I attend a performance of The Magic Flute, and for no reason, in the middle of the verve and joy of the music, the man sitting beside a blond woman is Münzenberg, and the flight of the hero lost in a forest and chased by dragons and faceless conspirators is also his light. Maybe he slipped into Germany, and although he doesn’t like opera came to this performance of The Magic Flute in a Berlin theater filled with black and gray uniforms to make contact with someone. But that scenario isn’t realistic; Münzenberg could have come into Germany incognito, but in the Berlin opera Babette would have been recognized immediately, the Red bourgeoise, the scandalous and arrogant deserter of her social class, of the great Aryan nation.
REAL EVENTS WEAVE dramas that fiction would never dare: Babette Gross had a sister named Margarete, as romantically enchanted as she with radical politics in the early hallucinatory and convulsive days of the Weimar Republic. Margarete, like her sister, married a professional revolutionary, Heinz Neumann, the leader of the German Communist Party. In early February 1933, when Hitler was recently named chancellor of the Reich, Münzenberg and Babette flee from Germany in the large black Lincoln to take refuge in Paris; Neumann and Margarete escape to Russia. There he falls from favor and is arrested and executed, shot in the nape of the neck; his wife is sent to a camp in the frozen north of Siberia.
In the spring of 1939, when the German-Soviet pact is signed, one of the clauses guarantees that German citizens who fled from Nazism and took political asylum in the Soviet Union will be sent back to Germany. No frontier is a refuge; all close like traps on the feet of the hunted. Margarete is transferred by train from Siberia to the border of a recently divided Poland, and the Soviet guards hand her over to the guards of the SS. After three years in a Soviet camp, she spends another five in a German death camp.
In Ravensbrück, where Communist prisoners treat her like a traitor, she meets a Czech woman, Milena Jesenska, who twenty years earlier was the love of Franz Kafka’s life and who moved in the same radical and bohemian circles frequented by Otto Katz before he emigrated to Berlin and there crossed paths with Münzenberg. In that Ravensbrück camp, Margarete, who never heard of Kafka, listens as Milena tells the story of the traveling salesman who wakes one morning turned into an enormous insect, and the story about the man who without knowing what crime he has committed is subjected to a spectral trial, found guilty before he is tried, then executed like a dog in an open field in the middle of the night. Milena, starving and ill, dies in May 1944, only shortly before news reaches the camp that the Russians are advancing from the east and the Allies have landed in Normandy. But the proximity of the Red Army offers no hope of freedom to Margarete, only the threat of a new captivity, of the repetition of a nightmare. She escapes from the German camp in the confusion of the last days, flees through two European armies — Germans in retreat and Soviets advancing — two hells and eight years that she survived with unbelievable fortitude.
IN 1989, AT NINETY, her sister Babette relates it all to an American journalist named Stephen Koch, who is writing the book about Willi Münzenberg that I will discover by chance seven years later. Babette lives in Munich, alone and lucid, still ramrod straight, the youthful gleam in her eyes undimmed. There is a fanatic intensity in the way she sometimes focuses on the young man, the diabolical determination to live and endure that sustains some extremist elders. Shortly afterward she moves to Berlin, and her apartment is not very far from the Wall; some nights she must have heard the sound of the crowds demonstrating on the other side, and the roar of skyrockets and songs of celebration would have reached her bedroom on the night of November 9 when the Wall finally came down, the world that she, her husband, her sister, and her brother-in-law believed in sixty years before, the world they helped create.
The woman speaks in a low, clear voice, in the accented but perfect English of the upper-class British of the 1920s, and that voice, like her eyes, is much younger than her years. Everything happened so long ago, it’s as if it never happened. Everything she knows and remembers will cease to exist in a few months, when she dies. The face of Willi Münzenberg will be lost with her, the smell of his body and the cigars he smoked, his enthusiasm, and the way he was sapped first by losing faith, then by the suspicion that he was being followed and the conviction that there would be no forgiveness for him. His intelligence, too, was eroded by the discovery that he, the inventor of lies, had himself been deceived, that he hadn’t wanted to see what was right before his eyes — all this he tried to tell in a hastily written, tumultuous book when it was already too late, when the intellectuals he had bewitched, used, and scorned for so long turned their backs on him, and his name was carefully being eliminated from the annals of his time.
Messengers came to transmit the order that he was wanted in Moscow. He invented delays, pretexts for postponing the trip, because it was unthinkable that he would openly refuse to obey. Others he knew had gone to Moscow and never returned; all trace of their activities was erased, even their names, or they were publicly denounced in Party newspapers as monstrously disloyal. Münzenberg knew all too well how a campaign of international indignation was organized, how easily reality could be reshaped with the clever use of publicity techniques such as tedious and relentless repetition.
He couldn’t go to Moscow now, he said, during that first summer of the war in Spain, just when he was called on once again to summon all his talents as organizer and propagandist in defense of the last of the great causes, the one closest to his heart after the fall of Germany: international solidarity with the Spanish Republic, with the government of the Popular Front.
But the messages and secret orders kept coming, briefer and more urgent, more threatening, even as news was filtering through of arrests and interrogations. In November 1936, Münzenberg and Babette Gross traveled to Moscow. He was still a high official of the Comintern and the German Communist Party, but there was no one to greet them at the station. A couple of foreigners dressed in opulent winter clothing stood in the grit and poverty of a Soviet train station, the man in his felt hat and long custom-made overcoat, the woman in high heels and silk stockings, her face powdered and her blond hair peeking from the collar of her fur coat. Beside them were piles of luggage appropriate for deluxe trains and the best cabins on transatlantic steamers, leather suitcases with brass fittings and stickers from international hotels, trunks, makeup cases, hatboxes: they are a portrait for an ad printed on the glossy pages of a 1930s magazine, one of those publications Münzenberg dreamed up and directed.
No one waits at the hotel they were assigned to, and there is no message for them in their room. From the window, from one of the top floors of an enormous hotel only recently constructed but already dark and depressing, where uniformed, armed women stand guard at the end of the corridors in a silence uninterrupted by voices or ringing telephones, Münzenberg and Babette can see in the distance, high above the dark rooftops, a red star shining at the very top of a skyscraper. This is the world they have dedicated their lives to, the only country to which it was legitimate for an internationalist to swear loyalty. It is so cold in the room they don’t take off their coats. There is a black telephone on the night table, but it’s disconnected or out of order. Even so, they look at it with the hope, or the fear, that it will begin to ring. As is routine, their passports were taken from them as they entered the USSR, and they have no tickets or return date.