Willi Muenzenberg has ideas that come spouting out of him all day long. Hans Schultz is usually kept busy until far into the night writing down these ideas, assigning tasks, composing calls to action. Schultz is a tall, lame, discreet, timid man. Muenzenberg delivers the headlines, Schultz must execute them. Arthur Koestler once described how such a task got formulated: “Write to Feuchtwanger. Tell him to get articles and so on. Tell him we need a pamphlet from him; we’ll smuggle ten thousand of them into Germany; about the saving of our cultural heritage etc., leave the rest to him, hugs and kisses. Then buy a book on meteorology, Hans, study the highs and lows and so on, find out how the wind blows across the Rhine, how many leaflets, small format, we can attach to a balloon, where in Germany the balloons are likely to land, and so on. Then, Hans, get in touch with a couple of balloon manufacturers, tell them it’s for export to Venezuela, ask cost estimates for ten thousand balloons. Then, Hans…” And Hans whirls. There’s no proposal he doesn’t follow up on. All this is backed up by Willi’s cat’s-paw, as they call him: Otto Katz, a.k.a. André Simone, as he styles himself here in exile. Muenzenberg’s adjutant, ambassador of the invisible Willi, his face to the world, and above all his voice. He speaks multiple languages, Muenzenberg speaks only Thuringian; he’s an excellent journalist, Muenzenberg not at all. When it’s a matter of rounding up donations in Muenzenberg’s name from sympathizers all around the world, Otto Katz is the man. He executes Muenzenberg’s propaganda strategy: Whoever gives money for something feels he belongs to it and has an inner connection. The more money someone gives, the stronger the connection. Muenzenberg’s connections thus extend far into the liberal bourgeoisie.
Katz is the ideal man to be out in the world working for his chief and for the movement. Charming, clever, and witty, with a soft face, a bit sly, always full of sparkling talk. When he smokes, he closes his left eye. Over time it becomes a quirk, and soon he’s closing it to think, even when there’s no cigarette. He comes from Prague, was the director of Erwin Piscator’s theater on the Nollendorfplatz in Berlin, accumulated a mound of debts, went totally bankrupt, and wanted to commit suicide in despair, when he met Muenzenberg, who installed him at one of his newspapers. “I fished him out of the Landwehr canal,” Muenzenberg likes to say when anyone asks him how he met Katz.
Another member of the circle is the journalist Arthur Koestler, born in Budapest in 1905. He has received money from Muenzenberg to come to Bredene, near Ostend, and write a sequel to The Good Soldier Schweik. And he writes and argues and observes Muenzenberg and his collaborators. He sees their petty jealousies; he also suspects that Otto Katz is reporting on his chief to Moscow. Muenzenberg is not liked by the Party ideologues, by the Germans Ulbricht*1 and Pieck,*2 by the ultraorthodox or the loyalists to the Party line. They’re all working to bring him down. Moscow Central views his independence with the deepest mistrust. Muenzenberg senses that his downfall is coming; he also senses that Katz is informing on him, but he needs him. And he certainly does not conceal from his adjutant how much he despises him.
Arthur Koestler will write about all this later on. He is already, even now, too independent for the Party and perhaps also too Jewish. An early convert to Zionism, he moved to the Holy Land, full of enthusiasm, but was soon obliged to sustain himself by selling lemonade in Haifa; rather sobered, he moved back to Berlin, became a reporter for the Ullstein*3 paper Berliner Zeitung am Mittag, and traveled through the Soviet Union and the Near East; he also flew over Antarctica in an airship. His first big success in book form had taken place two years before, in 1934, with the first volume of his Encyclopedia of Sexual Knowledge. But now, in exile, he is nonetheless dependent on the Party’s goodwill and its money.
—
When Roth joins the group, he behaves as if he’s oblivious to the Communists at Kisch’s table. Even when they make fun of the monarchists, it’s as if he doesn’t hear them. Roth has eyes and ears only for Kisch, whom he loves for his humor, his warmheartedness, and his honesty. Joseph Roth does not permit himself to be mocked by many people for his emperor worship. But if it’s Kisch, gladly. Even if he had wanted to be spared the jokers this summer, Kisch makes himself easy to love. “Now, Sepp”—he actually calls Joseph Roth Sepp; he’s the only person allowed to do that—“what’s your emperor doing in Steenokkerzeel? Does he wear his crown to breakfast?” he asks after the exiled heir to the throne. And Roth amiably, dignifiedly, calmly, replies, “Yes, an invisible crown.”
Then on July 13 the newspapers report the murder of the monarchist leader of the opposition, José Calvo Sotelo, in Spain, the first officers’ revolt, and on July 17, under the leadership of the Fascist general Francisco Franco, rebellion against the democratically elected government of the Popular Front breaks out in Spain. From then on, Kisch’s table becomes an overcrowded Communist resistance–cum–information bureau. As is clear to them all, the Spanish Civil War is going to be a laboratory for the coming war in Europe, a battle of ideologies between the great powers of the Continent. How will Nazi Germany react? And Mussolini’s Italy? And the Soviet Union? What does it mean for the newly elected Popular Front government in France?
And above all, how can those nonfascistic European countries be mobilized to reach in on the side of the Spanish government? Arthur Koestler is the first who is determined to get to Spain. Immediately, Muenzenberg calms him down. “What do you want there? In the trenches. What good will that do us?” Besides which there’s something he has to tell him—the Party isn’t interested in any new Schweik book. He can stop writing. Koestler doesn’t care. He wants to get to Spain. He still has his press pass from the Hungarian newspaper Pester Lloyd—maybe that’ll get him into the country. Muenzenberg’s eyes suddenly light up. That sounds really good. Hungary is after all a semifascistic country. It’s really, really good. And he has a much better idea for him than the trenches.
“Go to Franco’s HQ and take a little look around,” he says with a contented smile. The goal: to find evidence of German and Italian intervention on the side of Franco. And Koestler gets going.
—
Joseph Roth is only marginally interested in all this. The electric atmosphere of their readiness to fight is foreign to him. But his Austria in these weeks is also in a worse situation than ever. His fatherland signed an agreement with Nazi Germany on July 11. Or is this somehow good news? Is it a cunning chess move by the Schuschnigg regime to protect itself in the long term from the growing influence of Germany? Joseph Roth has no illusions. It’s a further step on the road to the annexation of Austria to Nazi Germany, a further step toward catastrophe. The agreement provides for an amnesty for imprisoned members of the Nazi Party, which is banned in Austria, and the lifting of the ban against several German newspapers; the Schuschnigg government also commits itself to bringing two National Socialists, one as a minister and the other as secretary of state, into the administration. The Austrian chancellor thereby hopes to preserve Austrian sovereignty going forward. But he’s only opening the door a little wider for the Germans. He’s neither the first nor the last politician to think that Adolf Hitler can be placated permanently with concessions. It’s a sign of weakness. And nobody sees this so exactly and so worriedly as the two Austrians at the seaside in Belgium. One of them, the one wearing narrow officer’s trousers, in particular.
* * *
*1 First head of state of the GDR after the war.
*2 First president of the GDR after the war.
*3 The Ullsteins were major newspaper proprietors and publishers in Berlin.
HE MOVED IN WITH HER at once, only days after they first set eyes on each other in the Café Flore. He lives with her in the Hôtel de la Couronne with its view of the sailboats and the station. The others can’t believe it. This young, suntanned, merry woman and the alcoholic Roth? How can it be? And where will it lead? “She’s trying to wean him off drinking, and he’s trying to wean her onto it. I think he’s winning,” says Kisch. Stefan Zweig is not convinced,
but he’s happy at first, because he sees how it’s giving new life to his old friend, putting him back on his feet again and helping him to get over the parting from Manga Bell. But then he also reverts to being the concerned brother who sees that Roth, when he’s sitting with Keun, is heavily increasing his intake of schnapps. The ban on it, which was supposed to obtain in Belgium, is easily evaded by practiced drinkers like Keun and Roth.
Keun describes it thus: “Unfortunately the drinks in Belgium are mostly pure shit. No wonder you get poisoned in a country where schnapps is banned. I ask you, what are you supposed to drink? The beer here is shit. Wine is a possibility only if it is really expensive. The sweet aperitifs turn your stomach after the fourth glass, plus they give you a headache. Naturally I have bars where I get schnapps. It’s always insanely expensive and almost never any good. You should earn enough as a writer to be able to drink one to two bottles of decent dry Champagne per day once you’re within eight or nine weeks of finishing a novel. It’s a shitty time, and this would put you in the right mood to work, and you wouldn’t get ill.”
When Irmgard Keun sends this letter to her lover in America, she’s already been with Joseph Roth, the king of grumps, the king of curses, and the king of all hates, for a month. Most of what they’ve done during these weeks is to laugh, so often and so loud that they’re in tears. Their favorite occupation is to make fun of Stefan Zweig and his good nature, his naïve, unshakable belief in the good in people, his love of humanity. “It can’t be genuine,” Roth keeps saying, although he of all people knows better.
Zweig takes him to a good tailor to have a new pair of trousers made for his suit. The tailor refuses to follow the narrow officer’s cut demanded by Roth, but Roth is delighted with the result nonetheless. But when he is sitting next day on the market square with Irmgard Keun and Hermann Kesten at a bistro table that looks like a beer mug, he orders three glasses of liqueur and empties them over his jacket one after the other, to the wild applause of his girlfriend, as Hermann Kesten recalls later. “What are you doing?” asks Kesten. “I’m punishing Stefan Zweig,” Roth replies. “That’s how millionaires are! They take us to the tailor, but they forget to buy us a jacket to go with the trousers!” Three days later Stefan Zweig indeed orders a jacket to be made for him too. “He’s a genius,” Zweig says to Kesten. “A genius like Verlaine, a genius like Villon!” And Roth is proud of his new jacket, and proud of the fact that he hasn’t behaved humbly with Zweig.
Kesten is the object of mirth too. Over his terrible books, and over his large stomach and his belief that if he just keeps sucking it in under the bistro table, nobody will notice it. “Diamond Hermann” is what Roth calls him when Kesten isn’t there, because he once had a jewelry business with his sister. At least Roth persists in saying so, even though nobody else has ever heard a word about it. The only nonliterary place Hermann Kesten has ever worked in was his mother’s junk shop.
—
Kesten wrote a story about Ostend two years ago that was published in Klaus Mann’s exile periodical The Collection. A horror story set in the midst of a Belgian summer idyll: “As the first star emitted its timid pinpoint of light against the end of the sky in a faintly green glow and a smokestack on the horizon announced the approach of the steamer from England, the bather and the jeweler dug the dead woman out of the sand. She was already decomposing, but the sand-damaged clothes were still new and pretty. The corpse’s body was slim and well built; only the face was horrifying, iridescent green and blue, in the colors of the ocean. But the gaping jaws were filled with brightly glittering sand, like a suffocated scream encased in stone.”
Hermann Kesten tells the story of the murder of this woman, the teacher Adrienne, daughter of a pious Ostend tailor, in a manner that is both meticulous and chilling. “Her death may have been grisly, fodder for newspapers, but her life was worse.” He tells of her great disappointed love, her rape in the dunes of Bredene, the way she is buried defenseless in the sand, and how two innocent people are declared guilty and put to death, and how a young boy, Paul, could have prevented this but remains silent. How the real perpetrator and two accomplices are also found guilty and hanged. Kesten writes about the lights on the fishing boats that sail out in the early hours of the morning into the dark and the open sea; he writes about the dance bar Mexiko, the boisterous atmosphere, the colorful Chinese lanterns in July, the cries of the seagulls, and the boy who wants only to stay silent and watch what happens. He ends thus: “It only remains to report that the boy Paul, whose strange frame of mind cost two good men their lives, is now fifteen and is already writing beautiful verses that promise a delightful poetic talent.
“The boy’s appetite is good. His sleep is undisturbed. His schoolmates give no cause for concern. In the warm summer nights, particularly when there’s a full moon, lovers like to lie at the foot of the dune where they found beautiful Adrienne, choked to death, her open mouth full of sand like a scream in human form.”
The beach of Ostend, the dunes of Bredene, writers who do not write about murder, lovers in the sand, and a strangled cry. Kesten has erected a literary monument to the terrible aspects of this town of émigrés. And every summer the writers return.
Finally the Tollers arrive too, from London, on the direct ship from Dover. Wherever they surface, they’re stars, with a nimbus of beauty and fame. The Socialist and his goddess, as people call them. The actress Christiane Grautoff is radiantly lovely and unbelievably young. A few days ago she was still on stage in London as Rachel in Ernst Toller’s play No More Peace, translated by W. H. Auden. She received good reviews and was loving her life as an actress in London. Toller is talked about all over Europe as a playwright and champion of revolution. He was the celebrated playwright of the Weimar Republic and the tribune of the Munich Soviet Republic, whose leadership of the revolution cost him five years in jail. He didn’t allow it to break him, either in the sweep of his writing or in his fighting revolutionary stance. In London he gave a speech as president of the International Association of Writers for the Defence of Culture at the opening of their congress, with the call: “No, no one can flee the present fight, particularly in a time when Fascism has raised the doctrine of the totalitarian state to the level of law. The dictator demands of the writer that he become the obedient mouthpiece of the ruling worldview. There is one good aspect to this claim of the dictators: it makes us reflect, it teaches us anew to treasure the spiritual values that we have come to undervalue because they were so often misused.” It is also his personal experience that he is pointing to in political terms when he cries, “Only he who has lost his freedom learns to love it truly.” And he closes with the acknowledgment that pulls together the lessons of his life and his life’s mission: “We do not love politics for politics’ sake. We take part in political life today, but we believe it is not the least significant aspect of our battle to free future mankind from the wretched competition of interests that goes by the name of ‘politics’ today. We know the limits of what we can achieve. We are plowmen, and we don’t know if we will be reapers. But we’ve learned that ‘fate’ is an excuse. We make fate! We want to be true, we want to be courageous, and we want to be human.”
Many battle-weary émigrés take new heart from Ernst Toller. From his clear-headedness, his bright face, his refusal to give up, his repeated appeals to the fighting spirit and to the optimism of those who are now landless. And his speeches of encouragement are all the more convincing because they are addressed first and foremost to himself. Ernst Toller is subject to severe depressions, is weary of life, and pessimistic to the point of self-abnegation. His lover and now for twelve months his wife, Christiane, will tell of this later and of how she always had to pack a length of rope in the top layer of his suitcase, so that he would have a final way to escape.
To the outside world, the lives of the couple are among the most glittering of the émigré community. That spring they raced along the Côte d’Azur in a sports car from town to town, never stay
ing put in any one place. Ernst Toller has long, recurrent phases in which he is unable to write, not so much as a word, in which he is tormented by the blank page and flees the void in his car. “Then we went speedily down the coast and back. To Monte Carlo, where I won five hundred francs in the Casino and thought I’d broken the bank. Who did we see in Nice? I have no idea any more. E.T. raced around in misery, and I with him.”
—
When Ernst Toller met Christiane in the summer of 1932, she was fifteen years old and already a star. They called her the Wunderkind. She had already acted on stage with Fritz Kortner, made a film with Henny Porten, and was the celebrated star this season in Max Reinhardt’s legendary production of A Midsummer’s Night Dream and in Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives. The critic Alfred Kerr wrote of her, “Child, when you come to understand what you’re saying—” But perhaps she already understood a great deal. In any case she regularly visited the apartment of the almost-forty-year-old playwright Ernst Toller, who shared it with his friend Fritz Landshoff, the publisher of Kiepenheuer. Toller asked him in some embarrassment if he was going to be home in the afternoon, as he was expecting a visitor. The latter reassured him that no, he was going to be in the publishing house. And as Landshoff was going down the stairs later, he met “a very young, very blond, very adorable girl” coming up, who seemed familiar to him. That evening Toller told him he’d had a visit from Christiane Grautoff. She wrote later that “E.T. and I had a very unusual relationship. It was wholly platonic. First of all I really was still a minor, and secondly E.T. was afraid of virgins. We had long conversations about his life and my life, his thoughts and my thoughts. I swam around in his poems as if I were in a pond whose waters were totally opaque, and there were water lilies on the surface and from time to time I picked them.”
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