by Philipp Blom
There Is No Bread
HOLODOMOR IS A UKRAINIAN WORD coined to describe the famine of 1932–1933; it derives from holod, “hunger,” and mor, “death,” “plague,” or “mass dying,” and it means “death by hunger.” The campaign of systematic starvation waged by Stalin on the rural population of Ukraine reached its climax in the spring of 1933, when all food reserves, all foragable materials, and all wild animals were gone and the ripening fruits and vegetables were still far off. The Austrian-born British novelist Arthur Koestler spent three months in the city of Kharkiv during the famine and published his memories, in 1949, in The God That Failed, his account of his own communist dreams and their eventual betrayal. “I saw the ravages of the famine of 1932-1933 in the Ukraine,” he testified, “hordes of families in rags begging at the railway stations, the women lifting up to the compartment window their starving brats, which, with drumstick limbs, big cadaverous heads and puffed bellies, looked like embryos out of alcohol bottles.”14
The Welsh journalist Gareth Jones also managed to enter Ukraine to report on conditions there, one of only a handful of international visitors who succeeded in doing so. A graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a former foreign policy advisor to prime minister David Lloyd George, Jones spoke fluent Russian and was in an ideal position to observe and evaluate. He managed to publish flaming indictments of the artificial famine in various international papers. In an interview with the New York Evening Post he said in April 1933:
Millions are dying of hunger. . . . Everywhere was the cry, “There is no bread. We are dying.” This cry came from every part of Russia, from the Volga, Siberia, White Russia, the North Caucasus, Central Asia. I tramped through the black earth region because that was once the richest farm land in Russia and because the correspondents have been forbidden to go there to see for themselves what is happening.
In the train a Communist denied to me that there was a famine. I flung a crust of bread which I had been eating from my own supply into a spittoon. A peasant fellow-passenger fished it out and ravenously ate it.
Jones added that the most hated man in Ukraine was not Joseph Stalin but George Bernard Shaw, who after a recent carefully stage-managed trip to the region had let it be known that “there is no famine in the Ukraine,” thoughtfully adding that he had partaken of one of the finest dinners of his life during his trip. But Shaw was not alone in denying that a monumental crime was taking place. Édouard Herriot was prime minister of France when he visited Ukraine in August 1933. On his return he describe the country as being “like a garden in full bloom.”15
The most important voice, however, was that of Walter Duranty, the Moscow bureau chief of the New York Times, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for his reporting about the situation in Ukraine. Duranty had met Jones after his trip and had spoken to him extensively. After doing some asking around, he confidently announced with the weight of a great newspaper behind him that Jones was spreading a “big scare story.”16 Impeccably patronizing, he characterized his colleague as “a man of keen and active mind,” noting that “he has taken the trouble to learn Russian, which he speaks with considerable fluency, but the writer thought Mr. Jones’s judgment was somewhat hasty.”
Admitting that the mismanagement of collective farming plus a “quite efficient conspiracy” by a Soviet official “have made a mess of Soviet food production,” he argued: “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, and the Bolshevist leaders are just as indifferent to the casualties that may be involved in their drive toward socialization as any General during the World War who ordered a costly attack in order to show his superiors that he and his division possessed the proper soldierly spirit. . . . These conditions are bad, but there is no famine.” The “present difficulties will be speedily forgotten,” he prognosticated, and in this estimation he very largely proved correct.
It is difficult to estimate how many victims the holodomor claimed. Official Soviet statistics are largely false, dreamed up to suit their ideological purpose, and after the world war, the revolution, and the civil war in Russia, population estimates were not necessarily up to date or reliable. In addition to this, questions of definition arise. There were famines not only in Ukraine but also in neighboring Moldova, the Volga region, Kazakhstan, the Urals, northern Caucasus, and Western Siberia. Taking only the victims of the Ukrainian famine, there were deaths from starvation and shootings, but also from typhoid and other epidemics, as well as those who were sentenced to hard labor in Siberia or elsewhere and who never came back. The earliest serious and at the same time most conservative estimate comes from the Ukrainian émigré scholar Volodymyr Kubiyovych, who estimated the number of victims as being around 2.5 million. More recently, Timothy Snyder put the likely death toll at 3.5 million, while Robert Conquest estimates that some 5 million lives were lost. This number is increased significantly if the population shortfall is taken into account, including millions of “never-borns.” Across the Soviet Union, the number of famine victims for the years 1932–1933 is likely to be between seven and eight million.17
An End to the Dying
THE WESTERN NATIONS and public figures had their own reasons to maintain silence about the information they received about the famine. One of the very rare protesting voices was Austria’s Cardinal Innizer, who called for food aid for Ukraine and pointed to instances of cannibalism, only to be rebuffed by Soviet officials who scoffed that there were “neither cannibals nor cardinals” in the USSR. Many leftist intellectuals and politicians wanted the Soviet experiment to succeed and wanted to believe that any news pointing toward the establishment of a cruel dictatorship was simply capitalist propaganda. Those on the right often enough defended the harsh treatment of striking workers at home and of colonial mutinies and were therefore hardly in a position to criticize Stalin for his policies. Thus a veil of silence was draped over one of the greatest crimes of the twentieth century.
In early 1933 Stalin began to fear that the collapse of several Soviet republics might destabilize the entire USSR. Bandits roamed the countryside, looting and killing. Thieves, even children, were frequently lynched, and village courts imposed cruel punishments in an attempt to control the lawlessness. The Supreme Soviet took measures to limit the crisis. Between January and July, 320,000 metric tons of grain were sent to Ukraine to end the famine. The distribution was organized strictly along “class principles.” Members of the Red Army were fed first, then workers on the kolkhoz farms, followed by industrial workers and the poorest peasants; last came “kulak, counterrevolutionary, parasitical, and enemy elements of all kinds that sought to exploit the food problems for their own counter-revolutionary purposes, spreading rumors about the famine and various ‘horrors,’ purposely leaving the dead unburied.”18
To make up for the shortage of agricultural workers, Soviet authorities simply rounded up people in the cities and sent them into the countryside, as an Italian diplomat reported: “The mobilization of the urban forces has assumed enormous proportions. . . . This week, at least 20,000 people were sent to the countryside. . . . The day before yesterday, they surrounded the market, seized all able persons, men, women, and adolescents, transported them to the station under GPU guard, and shipped them to the fields.”19
Miron Dolot, his last remaining brother, and their mother had survived the great famine. “By the beginning of May,” Dolot wrote, “our village had become a desolate place, horror lurking in every house and in every backyard. We felt forsaken by the entire world. The main road which had been the artery of traffic and the center of village life was empty and overgrown with weeds and grass. Humans and animals were rarely seen on it. Many houses stood dilapidated and empty, their windows and doorways gaping. The owners were dead, deported to the north, or gone from the village in search of food.”20
They were facing a bleak future, but they were alive.
·1933·
Pogrom of the Intellect
HE STOOD THERE, IN THE MIDDLE OF THE CROWD, AND WATC
HED. He watched the faces in the flicker of the torches and the bonfire. The scene on the square on this tenth of May was part auto-da-fé, part political theater, and part witches’ Sabbath, as one young man after another advanced to the burning embers and intoned fervently: “Against the soul-destroying overestimation of our impulses, for the nobility of the human soul! I consign to the flames the writings of Sigmund Freud”; “Against literary betrayal of the soldiers of the World War, for education of the people in the spirit of truth! I consign to the flames the writings of Erich Maria Remarque”; “Against impudence and arrogance, for respect and reverence towards the immortal German spirit of the Volk! Devour, flames, the writings of Tucholsky and Ossietzky!”
Earlier, another young man in the black uniform of Hitler’s Sturmabteilung, a student perhaps, had been heard shouting: “Against decadence and moral decline! For breeding and morality in the family and the state! I consign to the flames the writings of Heinrich Mann, Ernst Glaeser and Erich Kästner.”
The Action Against the Un-German Spirit took place all over Germany.
Kästner himself, wedged in among the other onlookers, knew that it was dangerous for him to stand there and witness the symbolic destruction of his works. At any moment the gaping crowd might turn into an angry mob. Suddenly a woman’s voice shouted, “But that’s Kästner there!” It was time to get away, and quickly. He disappeared into the darkness, leaving the last stage of the Nazis’ bonfire of German culture to continue without his grieving observation. “I saw our books flying into the roaring flames and heard the sentimental tirades of that slick little liar [Goebbels]. Funereal weather hung over the city. . . . It was revolting,” the writer would recall after the war.1
Though Joseph Goebbels, now minister of propaganda in Hitler’s new government, had indeed given a speech to mark the occasion of Germany’s great book burning, the event had not been his idea, and initially he had even been hostile toward it. Only after the momentum for such an event had become too great to be ignored had he taken over its stage management. Goebbels distrusted grassroots initiatives, which had a tendency to make him feel out of touch and out of control; this particular initiative had landed on his desk already well advanced. It had surprised him, as he had not thought the Germans ready for such a spectacular event. What if the citizens of the self-proclaimed Land der Dichter und Denker (country of poets and thinkers), with their famous love for the classics and their exalted view of literature, simply failed to turn up?
He needn’t have worried. The initiators of what was labeled the “Action Against the Un-German Spirit” were Nazi students, apparently as eager to impress their superiors as they were to change the world, and they left nothing to chance. Directly after Hitler’s appointment as the Reich’s chancellor on January 30, 1933, they set all the levers in swift motion.
Led by Hans Karl Leistritz, a student of law and the son of a school principal, the student organization set about planning a month-long campaign against the works of those writers, scientists, and teachers they deemed insufficiently “German” to contribute to the glorious future of the Third Reich. Leistritz himself wrote in a letter to local organizations: “The Jewish spirit, as it reveals itself in the worldwide campaign of hatred . . . and which has already had its effect on German literature, must be eliminated.”2 To publicize their position further, the students presented themselves as being inspired by the sixteenth-century Protestant reformer Martin Luther; they drew up a list of “theses against the un-German spirit,” printed it in blood-red Gothic letters, and on April 12, 1933, plastered it to thousands of advertising spaces in cities and universities throughout the country. In arrogant, pseudo-philosophical prose, the young authors claimed:
The German people are responsible for ensuring that its language and its writings are a pure and unadulterated expression of its peoplehood. . . . Jews can only think in a Jewish way. If a Jew says he is writing German, he is lying. A German who writes in German, but thinks in an un-German way, is a traitor. . . . Jewish works are to be published in Hebrew. . . . Gothic script is to be available only to Germans. The un-German spirit will be eliminated from all universities. . . . We demand from German students the will and the ability to overcome Jewish intellectualism and the related signs of decay now visible in German intellectual life.3
The declaration met with angry protests, often in the form of readers’ letters to newspapers, from Jews and non-Jews alike. Parodies of it were printed, and refutations published. A British parliamentarian and medical doctor, Dr. M. C. Well, who happened to be in Berlin at the time, addressed an open letter to the Deutsche Studentenschaft, the German student union, pointing out that regarding their document, “whose [red] printers’ ink had blushed with shame,” he and his medical colleagues were uncertain which diagnosis would be appropriate for the authors, but that in any case all the illnesses they were considering necessitated immediate action: “Is it Lues cerebrospinalis [syphilis] . . . ? I would recommend that the gentlemen concerned be examined in a mental asylum according to a blood test developed by a Jewish German by the name of Wasserman, though it is not published in Hebrew, and further that they be treated by means of the medicine Salvarsan, developed, though not in Hebrew, by the Jewish German Paul Ehrlich. Or is it a brain tumor? This would be the domain of the Jewish German Nobel Prize winner Warburg.”4
But the harsh reactions appeared only to strengthen the determination of the student leaders. Taking as their base the Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund, the country’s largest student organization, Leistritz and his helpers sent out circulars to all universities with a list of “forbidden” authors, which the students had drawn up themselves. They launched a full media campaign, including press releases, articles in newspapers, and radio programs. The response from other universities was more than encouraging.
On May 10, bonfires were prepared on the squares of some seventy cities, including all those with major universities. In Berlin, the city’s fire brigade thoughtfully supplied gasoline. Tens of thousands of books had been collected from university and city libraries, as well as from private homes: the bonfire on Berlin’s great avenue, Unter den Linden, was estimated to have been fueled by more than twenty thousand volumes. One newspaper in the university town of Göttingen had gone so far as to demand from its readers that they inspect and purge the libraries of their acquaintances, as well as their own. As darkness began to fall, members of the SA and uniformed young men of the student fraternities and other Nazi associations began to make their way to the designated places of burning in a torchlit procession, singing fraternity songs and assorted battle hymns as they marched to the execution by fire of everything they regarded as un-German.
This youthful vanguard was joined by thousands of onlookers; live reporting by the main radio stations meant that no “true German” need miss the spectacle. Newspapers accompanied the event with a flood of articles praising the resolution of German youth against the twin menaces of Judaism and communism, and encouraging the growth of a healthy, authentic art out of the deepest soul of the Volk. At half past ten, the pyres were lit; flames licked the darkness of the night sky as uniformed students brought cartload after cartload of books and hurled them into the flames. In many cities, the event took on the character of a street party, complete with music and sausage sellers. Only in the ancient university town of Freiburg was the book burning canceled, on account of heavy rain.
Seven of Germany’s ten bestselling authors were among those whose work went up in flames; they were consequently banned from publishing in Germany. Eventually, more than twelve thousand titles by some six hundred writers were to be banned. The authors included Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Sigmund Freud, the historian Emil Ludwig, the iconic theater critic Alfred Kerr, journalist Kurt Tucholsky, who was already in exile in Sweden, and Carl von Ossietzky, former publisher of the leftist magazine Weltbühne (World Stage), who was currently imprisoned in a concentration camp. Eventually, hardly an intellectual or artist of rank
escaped this perverse distinction: communist playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht, playwright and Nobel Prize–winning pacifist Bertha von Suttner, and major Jewish writers including Alfred Döblin, Lion Feuchtwanger, Egon Erwin Kisch, Arthur Schnitzler, Franz Werfel, and Stefan Zweig all fell into disgrace as “un-German.”
It was not only German-language authors whose names appeared on the list. The American adventure writer Jack London shared this honor with Russian Bolshevik Maxim Gorky and French pacifist Romain Rolland; Winston Churchill was listed together with John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway. Even the dead were represented: Karl Marx was one of the forbidden authors, as was the Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, who a hundred years earlier had prophetically declared, “A country that burns books will eventually also burn people.”
The students’ initiative had profound consequences for the listed authors. For many of them, it meant professional ruin. Unable to publish and so to earn an income from their work, most were forced to leave Germany, if indeed they had not done so already. Some would never recover from the blow. Kurt Tucholsky would die in exile the same year, 1933, from an overdose of sleeping pills. Novelist Heinrich Mann, unable to adapt to exile in California, fell victim to crippling depression; he would publish only a handful of new works. The Austrian Jewish Stefan Zweig, one of the most successful authors of his day, was equally unable to adapt to life in Brazil; he also chose to end his own life, and his young wife, Lotte, committed suicide soon afterward.