by Les Weil
THE INVISIBLE WRITING
Being the second volume of
ARROW IN THE BLUE
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
BY
ARTHUR KOESTLER
NEW YORK
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
I954 To Dorothy
Une vie d'analyse pour une heure de synthese!
FUSTEL DE COULANGES
Everything becomes legend, if the gentlemen will have the goodness to wait.
NORMAN DOUGLAS
Contents
Author's Note
PART I. EUPHORIA
1932
I. Bridge-Burning
II. Portrait of the Author as a Comrade
III. `Sink into the Mud'
PART II. UTOPIA
1932-33
IV. The Sorting Machine
V. Journey's Start
VI. Onions and Odkolon
VII. A Dream in the Caucasus
VIII. Mount Ararat
IX. Nadeshda
X. Storm over Turkestan
XI. To the Afghan Frontier
XII. Bokhara and Samarkand
XIII. Hadji Mir Baba
XIV. Instruments of Fate
PART III. EXILE
1933-36
XV. Poetic Interlude
XVI. The Crusade without Cross
XVII. Blind-Man's-Buff
XVIII. Red Eminence
XIX. Introducing Dr. Costler
XX. Schoolmaster in Maisons Lafitte
XXI. Down to Rock-Bottom
XXII. . . . And up into the Hayloft
XXIII. Purge in a Teacup
XXIV. Excursion into the First Century B.C.
XXV. Ten Little Nigger Boys
XXVI. Marking Time
XXVII. The House on the Lake
XXVIII. Homage to a Spy
PART IV. THE INVISIBLE WRITING
1936-40
XXIX. A Confidence Trick
XXX. The Return of Ahor
XXXI. In Dubious Battle
XXXII. Arrest
XXXIII. The Hours by the Window
XXXIV. Back to the Trivial Plane
XXXV. An S.O.S.
XXXVI. `What is this thou hast done unto me?'
XXXVII. Darkness at Noon
XXXVIII. The End of a Friendship
XXXIX. The End of a Typical Case-History
EPILOGUE
Portrait of the Author at Thirty-five and After
AUTHOR'S NOTE
The previous volume of this autobiography covered my first twenty-six years, up to my joining the Communist Party in 1931. The present, concluding volume ends with my escape to England in 1940, and my settling down in that country. An epilogue brings the narrative up to the present date.
To write one's memoirs before one has reached the age of fifty may seem a premature and somewhat presumptuous undertaking. But if one's past is worth recording at all, this should be done before its colour and fragrance have faded. Gains in distance and perspective must be balanced against losses in emotional freshness, for facts are more easily retained than feelings. Facts can be complemented by files and newspaper records, emotions not.
This point will become painfully apparent to the reader through the first five or six chapters of this book, which deal with my early Communist days in Berlin and Russia. I found it impossible to revive the naive enthusiasm of that period: I could analyse the ashes, but not resurrect the flame. I disliked writing these chapters, but felt the chronicler's compulsion to record material which appears to him trivial and boring, in the hope that at some future date it will appear less so. The reader is advised to get through these opening chapters as best and as quickly as he can.
Lonon December 31, 1953
Part One
EUPHORIA
1932
When one burns one's boats, what a very nice fire it makes
DYLAN THOMAS
I. Bridge-Burning
I went to Communism as one goes to a spring of fresh water.
PABLO PICASSO
I WENT to Communism as one goes to a spring of fresh water, and I left Communism as one clambers out of a poisoned river strewn with the wreckage of flooded cities and the corpses of the drowned. This, in sum, is my story from 1931 to 1938, from my twenty-sixth to my thirty-third year. The reeds to which I clung and which saved me from being swallowed up were the outgrowth of a new faith, rooted in mud, slippery, elusive, yet tenacious. The quality of that faith I cannot define beyond saying that in my youth I regarded the universe as an open book, printed in the language of physical equations and social determinants, whereas now it appears to me as a text written in invisible ink, of which, in our rare moments of grace, we were able to decipher a small fragment. This volume, then, is the account of a journey from specious clarity to obscure groping.
I joined the Communist Party on December 3rd, 1941. Seven months later I emigrated from Germany to Soviet Russia. These seven months of transition are divided into two periods. During the first, I was a secret member of the Party; during the second, an open one.
In The God That Failed I have told in some detail the story of my enlistment, and how I was drawn into the Party's Intelligence network. I shall therefore confine myself to a brief outline of these events.
My written application for membership of the K.P.D.--Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands--was addressed to the Central Committee of the Party. It was answered a week or more later by a rather mystifying letter, typed on blank paper and bearing an illegible signature, in which I was invited, 'with reference to your esteemed of December 31I st' to meet `a representative of our firm' at the offices of a certain paper-mill in Berlin.
The man whom I met at the appointed place and hour was Herr Ernst Schneller, head of the Department for Agitation and Propaganda (AGITPROP) of the German Communist Party, and at the same time chief of one of the Comintern's secret apparats or intelligence networks. In yet another capacity, Schneller was Reichstagsabgeordneter, a member of the German Parliament. This double existence as an official dignitary and as an underground conspirator was by no means exceptional. A large proportion of the Communist membership lived, and still lives, to use French Party slang, a' cheval-a term borrowed from roulette and referring to a player who backs two numbers simultaneously. Nor is such an existence considered dishonourable. To exploit fully the constitutional liberties provided by bourgeois society for the purpose of destroying them is elementary Marxist dialectics.
I had two meetings with Ernst Schneller, and after these I never saw him again. A few years later he died in a Nazi prison where he was serving a six-year sentence of hard labour. He was an insignificant-looking, shy, thin, bony man with a pinched face and an awkward smile. He told me that he was a vegetarian and lived mostly on raw vegetables and fruit; also, that he never read any newspapers except the Party press. At first I took him for a narrowminded bureaucrat, but my initial feeling of condescension soon changed into respect for his quiet and astute manner of arguing. I told him of my desire to throw up my job and go as a tractor-driver to Russia; but within a few hours Schncller had convinced me that I would be more useful to the Party by keeping my convictions secret, carrying on as a journalist, influencing, within the limits of my possibilities, the policy of my paper, and passing on to the Party any inside information that came my way. The Party, he explained, though still enjoying the privilege of legality, would probably quite soon be outlawed and forced underground. In that event people like myself, who were in respectable positions and untainted by suspicion, would be even more valuable than at present in the struggle against Fascism and imperialist aggression. Everything he said sounded so plausible that by the end of our first meeting I agreed to his proposal and became, without being fully
aware of the fact, a member of the Comintern's intelligence service.
At our second and last meeting, Schneller handed me my Party card, made out under the alias `Ivan Steinberg'. He had also brought along a dark, blowsy girl named Paula who would serve as a liaison with my future superior in the apparat, named Edgar. Thus from the moment of joining the Party I found myself plunged into a strange world of conspiratorial twilight, populated by 'Edgars' and 'Paulas' without a surname or address-fleeting, elusive shapes like the phosphorescent creatures of the deep sea.
Edgar and Paula were my only contacts in the apparat. We usually met in my fiat, where Paula took down on a typewriter what information I was able to supply, while Edgar would pace up and down the room and put in a question now and then to clarify a point. He was a slim, smooth, smiling young man of thirty, blond, with an open face and frank eyes. His real name I only discovered more than twenty years later, in the following footnote to AlexanderWeissberg's book, Conspiracy of Silence (London I952):
`In The God that Failed Koestler mentions a man named Edgar ..."Edgar" was a revolutionary worker from Hamburg. His real name was Fritz Burde. He was a decent fellow and a good comrade. I met him in I936 in Moscow when he had a high position in the Red Army Intelligence service.... For a long time the G.P.U. and the War Commissariat had been fighting for control of this important secret organisation abroad. Once Tukhachevsky was arrested, the G.P.U. had a free hand. They recalled almost all the military secret agents from abroad and arrested them. Fritz Burde was in charge of the secret service of the Red Army in Scandinavia, and when he was recalled with the others he told friends that he was going to his death, but that he had no alternative.'
Without knowing what fate had befallen him, I used `Edgar' some ten years later as a part-model for Bernard, the young Nazi agent in Arrival and Departure. I was trying to visualise a handsome and winning Nazi who would capture the reader's sympathy-and found myself, quite unintentionally, describing the smiling appearance and manners of Edgar, the Communist. He fitted the part perfectly.
My contact with the apparat remained a peripheral one, and after two or chrce months came to a dismal end. I was at that time foreign editor of the B.Z. Am Mittag and science editor of the Vossisdre Zeitung--two daily papers published by the Ullstein Trust, Germany's largest Liberal newspaper concern. In my capacity as foreign editor I had access to virtually all confidential
formation of a political nature that converged in that important nerve centre of theWeimar Republic. My assistant at that post was a young man of twenty-one, Von E., the son of a retired German ambassador.With only five years separating us, we soon became friends; I preached the Marxist doctrine to Von E., and became the kind of guru to him that Peter and Karl had been to me. After a fortnight or so, he had made sufficient progress to be roped into the service of the Cause. The Von E.'s entertained at their house members of the German general staff and of the diplomatic corps; my young friend's task was to keep his cars open and report to me anything of interest-in particular information relating to `the preparations for the war of aggression against the Soviet Union by Germany and the other imperialistic powers'.
For a few weeks all went well. Then young Von E. was seized with remorse, and one morning after a sleepless night, he presented me with an ultimatum: he must either reveal our treasonable activities, or shoot himself. He had written a letter of confession, addressed to the managing director of the firm; but he would only hand the letter in if I gave my consent. He placed the long, hand-written letter on my desk.
Logically this demand made no sense. In the terms of the law, we had committed no punishable offence. We had not stolen military secrets or sold political documents. Von E. had merely passed on some parlour gossip to me which I in turn had related to my political friends. But these arguments failed to impress the young man. To be a Marxist, or a Socialist, he said, was one thing; to pass on information to agents of a foreign power, quite another. It was treason; and whether, in the strictly technical sense, we were spies or not had no bearing on this fact. Unless I consented to his making a full confession, it was impossible for him to go on living.
I did not take young Von E.'s threat entirely seriously, and was unable to convince myself of the reality of the scene. The boy, standing in front of the desk--he had refused to sit down--looked ghastly, with black stubbles on his white face and red, swollen eyes. He was perhaps unconsciously dramatising the situation, and the thrills derived from self-dramatisation were not unknown to me. On the other hand, he seemed quite capable of carrying the act to the point of really shooting himself. His demand that I should expressly consent to his handing in of the letter was quixotic and absurd. Yet I consented without further argument--and without even reading the letter that would inevitably put an end both to my professional career and to my usefulness to the apparat.
The only reasonable course would have been to read the letter carefully and discuss its contents in detail; to explain away certain points, ridicule others, and put a harmless interpretation on the rest; to blur and confuse the issue, make young Von E. feel a fool, and then to gain time by asking him to think the matter over.With a certain amount of psychology and persuasion, it would perhaps have been possible to make the young man see matters differently, to make the harsh contours of fact dissolve in doubt and dialectical twilight. Even if I could not save my job, I could save my standing with the apparat by putting up a fight and denying Von E.'s accusations. Yet, strangely enough, I could not get myself to argue, not even to read that letter on which my future depended. The whole scene had a touch of dream-like unreality; and as I stuffed the letter back into Von E.'s pocket and told him to hand it in with my blessings and to go to hell, I was acting with a ddreamy inner certitude that made me indifferent to the consequences.
Such was the end of my hard-earned position in the newspaper world, the end of the road to respectability, and the beginning of another seven lean years. I had been prepared to sacrifice my future for the Party, but not to throw it away in such an apparently senseless manner. Now, however, after twenty years, it seems to me that my ready consent to Von E.'s denunciation and to the destruction of my career was senseless only in appearance. In reality it conformed to a recurrent, unconscious urge to burn my bridges, which I have tried to analyse earlier in these memoirs. I have mentioned there that all the crucial decisions which have altered the course of my life had in appearance been contrary to reason and yet in the long run had turned into spiritual blessings. It seems as if on these crucial occasions a type of logic were entering into action entirely different from the reasoning of the 'trivial plane'; as if one's decisions in these rare moments, however paradoxical or apparently suicidal, followed the commandments of the invisible text, revealed for a split second to the inner self.
To vary the metaphor: as I look back on the past, I see myself as a blind inan painfully groping with his stick along the crowded pavement, while his absent-minded dog trots along on a loose leash and might as well not exist. Yet at the critical moment when the street has to be crossed and the stick becomes useless, the blind man feels a reassuring tug of the leash and knows that his seeing eye has taken over.
In this particular case the blessings of unreason soon became apparent. My quixotic gesture towards Von E. saved me from the imminent danger of becoming a full-fledged apparatchik--the Party's homely slang-name for its clients. A short time before the disaster, Edgar had suggested that I go to japan for the apparat under the guise of a news-correspondent. I had agreed at once, and though this scheme did not materialise, some similar assignment was bound to turn up sooner or later. As yet I was still an amateur, drifting on the periphery of the vortex; a few more weeks or months and I would inevitably have been drawn into a zone from which there is no turning back. Thanks to Von E.'s confession, however, I not only lost my job with the Ullsteins but also my usefulness for the apparat--and this in a manner which to Edgar and Schneller proved my total unfitness for secret work. They dropped
me without ceremony.
A few days after the letter was handed in, the Ullsteins gave me notice on the pretext of reductions in the staff, and offered me a lump sum in compensation for the remaining term of my five-year contract. Not a word was said about Von E. and the Communist Party; they were anxious to avoid a scandal. So was the Party; Edgar instructed me to accept the settlement and
leave it at that.
Except on one occasion, I never saw either him or Paula again. Paula was later killed by the S.S. in Ravensbruck. Edgar's and Schneller's fate I have mentioned before.
II. Portrait of the Author as a Comrade
HAVING lost my job, I was free from the fetters of the bourgeois world; having lost my usefulness for the apparat, there was no longer any reason for keeping my Party-membership secret. I gave up my flat in the expensive district of Neu-Westend, and moved into an apartmenthouse on Bonner Platz known as the Red Block, for most of the tenants were penniless writers and artists of radical views. There I joined the local Communist cell and was at last permitted to lead the full life of a regular Party nrember.
Our cell was one among several thousand in Berlin, and one among the several hundred thousand basic units of the Communist network in the world. Cells exist in every country where the Party is legally tolerated; in countries where Communism is outlawed, a system of `groups of five' or 'groups of three' replaces the larger legal units. The term 'cell' is not purely metaphorical; for these are living, pulsating units within a huge, sprawling organism, co-ordinated in their function, governed by a hierarchy of nervous centres, and susceptible to various diseases--to the Titoist virus, to bourgeois infction or Trotskyist cancer. The part of the white phagocytes is played by the various defence mechanisms of the Party, from the Central Control Commission to the G.P.U.
Our cell comprised about twenty members. The consciousness of being one unit among millions in an organised, disciplined whole was always present.We had among us several litterateurs, such as Alfred Kantorowicz and Max Schroeder, who are now both back in Communist Eastern Germany; a psychoanalyst-Wilhelm Reich, who broke with the Party in 1933 and is now the director of the Institute for Orgone Research in Rangeley, Maine; several actors from an avant-garde theatre called The Mouse Trap; several girls with intellectual ambitions; an insurance agent and a number of working men. In so far as the majority of us were intellectuals, our cell was untypical in its structure, yet entirely typical in its function--that is, in our daily work and routine.