The Invisible Writing

by Les Weil

  Half of our activities were legal, half illegal. The cell met officially once a week, but the more active members were in daily contact with each other. The official meeting always started with a political lecture by an instructor from District Headquarters (or by the cell leader after he had been briefed at H.Q.), in which the line was laid down concerning the various questions of the day. This was followed by discussion, but a discussion of a peculiar kind. It is a basic rule of Communist discipline that, once the Party has decided to adopt a certain line regarding a given problem, all criticism of that decision becomes deviationist sabotage. In theory, discussion is permissible before a decision has been reached; in practice decisions are always imposed from above, without previous consultation with the rank and file. One of the slogans of the German Party said: `The front-line is no place for discussions.' Another said: `Wherever a Communist happens to be, he is always in the front-line.' So our discussions always showed a complete unanimity of opinion.

  During that fateful spring and summer of I932, a series of elections took place which shook the country like a succession of earthquakes-the Presi-­dential elections, two Reichstag elections, and an election for the Prussian Diet; all in all four red-hot election campaigns within eight months in a country on the verge of civil war. We participated in the campaigns by door-to-door canvassing, distributing Party literature and turning out leaflets of our own. The canvassing was the most arduous part of it; it was mostly done on Sunday morning, when people could be expected to be at home. You rang the door bell, wedged your foot between door and post, and offered your pamphlets and leaflets, with a genial invitation to engage in a political discussion on the spot. In short, we sold the World Revolution like vacuum cleaners. Reactions were mostly unfriendly, but rarely aggressive. I often had the door banged in my face, but never had a fight. However, we avoided ringing the bells of known Nazis. And the Nazis in and round our block were all known to us, just as we were all known to the Nazis, through our rival nets of cells and Blockwarts. The whole of Germany, town and countryside, was covered by those two elaborate and fine-meshed drag-nets.

  That last summer of Weimar Germany was for the Party a period of transition; we were preparing to go underground, and accordingly regroup­ing our cadres. We might be outlawed overnight; everything had to be ready for this emergency. The moment we were forced into illegality, all Party cells would cease to function, and would be superseded by a new, nation­wide structure, the `Groups of Five'. The cells, whose membership ranged from ten to thirty comrades, were too large in size for underground work, and offered easy opportunities for agents provocateurs and informers. The breaking up of the cadres into Groups of Five meant a corresponding diminution of risks. Only the leader of the Group was to know the identity and

  adresses of the other four; and he alone was to have contact with the next higher level of the Party hierarchy. If he was arrested, he could only betray thc four individuals in his group, and his contact-man.

  So, while the cell still continued to function, each member was secretly alotted to a Group of Five, the idea being that none of the groups should know the composition of any other. In fact, as we were all neighbours in the block, we each knew which Group was secretly meeting in whose flat; and, on the night of the burning of the Reichstag, when Goering dealt his death­blow to the Communist Party, the Groups scattered and the whole elaborate structure collapsed all over the Reich. We had marvelled at the conspiratorial ingenuity of our leaders; and, though all of us had read works on the technique of insurrection and civil warfare, our critical faculties had become so numbed that none of us realised the catastrophic implications of the scheme. These preparations for a long underground existence in decentralised groups meant that our leaders accepted the victory of the Nazis as enevitable. And the breaking up of the cadres into small units indicated that the Party would offer no open, armed resistance to Hitler's bid for power, and was preparing for sporadic small-scale actions instead.

  But we, the rank and file, knew nothing of this. During that long, stifling , summer of 1932 we fought our ding-dong battles with the Nazis. Hardly a day passed without one or two being killed in Berlin. The main battlefields were the Bierstuben, the smoky little taverns of the working-class districts. Some of these served as meeting-places for the Nazis, some as meeting-places (Vrtkrhtdlokale) for us. To enter the wrong pub was to venture into the enemy's lines. From time to time the Nazis would shoot up one of our Vrtkrhtdlokale. It was done in the classic Chicago tradition: a gang of S.A. men would drive slowly past the tavern, firing through the glass panes, then vanish at break-neck speed. We had far fewer motor-cars than the Nazis, and retaliation was mostly carried out in cars either stolen, or borrowed from sympathisers. The men who did these jobs were members of the R.F.B. (Roter Frontkampfer Bund), the League of Communist War Veterans. My car was sometimes borrowed by comrades whom I had never seen before, and returned a few hours later with no questions asked and no explanations offered. It was a tiny, red, open Fiat car, and most unsuitable for such purposes but nobody else in our cell had one. It was the last relic of my bourgeois past; now it served as a vehicle for the proletarian revolution. spent half my time driving it round on various errands: transporting pamphlets and leaflets, shadowing certain Nazi cars whose numbers had been signalled to us, and acting as a security escort. Once I had to transport the equipment of a complete hand-printing press from a railway station to a cellar under a greengrocer's shop.

  The R.F.B. men who came to fetch the car for their guerrilla expeditions were sometimes rather sinister types from the Berlin underworld. They came, announced by a telephone call or by a verbal message from District H.Q., but the same men rarely turned up twice. Sometimes, on missions of a more harmless nature, I was myself ordered to act as driver. We would drive slowly past a number of Nazi pubs to watch the goings-on, or patrol a pub of our own when one of our informers in the Nazi camp warned us of an impending attack. This latter kind of mission was unpleasant; we would park, with headlights turned off and engine running, in the proximity of the pub; and at the approach of a car I would hear the click of the safety-catch on my passengers' guns, accompanied by the gentle advice `to keep my chump well down'. But I was never involved in any actual shooting.

  Once the R.F.B. men who came to fetch the car disguised themselves in my flat before starting out. They stuck on moustaches, put on glasses, dark jackets and bowler hats. I watched them from the window driving off--four stately, bowler-hatted gents in the ridiculous little red car, looking like a party in a funeral procession. They came back four hours later, changed back to normal, and made off with a silent handshake. My instructions, in case the number of the car was taken by the police during some action, were to say that it had been stolen and that I had found it again in a deserted street.

  From time to time a rumour got round that the Nazis were going to attack our Red Block, as they had attacked other notorious Communist agglomerations before. Then we were alerted, and some R.F.B. men turned up to mount guard. One critical night some thirty of us kept vigil in my tiny flat, armed with guns, lead-pipes and leather batons, like a huddle of stragglers from a beaten army. A few weeks later, von Papen staged his coup d'etat: one lieutenant and eight men chased the Socialist government of Prussia from office. It was the beginning of the end.

  The Socialist Party, with its eight million followers, did nothing. The Socialist-controlled trade unions did not even call a protest strike. Only we, the Communists, called for an immediate general strike. The call fell on deaf ears. Like inflated currency, our verbiage had lost all real meaning for the masses. We lost the battle against Hitler before it was joined. After the 20th of July, I932, it was evident to all but ourselves that the K.P.D., strongest among the Communist parties in Europe, was a castrated giant whose brag and bluster only served to cover its lost virility.

  A few months later everything was over. Years of conspiratorial training and preparations for the emergency proved within a few hours to
tally useless. Thaelmann, leader of the Party, and the majority of his lieutenants were found in their carefully-prepared hide-outs and arrested within the first few days. The Central Committee emigrated. The long night descended over Germany.

  I threw myself into the activities of the cell with the same ardour and complete self-abandonment that I had experienced at seventeen on joining my duelling fraternity in Vienna. I lived in the cell, with the cell, for the cell. I was no longer alone; I had found the warm comradeship that I had been thirsting for; my desire to belong was satisfied.

  Only gradually did I become aware of certain under-currents that existed beneath the free and easy surface. I noticed that individual friendships within the cell were, though not exactly reprehensible, yet regarded as slightly ambiguous and suspect of political `factionalism'. 'Factionalism'-the formation of groups with a policy of their own-was a capital crime in the Party, and if two or more comrades were known to be often together and to take the same line during discussions, they inevitably became suspect of forming a secret faction.

  As in boarding-schools and convents intense personal ties are suspected of having an erotic background, so friendships within the Party automatically aroused political suspicion. This attitude was not unreasonable, for between people whose life was entirely dedicated to and filled by the Party, non­political friendships were hardly possible. The slogans of the Party emphasised the diffuse and impersonal `solidarity of the working class' instead of individual friendship, and substituted `loyalty to the Party' for loyalty to friends. Loyalty to the Party meant, of course, unconditional obedience, and and furthermore, the repudiation of friends who had deviated from the Party-line, or for some reason had fallen under suspicion. Almost unconsciously I learnt to watch my steps, my words and my thoughts. I learnt that everything that I said in the cell or in private, even to a girl comrade whose pillow I shared, remained on record and could one day be held against me. I learnt that my relations with other members of the cell should not be guided by trust but by `revolutionary vigilance'; that reporting any heretical remark was a duty, failure to do so a crime against the Party, and that to feel revulsion against this code was a sign of sentimental, petit-bourgeois prejudice:

  You and I can make a mistake. Not the Party. The Party, comrade, is more than you and I and a thousand others like you and I. The Party is the embodiment of the revolutionary idea in history. History knows no scruples and no hesitation. Inert and unerring, she flows towards her goal. At every bend in her course she leaves the mud which she carries and the corpses of the drowned. History knows her way. She makes no mistakes. He who has no absolute faith in History does not belong in the Party's ranks.... The Party's course is sharply defined, like a narrow path in the mountains. The slightest false step, right or left, takes one down the precipice. The air is thin; he who becomes dizzy is lost. ('Darkness at Noon').

  I learnt that the rules of common decency, of loyalty and fair play were not absolute rules, but the ephemeral projections of competitive bourgeois society. Antiquity had one code of honour; the feudal era another; capitalist society still another, which the ruling class was trying to sell us as eternal laws. But absolute laws of ethics did not exist. Each class, as it became dominant in history, had reshaped these so-called laws according to its interests. The Revolution could not be achieved according to the rules of cricket. Its supreme law was that the end justified the means; its supreme guide the method of dialectical materialism.

  The true revolutionary is cold and unmerciful to mankind out of a kind of mathematical mercifulness.... A conscience renders one as unfit for the revolution as a double chin. Conscience eats through the brain like a cancer, until the whole of the grey matter is devoured ('Darkness at Noon').

  The intense fascination of the dialectical method can only be understood through a study of its masters--by reading, say, Engels' Feuerbach, Marx' Eighteenth Brumaire, or Lenin's State and Revolution. I now lived entirely in a mental world which earlier I have described as a`closed system', comparable to the self-contained universe of the medieval Schoolmen. All my feelings, my attitudes to art, literature and human relations, became reconditioned and moulded to the pattern. My vocabulary, grammar, syntax, gradually changed. I learnt to avoid any original form of expression, any individual turn of phrase. Euphony, gradations of emphasis, restraint, nuances of meaning, were suspect. Language, and with it thought, underwent a process of dehydration, and crystallised in the ready-made schemata of Marxist jargon. There were perhaps a dozen or two adjectives whose use was both safe and mandatory, such as: decadent, hypocritical, morbid (for the capitalist bourgeoisie); heroic, disciplined, class-conscious (for the revolutionary proletariat); petit-bourgeois, romantic, sentimental (for humanitarian scruples); opportunist and sectarian (for Right and Left deviations respectively); mechanistic, metaphysical, mystical (for the wrong intellectual approach); dialectical, concrete (for the right approach); flaming (protests); fraternal (greetings); unswerving (loyalty to the Party).

  However, certain refinements of language were permitted and even encouraged. Thus irony was a desirable method in polemics, but its application was restricted to the use of inverted commas; e.g.: the `revolutionary' past of Trotsky; the `progressive' measures of the `Socialist' government; and so on. Equally popular was the use of what one may call semantic spooner­isms, initiated by Marx's famous pamphlet against Proudhon, The Philosophy Poverty and the Poverty of Philosophy. This delightful game could be varied endlessly: `the war on profits and the profits of war', `the psychology of adolescence or the adolescence of psychology', `the laws of terror and the terror of the law', and soon. There were also certain luxury words whose use was regarded as good form. For instance, in one of his works Lenin has mentioned Herostratus, who burnt down a temple because he could think of no other way of achieving fame. Accordingly, one often heard and read phrases like `the criminally herostratic madness of the counter-revolutionary wreckers of the heroic efforts of the toiling masses in the Fatherland of the Prolitariat to achieve the second Five Year Plan in four years'.

  Few among the intellectuals in the Party realised at the time that their mentality was a caricature of the revolutionary spirit; that within the short span of three generations the Communist movement had travelled from the era of the Apostles to that of the Borgias. But the process of degeneration had been gradual and continuous, and the seeds of corruption had already been present in the work of Marx: in the vitriolic tone of his polemics, the abuse he heaped on his opponents, the denunciation of rivals and dissenters as traitors to the working class and agents of the bourgeoisie. Proudhon, Duhring, Bakunin, Liebknecht, Lassalle, had been treated by Marx exactly as Trotsky, Itcikharin, Zinovicv, Kameniev et alia were treated by Stalin--except that Marx did not have the power to shoot his victims. During these three generations the uses of the dialectic had also been vastly simplified. It was, for ininstance, easy to prove scientifically that everybody who disagreed with the Party-line was an agent of Fascism because (a) by disagreeing with the line it endangered the unity of the Party; (b) by endangering the unity of the Party he improved the chances of a Fascist victory; hence (c) objectively he acted as an agent of Fascism even if subjectively he had his kidneys smashed in a fascist concentration camp. It was equally easy to prove that charity, public or private, was counter-revolutionary because it deceived the masses regarding the true nature of the capitalist system, and thereby contributed to its preservation.

  Our literary, artistic and musical tastes were similarly reconditioned. The highest form of music was the choral song because it represented a collective, as opposed to the individualistic approach. The same argument led to a sudden and unexpected revival of the Greek chorus in the Communist avant­garde plays of the 'twenties. Since individual characters could not be altogether banished from the stage, they had to be stylised, typified, depersonalised. The Communist novel was guided by similar principles. The central character was not an individual, but a group: the members of a partisan un
it during the Civil War; the peasants of a village in the process of being transformed into a collective farm; the workers of a factory striving to fulfil the plan. The tendency of the novel had to be `operative', that is, didactic; each work of art must convey a social message. And here again, as individual heroes could not be entirely dispensed with, they had to be made into typical representatives of a given social class, party or political attitude.

  Stripped of its exaggerations this conception has, of course, a certain validity in the field of the political and ideological novel. In later years I have written several essays criticising the Marxist theory of art, and trying to reconcile the striving for social relevance with the conflicting claims of aesthetics and psychology. But such critical exercises did not prevent me from falling into the very errors that I had pointed out. The effects of years of indoctrination reached deeper than the conscious mind, and are easily tradeable in my novels even ten years after the break.

  Nevertheless, the Marxist approach has produced valuable results both in literary criticism and in creative writing. At least two among the leading contemporary critics, Edmund Wilson and Lionel Trilling, owe much to it. The orthodox `proletarian' literature of the 'thirties appears today shallow and dated; but a whole generation of poets and novelists, who took Marx in small and digestible quantities, have added an essential feature to the civilisation of the twentieth century. Among them are Auden, Isherwood, Spender and Day Lewis in England; the early Dos Passos, Steinbeck, Caldwell and Sinclair Lewis in the United States; Barbusse, Rolland, Malraux, Sartre and Sperber in France; Becher, Brecht, Weinert, Renn, Seghers, Regler, Plivier in Germany--to mention only a few.