The Invisible Writing

by Les Weil

  HAPPINESS OF MANKIND.'

  It was either this auto-suggestion that did the trick, or the journalist's brazenness that I had acquired, for after the first few minutes the atmosphere became quite sociable. The four of us sat around a table; after I had told my story about Ullsteins, Duncker, and so on, they seemed to have run out of questions, and there was a pause. To my relief, they did not inquire about my associations in Berlin. Instead, the man at the head of the table--the Deputy Chief of the Political Department--said softly, in a tone of semi-humorous despair:

  `You don't seem to realise that you are the first Hungarian since 1919 to arrive with a legal passport straight from Moscow.'

  `I am also the first Hungarian who almost got to the North Pole,' I said.

  The obviously least intelligent of the three asked me slyly whether I had `established contact with Communists in Moscow'. I said that I had interviewed a lot of them, and that all my contacts had been Communists, as the Communists were the Government. `How did they strike you? he asked curiously. I said that some of them seemed very clever men indeed. Had I seen Stalin? I admitted regretfully that I hadn't. Whom else had I seen? I mentioned Bukharin and Radek, but before I could go on, the Deputy Chief interrupted in a casual tone: `And Bela Kun?

  There was a dramatic silence. Bela Kun, dictator of the Commune, had already become a legendary figure in Hungary, a devil with horns. Before I had time to think, I heard myself answer `Of course'--which was a lie. I had tried to see Bela Kun in Moscow, but he had been either too busy, or not interested. I am not quite sure why I lied--perhaps an instinct told me that if I denied having met Bela Kun they would not believe me; or perhaps I simply enjoyed a little boasting. At any rate, I had apparently taken the right line, for they all became quite electrified, and asked with naive curiosity whether it was true that Kun had gone completely bald; whether he had `made a career in the Kremlin'; and whether, living among all those Russians, he still spoke Hungarian fluently. My affirmative answers to the last two questions seemed to reassure their patriotic pride. I am sure they resented it whenDimitrov, the Bulgarian, instead of Kun became Head of the Comintern. (Kun Kun was arrested in the great Soviet purge in May 1937, and shot without trial.)

  In the end they gave me my passport back, and we all shook hands. The Deputy Chief's last, casual question was whether I intended to visit factories and working-class suburbs. I said no, I was working on a play. `Fine,' he said. As long as you stick to the cafes and leave the factories alone, you are all right with us.'

  It was a perfect summing up of the Communist Party's own view of its intellectuals.

  I left, highly satisfied with myself. It did not occur to me, in my self-congratulatory mood, to reflect on the liberalism of this 'semi-Fascist' regime, or to compare the relative freedom which its citizens still enjoyed with the condition of a citizen of the Soviet State.

  The play was never produced. Bardoss's enthusiasm evaporated as suddenly as it had been aroused. His excuse was that he did not like the Hungarian translation. He had only read the German original in a hurry, and on re-reading the play more carefully in his own language he had discovered both its weaknesses as a play, and its ultra-Left tendency.' The other projects of `the firm' came also to nothing. The second play was abandoned owing to our demoralised condition, though it was nearly finished. The Hungarian Press wouldn't touch my articles on Turkestan; though not directly political, they had an unmistakable pro-Soviet bias. All I managed to sell was a feature story about the harem of the Emir of Bokhara.

  Our funds were running out. In the end we churned out a couple of detective stories for pulp magazines, to pay for our rent. We wrote them, sitting back to back at two little tables in our favourite cafe, having previously parcelled out the chapters. Nemeth wrote in Hungarian, I in German, but as we were both bilingual this did not matter. It was quite fun while it lasted, yet we had to admit that for the second time--the first time was in Berlin--our literary partnership had ended in failure. Fortunately, I still had my ticket to Paris. Nemeth talked vaguely of joining me there later on. And so we parted, closer friends than ever.

  This last phrase may arouse some scepticism, for the failure of a joint enterprise usually leads to mutual recriminations or silent resentment. The fact is that Nemeth and I never quarrelled; to the end, our long friendship remained free from any tension, and any resentment of the other's short­comings. It was a singularly harmonious relationship and, for the irritable and quarrelsome character that I was, quite exceptional. The explanation is, I believe, that though we never talked about it, we were both well aware of the hidden springs and motives of our friendship. On the surface, it rested on the traditional attraction between diametrically opposed natures. I was active, efficient, full of nervous vitality; Nemeth was lazy, absent-minded, and completely helpless in practical matters. Twice I had revolutionised the dreamy trot of his existence: by getting him to Berlin, and by turning up in Budapest with the play. It was to happen yet a third time; but after each of these interludes he would quietly creep back to hibernate in the twilight of Juci's den. Like all his friends, I took it for granted that Nemeth was a kind of saintly sponger or sponging saint. Yet all this, as I have said, was on the surface. The real basis of our relationship was a tacit understanding that Nemeth was a noble failure and that I was a cheap success. This formula was not affected by the circumstance that I had ceased to be a success and had become a penniless exile. (I lost the typescript of Bar du Soled, together with other unpublished manuscripts, during in flight from France in 1940. In 1943, I wrote another version around the same basic idea and called it Twilight Bar. It had the same theatrical weaknesses as the original play, was produced in France, America and various other countries, and was nearly everywhere a flop.)

  My acquiescence in that role was partly due to my chronic inferiority complex, but mainly to the fact that I recognised Nemeth's superiority as a writer. I knew that Nemeth was an artist and that I was a journalist. I also knew that his approach to poetry and to music, his complete indifference to the vanities and trivia of existence, were on a plane different from mine. I knew that his lazy and absurd manner of frittering his life away somehow brought him closer to the essence of being than my furious entanglements in the webs of Maya. In Arrow in the Blue I have tried to describe the lasting split between the active and the contemplative sides of my character. The contemplative half had been dormant for a long time. In Nemeth it found its projection and incarnation. I had gone the way of the Commissar; I needed a Yogi as an alter-ego.

  I have often wondered since whether I had perhaps read more into Nemeth than the facts justified. By a series of hazards the text of the second play, which we had written together in Budapest, has survived. I re-read it, for the first time in twenty years, when I began writing this chapter. With mixed feelings I found my original notion confirmed. In the three existing acts of the play--the fourth was never completed--Nemeth had only written two or three scenes, leaving the rest of the donkey-work to me. But these scenes stand out like a group of live visitors in a museum of waxworks.

  I left for Paris in September, 1933, a short time after my twenty-eighth birthday. The escapist interlude had come to an end.

  XVL The Crusade Without Cross

  THE next three years, from the autumn of I933 to the autumn of I936, were for me years of extreme poverty and hectic political activity. They were the years of the great anti-Fascist crusade which, with drums and fanfares, advanced from defeat to defeat.

  First came Hitler's defiant withdrawal from the League of Nations. Then the defeat of the Socialist insurrection in Austria. Then Hitler's victory in the Saar. Then Hitler's repudiation of the Treaty of Versailles. Then the Anglo­German naval pact, granting Hitler a larger fleet than France's. Then Hitler's march into the Rhineland. Then Hitler's march into Austria. In between Mussolini's conquest of Abyssinia, and the Japanese conquest of Manchuria, and Franco's victory in Spain. And so on, to Munich and Prague, and to the war which we
had foreseen and had been unable to prevent.

  For seven years, the statesmen and the people of the West failed to see the obvious, failed to understand the threat to their civilisation, and to eliminate it while it could still be done at a relatively small price. This seven-years'­blindness which benighted the West from 1932 to 1939 was one of the remarkable phenomena of History. As if acting under a curse, the various nations and political parties, Right and Left, however opposed their policies were in other respects, seemed to collaborate to bring about Europe's destruction. The attitude of the Conservative forces ranged from inane misconceptions of the nature of Hitler's regime to passive sympathy and active complicity. The various Socialist and Labour parties indulged in rhetorical denunciations of the Fascist danger, and did everything in their power to prevent their countries from arming against it. The Communists exploited the anti-Fascist movement for their own purposes and wound it up with a staggering betrayal. It looked as if they were all partners in a secret European suicide pact.

  The only mitigating circumstance the West could plead was of a psychological nature. The West was mentally incapable of believing in the gory tales about Nazi atrocities and in their fantastic plans for world conquest which sounded like something straight out of science fiction. When Hitler was beaten, the same psychological block made its appearance with regard to the Stalinite regime and its plans for conquest; the pattern repeated itself with a perverse and uncanny precision. But then, it required exceptional powers of imagination for people brought up in the traditions of the West to accept and visualise the revival of mediaeval torture and antique state-slavery. It required an even greater intellectual effort to believe in the reality of the National­Socialist and Communist schemes to enforce the millennium by terror, conspiracy and conquest. This incredulity towards the incredible was the most generalised phenomenon in the Seven Years' Night.

  In 1933 and during the next two or three years, the only people with an intimate understanding of what went on in the young Third Reich were a few thousand refugees. In the torture chambers of Columbia House in Berlin, in the newly established concentration camps of Oranienburg and Sachsenhausen, of Dachau and Buchenwald, hundreds of comrades personally known to us were being tortured, murdered, and driven to suicide. For us, the actual deeds and future intentions of this new regime were not a matter of speculation and academic controversy, as they were for the politicians of the West, but an intimate, harrowing reality. This condemned us to the always unpopular, shrill-voiced part of Cassandras. Nobody likes people who run about the streets yelling `Get ready, get ready, the day of wrath is at hand'. Least of all when they yell in a foreign accent and, by their strident denunciations of the alleged aggressive intentions of Berlin or Moscow (as the case may be), increase international tension and suspicion. They are quite obviously fanatics, or hysterics, or persecution maniacs.

  It is doubly painful to write about these seven years at a time when the mood of Western Europe is bent on repeating the same suicidal errors. The lesson of the 'thirties: that an aggressive, expansive power with a messianic belief in its own mission will expand as long as a power-vacuum exists; that improvement of social conditions, however desirable in itself, is no deterrent and no protection against attack; that the price of survival is the sacrifice of a distressingly large part of the national income over a distressingly long period; and that appeasement, however seductive and plausible its arguments sound, is not a substitute for military strength but an invitation to war-­all this should be only too fresh in Europe's memory; yet an astonishing number of British, French, Italian politicians, not to mention millions of common men, seem determined to commit the same errors and relive the same tragedy again.

  `From the danger of war one cannot protect oneself by weapons, one can achieve this only by moving forward into a new world of law.... Armaments cannot be fought by piling up armaments; that would be like getting Beelzebub to drive out the devil.'

  This sounds like a speech by Mr. Aneurin Bevan in 1953. In fact it is a speech by Mr. Clement Attlee, delivered on March 11, 1935 in the House of Commons, in protest against the Government's proposal for a modest increase in rearmament. When he suggested `disbanding the national armies' as a brilliant idea to save peace, he was interrupted by shouts: `Tell that to Hitler.' He brushed the interruption aside, as Mr. Bevan and his French counterparts brush similar irrelevances aside eighteen years later. In the same year, 1935, a Peace Ballot on the sweetly reasonable lines that disarmament should start at home, obtained eleven million signatures in England--more than half of the total electorate.

  Even the slogans the aggressor employed to hypnotise the victim were the same. The leitmotif was Peace, Peace, Peace. Hitler, like Stalin, sponsored Peace Congresses and Peace Appeals, and never tired of denouncing `the conspiracy of the armament manufacturers' and `the warmongers of Wall Street.' Anti-Nazi refugees who talked about the German concentration camps and Hitler's plans for world-conquest were regarded as fanatics and fomenters of hatred, as their successors, the East-European refugees and ex­Communists, are regarded today. If only the Cassandras and Jeremiahs would shut up, we could have peace for our lifetime! After each act of aggression and defiance, Hitler made a gesture of peace which was as eagerly taken at face value as similar gestures by Stalin and Malenkov were later on; and people who warned against such gullibility were accused of deliberately sabotaging the chances of peaceful settlement.

  `It is to be hoped that this speech will be taken everywhere as a sincere and well-considered utterance.... There are no greater enemies to the peace of Europe than those who would spread an atmosphere of suspicion. . . .' Is this The New Statesman and Nation commenting on a speech by Malenkov, or The Times commenting on a speech by Hitler? It happens to be the latter-­on May 21, 1935; but the pattern and the arguments are the same. One of the outstanding features of neurotic behaviour is the patient's inability to learn from his past experiences. Behind the shallow truism that `history repeats itself' hide the unexplored forces which lure men into repeating their own tragic errors.

  The scapegoat of the deluded was at that time not the United States, but the 'militarism' of France. When Hitler marched into the Rhineland and the French Prime Minister came to London for consultations, he had the same type of welcome that American generals have nowadays in Europe, for it was obvious to all enlightened, peace-loving men that the real danger to peace came not from Hitler but from the aggressive French. `The St. Vitus' dance of Francophobia and Germanophiha which had seized the Left and the humanitarians in England since the conclusion of the Versailles peace reached its chmax.'1 It was the same unconscious desire to evade reality which we observe today; it is so much easier to stand up in a manly way to `French militarism' in I936, and to `American Imperialism' in 1953, than to the Nazi and Soviet Empires.

  There were also the so-called `detached political experts' who disliked the Nazi regime but warned against exaggerating its dangers by pointing out that the Germans only wanted to annex German territories such as the Rhineland and the Saar. The Germans, they went on, were far too intelligent to swallow a foreign body such as Czechoslovakia, which they could never digest. Since 1945, the detached experts have used precisely the same arguments regarding Russia's intentions in Central and Western Europe. The result of all this was that by 1936 the Belgians, Rumanians, Yugoslavs, etc., had become 'neutralists' and the system of collective security disintegrated, as the European Defence Community is disintegrating today. The neurotic who each time commits the same type of error and each time hopes to get away with it is not stupid; he is just ill. And the twentieth-century European has become a political neurotic.

  To watch this folly; to wait for the catastrophe which one is unable to prevent; to read, as late as October 1938, that `it is this happy conviction of faith in Herr Hitler's sincerity and honesty which offers the key to European peace2 --filled me with a choking, impotent despair. I tried to describe it some years later, during the war, in an article 'On Dis
believing Atrocities'.3 It is a highly emotional piece, but it reflects the mood: (1 Leopold Schwarzschild: World in Trance (London, 1943). Schwarzschild's book contains the :nost concise summary of the Seven Years' Blindness.

  2 Evening Standard, 31•10•1938­9 The New York Times Sunday Magazine, January, 1944.)

  There is a dream which keeps coming back to me at almost regular intervals; it is dark, and I am being murdered in some kind of thicket or'jungle; there is a busy road at no more than ten yards distance; I scream for help but nobody hears me, the Crowd walks past laughing and chattering.

  I know that many people share, with individual variations, the same type of dream. I believe it to be an archetype in the Jungian sense: an expression of the irrdividual's ultimate loneliness when faced with death and cosmic violence; and of his inability to communicate the unique horror of his experience. I further believe that it is the root of the ineffectiveness of our atrocity-propaganda.

  For, after all, you are the crowd who walk past on the road, laughing; and there are only a few of us, escaped victims and eye-witnesses of the things which happen in the jungle who, haunted by our memories, go on screaming at you on the wireless, in newspapers and at public meetings. Now and then we succeed in reaching your ear for a minute. I know it each time it happens by a certain dumb wonder on yourfaces, a faint glassy stare entering your eye; and I tell myself. Now you have got them, now hold them, hold them, so that they will remain awake. But it only lasts a minute. You shake yourselves like puppies who have got their fur wet; then you walk on, protected by the dream-barrier which stifles all sound.

  I have been lecturing now jor three years to the troops, and their attitude is the same. They don't believe in concentration camps, they don't believe in the starved children of Greece, in the shot hostages of France, in the mass graves of Poland; they have never heard of Lidice, Treblinka or Belsen. You can convince them for an hour, then they shake themselves, their mental self-defence begins to work, and in a week the shrug of incredulity has returned, like a reflex temporarily weakened by a shock.