There are people who have seen these things: none of it has sunk into the absolute oblivion that claims events and human beings when the last person to witness them, the last person to hear a certain voice or meet a certain pair of eyes, dies.
I know a woman who wandered lost through Moscow the morning Stalin’s death was announced. Eight months pregnant, she went back home because she was afraid that in the throng of people in the streets the creature kicking in her womb would be crushed. As I speak with her, I feel the vertigo I would feel crossing a soaring bridge of time, almost as if I were experiencing the reality she has seen, a reality that would be no more than a description in a book for me if I hadn’t met her. I know a man who won an Iron Cross in the battle of Leningrad, and when I was very young I shook the hand of another whose pale, skinny forearm bore the tattooed identification number of a prisoner in Dachau. I have spoken with someone who at the age of six clung to his mother in a cellar in Madrid, terrified of the air-raid sirens, and of the airplanes and exploding bombs, and at ten he was interned in a barracks in Mauthausen. That man was small, polite, and detached; his name was half Spanish, half French, though he didn’t really belong to either country. The black hair, combed straight back, the strong features and coppery face were Spanish, but his behavior and language were as French as those of any of the writers talking and drinking at that literary cocktail party in Paris where we met briefly, the beginning of my friendship with Michel del Castillo.
By chance, the way you meet a stranger at a party, I met Willi Münzenberg in a book I’d been sent. Begun half-heartedly, it turned into my insomnia. At some moment in the reading, without my knowing, there came a shift in attitude, and the person who had been nothing more than a name, an obscure and minor character, struck me as a powerful presence, someone intimately related to me, to the things that matter most to me, to my deepest being. You are in large part what others know, or think they know, about you, what they see when they look at you; but who are you when you’re alone in the dark and can’t sleep and your inert body is anchored to the bed and your untrammeled imagination confronts the intolerably slow pace of time? You don’t know the hour but don’t want to turn on the light and wake the person sleeping beside you; it might be the middle of the night or near the first light of dawn.
FROM AMONG THE GHOSTS of the living and the dead rises the specter of Münzenberg. He was with me that sleepless night, and he has returned often since; unexpectedly, over the years, I find him in the pages of other books, or he comes to me in my thoughts. All his life was a game between show and invisibility, between veiled power and the weightless splendor of appearances, and in the end he was invisible, erased from history by the same powerful people he served so well, the ones who in early June of 1940 hanged him from a tree in a forest in France.
Just yesterday I discovered that I had an excellent photograph of him. I found it in the second volume of Arthur Koestler’s autobiography, Invisible Writing, published in London in 1954. Coincidences suddenly fall into place: I had bought that volume with the red binding and coarse yellow paper in a secondhand bookstore in Charlottesville, Virginia, one winter day in 1993. The store was in a red wooden building that reminded me a little of a cabin or a barn, at the edge of a snowy woods. One day as I flipped through the book, looking for the publication date, I saw something I’d never noticed: on the inside cover was an illegible signature, and beside that a place and date: Oslo, January 1959.
I hadn’t remembered the photograph either, which has that chiaroscuro of portraits from the thirties. Münzenberg looks directly into the viewer’s eyes, with arrogance and firmness, perhaps with a hint of loss and anticipated desperation, and with the sadness witnesses to some terrible truth exhibit in photographs. He is a strong man, rough, but not vulgar, with a thick, strong neck and broad shoulders, slightly lifted chin, shrewd eyes ringed with fatigue, broad brow, carelessly combed hair, a sign either of constant activity or the beginnings of neglect. He is dressed in a formal but very modern mode: suit jacket with a fountain pen in the upper pocket, vest, tie, and a shirt with an attached collar. Koestler says his face had the solid simplicity of a wood sculpture, but was lightened by an open and friendly expression. Koestler worked on behalf of Münzenberg in Paris during the period the photograph was taken: a short man, squarely built, robust, with the look of a small-town cobbler, but one who nevertheless projected such an hypnotic air of authority that Koestler saw bankers, diplomats, and Austrian dukes bow before him with the obedience of schoolboys.
Münzenberg was born in 1889 to a poor family in a proletarian suburb of Berlin. His father was a brutal, drunken tavern keeper who blew his head off while cleaning his shotgun. At sixteen Münzenberg was working in a shoe factory and taking advantage of the educational activities of the unions. He had always shown intelligence and had a talent for organization as well as an energy that instead of being depleted by controversy and hard work seemed to thrive on them. To avoid serving in an army involved in a war whose internationalist principles he repudiated, he escaped to Switzerland, where in the refugee circles of Bern he met Trotsky, who was immediately taken with his intelligence, his revolutionary passion, and his organizational skills. Trotsky introduced him to Lenin, and soon Münzenberg was part of Lenin’s most loyal inner circle. One author reports that he was one of the Bolsheviks who traveled to Russia with Lenin in a sealed railroad car on the eve of the October Revolution. Dear friend, it’s said he told Lenin, you will die of your convictions.
But he was always a little different from his Communist comrades. There was something excessive about him, even when he was most orthodox. He liked the good life, and having been born into and lived in poverty, he had an appetite for grand hotels, expensive suits, and luxury automobiles. He was made of the same stuff as the great American plutocrats who rose out of nothing, energetic impresarios of railroads or coal mines or steel who had grown rich because of their clear vision and villainy, but especially because of the compelling force of a practical intelligence joined with a resolute and merciless will. Those who knew Münzenberg say that had he chosen to serve capitalism instead of communism, he would have been a Hearst, a Morgan, or a Frick, one of those colossal entrepreneurs never satisfied by any possession, no matter how excessive, and who never lose their rough edges; age or power or wealth do not slow their ardor for acquiring, and despite boundless wealth, they remain jovial boors.
During the first years of the Soviet Revolution, when Lenin, hallucinating on the country estates of the Kremlin, intoxicated by his own fanaticism, surrounded with telephones and lackeys, still imagined that at any minute all Europe would explode in the flames of proletarian uprisings, Münzenberg understood that world revolution would not happen immediately, if ever, and that communism would spread in the West only in an oblique and gradual way — not with the loud, crude, and monotonous propaganda that pleased the Soviets but, rather, through seemingly neutral and apolitical causes and with the complicity, in great part unwitting, of intellectuals of great prestige, unaffiliated celebrities who would sign manifestos promoting peace, culture, and goodwill among nations.