The Flight of Alfred Kantorowicz
LASKY, MELVIN J.
East Germany's leading theoretician goes West the flight of alfred kantorowicz By Melvin J. Lasky Berlin We are witnessing the death agonies of a great ideology. And it is here in Berlin, where...
...For his political testament, there was only the cryptic remark that "even after my death, I will find ways to make things difficult...
...The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War took him to the fronts of Madrid and Teruel (not, as he is so eager to point out today, to the GPU-ridden headquarters of Albacete, Valencia and Barcelona...
...to give up the last illusion—that out of such dregs a new and better world could ever be born...
...when I broke with the Party, he was the only one who did not spit at me...
...What a wise old bird...
...The feelings were mutual, Kantorowicz explained in a radio broadcast...
...But just in the face of this nightmare it is worth recording that on August 22, 1957 Alfred Kantorowicz, a life-long Communist intellectual who had fought on the barricades, found the inner clarity to say: "Can't one understand how I postponed my radical decisions for years and years in the desperate hope that the rawness, stupidity, violence, lawlessness, the oozing mire of lies, the strangulation of intellectual liberty —that all this was only a transitional convulsion, and that out of these awful labor-pains a new society would still issue, a society in which social justice and personal freedom would be beautifully balanced...
...In the words of Thomas Mann, whom I have quoted so often in my books—words which came to me a hundred times in the sleepless nights of the last years: 'I could no longer live, I could no longer work, I would have suffocated, if I could not, in the ancient phrase, wash my heart, if I could not speak out my deepest horror of what in the most miserable words and deeds was happening among us.' "And so, with my 58 years, I leave everything behind me once again, and begin anew...
...But he was an exceptionally warm-hearted comrade and a self-sacrificing friend, and he had both dignity and a rich sense of humor...
...Kantorowicz was one of the few Western exceptions, and although I knew of his Communist loyalties and his sense of secret (even fanatical) mission, I was for a while touched by the spectacle...
...Ulbricht has had Wolfgang Harich, the Soviet Zone's leading literary critic, arrested and, along with several editorial assistants, sentenced to a long prison term...
...Czeslaw Milosz takes his mind out of captivity in 1948...
...From writers and scholars like Hans Mayer, Stefan Heym and the sightless Arnold Zweig...
...I had to put that world of rawness, stupidity, violence, injustice and lies behind me...
...My own feeling is that somewhere right now (it could be Accra or Ceylon or Kerala) a young man is going into a bookstore to buy a copy of some little Marxist-Leninist pamphlet, and this will be his great illumination, for he will now know the "logic of history" and become possessed by the vision of "a better world," and we, poor cynical wiseacres, will have to wait some seven (or seventeen) years before he "sees the light," still failing, still flickering...
...I could breathe no longer," he said...
...He came first to Bremen, with the help of friends (read: comrades') in U.S...
...No, I could no longer close my eyes to the almost mythological phenomenon of our fighting, as we believed, for freedom and justice and against fascist barbarism, and all the while, behind us, fascism and barbarism were emerging again in the words and deeds and spirit of the 'apparatchiks.' In our fight we really meant the Rule of the People, and we found ourselves caught up in the Dictatorship of Bureaucrats...
...Very late," is the reaction in Europe...
...When does a man, who "should know better," finally come to see the light...
...And now I cannot conceal even to myself that feeling, which always came forward and was always painfully repressed, that tragic paradox, that I, for my own small part, contributed to build up exactly what I had wanted to fight against...
...With most of his left-wing friends, Kantorowicz became a political emigre after Hitler came to power...
...Franz Borkenau broke in 1928 and treated everybody who went along with the Communist movement after that with acrid impatience...
...Shortly thereafter, in the East Berlin University, the discussion turned to possible candidates for the Nobel Prize for Literature and what likely candidates from the "camp of peace and progress" could be nominated...
...There he was an active anti-Nazi, worked with Dorothy Thompson, did commentaries for the Columbia Broadcasting System...
...He naturally got only the Russian...
...The German "renaissance'' was not to be...
...How understandable...
...Things are being cleaned up...
...his only shortcoming was lack of moral courage...
...not a word has been heard...
...The more we get rid of people of this sort, the better off we will be...
...Only a week before, Walter Ulbricht, Communist chieftain in East Germany, stood waiting, confident and radiant, for his visitors from Moscow...
...With the flight a fortnight ago of Professor Alfred Kantorowicz, one of Communist East Germany's leading intellectual figures, another page in the bitter record of disillusionment has been written...
...We remained friends all through the Paris emigre years...
...When does a breaking point come...
...Koestler finally sees through the darkness at noon in 1938...
...So it has gone on for decades...
...Military Government, and then went on to Berlin with a grandiose plan for editing ;i magazine with the licenses of all the four Great Powers...
...They had begun to hope for the introduction of longed-for liberties...
...Then he went on to other tasks...
...Ulbricht insisted on a "Hungarian Resolution" to be signed by all the East German intellectuals...
...Kantorowicz suggested the name of George Lukacs, the celebrated Marxist esthetician, who had just been arrested and deported by the Soviets for his activities during the Hungarian Revolution...
...Kantorowicz's name, as we noted at the time, was missing...
...those who came back from the East returned to become "natives' and to work for the revival of their old Fatherland...
...And it is here in Berlin, where the young Karl Marx once sat at the foot of the Hegelians, that the spectacle of a crumbling political faith has been having some of its most ironic dramatic turns...
...In fact, we have from Koestler (in his contribution to The God That Failed) an interesting snapshot of those days: "Our Pol-Leiter was Alfred Kantorowicz...
...He was then about 30, tall, gaunt, squinting, a free-lance critic and essayist and prospective author of the Novel of Our Time, which never saw the light...
...By 1953 and the revolt of June 1617, when millions of German workers came out on the streets to demonstrate their libertarian opposition to the Communist dictatorship, things began to be muddled again...
...Bertrand Russell went to Russia in 1920, took one look, and ever since has treated the subject with a slight contempt...
...There were 40 signers...
...His magazine, called Ost und West, flourished for a few years...
...When the Hungarian masses did the same, how could there be any doubt that something had gone wrong with the Revolution...
...Some "choose freedom" earlier, some later...
...He wrote at that time: "We should be very happy about this...
...The emigres who came back to Germany from the West came as Conquerors in Allied Uniforms...
...I remember Arthur Koestler once showing me the Kunstlerkolonie where he and Kantorowicz and so many others used to sit up nights drafting Communist manifestoes and organizing tenants' strikes...
...The light fails, and flickers, and goes off and on again...
...I have finally had to give up the last hope the last illusion that out of such dregs [Abschaum] a new and better world could ever be born...
...The outbreak of World War II found him, for a while, in a concentration camp, but shortly thereafter he made his way to the United States...
...Kantorowicz also fled "from Germany to Germany," but he had only to cross a street which divides East from West Berlin...
...That's also a kind of getting rid of the rubble...
...In 1956 in Budapest, it occurs to Gyula Hay and Tibor Dery and Peter Veres that they had been wrong, terribly and tragically wrong, and that with one great revolutionary break perhaps their fine hopes could still be made good...
...I mean lawlessness, exploitation of the workers, the intellectual enslavement of the mind, the arbitrary rule of an unworthy clique who disgrace the name of socialism in the very way in which the Nazis disgraced the name of Germany...
...For 26 years, since my entry into the Communist party in September 1931, I held fast to this dream...
...From the events of June 17 to the heartbreaking and nerve-wracking (for so many of us, especially old Communists) Hungarian tragedy and the reign of terror against the intellectuals, I have finally had to give up the last hope—what am I saying...
...In 1949, I recall, he wrote an article on the question of Eastern refugees who were pouring through the open Berlin frontiers into Western Germany...
...And now Alfred Kantorowicz has run away...
...Marx himself once had to flee from the "police-dogs of reaction," and he went from Berlin to Cologne to Stuttgart...
...They had taken a new lease on life after the 20th Party Congress...
...When Mikoyan helped Khrushchev out of his railroad car, Ulbricht embraced him and they kissed...
...The man—he is now 58—belongs to that fascinating pre-Hitler generation of German radicals who, in Marx's own Berlin, came to have so much of that early romantic adven-turousness on behalf of "a better world...
...They spoke of "humanism" and of "liberalization...
...I met him briefly on his return to Germany after the collapse of Hitler's Third Reich...
...They had taken courage from the "socialist renaissance" in Poland and Khrushchev's apparent recognition of the possibility of "different revolutionary paths...
...Professor Ernst Bloch, the distinguished Marxist philosopher, was threatened, bullied, intimidated and forced into retirement...
...His old newspaper, the Berliner Zeitung, where he had written so often with such Party-line loyalty, noted his defection with the judgment: "He has betrayed the best cause in the world...
...For the East German intelligentsia, this—together with Gomul-ka's depressing visit a month before —was the symbol of the end...
...Kantorowicz himself went so far as to write in the Berliner Zeitung that "where power degenerates into abuse, into violence, it is the duty and responsibility of the writer rather to remain silent than to join the chorus in the court of the powerful...
...Too late," I hear the Berliners mumbling...
...But soon enough, let us hope, for our young man in Accra, Ceylon or Kerala...
...Bert Brecht, the world-famous playwright, died...
...But I did not have the heart at that time to enter into argument with him...
...Even silence can be eloquent...
Vol. 40 • September 1957 • No. 36
