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The Quiet Revolutionary

Margaret Dewar

The Quiet Revolutionary

Part Two:
Germany

* * *

Chapter 4
Communist Party

IT WAS the end of 1930. My boss Herr Herring had decided to close down the office; he had not been as successful with the sale of medical equipment as he had hoped. He regretted he had no contacts to recommend me for another job, unless I wanted to go to South America. Unemployment in Germany was rising and he thought it would not be easy for me to get another job. He also thought Germany was going to the dogs. If I wanted to make use of his South American connections, he would gladly help me, and recommend one or two families who might take me in.

He meant well, but it was out of the question. I had my teaching diploma in eurhythmics and my diploma in physiotherapy. By rights I should be starting to work on my own in that field. Instead, I accepted an offer from Erich Lange to work full-time at the Berlin district office of the International Workers’ Relief. The pay was small, the hours of work unlimited, the work – whatever came along. But it was the first time in my life that my interests and my work for a living coincided, and for the next two or more years I became completely involved in the organisation’s activity.

In addition to my daytime work I regularly attended the local branch meetings of both the Communist Party and the International Workers’ Relief. The membership was predominantly working-class. I had long since realised that my original offer to organise gym classes was totally out of place, so I sat back, absorbed the milieu, and began to study party literature, as well as basic books on Marxism, including Das Kapital – though I must confess, I never got beyond the first volume.

I became rather humble, greatly impressed by the members’ ability to get up at meetings and put involved questions to the speaker or make involved contributions to the discussions. I felt I would never be able to get up myself, knowing so little about the theoretical and practical aspects of the items on the agenda. I did not realise at that time how much waffle there was in all those discussions and how much muddle-headedness and inability to argue clearly and succinctly. True, I never properly mastered this art myself, but neither did I feel compelled to make a contribution just for the sake of saying something.

However I had to admit to myself that those German workers and their wives knew far more about current affairs and the problems of working life than I had ever imagined. I had to catch up on an enormous amount. It was probably only then that I began to read newspapers regularly, mostly the Communist press, which was very one-sided and rather crude. But for me it was probably the right thing to do. Regrettably, everybody else in the movement seemed to do the same, thus ignoring subtle shades of policy in the camp of ‘the class enemy’.

The head office of International Workers Relief was in the Friedrichstrasse, one of the busiest thoroughfares of Berlin, dividing the town from north to south and close to the working-class district of Neuköln. The Berlin district office was nearby. The founder and head of the organisation was Willy Münzenberg, a dynamic and exceptionally able person, Somebody once remarked that in different circumstances he could have become an equally successful business tycoon. As it was, he had joined the Communist Party in his youth and became founder and secretary of the Young Communist International. However, after a congress in Moscow he was demoted for some deviationist views. That was in 1921, the year the New Economic Policy was introduced and the USSR was engulfed in a famine which affected 25 million people, caused by both the devastation of the civil war and droughts in important grain-producing areas.

Münzenberg was known to be a brilliant organiser, so Lenin suggested he should raise help in Germany for the starving people in Russia. Münzenberg therefore set up the International Workers’ Relief. It was a great success. In later years he concentrated predominantly on Germany, helping striking workers, recruiting members and sympathisers both for the organisation itself and for the Communist Party, many from among intellectuals and artists. He used every means available. He published newspapers and an illustrated journal, organised mass rallies, films, festivals and entertainments with well-known left-wing artists.

When Hitler came to power Münzenberg escaped to France, where he continued his political activities, but was denounced by the German Communist Party as a renegade, since he had become critical of their policies. After the outbreak of war, the political refugees in France, Münzenberg among them, were rounded up by the police and escorted to camps in the region of France not yet occupied. But progress was slow and when it became clear that they might easily be overtaken by the German army a handful of refugees, including Münzenberg, broke away to make their own way south at a quicker pace. There all traces of Münzenberg vanished. Some time later a corpse was found in the woods with a wire around the neck. It was identified as that of Willy Münzenberg. There had been, among that small group, a person whom nobody knew or had seen before in the camp. Suspicion fell on the Communist Party, as in other similar cases of the violent death of so-called renegades and known Trotskyists.

I met both Willy Münzenberg and his wife, Babette Gross, at the head office, when I had to go there on business. Münzenberg was easy to get on with. Babette struck me as somewhat distant and aloof. She was a kind of business manager rather than directly involved in political work, as far as I knew.

I worked in the district office, not far away. It was usually teeming with people coming and going. The atmosphere was friendly and comradely, and hectic. But I was conscious that we were dealing with people and their needs, not with goods and profits, and for the first time I never objected to having to do the donkey work for senior colleagues. There were letters to be typed and sent out to the branches to direct their activities, speakers to be found for their meetings – often from among well-known intellectuals, among whom there were many sympathisers just as there were in England in the 1930s. Sometimes special campaigns and big rallies had to be organised throughout the district to recruit new members and collect money for various purposes. Or there were instructions to be typed for Lucie Peters, a comely middle-aged woman who was responsible for the social-welfare side, with special emphasis on women.

Erich Lange, the district organiser, was, like his boss Willy Münzenberg, a fount of ideas for new ways of organising rallies, finding speakers, attracting an audience and raising money. He was actively assisted by a variety of people who worked on a sort of freelance or part-time basis, if they had other jobs to make a living. There was a man called Katz who knew everyone and who always managed to find a hall to rent, a band to engage or some special performers. At big rallies and meetings we often had the composers Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler, with well-known singers to perform their famous agitprop songs. One of these was particularly popular – it likened the Social Democrats to radishes: red on the outside and white inside.

One of Erich Lange’s fruitful ideas was to issue stencilled educational courses, in Marxism and dialectical materialism, for the branches both in Berlin and the provincial district. Julius Hollos, a Hungarian journalist, was entrusted with the task of working out a syllabus and I was assigned as his assistant. And not just for such menial work as typing the stencils but for the actual work of drafting the separate courses. I, a Communist and Marxist of a year’s standing! However, we did it and the branches used our outlines and recommended reading lists. It was of course interesting and enlightening work for me, which I did mostly in my spare time at home.

Conveniently, Olya and I had recently taken over the flat of a friend of ours, whose newly-wed husband had been transferred to Frankfurt for six months. It was marvellous to be on our own and not in digs. There was just one drawback: the furniture was so new, conventionally middle-class and highly polished that we hardly dared sit on the chairs, use the dining table or sleep in those comfortable beds. But it was convenient for Hollos and me to spread our books and papers on the table, and for meals and informal occasions there was always the kitchen.

The move necessitated my transfer to a different branch of the International Workers Relief and I made friends with the branch chairman, Paul, who occasionally used to come round for a chat. He was unemployed at the time, like so many other members. I think he had been in the printing trade, though to me he looked more like a baker: flaccid and dimply, white and rather fat. But I remember him as a very unyielding chairman, a proper Communist Party member with rigid views. At that time I only sensed this in a vague way, perhaps because his physical softness and roundness did not seem to go with his unbending attitude. Yet his influence, or rather the influence of the movement in general, had become rather strong on me. I had absorbed, to the best of my ability, not only the political ideas of Marx, Engels and Lenin, but also the entire Communist ideology of that period. I began to preach it to my brother, but with such intensity that I nearly drove him into the opposite camp.

Andryusha had given up his job in Hamburg and had turned up in Berlin with a girlfriend. For a while we shared the flat with them. While he was looking around for work, she lazed around all day, never doing a thing, though Olya and I were working. My brother and I used to have endless discussions about politics, and most of the time he opposed everything I said – remnants perhaps of our childhood fights, though by then we used to get on well together. Then Paul intervened, and in a man-to-man discussion they thrashed things out. In the end my brother, too, joined the movement and became a member of the Communist Party.

Only Olya kept out of it. She was probably just not the type and she also found great satisfaction in her work as a hospital nurse. She had pleasant colleagues – and then Arnold, a German-Russian from the Volga region, also an emigré, appeared on the horizon and started to woo her assiduously. So she had no inclination to be active in any other field. She knew all my friends, she was always prepared to have them come to our house for meetings or just discussions, but never took part in them herself, except for absorbing, to a limited extent, some of my ideas. She was always very supportive and never opposed or objected to anything I did.

Some time during the winter of 1930–31 the International Workers Relief organised a two-week residential course somewhere out in the country to which I was sent with twenty-three other activists. A local member had placed a small house at our disposal, right in the wilderness, about three miles from a small town where the organisation had a branch. There was a small kitchen, two small bedrooms and a large living room, an outside lavatory and no washroom, only a loft to be reached from the outside by a step ladder. To this loft I used to repair every morning with a bucket of water for my ablutions, to the great amusement of all the others, who simply had a lick under the kitchen tap. There was only one other girl there, with whom I shared a pair of bunk beds, the other two being occupied by three or four men. The rest of the comrades, including the two lecturers, slept either in the second bedroom or on mattresses on the floor of the large room, which served as dining room and lecture room. But the more the merrier. It was warm inside, whilst outside the snow was piling up – enjoyable all the same on our daily walks and occasional trips to the town for shopping. Most of our food we had brought with us from Berlin, and a comrade from the local branch used to do the cooking.

One of our lecturers was Fritz Globig, a small live-wire who had had one arm amputated, and who tried hard to keep up with the young comrades, jumping over the chairs or tables. He was a rabid Communist, with whom I got into such a fierce argument that I nearly left the course and the movement, had it not been for the intervention of Peter Maslowski, the other lecturer. He was probably an equally Stalinist Communist, since he remained in East Germany after the war, and was still active there in the early 1960s. But he was also a person of great charm, cultured, obviously of middle-class origin and education, and a brilliant and convincing lecturer on dialectical materialism.

This subject appealed to me more than political economy, of which I was pretty ignorant. We had some seminars, and also had to write essays, at which I was quite good. I remember Peter saying that I might go some way in the movement and he would like to know how I would shape up in the years to come. But when it came to speaking – I just could not do it. I failed completely, and to my great chagrin the same Peter said that I would not be of much use to the movement if I could not speak.

Walter Friedrich, who was Erich Lange’s brother-in-law, was also on the course. He and his wife Liesel became two of my closest friends. Then still only in their early twenties, they were very active members of my branch and we often saw each other. Walter’s father had died in the war. His mother had brought up her two boys by taking in washing and working as a charwoman. His brother eventually became a policeman. Walter survived the hungry war years, including the winter of 1917–18 when the only thing to eat was swede, by going to bed as soon as he came home from school – no playing with other children in the courtyard or in the street; he simply did not have the physical strength. Yet he grew up a tall and good-looking man. He used to do some clerical work, but was already unemployed when I met him.

Liesel and Erich’s parents (their father was some sort of highly qualified worker) had been Communists almost since the foundation of the German Communist Party. Their other daughter, Friedel, became the wife of the well-known writer on dialectical materialism Kurt Sauerland and both later escaped to the USSR, where Kurt eventually perished in a camp or prison. Friedel returned to East Germany after the war, still as staunch a Stalinist as ever. So were Erich and his wife. Only Liesel and Walter became Trotskyists, soon after the collapse of all organised mass resistance to Hitler and his coming to power. After the war Liesel used to send food parcels to her parents in East Berlin, to help them survive. They accepted the parcels, at the same time accusing Liesel of being ‘an American agent’.

The residential course deepened my understanding of the class struggle, and strengthened my acceptance of Marxism as an analysis of the capitalist system – an analysis which is still valid today – and an outlook for a socialist future. For the first time I no longer felt my stay in Germany was only temporary. I had found an aim in life, and it was no longer all that important where I lived and worked. And I fervently hoped that I would remain true to my ideas and ideals. But I still could not speak in public! Despite this, I was occasionally delegated to speak at small branch meetings. When I complained to Erich Lange that I did not know what to say on the burning questions of the day, he simply replied: ‘Well, read today’s Rote Fahne (Red Flag) and you’ll find there everything you will need to know and to say.’ I found that rather unsatisfactory, as the branch members had no doubt already read the day’s issue themselves. I felt instinctively that rather more was required to be a speaker. But I tried my best from time to time.

In the late summer of 1931 the International Workers Relief organised an international conference to which delegates from other countries were invited. It was a really big affair with many well-known speakers, organised jointly by Willy Münzenberg and Erich Lange with their usual aplomb. They even invited Clara Zetkin. She was then 74 years old and very frail, but she did come, although she had to be supported by two women when she stood up to speak. Yet her short speech was inspiring. And I wished then, without in the least aspiring to be anywhere like Clara Zetkin in the movement, that I would be able to retain such vigour and idealism into my old age.

For the first time since the mid-1920s Soviet delegates came too, six in all, including two women. The conference was a great occasion and very successful. The Soviet delegates spoke no German and I was appointed their interpreter and guide. All six were highly placed officials in various trade unions. I became good friends with two of them: Katya was chairman or secretary of the Social Security and Health Service Workers’ Trade Union, and a member of the Supreme Soviet (the approximate equivalent of a Western parliament); Stepan was chairman of the Oil Workers’ Union. During the occasional private conversation he confessed that he was very interested in Trotsky’s writings and that he had managed to get one or two books in Berlin. He was reading them as fast as he could there and then. He also told me that such books were sometimes smuggled into the USSR in suitcases with false bottoms. It was an amazing confession, but it hardly registered with me then. I knew Trotsky’s name, but that was about all. We did not know much about his role in the party or his exile.

Katya invited me to Moscow. If I could pay my fare as far as the Soviet frontier, from then on everything would be free, she would see to that. She had been about the same age as me when the October Revolution broke out, working as a messenger girl in a factory. Shortly before the election for the National Assembly in October 1917, somebody pressed a stack of leaflets for distribu-tion into her hand in the street. It was an appeal to vote for ‘List No 5’ – the Bolsheviks. She read the leaflet, became interested in their slogan – ‘Bread and Peace’ – and became a Bolshevik herself. She joined the party, fought in the civil war, became the chairman of a revolutionary tribunal at the front and condemned more than one White-Russian prisoner to death. She confessed to me it was awful, but at that time there seemed no other way out than to be ruthless. After the war she trained to be an engineer. Later she switched to social security and health insurance and gradually worked her way up to the position she was in when she visited Berlin. She was a very efficient, matter-of-fact person, businesslike, yet pleasant and kind. In 1931 she was still an enthusiastic and convinced Communist, but in a soft moment she spoke of the ‘difficult road to socialism’, of the hard work to be done, of her occasional longing for the life of an ordinary citizen, of an ordinary woman.

Of the remaining delegates one was a rather old man, who had been active in the revolutionary movement long before the revolution; one was an up-and-coming young girl, and the other two I do not remember. They were proud of the achievements of the USSR, which was then in the third year of the first of Stalin’s Five-Year Plans, and hoped it would catch up with, even overtake, the economic successes of the United States of America.

The conference elected a fraternal delegation of about twenty people to visit the Soviet Union for the celebrations of the October Revolution. Most of the delegation were unemployed workers. By arrangement with Erich Lange, however, I accepted Katya’s invitation. As an employee of International Workers Relief, it would not have done for me to be one of the delegates, but two weeks’ holiday were due to me, and I could afford the fare to the frontier.

We set off in due course by train, with great expectations and enthusiasm, especially when we crossed the frontier and drove through the huge arch which welcomed visitors to the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. In Moscow the delegates were accommodated in a hotel in the centre of the town, while I stayed with Katya at her flat in the Dom Pravitelstva (The Government House), a huge block of flats just across the river Moskva, newly built for members of the Supreme Soviet and high-ranking officials. It had a special shop and a cinema, which in later years opened to the public. All entrances to the building were guarded by special janitors who questioned everybody about their business, and would not let any unauthorised person pass. Were they possibly members of the GPU, the dreaded state political administration?

For the rest of each day, meals, sightseeing and the like, I was attached to the official delegation. We visited factories, crèches, workers’ flats in new houses, and of course the Kremlin, the Tretyakov Art Gallery, the Lenin Mausoleum and above all the Red Square Parade on 7 November to celebrate the anniversary of the revolution (in 1917 there had still been a 13-day discrepancy between the Russian and European calendars). I remember how, as delegates from abroad, we jumped the enormous queue at the Lenin Mausoleum and were shown straight in by the military guard. And there was no murmur from the patient crowd in the queue. It was rather peculiar to see the body of Lenin lying there under a glass cover, looking like a wax figure, with a pinkish, slightly subdued light streaming from above. There was a hushed silence and a slow but steady movement of the crowd under the watchful eye and gentle prodding of the guard. I don’t remember having been deeply impressed or moved, but perhaps one did have a general feeling of awe and respect for Lenin as he once was.

We attended meetings, conveyed fraternal greetings to the Russian workers, we were fêted – the lot. And we never noticed the shortcomings, the difficulties and protests, behind the facade. I particularly remember the delight of one young German worker, Fritz Renner, an unemployed member of my own branch. He was like a child, full of delight for all he saw, and walked around Moscow with a perpetual expression of wonder on his face – wearing a red tie, which he must have bought in Berlin specially for the trip, the only man in Moscow to wear one as far as I could see.

Since we were quite a crowd when walking around, it was sometimes difficult to hear the explanations of the official interpreter, so I acted as an unofficial one to the small number of delegates I knew personally. Sometimes I also had to act as an intermediary between the delegates and the hotel administration to arrange a tour somewhere or tickets for something.

At meetings, too, I was sometimes asked to interpret for our group. On one occasion I was asked to address a large crowd of women workers and to convey to them greetings from German women workers, ostensibly as their representative. For greater effect, it was suggested that I spoke in German and my words were then translated into Russian, to the warm applause of the audience. I never quite saw the phoneyness of this at the time.

The delegation left Moscow after a week for some other town and I was given the option of going with them, or accompanying a Professor Goldschmidt to Kiev, Baku and Tiflis. I chose the latter and was not disappointed. Professor Goldschmidt, a well-known writer and publicist, was one of Germany’s ‘red’ intellectuals, a strong sympathiser with the Soviet Union. It was no doubt to the authorities’ advantage to arrange this special visit for him and his wife and to present the activities of the trade unions and other aspects of Soviet organisation in as favourable a light as possible. He was in his sixties then and quite a shrewd person, humorous and entertaining. His wife, rather younger, was less so; she was very middle-class, ostentatiously displaying their prosperity in her dress and make-up, and not particularly intelligent or interested. In one factory I was pulled aside by a few women who discreetly asked me whether Frau Goldschmidt was really also a communist, as make-up was then rather scorned among women in the USSR, and such dresses either did not exist or were not available to ordinary citizens.

Our young interpreter, named Vsevolod, who was no doubt an employee of the GPU, was pleasant and efficient in smoothing out any hitch on the journey. He taught me a couple of songs from popular Soviet films and from the Komsomol (the Communist Youth Organisation). And he cleverly tried to give plausible explanations for some of the obvious discrepancies between the theory and practice of Soviet life, which I for one lapped up only too readily.

We travelled in luxury in two compartments of an International Wagons-Lits carriage. Just as well, since the journey took two days and three nights. I shared a compartment with Frau Goldschmidt, while the other was occupied by the two men. Our first stop was Kiev, where we were supposed to visit a famous new tractor factory, but were unable to do so for some unexplained reason. Later I heard some talk about labour trouble at the plant. Instead we were taken to another factory where young Komsomol workers told us about their work. This involved a fair amount of overtime and weekend work, which they did only too willingly in order to fulfil the plan set for their factory. Much of this enthusiasm must have been quite genuine.

In Tiflis and Baku Professor Goldschmidt was primarily interested in interviewing trade union and local Soviet officials. It was very interesting for me and gave me a far better understanding of the functioning of the system – at least of how it functioned in theory – than all the sightseeing and being fêted in Moscow.

While in Moscow I had tried to contact Stepan, the other delegate I had made friends with in Berlin. I was told he was in Baku. That was even better from my point of view. I must have been given the address of his hotel and I sent him a telegram. He contacted me at our hotel and, although quite pleased to see me, was visibly disconcerted, whether by being openly contacted by a foreign communist or for some other reason, I did not know at the time. Nevertheless we met once or twice during my short stay in Baku and he explained to me – unofficially – that he had been sent to Baku by his trade union because of a fierce fire in the oilfields. Officially we were not told about it at all.

As well as the talks arranged for Professor Goldschmidt, we were taken sight-seeing to the new workers’ flats, but had to go through one of the old, narrow streets where the old dwellings still existed. One worker’s family seemed to be living in a storeroom or small warehouse. As we passed, we could see through the high wide open double door, which gave some light to the seemingly windowless interior. There were some dilapidated pieces of furniture and a couple of children playing near the entrance. When I remarked on it to our guide, he explained that new houses had not been erected fast enough to keep up with requirements. Even then, enthusiastic as I was, it seemed to me a somewhat lame excuse. We were also taken to the graves of the twenty-six commissars, who had been shot by the White-Russians in a mass execution during the civil war.

Baku was rather picturesque, with camels resting in the streets, but there were oil rigs on the horizon and a smell of oil in the air; an old town, hot and dusty. Tiflis was quite different. You could still feel the old elegance and lightness. The buildings in the main street were well maintained, with plenty of trees contrasting with the white houses, clean air and sun. A train took us up a mountain, from which we had a splendid view over the town. For me all this had an additional interest because of Rapho and what he had told me about his home town and country.

Professor Goldschmidt had the usual informative talks with officials. We were taken to a theatre to see a Georgian play and saw Stalin’s mother in one of the boxes – a little old woman, all in black. We were shown a beautiful ancient church and talked there to a Georgian priest or monk. And we were taken to Mzkhety, some distance from Tiflis, right in the mountains, where a hydro-electric installation was being built on the river bank. On the opposite bank was a tiny, ancient chapel, greatly revered by the orthodox Georgians, and nearby an enormous statue of Lenin, several times life-size, stretching his arm across the river and commanding that electricity be generated. ‘Socialism is Soviets plus electricity,’ he had said.

As well as collecting material for a serious study on certain aspects of the Soviet economy, Professor Goldschmidt observed the everyday life of the people, and later published a book with sketches of his impressions: some were plain descriptions of our experiences, some amusing, or satirical in a good-natured way. One such story was about Flushers and non-Flushers. This referred to the filthy state of the lavatories in our otherwise modern and clean hotels. Some of the visitors there from the Asian republics of the USSR had never confronted a flush toilet before. They did not know what the chain and the water cistern were for; they climbed upon the seat and used it in the way the French did (or do) in those old café toilets with just an opening in the floor.

In Moscow I went to visit our old Aunt Tori. She and her husband, a highly skilled engineer, now had an eleven-year-old son. They still lived in the same two-room flat, without a bathroom, in a wide street with pleasant two-storey timber houses, each built around a courtyard. Access to the first-floor flats of the inside wings were from galleries that ran all around the houses. The atmosphere was somewhat rural, but spacious and clean, and the tenants mostly skilled workers or craftsmen. But in 1931 Aunt Tori and her husband Ivan had to share their flat with another engineer and his wife, which meant each family had only one room and had to share the kitchen. They received me hospitably, dishing up tea and precious home-made jam, according to the Russian custom. The jam was incredibly sweet, but how could I refuse it? They also quite sincerely suggested that Olya, Andryusha and I should return to Moscow and bed down with them until we had found work and somewhere to live. This was, and probably still is, the spirit of the people, certainly between family and friends.

Ivan was a hard worker, and earned rather more than the average skilled worker because of his special qualifications and possibly for overtime and piecework. He was also a party member and quite content with life under Stalin. Not so his colleague and flat mate, another skilled engineer but rather older than Ivan. He was full of bitter complaints against the regime, and its shortages and shortcomings. This greatly surprised me, all the more as his five children all had university or technical college training, an opportunity he and they would hardly have had if they had grown up in Tsarist Russia. So I dismissed his complaints as the discontent of a disgruntled individual. But it is interesting that in 1931 a person was not afraid to be so outspokenly hostile in the presence of a workmate and a stranger, a foreigner at that, and I had not disguised the fact that I was a German communist.

In 1961 I tried to find out whether my aunt and her family were still alive. I found the street, but as to the house – my mind went blank. For thirty years I had remembered the number of the house and the flat, and now I did not know which was which or whether the numbers had changed. Some houses had been replaced by larger, stone-built ones, but one side of the street was the same. I went into several courtyards, looking up at the galleries. Nothing seemed to fit. In one there was an elderly man sawing logs. He looked up and asked rudely: ‘What do you want?’, to which I meekly replied that I was looking for a family with such and such a name, who had lived here thirty years ago. To which he equally brusquely replied: ‘Never heard of them’. And I made off quickly, unsure of what might follow. I have often wondered whether this lapse of memory was purely psychological, my wanting and yet being reluctant to find out what happened.

We returned to Moscow from the Caucasus in time for the grand parade, the climax of the delegation’s visit. From very early in the morning the centre of the town was cordoned off and all traffic had stopped. There were militia and army men everywhere. Only officials from factories, other large enterprises, government departments and individuals with special passes were admitted to Red Square. The International Workers Relief delegates had all been given passes and we planned to go to the square together. I had to make my way to their hotel from Katya’s flat across the river. I advanced with difficulty through the throng of people and the various checkpoints, where I invariably had to show my delegate’s pass. I was also invariably asked for additional explanations, which were not always readily accepted. Eventually I got wise to the game and simply waved my card, saying in broken Russian ‘Delegatsiya’, until I finally joined my comrades in the hotel. From there we were marched off to a front row in Red Square, just below the Kremlin Wall and quite near the Mausoleum, where we now had to stand and wait.

The whole square was empty, except for the invited guests lined up behind ropes, and militia and Red Army guards. The walls of the vast GUM multi-storey shopping centre were decorated with huge portraits of Marx, Lenin, Stalin and other Soviet leaders, with banners, inscriptions, exhortations, and the like; a very colourful, if somewhat crude, picture. Gradually our side of the Square began to fill with other foreign and Soviet delegations, all with their flags or banners. It was pretty cold, though the snow was not very deep, nor the frost too severe.

At last, when the clock on one of the towers of the Kremlin Wall was chiming ten, the huge gates opened and Stalin and his entourage drove out in big black cars. They got out and lined up on the wall above the Mausoleum, behind the balustrade: Stalin in the middle, flanked by the entire Politburo on one side and military dignatories on the other. The national anthem was played (I think it was at that time still the Internationale), then the parade started: first the armed forces – infantry, cavalry, tanks and heavy weapons; followed by contingents from factories and other large workplaces; other organisations followed, including the Komsomol, the young Pioneers and the sportsmen, all shouting salutes to those taking the parade; then came the foreign Communist delegations and those from other parts of the USSR. All with flags and banners flying, salutes and heads turned towards Stalin on the Mausoleum wall. There was solemn music, and the singing of old and new revolutionary songs. For four or five hours we shouted back and sang and applauded, and it was difficult to say which was greater, our enthusiasm or our exhaustion.

Then it was all over and everybody drifted back to their homes or hotels for refreshments and the evening celebrations, which included magnificent fireworks on the banks of the river Moskva. The Mosfilm Studio had shot a film of our delegation in the square, and I fervently wished for Vladimir to see it and recognise me. Then it was all over and we were getting ready to return to Berlin.

On the last day I went to the cinema at the Government House, where Katya lived, and saw a film about the life and work of young Komsomol members. I felt very sad and shed a few tears, realising that I had to go back to Germany, with its rising unemployment and tense political situation. I regretted that I had not responded to a further invitation from Katya to go on a short visit to Leningrad, but I felt I could not exceed my leave.

Back in Berlin, I could not refuse after this trip to speak here and there at branch meetings about life and work in the USSR. As I returned one night from out of town together with my co-speaker, a tall, handsome, impressive man known as the Red Pastor, he told me how surprised he was to see me at such a meeting in Germany! He had also been in Moscow, he told me, and seen me come into the hotel lobby one evening in a dark-grey, tightly belted coat, a black beret, and boots, with cheeks flushed and eyes sparkling from the cold outside. ‘Typical new Russian Woman’, he had thought, obviously as starry-eyed as the rest of us. He was quite a rare phenomenon in the German communist movement: a practising Lutheran pastor and at the same time an active – and popular – member and speaker for the Communist Party and the International Workers Relief.

Another amusing incident – though it did not seem all that amusing at the time – happened at a public meeting, attended by about 200 people. I had prepared my report very carefully and tried to keep strictly to my notes. Suddenly the lights fused and we were plunged into complete darkness. Luckily, before I could gather my wits and start to improvise (which might even have been better), the fuse was mended and I could continue. I don’t remember what sort of applause I got, but to my surprise and great satisfaction twenty people handed in membership applications after the meeting.

It was possibly on this occasion that there was no train back to Berlin after the meeting and I had to spend the night. I was kindly invited to stay at the house of the branch chairman, an unemployed comrade, and his wife. They were very hospitable and gave me supper. But I had to share their double bed with them! And the sheets on the bed looking as if they could well do with a change. Whatever the sleeping arrangements, there was no other way out and I could not have hurt their feelings.

It did not do me any harm to experience how some people had to live. I sometimes said to Erich Lange that I would really like to work in a factory for a while, to see what it was like. He did not think it a good idea, since the membership of both the International Workers Relief and of the party was predominantly working-class, while they had relatively few intellectuals or people with better than elementary school education.

In the spring of 1932 I left my job and went to work with DEROP AG, a Soviet oil company working under the mantle of a German company with a German director as figurehead. Known as the DEROP, its official name was the German company for the Distribution of Soviet Oil Products. In those days there were many companies, Soviet in all but name, to promote trade between the USSR and other countries.

For the first six months at the DEROP I worked in the personnel department, as assistant to the senior assistant to the Russian head of the department. In actual fact it was the senior assistant who ran the department. She was a German Communist, daughter of a dustman, very efficient in her job, very intelligent in general, and pleasant to work with. She also understood the work and personal problems of the German staff, and was upset if she had to give somebody notice. Our Russian boss was a somewhat bewildered man, unfamiliar with German labour laws, tax laws and so on, so he left everything to her.

We three got on well together and when times were slack had quite a few discussions on various subjects, including, I remember, children’s education. In those days before Hitler, and before the Moscow Trials, the atmosphere was not so tense and there was not quite so much suspicion on the part of the Russians as there was later. They both had young children and the two families occasionally spent Sunday together out in the country, using the Russian’s car and picnicking in the woods or by a lake. But they had very different views on children’s education. My German colleague greatly disapproved of the Russian’s ‘modern’ ideas of giving even a small child complete freedom. The Russian’s little daughter, for example, was allowed to eat whatever and whenever she wanted. If she ate too much that was her look-out and would teach her not to over-eat on chocolate or whatever. The children were also allowed to butt into the grown-ups’ conversation and tug at their parents’ sleeves until they got attention. My German colleague did not approve of that and brought up her two little boys in a stricter, more conventional, way.

The DEROP employed about half Russians and half Germans. The Russians were in all the leading positions and all what one might call confidential positions – book-keeping and drawing up balance sheets for example. There was a special department, equipped with the new Hollerith machines, which exclusively employed young Russian girls, specially trained to punch the holes into the cards which replaced the old ledgers. Obviously the system required great accuracy. No one except the girls and their elderly Russian boss was allowed into the department, except of course their Russian superiors. It was this that led to the trouble.

Sometimes there were slack periods and the Hollerith girls had little work – which would not do at all! What would the bosses say, if one of them strayed in and saw the girls idly sitting around? So the machine had to be kept going all the time. But what with? Well, there were always noughts that could be punched, and that, on the surface of it, could do no harm. But they could and they did! When the time came to draw up the annual balance sheets and prove the fulfilment of that year’s plan, the girls could not remember how many fictitious noughts had been punched, or where. All the book-keeping had gone haywire! And the bosses in Moscow were pressing for the figures! So a year’s work had to be done all over again.

With the best will in the world this was impossible. The old chief accountant was in despair, the chairman was frantic. Somehow or other he managed to get additional funds for temporary labour to draw up the accounts in the old-fashioned way, for which the DEROP tried to get fifty German book-keepers, practically overnight. The labour exchange was quite unable to provide so many, in spite of the high unemployment, and instead sent all sorts of unlikely people, including engineers and ballet dancers. The personnel department was certainly kept busy. Somehow a more or less suitable temporary staff was selected, the accounts disentangled and sent off to Moscow. Whether they proved satisfactory or not, none of us ever knew. But I seem to remember that the old chief accountant was recalled to Moscow and nobody ever mentioned him again.

Eventually the Russians decided that it was a waste of time my working in the personnel department, especially as I knew some Russian shorthand. This really counted for something. They had plenty of typists, but hardly any shorthand-typists, as the Russian shorthand system was difficult and took a long time to master. Letters were usually scribbled out by hand and then passed on for typing out. There was only one stenographer, Zinochka, a slender, overworked girl, working for the company chairman, primarily for confidential work, and that was all. So I was transferred to the secretariat, a purely Russian administrative department consisting of the chairman of DEROP, his personal assistant and secretary, Zinochka the stenographer, and me – mainly working as secretary to the boss’s personal assistant.

The chairman was relatively young, in his mid-thirties probably, lean, quick in movements and in grasping things, a live-wire who could assert himself when necessary. Because of his position and his manner almost everybody was in awe of him, though I think he was not a bad chap. He had a sharp, somewhat boyish face with a touch of humour to it, and he always wore a bow-tie and dressed in a slightly dandyish way. His personal assistant was older and extremely cautious, almost unsure, and sometimes irritatingly slow in taking a decision for himself. But he was quite unyielding when it came to carrying out the chairman’s orders. I got on quite well with him and he was very helpful when I was uncertain about something.

In fact I got on well with all the Russians I came in contact with. Working at the centre of the enterprise, I often had to go to see the Russian heads of other departments. There were two in particular who were very interested in what was happening in Germany and in the progress of the German Communist Party.

Whenever I had to see one of them and he was alone, I would be questioned about the party, the mood of the German workers, the Social Democrats, and so on. But as soon as another Russian entered the room, the conversation would abruptly switch over to business matters. I never questioned why.

One day Zinochka could not cope with her workload and the chairman asked me to type something for him. It was marked ‘confidential’, some purely business matter which did not mean anything to me. Yet the boss had, strictly speaking, no right to let me see it. But there are rules, and rules to be broken if need be. The fact was that the DEROP, like every Soviet institution or enterprise, had a confidential department, which no unauthorised person, either foreign or Russian, was allowed to enter. These departments handled classified material, which probably existed in many companies. The personnel had to be cleared and specially admitted to work of a confidential nature by higher authorities, including no doubt the GPU or, as it became, KGB. No doubt these departments kept an eye on the Soviet employees as well. I was now occasionally entrusted with these confidential reports or minutes of meetings. I was surprised, but tactful enough not to show it.

Later that year, 1932, when the presidential election campaign was taking place in the USA, the Russians were rather tense. The contest was between Roosevelt, for the Democrats, and Hoover, for the Republicans. The day the election results were announced, the chairman happened to be ill at home, but he rang early to give me some instructions. Then he asked eagerly: ‘What is the result of the elections?’ When I said ‘Roosevelt’ he was greatly relieved. He explained to me later how much more advantageous for Russia they expected Roosevelt’s presidency to be. He had good reason.

Earlier that year Olya and I had had to move again as our friend was returning to Berlin. Tired of lodgings, we decided to rent our own flat and found a very nice one somewhere between the predominantly working-class Wedding district and the more mixed district of Gesundbrunnen. It was a spacious and sunny flat on the fourth floor of a new block. There were two largish rooms and a very small one, a kitchen and bathroom, a covered balcony overlooking a large garden with green trees, and the use of space in the block’s loft and cellar, each of which could be locked.

We had no furniture and hardly any money to buy any. However, we managed to get a few things second-hand from one of our previous landladies, and with a couple of small occasional tables, a bookshelf in each room, and a few boxes covered with colourful materials, we each had a comfortable, pleasant room. The stoves in the spacious kitchen, where we had our meals, and in the two large rooms had to be heated with coal, which we stored in the cellar. It was marvellous to be in charge and not have to take special care with somebody else’s precious furniture. We were happy with what we had and did not want to acquire too many possessions. A young comrade, a working-class housewife, used to come in and clean for us once a week, as we were both working all day long. We felt free and independent.

In November 1932 there was the election for deputies to the Reichstag – the lower chamber of the German federal parliament, the upper chamber being the Bundesrat. To celebrate this independence from landladies, I decided to display a huge red banner with a communist slogan for the November Reichstag election. It stretched almost across the width of our two front rooms, proclaiming to the whole street (and the nearby police headquarters) the way I would vote. Olya did not protest (she never did) though it marked her too, of course, at a time when the political atmosphere was already tense.

At the DEROP I had made friends with a newcomer from Russia, a young woman about my age called Masha. She was burning with enthusiasm for the Soviet Union and communism in general, and was full of zest for life. She bubbled over with youth and health and interest for a lot of things apart from politics. One day she accepted my invitation to come home with me. It was quite a distance by underground and on the way she read out to me a letter she had received from her mother, and we talked very animatedly about this and that, in Russian of course. A man sitting opposite suddenly turned on us and rudely said we should stop jabbering in a foreign tongue, which nobody could understand, and were we discussing German politics? I exploded and told him to mind his own business, there was no law against speaking Russian. He piped down, but when we got out at our station he followed us, stopped us and showed his police badge. He took us to the stationmaster’s office. This was a blow, more so for Masha, as she was a Soviet citizen and could get into trouble. As for me, I had a small suitcase with me, full of International Workers Relief literature, and a party membership card in my handbag.

The stationmaster and the policeman looked through my belongings, fortunately without discovering the party card. Masha, stupidly, refused to reveal her identity and gave a false name. Then they rang the local police headquarters, which was quite near, to send somebody round to collect us. We were marched along our street, and looking up, I could see the light in my sister’s room, but could do nothing to let her know what had happened to us. At the police headquarters our names and other details were taken down and then we were made to sit and wait, for what we did not know. I decided it might be wiser to get rid of my party card and asked to go to the lavatory. There I carefully tore it up with all the monthly contribution stamps I had so proudly collected over two years. I flushed the lot down and that was that. Later I had visions of the police retrieving the bits and sticking them together again, but then decided they surely would not go to all that trouble for so little.

Eventually a police car arrived to take us both to the Alexanderplatz, the famous square with the vast Berlin police headquarters. There we had to go through the same questions, and Masha finally decided it was no good hiding her identity. She gave her name and asked for the Soviet consul or ambassador to be informed of her detention. Then we were taken to the women’s section and put into separate cells. It was a peculiar feeling to be searched and stripped of all your personal things, and then to be locked in behind a heavy door with only a spy hole as a link with the world outside. The cell was very small with a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, a bunk bed, a tiny table, a chair and a bucket with a lid. There must have been a small window, but I did not notice it – it was already dark outside.

I was worried that my sister might be worrying about me, but beyond that I was relatively calm. Perhaps I was already conditioned to the possibility of being arrested. Perhaps I even felt slightly romantic, caught in that situation, as nothing serious could have been held against either Masha or myself. I was also trying to steel myself with the thought that Rosa Luxemburg and many other revolutionaries had spent months and years in jail, so surely I could stand it for a little while until the matter was cleared up. I any case, it was no good speculating about it, better get some sleep – which I did.

In the morning I was given a piece of dark, coarse bread and a mug of so-called coffee. I wasn’t particularly hungry, but had some of both out of curiosity. At about ten o’clock we were taken down to a large office and then – much to my surprise – told that we could go, that our detention had been a regrettable mistake and there was no case against us. The official returned all our belongings, and all but apologised. So shortly before the election, tempers were getting frayed, he said, and there were people who feared spies or political infiltrators and therefore tended to act somewhat hastily. I thought then that the man in the underground must have been a Nazi sympathiser, or even a member. That was the end of the affair for me. For Masha the consequences were sadder: she was sent back to Russia and I never heard anything from or about her again.

The economic situation in Germany was not good. It had been deteriorating since the Wall Street stock exchange crash in October 1929. Unemployment had risen to six and a half million. This led to a political polarisation, with a staggering increase in the number of supporters of the Nazis – the National-Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei, or National Socialist German Workers’ Party. The election results of the major parties make it clear:

Between 1930 and 1932 the Nazis had almost doubled their vote. Even so, they had not yet reached the combined number of votes of the German Communist Party and the Social Democrats. If these two parties had stood together against Hitler, the future course of German and world history would have been very different. As it was, the Communist Party, following instructions from the Comintern, rather than uniting against the Nazis, turned against the Social Democrats.

The Comintern, (the Third or Communist International) had been formed in 1919 after the Russian Revolution. It replaced the Second International, which had been dominated by the German Social Democrats and in 1914 had supported war efforts – thus failing the working class of Europe. The Comintern, according to its manifesto, existed ‘to mobilise the forces of all genuinely revolutionary parties of the world working class and thereby facilitate and hasten the victory of the communist revolution throughout the world’. In fact, as the revolution was defeated and Stalin assumed greater power, it became a tool in his hand. The decisions of its Executive Committee, which met between congresses, were binding on all affiliated parties, and these were increasingly geared to the changing needs of the USSR as Stalin saw them. It too failed the working class.

By 1923 the revolutionary upheaval in Europe, and particularly in Germany, had come to an end. Both the capitalist countries and the USSR now turned towards building and stabilising industry. Stalin declared that the USSR was building ‘socialism in one country'. He was supported by the rapidly spreading party bureaucracy, which, isolated from the depleted working class, and rising above it, took over the state machine. The party became its political instrument. This process of ‘Stalinisation’ started in 1923 and lasted for five years. During that time Stalin turned his attention towards colonial struggles rather than to Europe, while at home the course was set for super-industrialisation. The first Five-Year Plan was introduced in 1928, based on the forced collectivisation of agriculture and the exploitation of the peasants; its aim was to ‘catch up and overtake the USA’.

Internationally Stalin and his supporters now swung sharply to the left, declaring that the ‘period of peaceful coexistence’ between capitalism and Communism was now at an end. A new period was on hand: one that would bring a sharpening of internal crises and international antagonisms. They decreed a policy of ‘class against class’ – the so-called ‘Third Period’.

A sharpening of the world economic crisis did indeed come in 1929, signalled by the Wall Street Crash in the USA. In Germany the crisis led to increasing political tension: though support for the Communist Party was growing, so too was that for the Nazi Party, as the election figures showed. Yet instead of calling for a united front between the Communist Party and the Social Democrats in order to defeat the Nazis, Stalin’s ultra-left policy brought an instruction from the Comintern that Social Democrats should be denounced as ‘social fascists’. Stalin called the Social Democratic Party the ‘twin-brother’ of fascism. Hitler, when he assumed power, threw these so-called ‘social fascists’ and Communists alike into the prisons and newly opened concentration camps by their thousands. Yet the Comintern declared that the German Communist Party was daily ‘strengthening its work’ and that Hitler’s victory, by destroying illusions about parliamentary democracy, was actually assisting the revolution.

Seven years passed between the sixth congress of the Comintern and its seventh – and last – in 1935. The Comintern became inactive and inert. But as Stalin destroyed the old Bolshevik Party in Russia, culminating in the Moscow Trials of the mid-1930s, so the Comintern politically destroyed the Communist parties abroad, and by the eve of the Second World War Stalin was trying to come to accomodation with Hitler.

It is not surprising that the majority of Communist Party members accepted uncritically the twists and turns in Comintern policy. They believed in a fair and just society and trusted their leaders to take them there, or at any rate to show them the way. The party leaders did not encourage criticism or independent thinking about these policies. There was even an instruction to refrain from delving into party policy, and to turn to oneself and one’s comrades for self-criticism, self-accusation and ‘vigilance’. In the 1920s there had been criticism and rejection of the party line by some of the German party leaders themselves: from the left by Ruth Fischer and Arkadi Maslow; from the right by Heinrich Brandler and August Thalheimer, who had set up the Kommunistische Partei Opposition, the Communist Party Opposition. They were all expelled. There had also been some dissenting voices in the early 1930s, in my own time, among the intellectual activists. After Hitler took power they went as refugees to the USSR, where they vanished without trace. The bulk of the membership, including myself, did not know any better and accepted the policy as it was passed down to us, Marx, Engels and Lenin notwithstanding.

In 1930, when I had joined the Communist Party, we had done a lot of propaganda work among the people in our area and especially among the Social Democrats – discussing issues such as unemployment and how to fight the Nazis. We knocked on the doors of the tenement houses with our literature on Sunday mornings, attended meetings in the evenings, and had discussions with Social Democrats on street comers. Sometimes on a Sunday we went out to nearby towns to sell our literature and explain our aims. On one memorable Sunday we went out on bicycles. I went on a borrowed man’s cycle, struggling through a wood over branches and roots, with no path to follow. I could just about sit on a bike and eventually I toppled over. My thigh showed a huge bruise in changing colours for several weeks. Every now and then I would spend a Sunday at home, huddled up on my couch, surrounded by papers, journals, pamphlets, books, trying to catch up on party literature, particularly the daily Rote Fahne and the journals Die Kommunistische Internationale and Inprekor, which covered foreign affairs. I also studied basic Marxist theory. Stalin was then not yet much of a writer, and Trotsky was taboo, though on occasion we argued passionately and arrogantly against his views, never having read a word by him ourselves.

Occasionally we organised small, local, demonstrations in our district, which the Social Democrats may have joined in. I remember one, probably connected with demands on behalf of women, because Liesel Friedrich and I were leading it with perhaps two hundred women and men following. Suddenly police appeared with their batons drawn and began to charge. What were Liesel and I to do? I was scared and could feel the demonstration behind us disintegrating, the people dispersing on to the pavement or into doorways. But Liesel and I were leading the demonstration and could not simply run away at the first provocation. So we marched on. But it was no use. There was no demonstration to lead any more. So we folded up our banner and left. The police did not pursue us and did not beat us up. They had apparently done their duty by dispersing the demonstration.

Once the Social Democrats became ‘social fascists’ in the eyes of the Comintern, and therefore in the eyes of the Communist Party, the street-rncomer arguments sometimes turned into violent clashes between the two parties. There were also clashes between the Communist Rote Front Kaempfer (Red Front Fighters) and the Sturm-Abteilungen, the Nazi Stormtroopers, or other Nazi thugs.

All the parties held mass rallies, with a lot of flag-waving, banners, slogan-chanting and speech-making. One Communist Party rally in the huge Berlin Sports Palace is particularly memorable, though I no longer recollect the occasion nor the names of the main speakers, or how a Russian delegate got there to say a few words. I only remember that I was suddenly pushed on to the platform to translate his fraternal greeting over a microphone to an audience of several thousand. Another time we were listening, bored stiff, to a lengthy oration by Ernst Thälmann, party leader at the time, who – seemingly under the influence of drink or out of sheer ignorance and arrogance – was getting all his metaphors mixed up, starting with one and finishing with another.

We were spellbound on another occasion by Heinz Neumann, a brilliant speaker and a member of the party’s politbureau since 1928. Neumann and a number of his friends began to oppose the Comintern after its change of policy towards the Nazis. Anticipating a possible seizure of power by Hitler after his election success in 1930, Stalin had directed that there should be no more street battles or fighting with the Nazis and their stormtroopers, only verbal argument. Neumann was immediately ordered to Moscow, deprived of all his functions and dispatched to Madrid in late 1932 – with strict orders not to interfere with the work of the Comintern representatives there, who were advising the Spanish Communist Party.

But Heinz Neumann urged his old friends in Germany to continue the struggle against Hitler by every means possible. When the Comintern got hold of one of his letters, they ordered him and his wife to Switzerland in 1933 with nothing to do and a false passport, which landed him in prison. Two years later the Soviet authorities declared that they were prepared to grant them asylum. In Moscow they were shunned by almost all their old friends – refugees from Hitler’s Germany – but soon noticed that the same reluctance to meet each other prevailed among all the refugees, even those not yet in disgrace. They all lived in an atmosphere of suspicion and fear. During the following two years he was called upon practically every month by one or other authority to ‘confess’ that because of his opposition to Comintern policy, the German Communist Party had been weakened to such an extent that it was no longer in a position to prevent Hitler taking power. Neumann had already made, while still in Switzerland, various ‘declarations’ admitting political ‘mistakes’. But all his declarations and confessions were to no avail. In 1937 he was arrested and never heard of again.

His wife Margarete, daughter of the well-known Jewish philosopher and Zionist Martin Buber and sister of Babette Gross, Willy Münzenberg’s wife, was sent to a Russian prison camp. In 1939, after Russia and Germany agreed the Ribbentrop-Molotov Non-Aggression Pact (named after the two countries’ foreign ministers) she and several other German prisoners of the camp were handed over to the German authorities, to be immediately interned in a Nazi camp. It was a truly treacherous act on the part of the Soviet authorities and her account of these events makes depressing reading. Yet my most vivid impressions, on reading her story, were not the equally barbarous conditions in the two camps (perhaps I had by then already read so many descriptions of concentration camps that I had to some extent – deplorably – become inured to them), but the difference betwen them. However tough the Soviet camps were, there was also a certain slap-dash way of dealing with the prisoners, which somehow allowed moments of a more human approach. The way Margarete describes the neatness of the German camp, the precision and military efficiency that ruled there, sent a chill down my spine.

Of all the in-fighting between the Comintern and the individual Communist parties we knew nothing. We followed the instructions that were issued and never realised how near the collapse was. And we all had our private lives to live and problems to solve, everybody in their own way. My problem was once more our brother, who was still without a job. On top of everything else he was stateless. When we lived in Russia we were Soviet citizens, while our mother had acquired German citizenship through her second marriage. When we left Moscow our stepfather had registered us on the exit-permit under his name as his children, to avoid complications. In Germany we registered under our own surname, as stateless, and were given so-called ‘Nansen’ passports. Then, in the mid-1920s, it became necessary either to opt for Soviet citizenship, or to apply for a full German passport. Since there did not seem any chance of us returning to Moscow at that time, Olya and I applied for German citizenship – but my brother, still under 21, remained stateless. This made it even more difficult for him to get a job.

I don’t remember what made him decide to go to Switzerland, but that was what he did. In Basle he got in touch with the small Swiss Communist Party and was given some work on their paper, and was even allowed to sleep on the premises. Andryusha was always very adaptable and quick on the uptake. He could grasp an issue, without necessarily going into great depth, and come up with an article or an argument which gave the impression of a much deeper knowledge than he had. I think we had that in common. It helped us both to tackle jobs that were strictly speaking rather above us, to muddle through and yet succeed. We seem to have both been bom under a ‘lucky star’. Olya was different. She worked and studied slowly, read more attentively, and the knowledge she acquired was deeper and more lasting.

Andryusha soon made the acquaintance of a very efficient young girl, Frieda, an ardent member of the Swiss party. They fell in love and she offered him a room in her flat in a modern, newly built block of flats. Having entered the country illegally, and not having a residence or work permit, he had to be careful in all his movements. He could not, for example, openly participate in any party activities, though he was active behind the scenes. Then somebody in the block of flats complained about bugs. And the Communist Party took up the case.

The authorities sent their officials to investigate. Whether or not they found any bugs, they did find my brother in Frieda’s flat, without papers, without permit, and suspected of being a Communist himself. He was expelled, and chose to go to France as the country nearest to Basle. This was a great blow, but for a while he managed to live half here and half there. In the long run this was not feasible and Frieda and he finally decided to emigrate to Russia, though not till after he had, unsuccessfully, tried his luck in Spain.

In January 1933 Hitler was appointed Chancellor by the elderly von Hindenberg, president of the German Reich and a tool in the hands of the reactionary Junkers – the rich Prussian land-owning class. There were no protests on the part of the Social Democrats or the Communist Party. Nothing. Everybody was expecting some action, demonstrations, a strike, a united front, difficult as this would have been. But nothing happened. To my knowledge, not a single protest meeting, demonstration or strike took place. The Communist press came out with the slogans ‘The worst the better’ and ‘After Hitler it will be us’ – claiming that Hitler and the Nazis would be so discredited that the people would turn to the Communists. It would have been laughable had it not been so tragic.

The signal for the Nazis to turn to ruthless measures was given by the Reichstag fire. On the evening of 27 February 1933 a passer-by noticed a fire in the parliament building. By the time the police and fire brigade arrived, Hitler and his propaganda minister Goebbels had arrived too, but the fire had already engulfed the main chamber. Hitler and Goebbels at once decided that it was the work of the Communist Party, and at dawn the arrests began. First the party’s parliamentary chairman Ernst Torgler was detained; a little later the party chairman, Ernst Thälmann. Somewhere in the corridors of the burning Reichstag, a young, mentally unbalanced Dutchman, Martinus van der Lubbe, was discovered wandering around. He too was detained. A. fortnight later three Bulgarians were arrested, including an important Comintern functionary, Georgi Dimitrov. The case was brought before the highest German court, but the only evidence seemed to point to the solitary van der Lubbe, who – whether justly or unjustly accused of arson – paid with his life. The Communists, meanwhile, accused the Nazis of starting the fire.

After the fire the Communists, at any rate in my district, became totally inactive. The movement became demoralised. The mass organisations set up by the Communist Party ceased to exist to all intents and purposes. The International Workers’ Relief, the Red Trade Unions, the aid organisation for political prisoners, the League Against Imperialism, some of the left-wing theatre groups, all just disappeared.

A nucleus of the party carried on its work on a small scale in a spirit of courageous self-sacrifice, but also rather stupidly and with disastrous consequences. The party was so unprepared for underground work that when the Nazis really got going they managed to round up thousands of party members and sympathisers. Often they found whole lists of names and addresses of party activists and members during their searches.

When the International Workers Relief ‘empire’ collapsed one person who found himself out of work was Walter Nettlbach. Now he was without a job and without digs, and had to go into hiding. I had, over the previous year or so, run into Walter at public meetings and internal gatherings. He was the photographer on Münzenberg’s successful journal Arbeiter Illustrierte (Workers’ Illustrated), and also contributed to other Communist papers. He came from a working-class family in Krefeld, a town in north west Germany near Cologne, well-known for silk-manufacturing. His father had died or left while Walter was still a child, and his mother looked after him and his elder sister on her own. She had a pretty tough time. So, no doubt, did the two children.

As a youngster Walter was apprenticed to a baker. He did not like it, especially the kneading of the dough at night in a huge kind of trough, which they did with their feet! He then became a painter’s apprentice, and later worked for some time as a decorator. I remember him criticising the poor workmanship on the doors of our flat. He had been taught to put the paint on so smoothly that no traces of the brush strokes could be seen. And it was as a painter, as he later told me, that he had learnt all those many songs he sang or whistled. When still quite young, he got involved in politics, read a lot, mixed with left-wing people, moved to Berlin, and eventually took up writing and photography. We had occasionally exchanged a few words. He was a good-looking, easy-going chap, well liked by his friends and colleagues. He could also be very persuasive, and somehow had the luck to fall on his feet in difficult situations.

Apart from the banner I had displayed in November 1932, and that brief detention at the Alexanderplatz police headquarters, I could have had no police record and was no more known to them than hundreds and thousands of other Communist Party members or voters. And we had that very small room in our flat, which we did not really use. So, with Olya’s consent, I offered it to Walter. It seemed the natural thing to do to help a comrade in those days. We all tried to keep in touch or get together out of sheer animal instinct, searching for closeness and comfort in those stormy and fearsome times, when we never knew what might happen next. We all felt so helpless.

In other circumstances Walter and I might not have been drawn to each other. As it was, a closer relationship and attachment to each other did in time develop, though we also had fierce arguments about many things. Walter was already a convinced Trotskyist and in touch with a few other supporters of the Left Opposition, of whom I met only one, a young Russian trying to set up a group in Berlin. He seemed an intelligent, intense person, with thick dark hair and large, horn-rimmed glasses, who behaved in a conspiratorial way. I only met him once and do not remember his name, but he struck me as typical of a type from before the Russian Revolution: the dedicated student propagandist. Walter and he met often to discuss political and organisational matters, before the young Russian apparently left Germany.

The Left Opposition began in the USSR in the early 1920s, in protest against internal economic policies, increasing bureaucratisation of the party and the pernicious policy imposed on Communist parties abroad through the Comintern. Stalin was already general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR. Lenin, though still alive, was gravely ill Trotsky led the Opposition.

Stalin’s enmity against Trotsky grew when Lenin’s Testament was read out to the Central Committee after his death: Lenin warned the party against re-electing Stalin as general secretary. In spite of this advice, Stalin was re-elected, and Trotsky was too loyal to the party, and too aloof, to fight for his own position. Gradually Stalin took the reins of power more and more into his own hands, supported by some of the old Bolsheviks, primarily Zinoviev and Kamenev. Trotsky was removed from all his posts, expelled from the party in 1927 and exiled, in the depth of a severe winter, with his wife Natalia and elder son Lyova to Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan, in the south-eastern USSR.

This was still not enough for Stalin. In 1929 Trotsky and his family were expelled from the USSR and transported to Istanbul. He was eventually granted asylum by Turkey on the island of Prinkipo, where he remained till 1933, and where, with the help of a succession of secretaries – including Jan Frankel, whom I later met – he could at least read, write and advise supporters in other countries. In 1933 he managed to obtain a visa for France and in 1937 he moved to Norway. At that time the Moscow Show Trials were in full swing, and his name had been mentioned. The Soviet government used this to put pressure on the Norwegian government to expel him. He finally found refuge in Mexico. But even there Stalin’s hatred reached him. In August 1940 he was killed, sitting at his desk, when one of Stalin’s stooges drove an axe into his head.

But this tragic event was still years ahead. In the winter and spring of 1933 Walter tried to set up a Left Opposition group in and around Berlin. I was, naturally enough, one of his first targets. But although I was deeply disappointed with the German

Communist Party, resentful of its inactivity at that moment of crisis, and doubtful now of its policies, I could not break away from it entirely. It seemed like a renunciation of all I had believed in and had worked for over the past years. Yet there were already quite a few who, like me, felt that the party had left them in the lurch. Somehow a group of old comrades and friends from the International Workers Relief and party, as well as new friends introduced by them, congregated in our flat to discuss all those questions, to take measure of the Hitler regime, and decide on what to do next. Some of them felt that Trotsky’s Left Opposition should be considered very seriously. Others disagreed and were more drawn to the right wing, to Brandler’s Communist Party Opposition.

To me, Walter’s arguments seemed sound, but I still did not want to be pushed or dragged into a new movement without knowing more about it. I wanted to read something by Trotsky himself and then make up my mind in my own good time. Walter’s attempts at forcible persuasion did not help – he often carried his arguments into the personal field, calling me a petty-bourgeois, someone who could not make up her mind, and so on. Our membership of the Communist Party – Walter’s, mine and that of two or three close friends from the same branch – had quietly lapsed. We no longer attended meetings, if any still took place. And nobody ever called to enquire or to collect subscriptions. As far as we could judge, the movement simply disintegrated in that winter of 1933.

 
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Last updated: 18 February 2023