The Invisible Writing

by Les Weil

  Another headache was the treatment of the crowd-scenes-of the amorphous, inarticulate, semi-barbarian horde which is the real hero of the book, milling down the highways of Italy, sacking its cities, defeating the disciplined legions of Rome. Most novelists avoid mass-scenes like the plague, even where the story calls for them; I was amused in re-reading War and Peace how adroitly Tolstoi got round them. The older generation of Soviet writers made a point of manipulating huge crowds in motion, but only two of them--Sherafimovich and Sholokhov--seem to have succeeded. Other examples that come to the mind are Stephen Crane in The Red Badqe of Courage, Werfel in The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, and Flaubert (at his worst) in Salammbo. I was influenced by none of these, but by a novel by Alfred Doblin, The Three Steps of Wang Lun. It is the story of a mythical mass-rising in China, written in a semi-expressionistic style, and half forgotten today even in Doblin's native Germany. Wang Lun was my literary bible, and when I tried to visualise the Roman slave horde, Dobhn's crowd of ragged Chinese beggars appeared before my eyes. Other `influences' were Thomas Mann, the early Feuchtwanger, and Thornton Wilder's The Woman of Andros. Their different styles popped up in different parts of the book--or so I thought, guiltily, for most readers failed to recognise the models. The novel was first published in England in 1939, in an excellent translation by Edith Simon. Then the war broke out, the German manuscript was lost during my flight from France, and the German edition which appeared after the war had to be re-translated from the English translation. A similar misfortune befell the next novel, Darkness at Noon.

  The Gladiators is the first novel in a trilogy concerned with the ethics of revolution, the problem of Ends and Means. In the second, Darkness at Noon, the problem is restated in a contemporary setting; in the third, Arrival and Departure, it is shifted to the psychological level. Spartacus is a victim of the `law of detours', which compels the leader on the road to Utopia to be `ruthless for the sake of pity'. He is `doomed always to do that which is most repugnant to him, to become a slaughterer in order to abolish slaughtering, to whip people with knouts so that they may learn not to let themselves be whipped, to strip himself of every scruple in the name of a higher scrupulousness, and to challenge the hatred of mankind because of his love for it--an abstract and geometrical love'. But Spartacus shrinks from taking the last step--the purge by crucifixion of the dissident Celts and the establishment of a ruthless tyranny--and through this refusal he dooms his revolution to defeat. In Darkness at Noon, the Bolshevik Commissar Rubashov goes the opposite way and follows the `law of detours' to the end--only to discover that `reason alone was a defective compass which led one such a winding, twisted course that the goal finally disappeared in the mist'; and that he had become guilty of `having placed the idea of mankind above the idea of man'.

  XXV. Ten Little Nigger Boys

  I HAD just finished writing the first chapter of The Gladiators--it was actually Chapter Five, for I had started writing it in the middle--when the Party ordered me on a new mission. I was to leave immediately for the Saar, to edit a comic weekly paper.

  The fate of the Saar territory with its important coal mines and 600,000 German-speaking inhabitants had been left undecided after the first World War (as it was to be left after the second). Clemenceau had originally claimed it for France, but the decision had been postponed for a period of fifteen years, at the end of which it was to be settled by a plebiscite. In the meantime, the territory was administered by the League of Nations.

  The date of the plebiscite had been fixed for January 13, 1935. Its outcome would be of symbolic importance, far surpassing the issue of the Saar itself, for here an ethnically German, but politically free population would be passing judgement on Hitler's regime after two years. The various politica parties in the Saarland had formed themselves into two camps: the `German Front', comprising all the pro-Nazi groups, and the `People's Front', comprising Socialists, Communists and Liberals. I arrived in Saarbrucken in the middle of December, when the propaganda campaign was at its peak. The comic weekly that I was to edit was to serve the interests of the campaign.

  The referendum gave the Saarlanders the choice between three solutions. They could either vote for the return of the Saar to Germany, or for its incorporation into France, or for the maintenance of the status quo--that is, for remaining under the League of Nations' administration. Since the population of the Saar is German, it was obvious that the French alternative had no chance whatsoever. Accordingly, the Socialists (and the Liberals, who numbered few) had been campaigning from the outset for the status quo solution. Whereupon, in the earlier phase of the campaign, the Communists had proclaimed that continuation of the status quo would indirectly benefit French interests, had denounced the Socialists as `agents of French imperialism and launched their own slogan for `a Red Saar in Soviet Germany' ('Eine Rote Saar in Soviet-Deutschland').

  `But, comrade,' complained the distressed Saar miners at Party headquarters, `there is no Soviet Germany as yet, so what do we stand for??

  'We stand, comrade, for a Red Saar in Soviet Germany.'

  `But, comrade, there is no Soviet Germany, so do you mean we should vote for Hitler?'

  `The Central Committee did not say you should vote for Hitler. It said you should vote for a Red Saar in Soviet Germany.'

  `But, comrade, until there is a Soviet Germany, would it not be best to vote for the status quo?'

  `By voting for the status quo, comrade, you would align yourself with the Social-Fascist agents of French imperialism.'

  `In this case, comrade, would you please tell us who the bleeding hell we are to vote for?

  'You are putting the question in a mechanistic manner, comrade. As I told you before, the only correct revolutionary policy is to fight for a Red Saar in Soviet Germany.'

  There had been hundreds of discussions on these lines every day.

  In 1953, when the Communist Parties in France, Italy, etc., play an important part on the European scene, it is difficult to believe such grotesque episodes from the earlier history of the Comintern. One must bear in mind, however, that before the inception of the `People's Front' policy in 1935, the European Communist Parties were relatively small, did not enter into coalition governments, and did not participate in the political life of their nations; they were, by and large, revolutionary sects rather than political parties, with a peculiar sectarian jargon and an incredibly twisted way of reasoning. Today, the jargon and the twists are still present, but since the Soviet sphere now embraces one-third of the earth, the peculiarities of Communist language and behaviour are treated with the same kind of embarrassed indulgence as the eccentricities of the rich and the foibles of the powerful. Churchill likes his glass of brandy and Stalin occasionally shoots his friends, for such are the habits of the great. But in 1934, when Russia was weak and frightened, and the Communist Parties in Europe no more than small, beaten, troublesome minorities, the paranoid tendencies inherent in the movement were manifested in stark and bewildering forms. The `Red Saar in Soviet Germany' slogan was only one example among many. The so­called 'Heckert Resolution' of 1933 was another. It proclaimed that Hitler had not defeated the German working class, which had merely carried out a `strategic retreat', and this was the gospel of the German Party for two years.

  Moreover, it declared, Hitler's victory was a good thing because it had 'cured the masses from the influence of the Socialists, and thus accelerated the speed of Germany's march towards the proletarian revolution'.

  The Comintern's attitude to the Saar reflected the struggle between the old, radical line and the 'People's-Front' line. The idiotic slogan of the `Red Saar' had obviously been designed by the German Central Committee for the purpose of evading the issue until that struggle was settled. It was on a par with Jan's nebulous talk about `widening fronts' and `deepening contacts'.

  When the decision was made in Moscow, the line changed overnight. Before June 1934, everybody who proposed to vote for the status quo stood branded as an agent of French
imperialism; after June 1934, every Communist's duty was to vote for the status quo.

  The change of line was made known to the faithful in an article in INPRECORR, the Communist International's official weekly, on June 8, 1934, under the headline `Leninist Tactics in the Saar Question' by W. Mueller. It seems worth quoting it, as a typical document of the period:

  For the Communists the Saar problem, as a class question, has always been a problem of the German proletarian revolution. With the proletarian revolution in Germany they want at the same time, by means of the revolutionary mass struggle in the Saar, to achieve the social and national emancipation of the Saarland. There Communists were and are even more today of the opinion that the prospects of the proletarian revolution in Germany have become more favourable as a result of the revolutionary upsurge which is taking place. Therefore they were, and are still today, of the opinion that the propaganda and preparation of the masses for the fight for Soviet power also in the Saar district must be continued and strengthened....

  None of the three alternatives on which the vote will be taken--namely attachment to France, return to Germany, or the maintenance of the status quo, corresponds to the Socialist aims. Because the Social-Democrats are splitting the working class and preventing their unity on a revolutionary basis, the Communists are still today unable to lead the decisive political class battle in the Saar and to solve the German problem in the sense of their final Socialist aim.

  The interests of the workers and the toiling population demand a decision which shall provide the greatest possibility for the development and exten­sion of the anti-Fascist class struggle. Under the present conditions, and in spite of the hostility of the Communists to the capitalist regime, this possi­bility is offered by the status quo. . . . For the time being the Comniunists decide for the status quo in order the better and more rapidly to clcvclup the revolutionary forces. But their support of the status quo will cease thc niunicnt the proletariat of Germany takes up the victorious fight for power.

  To appreciate this sample it should be noted that in the plebiscite the Nazis obtained over ninety per cent. of the votes, the anti-Nazis eight per cent., of which probably less than three per cent. were Communist votes. It should also be remembered that it was written at a time when Hitler's power was in rapid ascendancy, and when the Communist opposition in Germany had been completely and finally crushed. Against this background, the first paragraph of the quotation with its bombast about a`mass struggle' and `revolutionary upsurge' indicates the scluzophrenic estrangement from reality which was so typical of the Comintern of the period--and is still typical of the climate behind the Iron Curtain where the `closed system' is not only mentally but physically cut off from the rest of the world.

  Immediately after the referendum, the Communist paper on the Saar (I think it was called Volkstimme) came out with its last issue. The headline across the front page read: 'HITLER'S DEFEAT ON THE SAAR'. The article explained that dialectically the Nazis had suffered a defeat because they had only obtained ninety per cent. of the votes instead of the ninety-eight per cent. which they had boasted they would get. By the time the paper reached the news stands, its staff had fled to France. The editor was Ernst Reinhardt, our commissar in the Writers' Caucus.

  My own comic weekly was dialectically a lasting achievement, though mechanistically it only lived for one issue. When that came out, the Party stopped the paper and sent ine back to Paris.

  It was called Die Saar-Ente (Fiat, = Duck = Canard; after the famous French satirical -weekly Le Canard Enchaine) It appeared a month before the plebiscite, and had four pages, with drawings by `Fritta' and texts by myself. The only feature in it that I still remember was an illustrated poem in the manner of the "Ten Little Nigger Boys'. The ten little nigger boys were Nazi Brown Shirts who were liquidated, one after another, in the Strasser­Purge, in the Roehm-Purge, because of a non-Aryan grandmother, and so on; until the last surviving little nigger boy joined the anti-Fascist front.

  It never occurred to me that the story could also be applied, mutatis mutandis, to the Communist Party--and with even greater justification in view of the almost clockwork regularity of its periodic purges. But it must have occurred to others. Perhaps the subconscious mind, that sinister humorist who likes tripping up one's tongue and sticking out its own, had played one of its tricks on me--as it did once later, on a terrible occasion, when in a speech before a Party audience it made me say: `... And so, comrades, we shall continue the struggle against the Stalinite tyranny-I mean, of course, against the Hitlerite tyranny.' Luckily, the Party doesn't believe in Freud.

  Why exactly the Party stopped the Saar-Ente I have never learnt. Perhaps because of `The Ten Little Nigger Boys'; perhaps because intra muros Corninterni humour was always regarded as a dangerous virus; or perhaps simply because the paper was bad--though in the latter case it could have been continued under another editor. However that may be, I was merely told that the Party lacked the funds for the continuation of the experiment, so would I kindly pack up and go back to Paris.

  Yet another of my Party missions had ended in failure. But by that time I had become too hard-boiled to mind, and was only too glad to go back to the first century B.C.

  On my return to Paris, I wrote a report on the Saar for Schwarzschild's Das Neue Tagebuch. I have unearthed that article in a public library. It appeared a week before the referendum, and ended with what I thought to be a very cautious forecast of its result. One-third of the Saar, I said, was solidly anti-Nazi, another third undecided; thus the vote against Hitler would be somewhere between thirty and sixty per cent. I believed, of course, in this estimate, otherwise I would not have published it. Before I entered the Communist Party I had been a highly paid and fairly successful political reporter; the catastrophic deterioration of political acumen, which this story indicates, is an example of the effects of living inside the `closed system'. It is typical of the reports which the Kremlin's political intelligence agents send home regarding trends of public opinion in the West.

  During my fortnight's stay in Saarbrucken I met again, and for the last time, Paul Dietrich, my jovial Comintern chief of Moscow days. When I left, we shook hands casually; then he returned to.Russia and two years later joined the grey host of the millions who vanished behind the Arctic Circle.

  I also ran into some other people whom I knew by sight from Moscow or Berlin without knowing who they were, or in what confidential job they were engaged. Among them was `Edgar', my first contact in the apparat, who was to meet his fate even before Dietrich. They all looked a little greyer, a little more drawn in the face, a little more anonymous, than the last time. Among them was also a young woman with a curiously steady gaze, whom I had not met before, and whom the others called `Martha'. We spent a long and pleasant evening in a cafe, in the company of Dietrich and others, without my knowing that she was Babette Muenzenberg's sister, the wife of the fabulous Heinz Neumann who had engineered the Communist revolt in Canton in 1929. The next time I met `Martha', alias Greta Neumann Buber, was sixteen years later. By that time Heinz Neumann had been shot in Russia, and Greta had survived three years in a Russian, and another five years in a German forced labour camp.

  In short, the Saar was a kind of international rendezvous of the `Ten Little Nigger Boys', the pioneers of the European Communist movement. It was the last but one rendezvous of its kind--the last one was to take place two years later in Spain.

  In the background of that rendezvous was an event whose importance I did not understand at the time. But the Dietrichs and Edgars and Marthas had understood it at once, and this was the reason why they looked so haggard and reserved. On December 1, a member of the Russian Politburo, the Party boss of Leningrad, Sergei Kirov, had been assassinated by a man named Nicolaiev. His shots ushered in a new epoch in the history of Russia, and of the international Communist movement. On December 6, 12 and 18, the Soviet authorities laconically reported the execution without trial of a hundred and four persons. A special de
cree, issued on the day after the murder, deprived the accused of the right of defence and appeal, and ordered that death sentences were to be carried out immediately after pronouncement. Zinoviev, first President of the Comintern, Kamenev, President of the Moscow Soviet, and many other leaders of the October Revolution were arrested and later executed. The Terror had begun.

  It had begun with a revolver shot, as if at a prearranged signal--as the Terror in Germany had begun with the Reichstag Fire. The man who fired them, Nicolaiev, was a young neurotic, a hapless tool as van der Lubbe had been; and the whole bloody sequence of events followed the pattern set by the Nazis--as it was so often to be the case in years to come. (Strangely enough, most writers on the subject seem to have ignored the obvious parallel between the Reichstag fire and the Kirov murder. Conclusive evidence of the fact that the murder was a deliberate 'provocation', instigated by the Kremlin, has been available since 1938: cf. the official report of the trial of Bukharin, Rykov, Yagoda and accomplices, Moscow, March 193 8; and, for a comprehensive analysis of the evidence, H. Dewar, Assassins at Large, London, 1951)

  XXVI. Marking Time

  THE terror did not reach its peak at once; nor did it grow in a steady crescendo. Immediately after the murder of Kirov, tens of thousands of Russians were deported to Siberia--they were collectively referred to in Soviet parlance as 'Kirov assassins'. Then an apparent lull set in. While the liquidation of the old guard of the Revolution was being prepared behind the scenes, Stalin's propaganda played up the new Soviet Constitution, `the most democratic in the world.' The principal authors of the new Constitution were Bukharin and Radek. A year later, they appeared as the principal accused in the third Moscow trial.