The Aesthetics of Resistance Volume 2

by Peter Weiss

  They were right next door, the people I grew up among, my generation lined up in rows. We had trodden the same streets, we knew the same cities and times, spoke and dreamed the same language. We had come to the North uninvited, via secret paths, one of us seeking out hiding places, the others traveling to the drumming of boots that we had known since our earliest youth; we had both come under false pretenses. We’d both been cast out by a malignant land, one of us in conspiratorial silence, the others sent to rob and murder. The same threats, orders, and punishments, the same figures in plaster and bronze behind us, behind us the same benches on which we’d worn our trousers thin, behind us a history which had molded our faces and gestures. It would be impossible to distinguish me from them, they would have taken me for one of their own; with the ones from Bremen or Berlin, a horrible familiarity would have emerged. Transport ships had brought them here, many had sunk, hit by aerial bombs, torpedoes, many of them, whose breath had mixed with mine, had been washed up on the shore, lay swollen like sacks, sopping in the sand, in the swell, among shells they couldn’t feel, all the others marching, marching down Karl Johans gate in Oslo, across the town hall square in Copenhagen, taking up their posts, occupying, taking possession, arranging themselves beside wind orchestras to serenade the vanquished, enjoying the awe-filled stares of the children, while most of the other gazes turned away from them, their presence felt only as a gray, unspeakably bleak, leaden mass. I could still sense the movement of their arms as they passed, hear their laughter, their whistling, the buzzing of all the words exchanged, they were right next door, I could have stayed; I had left them, they hadn’t driven me out, but I had been forced to learn that there was no place for me among them, they want to snuff you out, I had seen in Spain how adroit they were at the business of extinction, but they hadn’t been born to do it either, they’d just allowed themselves to be squeezed into this trade, bit by bit, tighter and tighter, with an ever-dwindling measure of mercy. There may have been some among them whose knees quivered, whose heart throbbed in their throat; there might have even been some among them like Heilmann and Coppi. And here, on our side, there was one who had fled from them, he was called Rosner, short, Jewish, they’d have slain him in a second were they ever to get their hands on him, they’d throw him out the window; and of all people, he was the one who, on the ninth of April, with Das Lied von der Erde on the radio, scribbled down strange words of praise for them; nodding, whispering, mumbling: now Sweden is no longer under threat, the men from across the way have come to protect the Scandinavian countries, and under the current circumstances, the occupation of Denmark and Norway also means security for the Soviet Union. Rosner, the secret messenger of the Comintern, crouching in his nightshirt behind the newspapers I had brought for him, explained to me how we were supposed to view the situation now. The Germans, I heard him lisp through his dentures, have forestalled the English-French plan of opening a front in the North. Since the winter, when they had the intention of helping Finland, the policy of the Allies has been a policy of false hope, of mistiming. Germany had acted according to the rules of war. The blame for what had eventuated lay with the Western powers. I asked if the minefield off the Norwegian coast had not been aimed at protecting against a pending German invasion, and mentioned the Party paper that had been printed that afternoon, in which—what a shift—the war had been framed as an imperialist war. A confrontation of imperialist powers. With this, the thesis that the Allies wanted to drive Germany into a war against the Soviet Union was revoked. We have to assume that the Soviet Union will consent to Germany’s actions. With the establishment of the pact, I heard him mumble, the Soviet Union was attempting to contain the war. England and France’s provocation had expanded the war. As long as the pact exists, the Soviet Union was continuing their attempts to bring the war to an end. Rosner sighed heavily, stood up from his seat, which made him shorter, pulled out a bottle from bundles of newspapers, grabbed a couple of glasses, and poured some wine. In this phase of the war, it’s about the ore, he said, sitting down: the English want to cut off Germany’s supply from Narvik, the Germans want to prevent any Swedish ore from reaching England, and now Sweden is left with no other choice but to give priority to Germany. Mumbling, he raised his glass, reaching across for a toast. Right in front of me, his stubble-covered face, his hair unkempt, his eyes all but blind behind their lenses. Mahler had lived in Vienna as well, his sensibilities and thinking had been shaped there, by the unsteadiness, the roving spirit, the ragged depths and intellect of his adversaries, he had become their cantor, many of those who were on the other side of the border had listened to him, perhaps moved to tears, until, had he still been alive, they’d have shoved him onto the pavement, ground his mouth into the stone. If life is but a dream, Rosner sang along, and jeering could be heard in the background, why then toil and fret. In his hermitage he was constructing his world; now that everything seemed to be collapsing, it was necessary to erect a system that retained its validity. In a moment he would explain to me, he said, why Sweden would be left unscathed. It was thanks to the tactics of the Soviet Union. These tactics had proven their strength. I saw my classmates, their fingers on the hammers of their rifles, they were standing on Scandinavian soil, they would continue on wherever they were ordered to go, and in the East, having murdered the majority of the military leadership of their country in their blindness, stood the trustees of the October Revolution, petrified angular forms overlooking the mausoleum, their spokesperson the dwarf who had been suckled and cradled in the Danube Monarchy. The conflict with Finland was brought to a close. When West Karelia was taken, they had won what was needed to defend Leningrad. No further claims. The Swedish warmongers had lost. Rummaging through lists, Rosner ran through everything Finland had received. Eighty-four thousand rifles, four hundred fifty machine guns, one thousand two hundred sixteen pistols, eighty-five antitank cannons, one hundred twelve pieces of heavy artillery, forty-five million rounds, one hundred seven thousand five hundred grenades, fifty radio sets, along with trucks and other equipment for seven artillery divisions. Twenty-three percent of the air force and seventy-two percent of air raid defenses had landed in Finnish hands, as well as hundreds of Swedish-assembled American planes. Then there were another four hundred million kronor in donations. I fill my glass again and drain it to the dregs. In Germany—I listened to his crackling, gritty stutter, set to dark music—the news of the weakening of the Swedish arsenals had been followed with glee. The country could not have withstood an attack. But it was this very fact that also made an attack superfluous. Now all Germany had to do was show a hint of a threat and they would receive whatever they wanted from Sweden. In the event of an invasion, the ore mines could have been blown up. But Germany was interested in maintaining the orderly flow of ore transports. The entire ore production will flow into the German arms industry. Iron, high-grade steel, ball bearings. Though a section of the major industrialists sympathized with the Western Powers, the king and the leadership of the army were on the side of the Germans. This agreement—along with Germany’s and the Soviet Union’s shared interest in maintaining Sweden’s neutrality—prevented an immediate occupation. Now the government, which had been subject to extortion for days, had to show proof that concessions had been made. The fact that in Norrbotten, where the mining districts were located, General Major Douglas was holding an army of a hundred thousand men ready to confront a possible British intervention, that the Cabinet Secretary Boheman was in London to clarify the Swedish position, that there was no mobilization, all bore witness to the fact, said Rosner, that terms had already been agreed upon for a deal, in which Sweden would maintain its appearance of independence but would otherwise have to fulfill the duties of a vassal. Relieved that the war would not also extend into Sweden, as they had feared, the government and Admiral Tamm—the friend of the Greater German Reich who was supposed to be posted to Berlin—had no further objections to the increased demands. For this reason, said Rosner, our work will not
be interrupted, and even Brecht can stay, thanks to the ore. He propped himself up on the papers, for what does spring matter to me, he crooned, let me be drunk. A new day came. The tin boiled. Official statements gave off nothing but the stench of carrion. When the rulers yelled that sacrifices had to be made, belts had to be tightened, for the workers this meant wage freezes, more toil, and for the owners, increases in profits. All forces were at odds with each other. Though the Party press emphasized the aggression of England and France to alleviate the precipitous characterization of Germany as an imperialist power, the Communist rank and file condemned the German attack on the neighboring Scandinavian countries. Bourgeois circles meanwhile were urging, on the one hand, the consolidation of the annexation to Germany and the launch of a campaign of vengeance for Finland, and on the other—though likewise in the interests of securing protection from the Soviet Union—calling for an alliance with England. At the same time, the Communist Party was attempting to convince us that the imperialist war could turn into an anticapitalist one, which, through the influence of the Soviet Union, would lead to the triumph of socialism, allowing them to say that that the struggle against capitalism was inextricably linked with antifascism. But, as reports of the first signs of Norwegian resistance filtered through, in order to avoid the impression of an estrangement between the members of the pact, the Comintern issued an order to place faith in Falkenhorst’s assurance that the German troops would respect the continued existence of the Norwegian kingdom and would honor the freedom of the Norwegian people. Yet king and government were on the run, and Quisling inspired nothing but disgust. People asked what would await the Communists and socialists in the occupied countries. We couldn’t believe that the pact would ensure that their rights would be respected. Thälmann, and tens of thousands of others, were still locked up in Germany. Lindner had heard that arrests had already taken place in Denmark. Members of the opposition were being sacrificed, she said, so as to hold onto the pact. Likewise, the Polish Communists who wanted to join the Red Army were being turned away and handed over to Germany, much like the antifascists who had sought refuge in the Soviet Union. Rosner would have explained this away by saying that the direction of the Polish Party was not aligned with that of the Comintern, and that right now, with the Soviet Union fighting for its existence, its focus had to be on casting out anyone whose loyalty was questionable. In France too, said Lindner, under the cover of war, the government was disposing of its political opponents. Daladier organized for leaders of the banned Communist Party, former members of parliament, to receive long prison terms, locked up almost every last emigrant in concentration camps, and threatened Republican Spaniards with deportation to el Caudillo’s Spain. It was a mere question of arithmetic, said Rosner, popping up from behind stacks of newspapers, of how many human lives would have to be expended to avoid greater losses. According to Soviet directives, the Norwegian Party had declared itself neutral and willing to cooperate with the occupying forces. They called upon the populace to suspend all forms of insubordination. The fleeing government of Nygaardsvold no longer possessed any legality. Though there were demands for Quisling’s coalition government to step down, this seemed to be more a result of the transference of the Soviet-German pact to the national stage, where there was talk of the possibility of an alliance between the Communist Party and the German occupiers. This mistaken belief, provoked by the passivity to which the Communists had been condemned, led to intensified attacks against the Swedish Party. There were renewed calls for it to be banned. While the leading Norwegian Social Democrats headed to England to prepare the fight for the liberation of their country from there, the Communist Party urged against doing anything that could drag Norway into the war. But the declared restraint did not preclude Grieg, the writer and Communist, from transporting the gold reserves of the Norwegian Central Bank to England in a boat with an expeditionary unit, as I found out from Hodann. British units were battling in Narvik to provide cover for the withdrawal of Norwegian regiments. Refugees who made it to Sweden were interned, those suspected of being Communists were subjected to strict surveillance in the camps at Långmora and Smedsbo, and German deserters were sent back across the border, toward their summary execution. But when, on the eleventh, the mobilization was ordered after all, and Per Albin Hansson gave a speech the next day pledging that all German demands for the right to march through the country would be rejected, this might have been intended to strengthen the position of the Swedish emissary negotiating in Berlin; but Germany didn’t need to take any notice of this, for in southern Sweden General Peyron sent over just a single cavalry brigade, and Admiral Tamm fell silent in awe of the gentlemen from the Reich Chancellery, announcing his excitement about the strike-power of the German Wehrmacht and falling into Waidmann’s open embrace in Carinhall. The shipments of provisions and medical supplies had been guaranteed by Günther, the foreign minister; regarding the question of the passage of nurses and vacationers, it could only be a matter of settling on numbers, per week or per day; and soon enough they would also give in on the transport of fuel, battlefield provisions, and reinforcements. The mobilization, therefore, was directed primarily at the people, to convince them of the seriousness of the situation, which meant the need to lower living standards, to save, to increase production. Rosner described the policies of the Swedish government as rational, practical, opposed to all forms of suicidal heroism. Selin agreed with him. Pressed by the workforce, he explained the position of the Communist Party in the tin cellar of the factory. Right now, the efforts to maintain peace were more important than the restrictions on freedom they necessitated. To the question of whether we shouldn’t support the struggle that was now breaking out in Norway and Denmark, he answered that as long as the army was not controlled by the people, then stoking a defensive spirit, or building up arms, or even joining the war were all useless to us. Military clashes never took place for our benefit, which is also how we ought to understand the directive of the Norwegian Party that no blood should be spilled for imperialist interests. If today we see a policy of peace as a kind of art of the impossible, he said, then we will start to understand the search for escape points, for stopgaps, which makes the position of the Soviet Union suspect in the eyes of many. Any and all measures that seek to stave off a world war are justified. But how are we supposed to confront them, that lot standing over there whose gray impression was staring out at us from the pages of the newspapers; what was to be done with them, how were they supposed to ever change on their own, when they were already starting to stamp their feet, when they received the signal, they wouldn’t be able to resist the stamping that was within them. In order to put a stop to this stamping, they had to be struck down. My separation from them had taken place long ago, our experiences were no longer the same; I belonged, like Heilmann, like Coppi, to those who had rebelled against the self-destruction; everything that we shared was now only a mirage, I could hardly imagine anymore how I had managed to resist the compulsion to submit, they were standing next door, those to whom I too could have belonged, but didn’t, due to divergent convictions and decisions. I knew that there could be no peace with them, that the final clash with them would soon commence. The sudden calm—as if those troops over there who were now being joined by the ones in black uniforms had already achieved everything, as if only a few more skirmishes had to take place—was a harbinger of a monstrous explosion. Yet it was this pause which, on the seventeenth of April, allowed a ship to depart the Skeppsbron in Stockholm, destined for Helsinki. Matthis, who—along with Santesson, Lazar, and the Goldschmidts—had accompanied Brecht and his entourage to the quay, described the scene to me. On the left, the building of the German embassy on Blasieholmen, and on the right, the German freighters in Stadsgårdhafen, were flying the swastika, the flags flapping in the breeze. Between the two, on his way across the footbridge, Brecht broke down, had to be held up, almost carried on board.