The Invisible Writing

by Les Weil

  Extracts from Ullrich's Diary

  April 6, 1934

  At times I feel literally stifled and choked by loneliness. For instance, I am sitting alone in a room, reading a book. The others are playing in the garden. I know it, but I don't hear them. Suddenly I stop reading. The air around me begins to vibrate. The whole room trembles with loneliness. It is saturated with loneliness like a chemical solution. My nerves swell with it like capillary tubes. It penetrates into my stomach and heart like an acid. It pumps tears into my eyes like an acrid fisme. There is a horror in it which cannot be described.

  Then I want to join the others. I want to warm myse f against their bodies, I want to belong to them, I rub myself against them like a sheep pressing against the flock. I want to feel that I am not the only person alive in this world.

  But 1 have hardly been two minutes with them, and it is allgone. They bore me. They are primitive. They are stranger to me than Hottentots. They don't understand me. I can't talk to them. I don't have the feeling that they are really alive. Some are like marionettes on wires, others like figures in a waxworks. I feel even lonelier in the garden than I did in my room. I hurry back to my room, and the whole thing starts afresh.

  April 10

  Today I am sixteen; and it is exactly sixteen days since I was expelled from the Collective. Talk of numerology ...

  As a birthdaygift they have generously offered to take me back into the Collcctive. The Bonze transmitted the messaqe in the presence of the whole horde. I refused, of course. It is clear to me that the offer was inspired from `above'. Loft alone, they would never have made it. I don't care a darnn. I told them in the presence c f the whole precious Collective that I don't care a damn.

  April 11

  It drives me mad that my mother should after all have been proved right: I don't belong to them. No profession of faith in Marx and the proletariat can alter the fact. I believe in Marx and I believe in the proletariat, but I can't get accustomed to the smell of Charlie's socks. I am a frustrated Communist. I am frustrated by a pair of socks--the real ones of Sweatfoot Charlie, and the intellectual sweatfeet of Piet and Florian.

  April 12

  However-if I feel so repelled by them, and they by me, then why does it hurt so much that I don't belong to them? There is a contradiction here.

  The same evening

  Whether I feel repelled or not, is beside the point. The point is that I luwe no other choice. For outside this Home I have nowhere to go. If I can't adjust myself to my present circumstances, the only solution is to hang myself. The contradiction is solved.

  April 13

  `The spiritually inclined is always lonely,' my father used to say. Rot. My father, the Herr Professor, was a mummy already in his lifetime. My mother is the vestal virgin of a mummy.

  No, I don't belong to the sunken world of my parents. But I don't belong to the others either. Least of all do I belong to myself. That mysterious personage is unknown at this address.

  April 14

  I know that these little Proles can't help being what they are--dumb, callous, primitive, narrow in mind, coarse in spirit. Perhaps I still labour under that contempt for the `children of the streets' which my parents inculcated into me. But however hard and honestly I try, I can't find the proper tone with them. For it is of course up to me, the privileged and superior party, to find the proper tone. There is an estrangement, impossible to bridge. Before one of them answers my question, I already know the repartee, and the re-repartee, and everything else he is going to say. I do not despise them since I have become a Marxist--but they bore me stiff. They think so slowly that I can hear the grinding of the wheels in their heads, as in an old grand­father clock. In mine, they go tick-tack as in a chronometer.

  April 16

  I have been reading a beautiful and terrible book by Ernst Glaeser. It has a dialogue between an old professor and a young boy:

  `I have come to you,' says the young boy, `to ask you on which side I stand in this great upheaval, and where I belong.'

  `Well, well,' says the professor, `I believe that you don't belong anywhere.'

  Then he goes on: 'The patrician class is dying. We are dying with it. A new class, whose education and philosophy of life is different from ours, has taken the wheel of History in its hands. In twenty years from now it will be alone on the bridge.'

  Then the young boy talks some nonsense, and the professor goes on:

  `There is a collective destiny, and to revolt against it doesn't lead anywhere. History is not interested in the wishes of individuals. We are individuals. We are condemned to remain individuals. We can never get into the stream.'

  `But if we take the plunge and dive into the stream?' asks the boy.

  `Then it will deposit us at the next bend like phosphorescent driftwood,' says the professor. `History has spat us out. We stand between the front lines. We are civilised but useless. If you remain honest, you will spend your life in depressing independence between the fronts. You will see everything and understand everything, you will survive new wars and new revolutions, but you will be alone, without friends, without a roof or a country, without echo and achievement ...'

  When I read this I felt as if I had been clubbed on the head. It sounded like one of those dreadful curses out of the Old Testament. I am still shaking as I write these lines.

  No, no, this shall not be my destiny. I don't want to be a piece of phosphorescent driftwood left at the muddy bend. I want to be carried by the stream, in the stream, with the stream, part of the stream. I shall do everything to belong again. I shall go to Canossa. I shall deny myself as I have denied my parents.

  I shall write this very day a demand to be accepted again into the Collective.

  Here the first part of Ullrich's diary ends. He tries with all his might to make up to the Collective, and in particular to Piet, the son of the martyred stoker from Hamburg, who symbolises in Ullrich's eyes the honest, strong and simple-minded revolutionary working class. But his advances to Piet strike a false, patronising note; instead of a reconciliation there is a row, ending in a fight; Ullrich is knocked out and seriously injured. Piet is reprimanded, and the next day vanishes from the Home without trace. Piet is almost grown-up anyway, he felt out of place among the children and decided to fend for himself. Ullrich is devoured by remorse, and a more unhappy adolescent than ever:

  May 16

  I shall soon start dreaming of Piet as Brutus dreamt of Caesar after murdering him. What nonsense. I didn't do anything to him. I wanted to be reconciled with him, and he offended and bullied me. But they all behave as f it was my fault that he has left. They hardly talk to me now. The worst of it is that I am unable to rid myself (f this unjustified sense ofguilt. They avoid me as f I were a leper. This is hardly an exaggeration. Yet I am not a leper, merely a phosphorescent piece of driftwood left on the bend. The river steadily follows its course, and I sit on the bank and throw the pebbles of my idle thoughts at it.

  May 17

  It really can't go on like this. I ought to leave. But Mother hasn't got the money to take me out, and I wouldn't go back to her anyway. There is no return to where I came from. And there is no road leading where I want to go.

  May 18

  I have read Ehrenburg's new novel. It is a variation on the same theme as his Kolya, too, can go neither forward nor back; he loves Tolstoy and is bored by the Five Year Plan, he is interested in individual people and not in the timetable of man­kind. Needless to say he commits suicide in the end, a Werther-case of unrequited love for the proletariat. Ach! the silly, maudlin Werther. The sound of his name is enough to make me sea-sick. To die is a great thing; to remain ridiculous even in death is unthinkable. The Romans used to tie comic masks over the faces of their prisoners before they let the beasts loose on them in the arena; they died not as martyrs but as clowns. Their torturers robbed them of the last shred of their humanity: the dignity nf death.

  The same evening.

  The unimaqinnble thing
about death is that there is no sequel to extinguish the pain. The moment of death freezes into an eternal present because it can never dissolve into memory. L'eimui sans fin de la inert.

  At this point Ullrich's diary ends, and he tries to kill himself by cutting his wrist in a rather amateurish way. After he has been bandaged, a new member of the staff, Dr. Moll, the only person in the Home who has a liking for Ullrich, sits down at his bedside:

  `I became so frightened as it grew slowly darker around me,' Ullrich said in a feeble voice, which sounded more childish than usual. `I suppose I didn't mean it very seriously from the beginning.'

  'Well, dying needs a lot of patience,' said Moll.

  `I feel so terribly ashamed,' said Ullrich, `and yet I feel happier than I have for a long time.'

  `Don't overestimate that,' said Moll, `the hangover will come afterwards.' `Why are you always so disagreeable to me?' asked Ullrich.

  `I am disagreeable by nature,' said Moll, `only the others don't notice it so much.' `Do you also believe,' said Ullrich, `that History has spat us out and that we can't get away frorn our past?'

  We can,' said Moll, `but it is rather dffiicult.'

  `I can't,' said Ullrich. `I tried but I haven't succeeded.' `You were too arrogant,' said Moll.

  `Only at the beginning,' said Ullrich. 'Afterwards I went to Canossa and was filled with humility.'

  `That's only another form of arrogance,' said Moll, `and the most unappetising one.

  ,`But how should I set about it?' asked Ullrich.

  `It is rather difficult,' said Moll, `and only a few succeed. It is a kind of hara-kiri. You must saw off the branch on which you sit, and tear out the roots that have nourished you, for their sap is poisoned with the thoughts and images and feelings of a world that is doomed to perish; and you must be able to grow roots in the new earth.'

  After a while Ullrich said:

  `One can agree to all this and nevertheless feel sad for that which must perish­even if one hates it. For it contains so much that is part of oneself that one cannot imagine living without it.'

  `The world of the burghers must perish because it denies and mocks the ideals that have constituted it,' said Moll.

  'Everything you say is so harsh and hopeless,' said Ullrich, already half asleep, in his new, childish voice. `It is like a burden that one must carry. All I want is to live like others, and nothing else.'

  `That is a very ambitious wish,' said Moll. `We all only want to live like the others, and look at the complications to which that leads. Good night, my boy.'

  XXIL . . . And Up Into the Hayloft

  I WAS saved by an unexpected offer from the Party. It was the offer of a full-time job, unpaid, but one very much to my liking, and in which I became entirely absorbed during the next six or' nine months. The idea was to create a centre for the study of the social structure and inner workings of Fascist regimes, more scholarly in its approach than the mass-propaganda methods of the Muenzenberg Trust permitted. The idea came from my old Party friend and Party-guru, Peter Maros.' He had just returned from a, prolonged stay in Yugoslavia to Paris, and it was he who asked me to work in the new set-up. It was called INFA--Institut pour 1'Etude du Fascisme.

  Peter could not have turned up at a more appropriate moment. I was immensely grateful to him for coming to my rescue by providing me with work and a new purpose. On his arrival he had telephoned me and suggested that we meet at the Cafe Weber in the Rue Royale.'I was taken aback by his suggesting such a resplendent place, and proposed a cheaper locality.

  'Never mind,' said Peter, `I'll pay for the coffee. It will do you good to come out of your hole.' So he must have already heard that I was in a bad way.

  It did me good indeed. I had not been near the Boulevards for weeks, and to save the Metro fare I walked all the way from Belleville to the Rue Royale. During my first stay in Paris as a correspondent of Ullsteins, whose offices were in that neighbourhood, Weber's had been my favourite cafe. Now it appeared to me as a place in a foreign country, on the distant shores of Luxury. It was in the carly summer, the terrace of Weber's was basking in the sun, and the crowd looked as if a swarm of chattering starlings had settled down at the tables, momentarily assuming human shape. So life seemed to be going on, in spite of the Caucus's condemnation of my first novel. Peter was sunburnt, but otherwise quite his former lean, thin-lipped, ascetic-looking self. He gave me his firm and meaningful handshake and, as was his habit, stared at me for a few seconds, without speaking, through his slightly goggly eyes which radiated brotherly love and the stern determination of an important Comrade on the Cultural Front. Then, with his usual enthusiasm and convincingness, he explained to me the project.

  The Institut pour 1'Ettede du Fascisme was to be an enterprise off the beaten track of Party life. The Party was to run it, in the person of Peter, but the Institute was to finance itself, and appear to the public as one of the enterprises of the Popular Front. Various French personalities had been approached and had promised moral support and financial contributions-among them Professor Langevin and the Joliot-Curies, Andre Malraux, Bertrand de Jouvenel, and so on. The French Trade Unions were also interested. But, at the beginning, money was of course slow in coming in. So, for the time being, the Institut was staffed with unpaid voluntary workers. Metro fares were, however, being provided, and also a soup at midday, for the Institute was housed in a flat which included a kitchen. That, said Peter,was all that INFA could offer--except for the truly fraternal atmosphere of a small band of people devoted to an important mission on the cultural front. Would I be prepared, under these conditions, to take over the Institute's Department of Publications? Of course I would--it sounded wonderful. Then I asked who the Department consisted of. `For the time being,' said Peter, `of yourself.'

  I started work the next day. The Institute's premises were a four-roomed flat at 25 Rue Buffon, near the Jardin des Plantes. The staff consisted of Peter; three German women called Rita, Ellen and Lys, who did the clipping, filing and research work; a boy called Rene, half French, half Russian, who did the translating; a middle-aged man called Max, who was the `business manager'; and a cleaning woman who also did the cooking of the midday soup. All were Party members, with the exception of Rene and Ellen, who were merely sympathisers. Strange as it may seem, in spite of months of intimate collaboration, I never knew the surnames and background of most of them, nor even where they lived.

  They were an extremely pleasant and devoted bunch of people, and on the whole INFA was the happiest and most decent set-up that I had come across in my whole Party career. It had something of the spirit of the early days of the movement--that was perhaps the reason why, after a year, the Party bureaucracy deliberately wrecked it. We all worked on the average ten hours a day, without pay, and some of us with the midday soup as our main meal. (It was always a thick, puree-like, German soup of lentils, peas or potatoes, occasionally with bits of delicious sausage swimming in it.) There were no jealousies or intrigues until after six months the Party appointed a kind of Commissar, who, within a short time, destroyed the whole enterprise.

  Peter's basic idea in launching INFA had been to find out what Fascism really was. Obviously slogans like `barbarism', `return to the Middle Ages', `gangster rule', and so forth, did not provide an explanation. Nor did the so­called `theoreticians' of our Party--though of course we were careful not to indulge in any explicit criticism. The Party regarded Fascism simply as `the overt form of the dictatorship of the finance-capitalists', as distinct from the `camouflaged form of the same dictatorship in the so-called democratic countries'. Thus the only difference between, say, England and Nazi Germany was in the `external forms' in which the dictatorship of the capitalist ruling class expressed itself, whereas the 'class-content' of both regimes was the same. Also, in Party parlance, everybody who was not on our side was a Fascist. The Socialists were 'Social-Fascists', the Catholics were 'Clerical­Fascists,' the Trotskyists were 'Trotsky-Fascists', and so on. Hence at 25 Rue Buffon, INFA
resolved to find out what Fascism really was. Our programme was to start on a modest and scholarly basis. The `publication department' was to issue a bi-monthly bulletin (of which three numbers were actually published), and a series of pamphlets and books for a specialised audience (several were actually published by writers for whom we provided the research-material). It would also provide progressive cultural organisations and Trade Unions with `ideological weapons'--that is, documentary material, and furnish, on request, similiar material to the French Press.

  At the beginning all went well. After a month--the first INFA-Bulletin appeared in print. An Italian comrade wrote for it an excellently documented article on `Conditions in the Ricefields in the Po Valley', which I still gratefully remember because all the rest of the bulletin I had to write myself. I also wrote, under INFA'S imprint, a series of six somewhat optimistic articles on `The Underground Resistance Movement in Germany' for the Paris evening paper L'Intransigearat. In spite of my desperate need of money, I had been unable to bring myself to write for the French bourgeois Press; now, as I wrote in the name of INFA, my inhibitions vanished, and I regained my journalistic skill. We all got on extremely well with each other. Peter, in spite of his streak of messianic phoneyness, was an endearing character and very pleasant company. I never felt that he was my boss, and to the end we worked in complete harmony. Rene was a quiet, efficient, somewhat colourlcss young man of agreeable manners. Lys was a middle­aged woman who had a charming little daughter. I think she was the widow or divorced wife of a Party bigwig, and that she scraped along on a small Party pension; she never mentioned her private circumstances. Rita was a tall and beautiful girl who lived with a Russian comrade presumed to be working for the apparat, and had accordingly even more reason to be discreet. Ellen, the youngest--she was not yet a member of the Party--was the amusing and high-spirited daughter of a Jewish banker from Berlin; she liked to emphasise her exotically piquant features by a barbaric make-up, and looked rather like a Nefertete from the Kurfilerstendamm. Her parents were in despair about her `getting mixed up in politics' and had cut her allowance, so that she was nearly as poor as the rest of us, which she regarded as a huge joke. She had a golden cigarette case, but never a cigarette in it. She was the only one who, free from the priggish inhibitions of the really poor, always tried to borrow a franc or two from the others. The three women got on miraculously well. Then there was also Greta, the char-cook, a working­class woman from Berlin's red suburbia, who mothered us all.