The Invisible Writing

by Les Weil

  Certain scenes in the play have the rugged and hostile greatness of a moon-landscape; others read like a vitriolic parody of the Communist creed. Yet the idea that it may be viewed as a parody never occurred to author, actors, and audience. The play had the inhuman consistency of a schizophrenic vision; and once you accept its two basic tenets, that the Party can never do wrong, and that the End justifies the Means, its apparently prophetic foresight becomes merely logical extrapolation.

  In his excellent analysis of Brecht, Herbert Liithy has shown how the ex-anarchist, ex-libertarian poet became attracted `not by the workers' movement--which he had never known--but by a deep urge for a total authority, a total submission to a total power, the new Byzantine State Church--immutable, hierarchic, founded on the infallibility of the leader'.'

  The immense success of his plays was a symptom of the morbid death­wish of German democracy. The leading part in the play which made Brecht's reputation, The Beggar's Opera, was played by a remarkable actress, Carola Neher, Brecht's mistress, muse, and closest friend. A few years later she went on a tour to Russia and shared the fate of the `young comrade'. Brecht did not protest; he has remained faithful to this day to his party and his creed: `sink into the mud and embrace the butcher.'

  I was waiting for my visa to Russia. When I lost my job I had asked the Party for permission to emigrate. This was regarded as a rare privilege, for the duty of every Communist was to work for the Revolution in his own country. However, I still enjoyed a certain reputation as a liberal journalist (the reasons why I had to leave the Ullsteins were not known in public), and the Party was willing to exploit this advantage. It was agreed that I should go to Russia and write a series of articles on the first Five Year Plan, maintaining the fiction that I was still a bourgeois reporter. I accordingly entered into an agreement with a literary agency, the Karl Dunker Verlag who undertook to syndicate the series in some twenty newspapers in various European mtries. But the months passed by, and my visa did not arrive. Meanwhile I had to live. The sum which the Ullsteins had paid me as a final settlement I sent to my parents; it would keep them going for two or three years--that is, until after the victorious Revolution. I had only kept the amount required to pay my fare to Moscow, as I had optimistically assumed that once the Party had agreed to my going to Russia, my visa would be granted at once. Fortunately I managed to sell a detective serial to the Muenchner Illustrierte Zeitung for a fairly large sum; besides, I also worked as a free-lance journalist for my former paper, the Vossische Zeitung. To be fired one's employers as a Communist agent, but permitted to go on working for them informally, was one of the amiable paradoxes of bourgeois liberalism which I held in such contempt.

  I would probably still be waiting for my visa if Johalmes R. Becher had not arrived in Berlin from Moscow.

  Becher, the Communist poet laureate, was President of the `League of Proletarian Revolutionary Writers of Germany'. He was a tall, sturdy Bavarian with a fleshy, nondescript face, made even more inscrutable by thick-lensed, steel-rimmed spectacles. One could take him for a teacher of mathematics or the director of an insurance company--for anything but a poet. But behind this calm poise and neutral facade was a complex and facinating personality.

  Becher became known in Germany in the mad years after the First World War, partly as a young expressionist poet, partly as the lucky survivor of a suicide pact. He had shot the girl with whom he was determined to die, neatly through the head, but had himself survived through some accident. Subsequently he was acquitted by a German court on the grounds of having been mentally irresponsible at the time when the act was committed. Becher's outstanding quality was a cynical humour, very unusual in Party circles. Together with this went an astute judgment of men, remarkable cunning in handling situations, and a ruthless capacity for manoeuvring in troubled waters. It is probably this combination of abilities, so rare in a poet, that has enabled him to survive the Purges and the traps which threaten the communist writer at every step. In the inner circles of the Party he was sometimes called `the tightrope walker'--a name which, in view of his heavy build, sounded both ludicrous and slightly sinister.

  Becher took a liking to me which I reciprocated and in a manner still do, regardless of the fact that he has since publicly denounced me as a war criminal, a gangster and a spy, and has variously demanded that I should be exterminated or put into a mental asylum. But to issue statements of this kind is no more than an inescapable formality for Party members; the Soviet

  citizen who, as a matter of routine, signs a resolution asking that this or that fallen leader should be `shot as a mad dog' has no ill feeling against the victim and would be surprised if told that the latter resented his performing such a simple act of duty. When one knows the rules of the game one does not take these matters seriously, and when one's former friends and comrades keep calling one every name out of the Zoo there is no need even for forgiveness; one knows that they cannot act otherwise.

  So Becher and I got on well, and he procured me an official invitation from MORP (Meshdunwodnoe 0byedinenie Revolusionnykh Pisateley.), the `International Organisation of Revolutionary Writers,' to write a book on the Soviet Union: Russia through Bourgeois Eyes. The idea of it was similar to that of the articles for which I had signed up with Dunker: Mr. K., a liberal news-correspondent, starts his journey with an anti-Communist bias, is gradually converted by the results of the Five Year plan, and ends up as a friend and admirer of the Soviet Union. As MORP was de fccto a branch of the Comintern, and Becher himself occupied a high position in it, my visa was now at last granted.

  I had few possessions, having always lived in hotel rooms or furnished flats; the books about which I cared filled no more than a large crate. But I still had my car, the little red Fiat that had rendered such faithful services to the cell. It was known in the Party under the petname 'Gretchen'. One day Becher happened to ask me whether I intended to sell Gretchen before I left. I told him that I intended to leave her to the Party.

  `The Party,' said Becher, `is a large body. The German branch of MORP is affiliated to it. It would be logical to leave Gretchen to us.' I agreed that it would be logical. As Becher happened to be chairman of the German branch of MORP, it was also logical that he took personal possession of Gretchen, and a few days after I had left for Russia, he went off in her to find inspiration in the Black Forest. As a sign of his appreciation, he procured me a contract for my book with the Russian State Publishing Trust against a cash advance of three thousand roubles. This amiable deal gave me the first intimation that a writer's existence in the Soviet Union depended entirely on his standing with the Party.

  By the end of July I932, I was at last ready to turn my back on the hourgeois world and head for the Promised Land. It was six months before the Germany of Weimar became Nazi-land. It was also six years and six months after I had emigrated to the first Land of Promise, Palestine. I felt the same exhilaration at having burnt my bridges, the same hectic expectation of a journey into Utopia. It took me many years to discover that the restless traveller has only one goal: to escape from himself.

  This time there was no crowd of friends on the platform to sing anthems and wave me good-bye. The members of the cell were political allies, not personal friends; I had not asked any of them to come to the station. One girl alone stood outside the window of my third-class compartment: Lotte, the last and most faithful among the Helenas of vanished Weimar. As the train moved out of the Bahnhof am Zoo, she made a mocking curtsey; I never saw her again. When I turned away from the window, I felt, for a moment, a very lonely voyager. Then I became immersed in a pamphlet on the increase of steel production under the second Five Year Plan.

  Part Two

  UTOPIA

  1932-33

  They believe everything they can prove, and they can

  prove everything they believe.

  `The Age of Longing.'

  IV. The Sorting Machine

  THE chapters which follow describe my travels in Russia
in 1932-33. Conditions have, of course, considerably changed since that time; yet I believe that certain basic values and characteristic features of the Soviet regime have remained substantially the same.

  My first destination was not Moscow but Kharkov, then capital of the Soviet Ukraine. I had friends living in that town, who had invited me to stay with them until I found my feet in the new world. They were Alex Weissberg and his wife; and they are going to play an important part in my life.

  Eva, a dark, strikingly beautiful girl, was a painter and designer of ceramics. I had known her since my childhood; she appears in The God that Failed as Eva, and elsewhere under a different pseudonym. Alex was a physicist, and a member of the Austrian Communist Party. I had first met him in Eva's studio in Berlin, before they married and left for the Soviet Union, where an important research job was waiting for him. I had no inkling at that time that they were heading for years of prison and torment in Russia; nor that Eva was to supply, from her own tragic experience, the background material of a future novel, Darkness at Noon. In my Preface to Alex's autobiographical book, Conspiracy of Silence,' I have described our first meeting:

  My first impression of Alex was that of a prosperous and jovial business man with a round face, rounded gestures, a great gusto for telling fimny stories and a curious liking for sweets--there were little trays with chocolates about, which he kept gobbling up absentmindedly by handfuls. I failed to see what Eva found so remarkable about this character until the other guests were gone and we became involved in au argument on some of the finer points of Marxist theory. Then Alex's eyes became narrow and piercing, every trace of humour left him, and he made dialectical mince­meat of me. He had a lucid, trenchant and relentless way of arguing, and, not content with knocking his opponent down, he continued to hammer away at him. After a while he became jolly and jovial again.

  What enabled him to hold out [under G.P. U. interrogation] was his great physical and mental resilience--that jack-in-the-box quality which allows quick recuperation and apparently endless comebacks, both physical and mental; a certain thick thickskinedness and good-natured insensitivity: an irrepressible optimism and smug complacency in hair-raising situations.

  Practically all of my Central-European friends have had experiences of varying severity in prisons and concentration camps. I don't know a single one who, after three years in the hands of the G.P. U. and five years hunted by the Gestapo, has emerged physically and mentally so unscathed and pleased with this best of all possible worlds as Alexander Cybulski Weissberg. He looked like a prosperous business man when I first met him twenty years ago, before the roof collapsed over our heads; and he still looks like a prosperous business man, with rounded gestures, a fondness for Viennese coffee-house stories, munching pralines or his favourite Turkish delight.

  My idea of Russia had been formed entirely by Soviet propaganda. It was the image of a super-America, engaged in the most gigantic enterprise in history, buzzing with activity, efficiency, enthusiasm. The motto of the first Five Year Plan had been to `reach and surpass' the Occident; this task had been completed in four years instead of five. At the frontier I would `change trains for the twenty-first century', as another slogan had promised.

  A few trivial episodes of the journey are sharply outlined in my memory even after twenty years. First, the Customs exatnination at Shepetovka, the frontier station. As a travelling reporter, I had gone through frontier controls in nearly all European and several Oriental countries; but the Customs examination at Shepetovka was different from any previous experience. The Soviet Customs officials did not follow the usual routine of plunging their hands into a suitcase, feeling their way along its sides and bottom, or pulling out a few objects for closer examination. They completely unpacked the contents of every suitcase in every traveller s possession and spread them out on the customs counters and on the grimy floor. They unwrapped every object packed in paper, opened every box of chocolates or collar studs, examined every book and printed sheet. Then they re-packed everything again. It took half a day. Meanwhile the train in the station could not be boarded by the travellers: the empty compartments were being subjected to the same minute search,

  Most of the travellers in the train were Russians, and most of the contents of their baggage was food. Hundreds of pounds of sugar, tea, butter, ,ausages, lard, biscuits, and conserves of every variety were piled on the counters and grimy floor of the Customs shed. I was startled by the look on the Customs officials' faces while they were handling these foodstuffs. It was a look of greed and resignation. I had suffered hunger myself; the way a hungry man takes a piece of salami into his hands--the deference of his touch, and the pathetic gleam in his eyes--cannot be mistaken.

  The train puffed slowly across the Ukrainian steppe. It stopped frequently. At every station there was a crowd of peasants in rags, offering ikons and linen in exchange against a loaf of bread. The women were lifting up their infants to the compartment windows--infants pitiful and terrifying with limbs like sticks, puffed bellies, big cadaverous heads lolling on thin necks. I had arrived, unsuspecting, at the peak of the famine of 1932-33 which had depopulated entire districts and claimed several million victims. Its ravages are now officially admitted, but at the time they were kept secret from the world. The scenes at the railway-stations all along our journey gave me an inkling of the disaster, but no understanding of its causes and extent. My Russian travelling companions took pains to explain to me that these wretched crowds were kulaks, rich peasants who had resisted the collectivisation of the land and whom it had therefore been necessary to evict from their farms.

  Another incident was so slight that I only registered it half-consciously. As our train was approaching a river across which a bridge was being built, the conductor came walking down the corridor with an armful of square pieces of cardboard and blocked up all the windows. When I asked why this was done, my travelling companions explained with smiles that bridges were military objectives, and that this precaution was necessary to prevent anybody from photographing them. It was the first of a series of equally grotesque experiences which I put down as examples of revolutionary vigilance.

  The next surprise came in Kharkov when I found that my friends had not turned up at the station. When I tried to telephone them, I discovered that the only public telephone at the central railway station of Kharkov was out of order. Instead of taxis, there were only horse-drawn droshkys which seemed to come straight out of Chekov. I did finally find the Weissbergs' flat; the telegram which I had sent before leaving Berlin arrived eighteen hours after myself. In 1932, letters in Russia often took several weeks to arrive; inland telegrams took several days, while long-distance calls could only be made by Government and Party officials.

  I reacted to the brutal impact of reality on illusion in a manner typical of the true believer. I was surprised and bewildered--but the elastic shock­absorbers of my Party training began to operate at once. I had eyes to see, and a mind conditioned to explain away what they saw. This `inner censor' is more reliable and effective than any official censorship.

  To illustrate this point, I shall quote a passage from the travel-book that I started to write a few weeks after my arrival. Working on the book was a means to work all doubts and misgivings out of my system by ridiculing my own bewilderment. It was a strenuous effort, as the style of the excerpt reveals; it is a description of the author's first impressions on Russian soil:

  ... Let us not deceive ourselves: this writer did not stand up very well to the test of the first few days. He splashed about rather helplessly in the bottomless porridge of impressions which he had found instead of the neat and tidy contours of socialist life anticipated in his imagination. He had visualised the Soviet Union as a kind of gigantic Manhattan with enormous buildings sprouting from the earth like mushrooms after rain, with rivers queuing up before power stations, mountains being tossed into the air by faith, and people breathlessly racing, as in an accelerated film, to fulfill the Plan. Yet the first
Soviet town in which he set foot gave the impression of a huge village of seven hundred thousand sleeping souls, lazy as the Orient, timeless as the steppes. From the railway station a heavy peasant crowd was clumping through the dusty streets as if heading for a fair; and this was not a backward village, but the capital of the second largest Republic in the Union. In the antique tram-car the conductress sits ensconced among the passengers, chewing sunflower seeds, and if you ask her for a street she looks at you reproachfully from under her peasant kerchief and shrugs. The droshkys look like relics in a museum: high up on his lofy seat the isvoschik wields his whip, cursing the mother and grandmother of his skinny mare; an occasional motorist clatters, wildly hooting, with creaking axles along the un­paved road; stalls with gory posters depicting the tortures of the Inquisition lure the mushiks inside to enjoy modern art-which is further represented by the street photographers' backdrops, showing palaces with marble columns and lotus-covered ponds. Foreign newspapers are unobtainable, telegrams travel slower than the trains, a telephone call takes longer than a journey in the tram.

  Yet in the centre of this sleepy village with its dusty streets, milling crowds, and overcrowded tram-cars, there is a square with two modern skyscrapers; and next to it the new telephone exchange all in steel and glass and there is a new model hospital, and the new tractor factory--the second largest in Europe; and the sports stadium, the amusement park, the workers' club, and so on and so on....

  It looks like a film which, through a mistake, has been twice exposed by the photographer: once in the past and once in the future. The two pictures overlap and irrterlace; the result is chaos. Only slowly does the newcomer learn to sort things out, to distinguish between the two layers, to discover in this confusing maze the dominant pattern. It will take him even longer to understand the people of this country, these men and women who are again a mixture of two diffierent epochs: of the race that plods barefoot through the mud, and another that carries briefcases and wears horn­rimmed lenses. Their heredity is the shapeless vagueness of the steppes; their environment the hard precision of the Plan.