by Les Weil
Kantorowicz peered into the street from behind the curtain. `There is nobody,' he said reassuringly.
`When I came in, he was hiding behind a lamp-post,' said the girl.
She spoke in a quiet, resigned voice, without any emotion. Kantorowicz now explained to me that comrade Hilda was in trouble: a man had been shadowing her for days, but he had been unable to gather from her story whether she suspected the Police or somebody else.
`It is not the Police,' the girl said, in the same resigned voice. We pressed her to explain, and after a long pause she said:
`It is a chap from the Bezirksleitung' (the District Committee of the Party).
With great effort and with lengthening intervals, during which the girl relapsed into silence and became incommunicado behind a fixed stare, we extracted from her a confused story to the effect that a man from the District Committee (our immediate superiors in the Party hierarchy) had wanted to sleep with her; that she had refused; that subsequently he had been accusing her of some unnamed crime against the Party, and was now following her round, hiding behind doorways and lamp-posts after dark.
Kantorowicz and I discussed this for a while, trying to think of a way of helping her. But the girl no longer took an interest in us. She had now completely withdrawn into herself; her stare had become fixed and glassy. She sat upright and immobile at the table, as if petrified. Gradually her upper lip began to lift, baring her teeth and her gums, and remained fixed in a snarl. A few tears detached themselves from the corners of her eyes and slid slowly down her face; but she neither sobbed nor gave any other sign of emotion; and that snarl, like a dead rabbit's, had become a permanent feature. It was obvious that a case of latent paranoia had suddenly entered its acute phase; the girl had gone insane before our eyes. We somehow got her into a taxi, and Kantorowicz drove her to a hospital.
I once took a rabbit, caught by a spaniel, from the dog's fangs. The rabbit was apparently unhurt but died a few moments later, probably from fright or shock. Comrade Hilda's face, with the bared gums and glassy stare, had worn the same expression. It was a pitiful and horrifying experience, that in moments of anxiety haunted me for a long time. The transformation of a face into a mask, of a human being into an automaton, bore the familiar sign of Ahor--the archaic horror of my childhood. That unfortunate girl would probably have gone insane in any case, Communist or not. But the particular form which her insanity took was characteristic of the atmosphere in which we lived. No doubt there was a grain of truth in the story around which her fantasies had crystallised. In former days, persecution manias focused on devils and incubi; for poor Comrade Hilda the fiend was `a chap from the District Committee' denouncing her crimes against the Party.
The hysterical Valkyrie and Comrade Hilda certainly do not represent German womanhood; but they do represent, as extreme cases, the `politically awakened' part of it, anno donuni 1932.
III. 'Sink into the Mud'
A SHORT time before I lost my job, I had organised a caucus of Communist sympathisers among the Ullstein staff. The group met once a week in my flat, and comprised about a dozen columnists, sub-editors, magazine artists, theatre and film critics. Its purpose was to exchange information, and to counteract the pro-Nazi tendencies within the trust. Only two of us were members of the C.P.--Kantorowicz, who was a free-lance contributor to several Ullstein papers, and myself; and we were the only ones who punctually attended the meetings of the caucus, who took the matter seriously and knew what we were about. We were disciplined members of a civilian army acting under instructions; the others were free Agents, divided and confused, as intellectuals always are in matters of practical action, anxious `to do something', frightened of the consequences, and given to long, rambling, pointless arguments.
I reported every week on the antics of the group through Edgar to the apparat, including brief reports on the background and character of each of the members. My instructions were to let them all talk to their hearts' content and just to keep the thing going, while watching the individual evolution of each member with a view to his possible future usefulness. By this slow, patient, apparently aimless method did the apparat cast its nets into thousands of similar `study groups' and `discussion circles' in universities, (ditorial offices, government agencies, industrial enterprises all over the world. It was all perfectly harmless and high-minded; and it produced an astonishing harvest of Alger Hisses, Nunn Mays and Donald MacLeans. Yet such big and dramatic catches were rare; of equal importance were the more intangible results of ideological infiltration, the creation of a mental climate in progressive-liberal circles which ranged from benevolent neutrality to Artive support of the Great Social Experiment, and the equation of all criticism of Russia with a reactionary, Fascist attitude.
Our particular little group was not a successful one, and it petered out after a few months. With the constant dismissals at Ullstein's, and the shadow of Hitler lying across the country like a monster-shaped cloud, our motley little crowd of intellectuals was too scared to be capable of any clear thought. It was easy to win their sympathy for Russia, but almost impossible to make them take a determined stand for their own interests in Germany. The liberals in Germany--and elsewhere--have rarely understood that there are situations in which caution amounts to suicide.
When Franz Hollering, editor of the Ullstein's mid-day paper B.Z. Am Mittag was sacked for his leftist views, I tried to organise a collective action of protest. In spite of Hollering's great popularity amongst his colleagues, not one of them was prepared to sign the quite moderate letter that I had drafted. Some shrugged and muttered: `You are a young man, but I have my family to consider'; others talked of `Communist methods'. This last remark reveals the ambiguity of the whole problem. Whenever Communists took the lead in actions of social protest--in defence of anti-Fascists, Negroes, and natives, or in the war-time resistance movements in any part of the world-they certainly acted for devious motives of their own. But at the same time they behaved with courage, discipline and determination, which won them grudging admiration and gave them a considerable moral advantage over their soft and undecided progressive allies. It was this fearless, active, knight-errant aspect of Communism which attracted me and millions of others to the movement, and which compensated us for our disappointments.
Another episode, that I still remember with considerable satisfaction, concerns the threatened eviction of a destitute woman and her child from a flat in our vicinity. When we heard of this, some thirty of us marched in a body to the landlord and told him that if he insisted on carrying out the eviction, the police would first have to knock every one of us cold before they could get the woman out, and that we would take good care that the story got into the press. The landlord desisted, and we subsequently called a public meeting that resolved: `no more evictions around the Red Block.' These were actions spontaneously undertaken by our cell without any order from District H.Q. Sooner or later we would have got into trouble for `Trotskyism' or `Leftist deviation'; but Hitler came in first.
The Ullstein-caucus of sympathisers disintegrated soon after my dismissal. Having lost my position in the Trust, I also lost my authority in the group, for, as one of them coldly put it: `You no longer have anything to lose--we still have.' That was, of course, true, but not for long. The jobs to which they clung so fearfully, without regard to principles and without understanding that only concerted and courageous action could save them, they all lost a few months later. Their fate was symbolic of the undignified end of the Weimar Republic. Their cowardice and helplessness filled me with contempt, and made me glad and proud to be a Communist.
Outside the cell which had become my universe I now had few friends and social contacts. Even these were either Communists or sympathisers. With others I no longer had a common language. We were moving into the totalitarian era; all relations became polarised and tense. It was a process like the requisitioning of private telephones near the front-line. The possibilities of human communication were rapidly narrowing.
Among the Communist intellecttrals who were prominent in pre-Nazi Berlin, my favourite was Hans Eisler, the composer. His family belonged to the high Comintern aristocracy and deserves a brief description.
The three Eislers--Hans, Gerhart and Ruth--came from Vienna; their father was the respected author of several works of sociology. Ruth (alias Ruth Fischer) is probably the most brilliant woman in Communist history. In 1918 she founded the Austrian Communist Party and became its charter inember No. I; later she was elected chairman of the Berlin C.P., a Deputy of the Reichstag, and a member of the Praesidium of the Comintern. She was excommunicated for `Left deviationism' in 1926. Now she is the most ardent and temperamental among the ex- and anti-Communists, but also the author of the most scholarly work on Comintern history.
The third of the Eisler siblings, Gerhart (alias Hans Burger), started his Party career on the wrong foot as a`Right deviationist'. He managed, however, to work himself back into Stalin's personal favour and in 1929 was sent--disguised as a salt merchant--to China, to liquidate the Party's revolt against Stalin's pact with Chiang Kai Shek (the Stalin-Chiang pact of 1927 was a forerunner of the Stalin-Hitler pact of 1939). Gerhart's experiences as a Comintern agent in China inspired his brother Hans' opera The Punitive Measure, book by Bert Brecht, which has since become a Communist classic. Later on Gerhart was a Comintern official in Moscow (where I met him in 1933), a Comintern agent in France (where we were interned together in the concentration camp of Le Vernet), and in the United States (where he was arrested in I950 and, after jumping bail, was smuggled out of the country on board a Polish liner). At the time of writing he is head of the propaganda dcpartment of the Soviet Zone of Germany.
Though all three Eislers were Communists, the characters of Hans, Gerhart and Ruth were entirely unlike each other. Ruth Fischer--a short, stout woman with an explosive temperament--revolted against the straitjacket which Stalin put on the revolutionary movement. Gerhart, a smoothfaced, smooth-mannered careerist, succeeded in maintaining his place in the Conuntern hierarchy by intrigue and self-abasement. Hans was neither an enthusiast like Ruth, nor an opportunist like Gerhart. He was a musician, who also happened to be a member of the Communist Party. He did not care a fig about political intrigues, and managed to remain almost miraculously detached amidst the earthquakes and tempests of Party life. As music is further removed from politics than literature or painting, composers were at that time still left relatively alone; the Politbureau's thunderbolts against Shostakovich and the Formalsts only came twenty years later. Amiable Hans was a bald, moon-faced little man with a wealth of humour and selfmockery. To listen to him hacking out on the piano his revolutionary songs and singing the words in his cracked, croaking voice was pure joy. These songs--'The March of the Unemployed', `Hymn of the Comintern', etc., with words by Becher or Erich Weinert--were at the same time sentimental, stirring and didactic. They were the only successful works of popular art that the European Communist movement has created, the beginnings of a revolutionary folklore.
The most fashionable poet among the snobs and parlour-Communists of the period was Bertold Brecht. I have never met Brecht in person, but it is impossible to evoke the last years of the Weimar period without mentioning him. His plays had a success far surpassing the Auden-Spender-Isherwood productions in England. Some of them were set to music by Hans Eisler, others by Kurt Weill. They were full of catchy melodies, easy to hum, sentimental in the tradition of the German ballad, but with a dissonant, modern orchestration which gave them a ring of sophisticated mockery. You were moved, but at the same time remained ironically superior, as when listening to a tear jerking Victorian ballad. Against this ambiguous musical background was set a text of great brilliance and intellectual dishonesty.
Brecht's greatest success, Die Dreigroschenoper, was a modernisation of Gay's Beggar's Opera. It was a highbrow epatez le bourgeois-prank in praise of thieves and whores. One of its refrains, which compressed Brecht's message into a single formula, became a catchphrase in pre-Hitlerite Germany: `First comes my belly, then your morality'. (Denn erst kommt das Fressen, und dann kommt die Moral.)
The theme of another Brecht success, the didactic play A man is a man (Mann ist Mann), can also be reduced to a formula: `To hell with the individual.' A soldier disappears from his regiment; he is replaced by a man caught at random in the street and pressed into service. It makes no difference w hatever, for all men are interchangeable regarding their function within the collectivity: `The sun doesn't care on whom it shines.'
The dreary message of these plays was made attractive by Brecht's considerable lyrical talent, by the catchy tunes of the songs, and above all by their stylised and exotic settings: Alabama, China, India, the slaughterhouses in Chicago, the Kingdom of the Dead. Some of the songs were lifted, without acknowledgment, from Kipling, others from Villon. When a leading German critic exposed the plagiarism, Brecht coolly answered that he did not recognise individual property in literature any more than in economics. This statement was acclaimed by the progressive intelligentsia as highly original and daring.
The climax of Brecht's literary career, and at the same time most revealing work of art in the entire Communist literature, is the play Die Massnahme (The Punitive Measure). It will, I believe, be quoted by historians in coming centuries as the perfect apotheosis of inhumanity. As it has not been translated into English, I feel justified in describing its contents in some detail.
The play takes the form of a trial. Three Comintern agents return from a secret mission in China, and explain before a Party tribunal, in the form of flashbacks, why they had been obliged to kill their fourth, young comrade and to throw his body into a lime pit. The tribunal is represented by an anonymous, Greek 'Controlchorus'. The three agents are equally anonymous--they wear masks on their mission, having effaced their personality, their will and feeling, by order of the Party:
`You are no longer yourselves. No longer are you Karl Schmitt of Berlin. You are no longer Anna Kyersk of Kazan, and you are no longer Peter Savich of Moscow. You are without a name, without a mother, blank sheets on which the Revolution will write its orders.
`He who fights for Communism must be able to fight and to renounce fighting, to say the truth and not to say the truth, to be helpful and unhelpful, to keep a promise and to break a promise, to go into danger and to avoid danger, to be known and to be unknown. He who fights for Communism has of all the virtues only one: that he fights for Communism.'
The 'young comrade' however, was unable to live up to this ethical code. He was guilty of four crimes, having successively fallen into the traps of pity, of loyalty, of dignity and of righteous indignation. In the first episode he is described as one of a gang of coolies pulling a boat up the river. He tries to help some exhausted comrades, thereby attracts attention, and the agents have to decamp. In the second episode he comes to the defence of a workman beaten up by the police, with the same result.
In the third, he is sent to negotiate with a representative of the Chinese bourgeoisie, who is willing to arm the revolutionary coolies to get rid of his British competitors. All goes well until the fat bourgeois sings a song in praise of business profits; the young comrade is so disgusted that he refuses to accept food from the bourgeois, and the deal falls through. The moral is driven home by the Controlchorus, who asks the rhetorical question:
Controlchorus: But is it not right to place honour above all? The three agents: No.
Controlchorns: What vileness would you not commit to exterminate vileness? ... Sink into the mud, embrace the butchet, but change the world: it needs it.
The climax of the play is the fourth episode, in which the young comrade deviates from the Party line. The line, it should be remembered, was the Stalin-Chiang pact of 1927, one of the most terrible episodes of Comintern history, which led to the wholesale massacre of Chinese Communists by Chiang, and with Stalin's passive complicity. It should also be remembered that Gerhart Eisler had played a decisive part in implemen
ting this policy, and that Hans Eisler wrote the music for the play. We may, therefore, assume that Brecht knew exactly what the consequences of the `line of 1927' had been. The young comrade in the play refuses to implement that line. He tears up `the scriptures of the Party classics', and cries out:
`All this no longer has any bearing. At the moment when the fight is on, I reject all that was valid yesterday and do my human duty. My heart beats for the Revolution.'
He tears his mask off and shouts to the coolies:
`We have come to help you. We come from Moscow.'
So the agents, who `in the dusk saw his naked face, human, open, guileless', have to shoot him. But before they do that, they ask the young comrade whether he agrees to be shot. He answers:
`Yes. I see that I have always acted incorrectly. Now it would be better if I were not.'
The three agents: `Then we shot him and threw him into the lime pit and when the lime had absorbed him we returned to our work.'
Controlchortis: `Your work has been blest. You have propagated the Principles of the Classics, the ABC of Communism. And the Revolution is on the march here too, and here too the ranks of the fighters have been formed. We are in agreement.'
The play reads like a glorification of the anti-Christ. Perhaps the most uncanny scene in it is the young comrade's confession, and his acquiescence in his own liquidation. Written in 1931, it seems to be a prophetic forecast of the Moscow show trials that were to start five years later. The young comrade stands in reality for the old bolshevik guard, the generation of the civil war, who had to be thrown into the lime pit because they had retained some vestiges of humanity; and above all, because they were old-fashioned revolutionaries `whose heart beat for the revolution', and who put the interest of the coolies before those of the 'controlchorus'.