction of the sutler seemed to be marked by the same odd ambivalence that he had shown toward the queen of the Union. Just as with Margaret, who, having been ferociously caricatured, was then able to assume a certain grandeur, he was also ultimately seized by Mother Courage, whom he had wanted to depict as a terrifying figure. The last judgment of the lowly and suffering, presaged in the facial expressions of the dying queen, found a simpler variation in the radio play in the appearance of the plaintiff against the commander. It was a relief for me that I now only had my trips to Rosner. Now, when I came from Rosalinde’s place, I would be able to devote myself more amply to the Saint Jerome of the Comintern. The fact that she was asleep when I left seemed for a moment to be the sign of a complete separation. I wanted to be able to wait, but I was driven out by restlessness. The trip on my bike through the cold October air to the train station, up Upplandsgatan—which lay barren as usual—past the house in which Rosner lived to Vanadisvägen, where I left my bike, the leisurely stroll back, hammers beating on tin, the hissing of the welding guns in the basement of the workshop, the arched entranceway with the number seventy-seven, meager stucco work above it, a few steps, a folding door with glass panels, a hallway, at the end of which the stairs coiled around the central pylon, the bell on the right, the prearranged signal, inside, the hobbling steps accompanied by the thudding of the cane, waiting, the noise from the workshop, the signal again, as agreed, Rosner appearing, with glistening eyes, whistling cheerfully, on the left, the door to the kitchen open, at the front, beside an inbuilt cupboard and facing the street, the closed doors to the family’s rooms, and then into the kitchen, where his host had prepared him a meal and a thermos of coffee. Sitting down at the table on the wall that curved around the stairwell, he showed me his new dentures, described to me how he had been transported to the dentist in the trunk of a car, how the dentist, in a single nighttime sitting, had pulled his rotting teeth and fitted the prosthetics. His feigned distress—quickly replaced by a grin—at the fee demanded of him by his dentist and fellow believer, whom he had taken for a philanthropist, amounting to the exorbitant sum of one thousand five hundred kronor, which the Communist International had to front. At the kitchen table, which he had loaded up with newspapers, he explained to me how things stood now that Poland had been divided. His hideout seemed to contradict the health and reach of the global movement of which he was a representative, but, he said, for anybody who has spent years in prison and is used to carrying out their work in hiding, this kitchen with a sink, oven, and firewood box, this room, even if it is scarcely larger than a wardrobe, is the epitome of freedom of movement. Also, he said, the dialectics of history are proven here, in that a concealed action at the right moment can counterbalance or even outweigh a public strategy. The expansion of the agreement with Germany from a nonaggression pact to a pact of friendship should be interpreted as facilitating a renewal of revolutionary possibilities of the kind that arose toward the end of the previous war. An accord between the Soviet Union and the German people would lay the foundations for a future cooperation. The declaration of friendship, he said, was meant to convey that there is no land in which the working population wants war, that the offer of friendship was intended for the workers. This didn’t mean that a fraternity was immanent, for fascism always carries war in its core. The crucial thing now was the degree to which the German working class was capable of appreciating the new relationship. Great demands had also been placed on the international proletariat to trust Soviet policy, to refuse to be influenced by the bourgeois propaganda that portrayed the agreement as a betrayal. Through the advance of the Red Army, he said, pouring coffee from the thermos into our cups, and in coordination with the negotiations of recent weeks, the border between the Soviet Union and Germany had been established. The Western powers had opposed the Soviets’ freedom of movement because they were expecting the Germans to conquer all of Poland. Rejected by England and France, the Soviet Union had taken the necessary step to protect their own territory, neutralizing a German military objective and establishing a ceasefire. Only the West was pushing for a continuation of the war, in the hope that the German attack would be directed against the Soviet state. This is what we have to make clear now, he said, pushing the crockery aside, that having been driven into isolation by the Western powers, it is the Soviet Union that is attempting to calm tensions by way of an alliance between the peoples. Provocatively, in pursuit of their own interests, the bourgeois governments had turned their backs on them, had accused the Soviets—who were fighting for nothing but the maintenance of peace—of a policy of aggression; and the Social Democratic movement, by expelling the Soviet trade unions from the International Federation of Trade Unions, had eradicated every last hope of cooperation. That’s what it’s all about, he said, sitting down to write his weekly report, asserting our perspective, despite the defamation to which the Communist Party is being subjected. Rosner, with his big, curved nose, his blinking mole’s eyes, Rosner, smacking his lips, wheezing, Rosner, holed up in a foreign land and at home in his beliefs, Rosner, denied the possibility of moving about freely on the streets, rummaged through the heap of newspapers, handed me the sheets of paper covered in scribbles to be made into fair copies. Often, while he worked he would have the radio that the Party had provided him switched on, the volume turned down low. Stop, he would call out suddenly, when a piece of music spoke to him, throwing his head back, rocking to and fro, this time to the voice of Edvard Persson from Skåne, whose folk songs he particularly loved. The schmaltzy, dialect-inflected singing formed the background to my report on the conditions in the separator plant, where, as in all other industries, the Communists were being put under pressure by the union leadership. The metalworkers’ association recommended removing members of the Communist Party from positions of import. It claimed that because of its allegiance to the Comintern, the Party could no longer continue to exist within a democratic context. They were striving to have the Party banned, as had happened in France. While Persson conveyed an unconcerned unity in peacefulness, in a sense of belonging, I brought up how comrades in many industries were now being subjected to daily denunciations, attacks. Acts of sabotage were being carried out at their workbenches, they themselves were then being held responsible for the destruction, for the loss of productivity. Humming along to the blaring melody, Rosner replied that we were only faci
ng preliminary bouts of a harmless nature at the moment, but that soon we would be facing very different clashes. He spoke of the dangers brewing next door in Finland. We must assume, he said, regardless of what we might say about a Soviet-German friendship, that this peace is nothing but a mere postponement of armed confrontation. The anti-Communist slander in Sweden is being spread by groups—plenty of them from among the top rungs of the military—who have an interest in provoking the outbreak of war between Finland and the Soviet Union. They are promising the profascist Finnish government military support and encouraging their rejection of Soviet suggestions on regularizing their borders. The proposals—of pushing back the northeastern Finnish border due to the precariousness of Leningrad and of leasing Hanko, at the mouth of the Gulf of Finland, offering Soviet regions in Karelia in return—are already being construed in the bourgeois press as a sign of Soviet plans of aggression. Desperate to be cut loose, the generals declared that Finland’s struggle was Sweden’s business. We sorted and numbered the pages that, subject to strict precautionary measures, were to be picked up in the evenings and taken to the printers. The gated entrance to number eighty-four Kungsgatan, which led to the courtyard buildings of the Party headquarters, was monitored by police informants. Despite the fact that the Communist Party enjoyed complete legality and was represented in the national parliament, members were subject to sudden arrests, house searches, the confiscation of materials. The singer with the soothing, slick voice had not prevented Rosner from unfurling the map of Scandinavia on the table in front of him. Have you ever been to Lapland, he asked, and traced his knobbly index finger along the rivers running down from the mountains to the Gulf of Bothnia. He pointed to the gnarled walking stick standing by the kitchen door and said we have to be prepared to hike, across the highlands to Lake Inari and on to Petsamo, with nothing but emergency rations in our packs. Here at the kitchen table, he seemed to view the enormous trek, equal to walking down to Italy, as nothing more than a light stroll. And yet, the first guard on the edge of the city would arrest him, for who, I thought, could look more suspicious than this disheveled Wandering Jew schlepping the International around on his hunchback. He wanted to hear more about my day in the factory. How could the workers, he asked, be freed from mechanistic thought and reoriented toward an offensive position. The international unity of action of the working class is ongoing, he wrote on his corrections sheet. I need local color, he said, I want to touch and smell what’s going on in the workshops, in the cafeteria, in the union meetings. It was as if he were straining against a tiny sliver of light that I had opened up, as if he wanted to haul the whole factory into his kitchen nook, with its smoke and din. We heat a lot with peat now, I said, it leaves an earthy effluvium hanging over the courtyards. There’s a lack of tin; trucks bustle in loaded to the top with scrap iron to be melted down to recover raw materials. Tin bars are being stolen; a stockpile was found in a shed on the canal intended for sale on the black market. Separators are now being created only for large dairy farms, not for use by individual farmers. The lathes in the bigger machinery halls have been converted to produce artillery shells. The parts are delivered from the steelworks in the north, the shells produced are seven and ten-and-a-half centimeters in caliber. People from the Landstormen monitor the packaging departments. I watch without being noticed. I listen and keep quiet. I take part in the union meetings. I invoke my Social Democratic background. My father’s name is familiar to the union functionaries. As a member of the union I am also affiliated with the Social Democratic Party. And though joining the Party is no longer compulsory—as had initially been decided at the founding congress of the national organization in eighteen eighty-nine—anybody who makes use of their right to abstain makes themselves identifiable as a Communist or arouses suspicions of at least being sympathetic to the Communist Party. In this way, Communists can simultaneously belong to their own Party and to that of the Social Democrats. The struggle of the Swedish workers’ movement is identical with the struggle of the trade unions. To push through the objectives of their struggle, the trade unions need a governing Social Democratic Party. In an interplay of interests, the Party draws its strength from the unions while the unions draw their strength from the Party. What is necessary is for the Party to reach an absolute majority. If, in the continual balancing act, the scales tip toward the bourgeois parties, the demands of the unions cannot be realized. Scorned as an ideological enemy, the small Communist Party nevertheless helps the Social Democratic Party to reach a narrow socialist majority. Despite the disputes, there are still Communist shop stewards within the trade unions. They can be supported in the union elections. My membership in the trade union and the Party makes me eligible to take part in the elections. I pay five kronor a month to my division, the metal division. Of that, four kronor a year are handed over to the Social Democratic Party. Even though most of the union initiatives in our workplace are issued by Selin and other Communists in positions of power, and though solidarity still reigns on the workplace floor, the slander spread by the leadership of the metalworkers’ union has still borne fruit. They tie the antifascist struggle to the struggle against the bolshefascists. The trade unions make gains among militants by emphasizing what is suppressed by the Communist press. The German victories, justified by the Communists, are pilloried. The trust lost by the Communist Party through its cover-ups is gained by the Social Democratic Party through its apparent honesty. The workforce is being fractured by the ongoing scheming. Because everyone is worried about keeping their jobs, caution and passivity are intensifying. Even in addressing union issues, an awkwardness, a hush sometimes descends. It’s not only the threats and blackmailing that are driving many to leave the Communist Party but also the inconsistency of its political positions. Fundamental solidarity at the workbenches, but when you look further, exhaustion and demoralization. As always, in the interests of national unity, a depoliticization of the workers. A focus on the most immediate interests. Our problem: there’s no soap in the washrooms. The rations of crystalline soft soap are unusable. Our problem: no hot water in the showers. The food is getting worse: nothing but cabbage and potatoes hollowed out by worms. We demand better food in the cafeteria, and at cost price, one krona fifty. Numerous accidents, which the factory doctor hardly ever treats anymore. The nurse wraps an emergency dressing around a black fist with a severed finger, around a gaping foot, a brow pelted by a drive belt. Grievances of that nature are discussed. Letters are written to Fossberg, the technical director, who skirts the questions and speaks about the difficulty of keeping production and sales going at all, who yells sacrifices must be made when wage increases are requested. It isn’t raises we should expect but reductions, further cutbacks, remember, it’s wartime. A brief consensus in the assessments of the employers and the union fat cats. Then back to exhaustion. You’ve got to keep your mouth shut, for tactical reasons. Look how they pit us against each other, you’d like to say, just like they always have. You only dare to agitate among the barking of the tin cauldron. And on top of all that, I said, I’m trying to help out with the draft of a play about Engelbrekt; Engelbrekt, leader of the Swedish struggle for freedom, in the thirties of the fifteenth century; Rosner interrupted: now that would be something, that could mobilize the workers, he yelled, something has to be written about that in the magazine; but it’s too early, I said, it’s Brecht’s play, I’m collating the material for him, he wants to put it on the stage in the winter; and I was overcome by a sudden feeling of dizziness.