Nevertheless there was a problem. Even as youthful believers in the inevitability of world revolution we knew, or must have known in the last months of 1932, that it was not going to happen just then. We were certainly not aware that by 1932 the international communist movement had been reduced to almost its lowest point since the establishment of the Comintern, but we knew that defeat was what faced us in the short run. Not we but someone else was making a bid for power. Indeed, neither the rhetoric nor the practical strategy of the KPD envisaged anything like an imminent takeover. (On the contrary, the Party was making serious preparations for illegality, though, as it turned out, nowhere near serious enough: its leader Ernst Thälmann was caught in the first months of the new regime and imprisoned in one of the new concentration camps.) What is more, once Hitler was in power, there was no more room for illusion. So what exactly was in the mind of teenage would-be militants like me?
Certainly the knowledge that we were essentially a global movement comforted us. The triumphant USSR of the first Five-Year Plan stood behind us. Somewhere even further east, the Chinese revolution was on the march. That there was Storm over Asia (to quote the title of Pudovkin’s great film) made communists at that time probably more acutely aware of Asia than anyone else. That was the time when China became, for Bertolt Brecht and André śMalraux, the quintessential locale of revolution, and the test of what it meant to be a revolutionary. It is probably not fortuitous that the only specific newspaper headline which I recall from those days (apart from the obvious ones announcing Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor and the Reichstag fire) is one reporting the mutiny of a Dutch warship, the Seven Provinces, off Java a few days after Hitler took power. It was not the drama of insurrection we expected to experience, but that of persecution. In our minds – at least in mine – the image before us was that of danger, capture, resistance to interrogation, defiance in defeat. Ideally we imagined ourselves in the role that would be played in real life within less than a year by Georgi Dimitrov, defying Göring at the Reichstag fire trial. But always with the confidence, derived from Marxism, that our victory was already inscribed in the text of the history books of the future.
So much for the image. What of the reality? Until a few days before Hitler’s appointment I cannot recall undertaking any actual communist activity other than going to the meetings of the SSB cell. No doubt, like all of us, my spirits were lifted by the sharp setback for the Nazis at the elections of 6 November, and by our own impressive advance, but I am quite certain that I had no understanding of the meaning of the Papen government’s fall, and the activities of the shortlived new government of General Schleicher, the last Chancellor before Hitler, or of the December crisis within the Nazi Party, when Hitler eliminated the second most important, or at least prominent, member of his party, Gregor Strasser. On the other hand, there was nothing problematic about the increasing aggressiveness and deliberately provocative tactics of the brownshirts, and their tacit toleration by the public authorities. On 25 January 1933 the KPD organized its last legal demonstration, a mass march through the dark hours of Berlin converging on the headquarters of the Party, the Karl Liebknechthaus on the Bülowplatz (now Rosa Luxemburg-Platz), in response to a provocative mass parade of the SA on the same square. I took part in this march, presumably with other comrades from the SSB, although I have no specific memory of them.
Next to sex, the activity combining bodily experience and intense emotion to the highest degree is the participation in a mass demonstration at a time of great public exaltation. Unlike sex, which is essentially individual, it is by its nature collective, and unlike the sexual climax, at any rate for men, it can be prolonged for hours. On the other hand, like sex it implies some physical action – marching, chanting slogans, singing – through which the merger of the individual in the mass, which is the essence of the collective experience, finds expression. The occasion has remained unforgettable, although I can recall no details of this demonstration. I can only remember endless hours of marching, or rather alternately shuffling and waiting, in the freezing cold – Berlin winters are hard – between shadowy buildings (and policemen?) along the dark wintry streets. I cannot remember red flags and slogans, but if there were any – and there must have been some – they were lost in the grey mass of the marchers. What I can remember is singing, with intervals of heavy silence. We sang – I still have the tattered pamphlet with the texts of the songs, ticks against my favourites: the ‘Internationale’, the peasant war song ‘Des Geyers schwarzer Haufen’, the sentimental graveyard doggerel of ‘Der kleine Trompeter’, which (I am told) the leader of the GDR, Erich Honecker, wanted played at his funeral, ‘Dem Morgenrot entgegen’, the Soviet Red Airmen’s Song, Hanns Eisler’s ‘Der rote Wedding’, and the slow, solemn, hieratic ‘Brüder zur Sonne zur Freiheit’. We belonged together. I returned home to Halensee as if in a trance. When, in British isolation two years later, I reflected on the basis of my communism, this sense of ‘mass ecstasy’ (Massenekstase, for I wrote my diary in German) was one of the five components of it – together with pity for the exploited, the aesthetic appeal of a perfect and comprehensive intellectual system, ‘dialectical materialism’, a little bit of the Blakean vision of the new Jerusalem and a good deal of intellectual anti-philistinism.6 But in January 1933 I did not analyse my convictions.
Five days later Hitler was appointed Chancellor. I have already described the experience of reading the news headline somewhere on the way back from school with my sister. I can see it still, as in a dream. It is now known that he resisted the Conservatives’ proposal to ban the Communist Party immediately, partly because this might provoke a desperate attempt at public resistance by the Party, mainly because it strengthened the Nazi argument that only its paramilitaries, the SA, preserved the country from bolshevism, and to lend a national rather than partisan character to the enormous Nazi demonstration on the day of the transfer of power. (It is impossible to imagine that anyone, including themselves, took seriously the call for a general strike which the KPD leadership claimed to have issued on 30 January, presumably to go on record as not having given in without a gesture.) Indeed the SA and SS (at that time much less prominent) were soon authorized to act as auxiliary police, and began to organize their own concentration camps – as yet without official state authorization.
The new government avoided giving the Reichstag, or anyone in it, even the faintest chance of expressing an opinion, by dissolving it immediately and calling for new elections at the soonest possible constitutional moment, 5 March. Within days a suitable Emergency Decree for the Protection of the German People restricted press freedom and provided for ‘protective custody’. On 24 February the brownshirt and blackshirt paramilitary forces of the Nazi Party were enrolled as ‘auxiliary police’. On that day the police raided the Party headquarters, claiming to find great quantities of treasonable materials, though actually nothing of significance was discovered. Such were the conditions under which the last nominally free multiparty elections of the Weimar Republic were to be held. And then, less than a week before the vote, an utterly unexpected joker was slipped into the cards already stacked against the opposition. On the night of 27 February the Reichstag building was burned down. Whoever did it, the Nazis immediately exploited the occasion to such spectacular effect that most antifascists came to believe that they must have planned the fire.2 An emergency decree on the next day suspended freedom of speech, association and the press as well as privacy of post and telephone services. For good measure, the decree also allowed the autonomy of the Länder by the right of the Reich government to intervene to restore order. Göring had already begun to round up communists and other undesirables. They were dragged into improvised prisons, beaten up, tortured and in some cases even killed. By April 25,000 were in ‘protective custody’ in Prussia alone.