Red Love

by Leo Maxim

  Anne knows that there is a proscribed writer in her own family, branded a “‘right-wing traitor” in the official history of the GDR. It’s her grandfather Dagobert Lubinski, her mother’s father. Dagobert was a Jewish Communist who lived in Düsseldorf and worked as an economic journalist for the Party newspaper Freiheit. In 1928 he was excluded from the KPD along with others because he openly stood up to the policy of the Party. Her grandfather is not mentioned much in the family. There is a photograph of him in the big bookshelf in the sitting room. The photograph shows a bald man with round nickel glasses and a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, looking confidently past the camera. Every now and again Anne learns a few scraps about him that she has to assemble herself. She knows that in 1943 Dagobert was murdered in Auschwitz by the Nazis, and that he had been in prison in Düsseldorf for a long time before that. She knows he founded a group in 1928, called the “Kommunistische Partei Opposition”, KPO for short. In the East German history books they talk about a “splinter group” that went over “to the camp of the class enemies”. They speak of “hostile machinations of dissenting appeasers”, after whose disempowerment and exposure a new chapter in Party history could begin—the time of unity and solidarity, which Anne had learnt of as a historical advance.

  When Anne’s mother talks about Dagobert, she soon has tears in her eyes. Gerhard prefers not to talk about Dagobert at all. His painful story is like a dark, mysterious stain on the family chronicle. Anne feels magically attracted to her grandfather. She feels a connection with this strange man, and she is unable to explain it. Again and again she decides to take a serious look into his history. And again and again she drops the idea. It’s as if she senses that Dagobert will change her life.

  In the early Eighties, Anne’s mother gives her the letters that Dagobert wrote from prison in Düsseldorf. The letters are Dagobert’s legacy, in which he formulates his final thoughts. “Keep the letters!” he writes again and again. Perhaps he already knows that apart from a photograph they will be the only thing that remains of him.

  Anne learns that the KPO produced a magazine called Against the Stream. She looks for it in the catalogue of forbidden books, but finds nothing. Anne asks the librarian, and it turns out that there is a locked catalogue for which even the “poison room” isn’t secure enough. This catalogue is in the office of the library director, and very special permission is required to access it. It takes another few months, and a certain amount of persuasion, before Anne receives the requisite permission. The librarian who finally brings the dusty volumes to her seat says that no one has ordered this title for a very long time. Anne flicks through the first edition, published at the end of 1928. There is only text, no pictures, and every now and again a framed appeal to the readers to donate money so that the magazine can appear again. The motto of the magazine is: “He who wants to get back to the spring must swim against the stream.” Anne likes that sentence very much.

  She looks for Dagobert’s name in the register, but doesn’t find it. The most-named author in the economics section is Erich Lessing, often abbreviated to E.L. Once next to his name there is the reference: our economics expert from Düsseldorf. Did Dagobert write under a pseudonym? Anne orders a volume of the Düsseldorf KPD paper Freiheit, for which Dagobert wrote until he was thrown out of the Party. Almost all the articles on economics are signed E.L. So it is him.

  From the magazines Anne learns a lot about her grandfather’s history. The split between Dagobert and the KPD was caused by the decision of the Communist International in August 1928 to declare Social Democracy to be the main enemy of the Communist movement. The Social Democrats were at least as bad and dangerous as the fascists, it said in the paper that was delivered at a congress in Moscow. The Communist workers were told to leave their trade unions and form their own “revolutionary associations”. Dagobert was at the congress in Moscow. Later, in an article, he described the Party’s decision as “a policy bordering on insanity”, because it split the working class and thus paved the way for the Nazis. Many other comrades saw it the same way, hundreds were thrown out of the Party because they persisted in their dissenting opinions. The leading men of the opposition were called Heinrich Brandler and August Thalheimer. Both worked at KPD headquarters in the early Twenties, and were fired by Moscow for incorrect behaviour. They assumed that the majority of workers followed the SPD and the trade unions, and that it was therefore important to act together. Until 1928 such views were tolerated in the Party, but after the Moscow congress there was a switch of direction, called the “Bolshevization” of the Party, which meant nothing but the complete elimination of democracy within the Party. Until then, Anne learns in these old magazines, there had always been violent debates within the Party. The various factions argued with each other, but no one was demonized as an enemy. The representatives of the minority, she reads with astonishment in an article, were even given extra time to speak to set out their concerns in detail.

  Anne is astonished that this form of democracy had ever existed in the Party. She only knows the compulsion to unanimity. In her experience opposition amounts to hostility. Dagobert had known the old Party, so he and his fellow campaigners had vehemently put forward their opinions until the end. In October 1928 Dagobert is fired from the editorial team of Freiheit. A month later a campaign is waged in the same paper “against the Brandler-Thalheimer faction under the leadership of the Comrades Becker, Rautenbach, Lubinski and Strobl”. Anne reads the articles that accompany the fall of her grandfather. In December and January the tone hardens. Now there is no mention of comrades. They are called “right-wing liquidators”, who are “waging an underground war of subversion with poisoned weapons”. On 8 January 1929 Dagobert is “excluded from the Communist Party on the grounds of his continued factional work against the Party”, as Freiheit announces in bold type. This is, incidentally, the same newspaper in which Gerhard will take his first steps as a journalist after the war.

  This tone, this vehemence, with which “the enemies of the working class” are published in the Party press, is familiar to Anne. It’s the same language, the same hate-filled destructive rhetoric that she herself encountered in newspaper editorial offices in the GDR. Except here a member of her own family was suddenly in the stocks. Someone she knew was not an enemy. Someone who had even been proved right only a few years later when the KPD’s strategy in fact turned out to be a disaster. With their narrow-minded policy against the Social Democrats, the German Communists decisively encouraged the rise of Adolf Hitler. They made themselves partially guilty. That this error was later acknowledged and recognized did not, however, mean that the people who had tried to prevent that mistake from the outset were in any way rehabilitated. Anne remembered a seminar about the history of the German labour movement in which the professor explained that the KPO had been wrong in spite of everything, because they had opposed the decisions of the Party. This lack of discipline was a graver crime than anything else.

  Anne can’t shake off her grandfather. For her, he is proof that one can be right and on the other side. That the supposed traitors are sometimes the better comrades. Dagobert frees her of her fear of becoming a traitor herself. Dagobert becomes a key for her, which will allow her to escape the “prison of loyalty”. That is what she calls that profound feeling that has for so long bound her to the state. The feeling that she must not harm the GDR because it is the safe haven that offers peace and protection to her persecuted parents.

  Today Anne says that she identified with her parents in their persecution. That was the core of her dependency. And now all of a sudden there was someone else who also belonged to her family, who was also persecuted, who was also a good Communist and who still followed his own convictions. A man with a heroic tale very different to that of her father. With this other hero, she sensed, she might be able to break that old dependency and finally become free. The things that had inhibited her until now—history and the family—could now help her find her own way.
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  At six o’clock in the morning on 3 November 1936, Dagobert is arrested by the Gestapo at his apartment in Düsseldorf. He is accused of belonging to an illegal Communist group. The last testimony that Anne has of him is the death certificate issued in April 1943 by the register office of Auschwitz II. It testified “that the journalist Dagobert Israel Lubinski died on 22 February 1943 at 6.45 in Auschwitz, Kasernenstrasse”.

  Dagobert was deported to Auschwitz not because of his political work, but because he was a Jew. When Anne starts becoming interested in his story, she also comes across Dagobert’s family, which lived in Breslau, Prague and Hamburg, and which she finds again in autumn 1941, in the Litzmannstadt Ghetto. In May 1942 they ended up on the first transportation to Chełmno extermination camp, where they were all killed in gas trucks. Anne is shattered to discover this, because the story she was most familiar with was the one about her father’s Jewish relations, most of whom were able to escape to safety. Dagobert’s wife Charlotte survived because she was Aryan, and their two daughters, Nora and Hannah, just escaped deportation as “mixed blood, first degree”. It is only now that Anne learns of the fear in which her mother Nora lived for months because she was on the deportation list in autumn 1944, and didn’t know whether they would come and get her. The owner of a clay quarry in the Westerwald had hidden Nora at his house. He offered to leave her at the clay quarry and provide her with food if this proved necessary. A day after the Americans marched into the Westerwald, the man wanted written confirmation for his help. The man was a member of the Nazi Party and the SA. Saving a half-Jew may well have spared him serious unpleasantness.

  For the first time Anne feels part of a Jewish family. It’s a funny feeling. As a historian she is used to remaining detached from events, but now history has caught up with her. She doesn’t know where she fits in this family. She somehow belongs to it, but she also finds it presumptuous to place herself in a line with the dead. Her parents have repressed their Jewish heritage, and even Dagobert, her new hero, didn’t want to have anything to do with it. Assimilation, he is supposed to have said to his daughters, was the only way forward for the Jews in Germany. Anne goes to the Library of the Jewish Community and starts reading. She tries to achieve an objective view of the matter, she finds the feelings too strange. But rather than emerging from the pull of the emotions, she is drawn deeper and deeper into them. In the community she meets other children of survivors. She understands that you can’t just push all those things away, that it’s too late for an objective and detached perspective. She’s in the midst of her own story. Sometimes somebody in the community asks if she doesn’t want to become a member. She says she’s in the process of freeing herself from another community of faith. “That’s quite enough for one life.”

  I remember meeting Anne in the street in Karlshorst one day. I must have been about fifteen. When she saw me, she started crying. We hugged and she told me the son of Augustin the baker had called my brother a “stupid Jew” at school. I had no idea how the son of Augustin the baker had worked out that we might be Jews. Anne didn’t know either. But she was very troubled by it. A few weeks later she read to my brother’s class from the memoirs of a Jewish prisoner who had survived Auschwitz. There was no trouble after that. It was also the time when I started thinking about what it meant to me to come from a Jewish family. My mother had told me that the Jews had always been a very disillusioned people, which was why Jewish descent was always passed down through the mother and not through the father, because you could never be sure if he really was the father. Because in their family only both grandfathers were Jewish, I couldn’t have been left with much. In the book that Anne would later write about her grandfather, she writes on the question of what it means to be Jewish: “Perhaps the feeling of a stigma, the thought of the dead, of the survivors scattered all over the world, and a slightly strange feeling about myself.” I think it’s a great description.

  In March 1982 Anne has a Parteiüberprüfungsgespräch, a “scrutinizing conversation”, a kind of confession for loyal comrades. She stands in a seminar room in the main building of the Humboldt University. Sitting facing her are three comrades from the Party leadership. This time Anne decides to say everything. She has decided to accept expulsion from the Party if there’s no way of preventing it. Anne talks about all the things she doesn’t agree with. The lies, the rigid thinking, the ideology that ended up deep-frozen at some point. She says she has profound doubts. She listens to herself, chasing after the words pouring from her mouth, apparently beyond her control. She thinks something bad is about to happen to her. But nothing happens. The comrades smile at her benignly, saying that everyone has their doubts and problems. The only important thing is that she remains a Socialist deep down. It seems that things have changed somewhat. The Party has become softer. And it’s clear that nobody is being thrown out of the Party any more. She would have to take that step herself. But Anne doesn’t think about that at all. She is relieved to be able to keep her opinion and still remain a comrade.

  After she’s finished her doctoral thesis, Anne receives an offer to work for a magazine called the Neue Berliner Illustrierte. She doesn’t actually want to work in journalism in the GDR any more, but on the other hand she has to do something. She decides to give it another try. But it quickly becomes apparent that she can’t do it any more, she’s emotionally too remote from it. In the spring of 1986 she is to write an article about the Marx-Engels monument that has been erected near the Berlin television tower. She thinks the monument is ugly and the sculptor dreadful. She scribbles something together, and the few aspects that seem interesting to her are deleted too, and even the title is changed. “The memorial to the working class”, it says above her text. When she leaves the office in the evening she knows she has reached the limit of her compromises. She resigns and stays at home the next day. She can’t do it any more.

  In the flat in Karlshorst there is a lovely veranda with big windows on all sides. There are old lime trees outside the windows. This veranda is where Anne now wants to work. Wolf makes shelves and a desk out of old floorboards. He’s glad that Anne is finally working at home too, as he had always advised. “Do you feel this freedom?” he asks, and she cries because she feels so lost. She knows she is outside once and for all, that there’s no going back. She is thrown back on her own devices, alone in her little world. Of course she can do what she wants now, but what does she actually want? It’s a while before she decides to write a book about Dagobert. After all, it’s partly his fault that she can no longer function out there. The photograph from her parents’ bookshelf is now on her desk. Her ostracized grandfather has become her new companion.

  21

  Declarations of Faith

  TWO WEEKS AFTER WOLF YELLED at my headmistress Frau Reichenbach over the business with the sub-machine gun, we got news that my application to sit the Abitur had been turned down, which made Wolf very sad because he now really thought it was all his fault. In a letter from the district school council it said, “Among the applicants many pupils have a much higher capacity for achievement, along with model behaviour.” In general, only the two best from each class were allowed to go on to extended secondary school. At our school they were Christiane and Sven, who were really better than me. In Russian and maths I had only a Three, and my work was assessed as “inadequate”. Even so, Anne objected. She said she could not allow this state to make a worker out of her son. Anne wrote to the school council to say she would complain to Erich Honecker if I wasn’t allowed to do the Abitur. But the school council wasn’t particularly impressed. The rejection stood, and I asked my mother not to write to Erich Honecker, because I suspected that the General Secretary might have more important things to do than worry about a school place for me.

  The business with the Abitur was difficult for all of us. I didn’t know what to do after school, it was becoming clear to Anne that the country was not good for her children, and Wolf still thought everything was his fault. F
or the first time I felt the power of this state, which could simply determine what path one’s life could take. And I thought for the first time about what path mine might be. Everything until then had been clear and straightforward, but suddenly there were decisions to be made.

  Anyone who didn’t do the Abitur had to learn a trade at sixteen. Just doing nothing wasn’t an option in the GDR. I actually wanted to be a chemist, because I enjoyed chemistry and it had nothing to do with politics. But it’s also possible that I was interested in it because my friend Sven wanted to be a chemist as well. Anne and Wolf made enquiries and found me an apprenticeship as a chemistry-lab assistant in the Academy of Sciences. The plan was later to let me switch from work to study. But first of all I had to do that training. The practical part took place at VEB Berlin-Chemie in Adlershof. It started at seven in the morning, which meant that I had to leave at six. The tram that ran from Karlshorst to Schöneweide was so full at that time of day that you had to force your way in. I had had no idea until then that so many people were out and about so early in the morning. Most of them were workers going to the Oberspree cable works. Their faces were pale, their eyes stared into the distance. Some even managed to sleep standing up. After a year I could do the same. It was worst in winter when it was still dark in the morning. The walk from the factory gates to the production hall was not without its hazards. Foul-smelling gas hissed from rusty pipes, little streams of corrosive liquid flowed along the paths. When insulin for diabetics was being manufactured it smelt of decomposing pig placenta. Our foreman insisted on punctuality, and because I generally didn’t get to work on time I usually had to scour the big mixing pot by way of punishment.

  This switch from pampered childhood to reality in the GDR was a shock to me. I felt lost, like a fish out of water. I thought of the others who were now allowed to sit the Abitur, of the heated, clean classrooms, the books, and the pride they must feel at being among the best. I saw my colleagues in their grey padded cotton jackets, the trees white with chalk dust, the pall of smoke that hung over the factory. This reality seemed terribly unreal to me, exaggeratedly wretched and bad. I didn’t want to work in this factory, I didn’t want to be a chemist any more, I just wanted to get away. I was like a spoilt child that has to take his first steps on his own and immediately starts to stumble. All of a sudden I understood how little my parents’ world had to do with everything else that was happening in the country. How shielded from reality I had been in that airy, warm household of intellectuals. I understood now why it was so important for my father to work at home, to be independent, why my mother wanted at all costs to stop them turning me into a worker. My parents’ friends were photographers, painters, designers, architects or doctors. They all lived far from the everyday life of the GDR, far from the toiling masses who kept this country running. I felt like an exile, like someone banished to reality.