It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us…
Evidently Fuchs, who liked clear-cut answers, was powerfully impressed by this depiction of opposites coexisting.
Fuchs was searching to find what it was within himself that enabled him to ignore so boldly the normal requirements of relationships with other people, to divide his mind in the way that he did, and keep reality at bay. He felt some trepidation, as anyone must who conducts such a search seriously.
We don’t know enough to understand his inner motivations, but we can see some areas of his mind and his life where the motivations that he did not understand may have developed. Fuchs said his childhood was a very happy one. But the experience of psychiatrists is that a person may not be a good judge of whether or not his childhood was happy. His memory may bend itself to meet some requirements in his mind, something that says he ought to recall a happy childhood (or an unhappy one in some cases). A family in which the three women members suffer two suicides and a mental illness contains dark areas, remembered or not.
It would be interesting to know what Fuchs’s relationship with his mother was before she committed suicide. And what his reactions were to the event: Grief? Pity? Loss? Guilt? Relief? Why was this woman who was his mother for nineteen years apparently so remote from his recollection? In subsuming his emotions and replacing them with political beliefs — for even as a student in Germany, he chose his friends from his political comrades, his affections following ideological lines — he would be able to suppress feelings about his mother along with others.
Emil Fuchs wrote about his wife Else in his memoirs with respect, but he did not write about her very much; in fact, she hardly features in them at all. The traditional German family has a strong, authoritarian father and a soft, compliant mother. In this family, the mother seems almost to be absent.
Emil Fuchs does not seem like an authoritarian figure. Decent, humane, concerned for others, brave, he encouraged his children to form their own beliefs and find their own ways, yet somehow, they all went most of the distance along his way. Parents instruct their children on a verbal, conscious level and at the same time on another, unconscious level. Sometimes, those two sets of instructions contradict one another. A family, or any other close-knit group, may have relationships on both of these levels, the one conscious and visible, the other unconscious and observable only by the effects it creates, like sub-atomic particles.
The picture that emerges of the Fuchs family is cloudy and of necessity very incomplete. It is of a family in which extraordinary pressures are felt by the women, the mother and two daughters, but apparently not by the father and two sons; two of these, at least, have strong personalities and lead successful lives. But the mother seems to be partially erased from the memories of these two. The father appears to be permissive, yet the effect is as if he had issued commands and had been obeyed, as if, in fact, on one level he was commanding. It seems almost as if he played the roles of both parents in the traditional German family, replacing the mother.
The second son, Klaus, is highly intelligent, closely attached to other members of the family, but, as regards the outside world, very independent. He is able to establish relationships of mutual affection and support while remaining on one level detached.
He follows his father’s precepts all his life. He has women friends: one is a ‘spoiler of men’, another his ‘English mother’. But he does not form a strong, exclusive sexual bond with a woman, nor even, it appears, acknowledge the need for one, until comparatively late in life, when as we shall see he has returned to the country that is both his father’s land and his fatherland. (Britain, by contrast, is always the mother country.) He has a powerful, even dominant, sense of right and wrong. In Freudian terms, one can say that he has a very strong super-ego, and an id that is almost buried out of sight.
Speculations along these lines should not be taken as an attempt to explain away Fuchs’s political beliefs, to invalidate them by describing them in terms of unconscious motivations. He deserves to have his belief in Communism and his later change of mind treated at his own assessment. For one thing, they parallel the changing beliefs of a lot of other people during this period. His story belongs to the real world of politics and ethics.
His crime was treason. But it cannot be answered simply by an appeal to patriotism. Other causes besides Communism are international. No democrat would have blamed Fuchs because, while a German citizen, he helped the war effort against Nazi Germany, nor would a democrat accept an accusation of treason against Soviet citizens who oppose the Communist system. Today there is a possibility of a war that threatens not merely one nation, but the planet, the whole biosphere. Many major issues — in fact, all the really major issues — transcend national boundaries. Now, more than ever, patriotism is not enough.
Fuchs was not motivated in what he did by ambition, or greed. He was selfless. More than most people, he was driven by a moral passion to do what is right. His dilemma was one of conflicting loyalties.
One can require loyalty, but one cannot command it. It would have been wrong for the British authorities to have rejected Fuchs simply because he had once been a member of the German Communist Party (although they would have had good grounds for suspecting him because he concealed the fact). A former attachment to Communism, or some other alternative to our form of government, cannot be taken in itself as an indicator of potential treason. It is not unusual for intelligent young people in particular to look at different ways of organizing society, and to prefer one radically different from their own, and perhaps even opposed to it, nor is it unusual for them to change their minds later on. A woman can demand of her husband that he should not be unfaithful to her, and vice versa. She cannot reasonably demand of him that he never find any other woman attractive. If she is going to make this requirement, she would do best to marry either a blind man or a liar. Mutatis mutandis, if a government requires as a criterion of loyalty unswerving lifelong support for its system, then a lot of people who satisfy this condition will be either fools or good liars.
Loyalty has an exclusive quality. Whether the requirement for it is embodied in an oath of allegiance or a marriage vow, it involves pledging a fidelity to one that is denied to others. A conflict of loyalty arises because two loyalties are mutually exclusive. This is a perennial theme in literature, a conflict between love and duty, or friend and country. And not only in literature: such conflicts occur in real life. Whether something is loyal or treacherous may depend on the perspective. During the Algerian War, when elements in the French Government were trying to curb some of the brutal methods that the army was employing to put down the rebellion, officers of one paratroop regiment took a secret oath on the Bible that if they were questioned by a tribunal about the torture of Arab suspects, they would not tell the truth. They were being resolutely loyal to the men they led, but false to their government; they were taking a solemn oath to break another. During the Watergate goings-on, Deep Throat leaked information about the dirty dealings in the circle around Nixon because, presumably, he rated loyalty to certain standards of conduct, or perhaps to the law, above loyalty to the President.
There is another instance of conflicting loyalties that is more directly pertinent to the case of Klaus Fuchs. It has never been told in print before.