by Les Weil
'You are all blockheads. The burglars are all honest people to start with. But in pursuance of the capitalist system, and the economic crisis, they had to ;o on the dole. Thus they became burglars in pursuance of satisfying their economic needs and to care for their innocent wives and children. Thus all burglars, and also all ordinary thieves are a manifestation of capitalism.'
`. .. and in pursuance of the profit-system,' added the Bonze.
'That is correct,' said Piet the Great.
Little Louise asked timidly: 'But when capitalism is finished, will burglars be finished?'
`Burglars will be finished, because in Pursuance of the Revolution and of .Socialisrn everybody will have enough to cat and thus nobody will have to be a ,burglar,' explained Piet.
`But if he wants to?' asked Saucy Gustav.
`He doesn't want to, you idiot!'
`Why doesn't he want to? Maybe he wants to, nevertheless.'
`Why should he want to? If, for instance, you get two pounds of chocochite with every meal, would you want to break into the cupboard and filch Igelchera's pnrce1?' Gustav did some hard thinking. 'No--in that case I wouldn't want to,' he said on a tone ofsurprise.
`So there you are.'
Everybody admired Piet. Then Little Louise asked:
`Do theyget two pounds ofchocolate with every meal in Russia?'
Everybody laughed.
`Silence,' shouted the Bonze. `Anybody who laughs will be expelled.'
'Oi declare,' said Saucy Gustav, `we should now pass on the burglar a sentence of not guilty in pursuance that he is a victim of the capitalist crisis and system.' `Hear, hear.'
`Silence,' said the Bonze. `I agree that we should pass sentence of not guilty. But before we pass sentence, we must know on whom we pass sentence.'
`That's correct,' said Gustav. `We must establish the identity of the criminal.'
`Just like a detective story,' whispered Little Louise.
`Silence,' said the Bonze. `This is not a detective story, but a Collective Court. I now ask everybody present, on their word of proletarian honour, whether he did it.'
Silence.
`Word of honour, it wasn't me,' said Gustav.
The Bonze: `I haven't asked you.'
Gustav: `Why not?'
The Bonze: `Well, who was it?'
Silence.
The Bonze: `He who did it should speak out without fear, as he is going to be found not guilty anyway.'
Silence.
The Bonze: `Then I declare: nobody did it. Then it must have been one among the small fry.'
Gustav: 'Oi declare, if it was one of the small fry, we needn't declare him not guilty!
` Why? Isn't he too a victim of the economic crisis?' protested the Goose; and she added as an afterthought: 'In America they pour chocolate into the Ocean in pursuance of profits, and we poor refugee children have to go a-burgling for our chocolate.'
`That's correct,' said Piet the Great.
`It isn't chocolate the Americans pour into the Ocean, it's coffee. Mocca. From Brazil.'
`That makes no difference,' said Piet.
The Bonze: `Whether chocolate or co ee is all the same; our duty is to find the culprit. That is our collective duty. that's all.'
Piet the Great: `I propose that we appoint a commission.'
`A Criminal Investigating Commission,' whispered Little Louise. General consent.
They proceeded to vote. Florian and Piet were nominated by an overwhelming majority. The session was closed.
XXI. Down to Rock-Bottom
IN spite of its documentary realism and Socialist uplift, the novel was condemned by the Party as a reflection of bourgeois, individualistic tendencies. This had disastrous consequences for me; and as the episode is typical of what Communist writers have to endure, I shall describe it in detail.
The Party was represented in this case by the Communist caucus within the `Association of German Writers in Exile'. The latter was a kind of cultural centre for the German emigres in Paris. It held weekly public meetings where German and French writers read from their works, or lectured on some literary subject; this was followed by public discussion. Officially, the Association was politically neutral except for its opposition to the Nazi regime; in fact it was run by the Caucus, a group of Communist writers who determined the policy of the Association, decided whom to invite as speakers, and steered the public discussions into the proper channels. As usual in such `front'1 organisations,l the chairman (a second-rate litterateur by name of Rudolf Leonhard) was not a member of the Party, but drew a salary and took his orders from it. 1(Communist-controlled organisations, camouflaged by a neutral facade or front.)
The Caucus met privately once a week. Only one of its members was a writer of international standing: Anna Seghers, author of The Fishermen of St. Barbara and The Seventh Cross, whom I admired, and still admire, both as a novelist and as an attractive and charming woman, but with whom I never found any personal contact. Next in importance came Egon Erwin Kisch ('Egonek' for short), one of the most popular characters in the international crowd of Communist intellectuals, who during the years of exile was a kind of father-figure for me.
Kisch came from Prague, where he had made his reputation as a young crime-reporter and writer of short stories about thieves and prostitutrs. His first book, Der Rasetide Reporter, became a classic of German journalisiu, and was followed by a series of travel-books on China, America, Australia and Soviet Asia, all written from the Communist point of view, but sparkling with wit and colour. He was then around fifty, short and fat around the midriff, but with his dark, humorous face and charming manner still very attractive to women. He had a penchant for young girls, whom he held spellbound by his accomplished art of telling anecdotes, some of which would last for half an hour. He was also an amateur magician, and performed thought-reading tricks with his wife--faithful, complacent, horse-teethed Giesl, who looked like a school-mistress and worked for the G.P.U.
In his attitude to politics, Kisch was a complete cynic. He always avoided getting involved in argument with the stock phrase `I don't think; Stalin thinks for me', delivered with a straight face; this usually caused a tense silence, followed by a hasty change of subject. He was also the inventor of a parlour-game, a new variation of the kind in which you throw dice and push a little horse along a race-track; only, it was not a race between horses, but between Party officials: instead of falling into a ditch or crashing into a fence, the participants were purged for Trotskyist leanings, expelled for Bukharinist deviations, and so on. How he got away with all this is difficult to explain: partly, I suppose, because he was one of those irrepressible personalities to whom everything is forgiven; partly, because his popularity was an asset to the German Party among intellectuals and sympathisers; and also, perhaps, because Egonek's heresies served as a screen for Giesl's work for the apparat.
Hidden behind the mask of the humorous cynic was a tired, disenchanted man, who had no illusious about the Party, but even fewer about the world outside the Party. At any rate, he felt too old to retrace his steps and start afresh. In one of my novels, an elderly Communist remarks: `Once you have invested all your capital in a firm, you don't withdraw it--not at our age, not after thirty years. It would be indecent, I tell you; positively indecent ...' Kisch never said this to me in as many words; but when I wrote that line, I heard it spoken in his voice. He died of heart-failure, in his native Prague, under the new Communist regime, a short time before his compatriot and intimate friend, Otto Katz, was hanged.
There were two other novelists in the Caucus; Gustav Regler and Bodo Uhse. Though I respected Regler, particularly for the courageous and distinguished part he played as a Commissar of the International Brigades in Spain, we were never on intimate terms; with Uhse I got on well, on the basis of a somewhat superficial camaraderie. Becher, Willy Bredel and other German writers living in Moscow participated in our meetings when they visited Paris; Manes Sperber, who at that time was not yet in Paris, join
ed our ranks at a later date. The remaining members of the Caucus (among them Alfred Kantorovicz and Max Schroeder, both former members of my old Party cell in Berlin) had never written a book; they were small Party-bureaucrats whose claim to be writers was based on an occasional article in the Party papers. They were a humourless, fanatical and unpleasant lot, but as they were more important in the Party hierarchy than the real writers, they ran the show.
Only three members of the Caucus have left the Party since: Regler, Sperber and myself. Kisch is dead; the others live in the Eastern Zone of Germany.
When I had finished the novel, I was asked by the Association of German Writers in Exile to read extracts from it at one of their weekly public meetings. The reading was fairly successful, but the next day the Caucus met in conclave and came down on it like a ton of bricks.
The attack was led by one Otto Abusch, alias Ernst Reinhardt, former editor of the Rote Fahne, the official Party paper in Berlin. He was the delegate of the Central Committee to the Caucus, with the task of acting as a political watchdog over us unreliable intellectuals, and hence in a position of virtually absolute authority. In a dry, dispassionate voice Reinhardt declared that I had not succeeded in ridding myself of the heritage of my bourgeois past; that instead of Socialist realism, I employed the methods of bourgeois individual psychology; that I represented the turmoils of puberty as a general phenomenon instead of correctly pointing out that such crises only occur in adolescents brought up in a decadent bourgeois environment, but are unknown among the healthy youth of the Soviet Union; finally, that the book displayed a frivolous, critical attitude towards an institution maintained by the solidarity of the international working-class and its anti-Fascist allies, and controlled by responsible comrades of the Party.
This set the key for the debate. Two or three of the Party-hacks followed suit. I retorted in a sharp and irritated tone, and thereby put myself even more in the wrong. None of the writers dared to contradict openly the delegate of the Central Committee. Only Kisch came to my defence by pleading tolerance on the grounds of my lack of ideological training. The discussion was wound up by the chairman of the Caucus-- young man of twenty named Hans Dammert who was not a writer either, but who had shown great courage under Nazi torture. He declared crisply that the deviations and distortions of the novel were of so serious a nature that they called for measures which exceeded the competence of the Writers' Caucus, and that `other organs of the Party' would accordingly be informed.
The disciplinary action at which Dammert had darkly hinted did not materialise, but there was not much comfort in that. A first novel is as nerveracking an experience as the first courtship of a clumsy and sensitive fool. I had set the usual high hopes on it, and had awaited judgment with trembling incertitude. I had sent the manuscript to a German publishing firm in Holland, who had politely rejected it. That had, of course, been a blow; but the condemnation of the Writers' Caucus had the effect of a sledge-hammer coming down on my head. It was not the dashing of my hopes to see the novel published that hurt most, but the cold spite of the bureaucrats in the Caucus, and the indifference of the real writers who had been present.
I no longer had any friends outside the Party. It had become my family, my nest, my spiritual home. Inside it, one might quarrel, grumble, feel happy or unhappy; but to leave the nest, however cramping and smelly it seemed sometimes, had become unthinkable. All `closed systems' create for those who live inside a progressive estrangement from the rest of the world. I disliked a number of people in the Party but they were my kin. I liked a number of people outside the Party, but I no longer had a common language with them.
Had my novel been condemned by some literary clique, I could have left it after a comforting exchange of abuse. But in this case no such escape was possible. The Caucus met in session once a week, but privately we saw each other all the time, and its members were my only social circle. How long would it take for me to live this disgrace down? Would I ever live it down, or was I always going to remain an outsider, and treated, at best, with tolerant condcscension?
My discouragcment was verging on despair. This was the second book which the Party had rejected. Red Days was at least going to be published, in a mutilated version, for the benefit of German-speaking Ukrainians. With the novel I did not even have that meagre consolation. It was fated to wilt away in a drawer, together with the manuscripts of the two plays. A drawer full of unpublished manuscripts has about the same efhect as a decaying corpse under the floorboards. Particularly, if one is an exiled writer hving in a cheap hotelroom that smells of discouragement anyway. For the first time I gave myself up to a prolonged period of self-pity.
The hotel room was on the Boulevard de Belleville, where I had moved since my return from Maisons Lafitte. Belleville, with the adjoining Menilmontant, had once been famed as the quartier des apaches, and had since become a dreary working-class suburb. The sixty pounds that I had earned with the Encyclopaedia had been spent to the last penny. For a while I lived on the charity of a friendly couple. They had a self-contained little flat in the same hotel, and were both social welfare workers, employed in a medical centre in the slums. As they were busy all day, I scrubbed their kitchen floor, did the cooking and washing-up, and in exchange shared their meals. Sometimes they shamefacedly gave me five francs for a packet of cigarette tobacco or a cake of kitchen soap. The name of this kindly couple was Grunwald; they helped me a second time during my flight from France in 1940. He died a few years ago; Hanna Grunwald is now a welfare worker in Harlem.
I was again at a dead end, as I had been eight years earlier, when I had nearly starved in Palestine. But now I was twenty-nine, and I felt rather like the once promising, no-longer-so-young young man of whom it was said that `he had a great future behind him'. Living on charity, a writer of rejected books and plays, a refugee, and an outsider among my friends and comrades--my self-pity knew no bounds. It was, as I have said, the only prolonged period in my life when I abandoned myself to that vice. It only lasted a few weeks, but it was ghastly--ghastlier than prisons and concentration camps; for if under normal circumstances self-pity is an indulgence, in a crisis it becomes a powerful destructive agent. I did not leave my room for several days, and one night I stuck scotch tape on the draughty slits of the door and window, and opened the gas-tap. I had placed my bug-stained mattress next to it on the floor, but as I was settling down on it, a book crashed on my head from the wobbly shelf. It nearly broke my nose, so I got up, turned off the gas and tore off the tape. Of all one's failures, a failure in suicide is the most embarrassing to report. The book that fell on my head was the Second Brown Book, Dimitrov contra Goering, with the story of the Reichstag Trial. A more drastic pointer to the despicableness of my antics could hardly be imagined. I must either have kicked the shelf, or it was a case of the Dialectic producing a miracle.
In favour of the miracle theory I should mention that I repeatedly seem to have been saved by things falling on my head. The last time this happened was a few days before the fall of Paris, when I was hiding from the police. Adrienne Monnier, that admirable French woman of letters and friend of Briand, gave me shelter in her flat. I was exhausted, and lay down on a couch with a book that I had taken at random from her shelves. As I was lying on my back, holding the book over my head, a small, flattened object fell from between its pages on my forehead. It was a pressed, four-leafed clover which had been lying in that book for some years. Mademoiselle Monnier, who saw the clover fall on me, came over to the couch and kissed me between the eyes. `Now I know,' she said, `that you will come through safely.'
I told nobody about the stupid incident with the gas-tap, except, some time later, one person, Egonek. Kisch was always fond of grotesque anecdotes, and I told him the story in that vein. It must nevertheless have got round, for twelve years later, when I returned to Paris after the war, and became the target of a concentrated attack by the French C.P., several newspaper articles mentioned `the traitor Koestler's attempted
suicide in a Paris hotel room in the 'thirties' as an additional sinister streak in my character. What puzzles me is that they never came out with the Dr. Costler story which, by one way or another, must have come to the knowledge of the apparat. Perhaps the Party thought that it would rather endear me to the girl comrades.
This is a chapter of digressions which I have crossed out and reinstated again. My inability to stick to a straight narrative of that period reveals how painful its memory still is, and how strong the inhibitions are in approaching it. It was one of the most depressing periods in my life--depressing from several points of view: poverty, failure as a writer, isolation within the Party. On top of all this, the girl comrade with whom I lived at the time was going through a harrowing conflict of her own, and was unavailable just at the time when I was in desperate need of moral support.
There was one psychologically very curious aspect to this crisis: it followed almost exactly the story of the novel which was its cause. My conflict with the Writers' Caucus was a repetition of the conflict between `Ulkich the Opposition', the lonely adolescent intellectual, and the Children's Collective--even to the point of Ullrich's abortive attempt at suicide. It is usual for writers to transform lived experience into fiction; but it struck me as unusual and in fact uncanny, that I should have to relive as personal experience a fictitious situation that I had invented. The explanation of the mystery is, of course, that Ullrich was a character closely modelled on my own past; I had projected myself back into adolescence. The chapter from the novel which follows was written a few months before the events that I have just described, and which it foreshadows in the prophetic ways of the unconscious. My reason for inserting here what appears as yet another digression is that these extracts faithfully reflect a mood which I am unable to recapture today, twenty years after the event, when the faith and despair of my Communist days have gone dead on me.