But what about the working classes?
Marx was not mistaken, her friend G. said. The working classes had voted for Hitler, but H. was still wrong in his theory that the Communist Party had been defeated.
But Hitler is leading the workers into the next war to defend the interests of Big Capital, leading them to the slaughter! Haven’t people always said: A vote for Hitler is a vote for war?
The worse this war turns out to be, G. said, the better for us. For the masses to turn away from him and come running into our arms, we need the crimes he is about to commit to be as huge as possible.
She looked down to contemplate this sentence, looked at the thin layer of snow lying upon the ice, and thought about how shallow the water in this lake was. The lake was enormous, but when you swam in it during the summer, there was no point where the water reached higher than your neck.
She didn’t see her husband again until 1934, in Prague, and from there the two of them applied for a visa to the Soviet Union. Shortly after their arrival in Moscow, they heard Dimitrov speak at the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International. In his speech he said the same thing as her husband two years before: If the Social Democrats hadn’t drawn a line between themselves and the Communists, but instead had joined with the Communists to create a united front against the Nazis, there wouldn’t have been a majority for Hitler.
But what was right could only be right when it was uttered and codified by the Party, that’s what the Party was there for: to be the wisdom of many, not the wisdom of one. An individual might lose his head, but not an entire Party.
*
Instead of taking on Hitler jointly, Communists and Social Democrats jointly erred; on the basis of two carefully differentiated, but equally faulty, assessments of the situation, they apparently arrived at two carefully differentiated but equally faulty positions. The Social Democrats described the Communists as radicalinskis, as terrorists and subversives, while the Communists decried the Social Democrats as the murderers of the workers, the slaves of Big Capital and Social Fascists. Once labels of this sort were applied, an alliance was no longer possible. But did all these words matter?
In the two years that passed between one sentence and the next, her friend G. was arrested while performing illegal work in Germany and shot at Brandenburg Prison, and her lovely friend Z. was behind bars. She’d heard that poet J. — cat hair on his jacket, his teeth brown from smoking — had gone underground, but she never heard from him again.
Certainly all decisions about whom one should form alliances with — when and at what cost — had to be reevaluated moment by moment. Before you set out to fight the enemy, you had to know who the enemy was. But who could know for sure?
G. had long since been buried in Brandenburg soil, his two eyes shut forever — the Nazis had condemned and executed him on charges of high treason. If he were still alive, they would no doubt be charging him with high treason here in Moscow as well, since to the end he maintained a close friendship with A., the latter-day Trotskyite. Given that Hitler seemed not to be going anywhere and the formation of factions was proving to be part of the general collapse, this friendship (which at the time was not yet a crime but only something difficult to understand: an error perhaps, a case of thickheadedness, shortsighted obstinacy, but also perhaps, who knows, the result of meticulous tactical deliberations on the part of the intellectual pioneer of the Communist movement G.) would most certainly have metamorphosed into an unpardonable wrong. But by executing G. for treason in 1934 at Brandenburg Prison, the Fascists had ensured that what would remain in his comrades’ memory was his fame. Death is the beginning of immortality. Meanwhile, the doors to the hall of fame have been sealed up, and the Beyond is nothing more than an endless strip of sand between the fronts, a no-man’s-land in which all those who have gone missing over the last few months — now including her husband — will be forced, dead or alive, to walk on and on unto all eternity on their bloody feet.
She, too, had been acquainted with A., the latter-day so-called Trotskyite, ever since the first time she participated in a meeting of the Communist cell Vienna-Margareten, and she’d run into him a few times after his expulsion from the Party in 1926, the last time in Prague, shortly before she left for Moscow. This portly comrade had come late to a meeting of Austrian emigrants and had taken the last remaining empty chair, right next to hers, then he had spent the entire evening silently smoking, only once addressing her in a low voice, asking what had become of their mutual friend G. G. had recently been sent to Berlin, she’d replied, that’s all she knew. I understand, the so-called Trotskyite had responded. The smoke of his cigarette had hovered above him, motionless and thick, and for a moment the smell reminded her of J., the poet who’d gone underground. When they were all saying their goodbyes outside afterward, she had impulsively hugged A., whom no one else was deigning to so much as shake hands with, but it seemed to her that he returned the hug more out of exhaustion than friendship.
I committed a serious error in November 1934. In Prague I participated in a meeting of Austrian Schutzbund supporters at which the Trotskyite A. was also present, and I did not report this to the Party organization. I was severely chastised for this by the Party leadership, but the reprimand was removed from my record after conversations with Comrades Sch. and K. when I practiced honest self-criticism with regard to my lack of vigilance.
Was it better to call an error you had recognized by its name, thereby taking away the power with which, years later, it threatened to destroy you? And did not the forcefulness of an error’s attack fundamentally reflect the passion with which you had once committed it — in other words, was it you yourself creating your own downfall without knowing how and when?
Should she even mention that her self-criticism had been accepted? Did the expunged punishment require her report? Surely there were papers covering all of this, other people’s reports. Surely she was mentioned in one or the other self-criticism written by someone else, or in the account of someone else’s life. So should she simply leave unmentioned what had been expunged? But that might be interpreted as malicious concealment on her part. Should she drag this expunged punishment back out into the light? (But then it wouldn’t be expunged any longer, would it?) It was a matter of honesty, such honesty as left each individual lying there as if naked before the other. But who would this other be? And what is the deepest layer one can lay bare? In the end, does coming clean mean scraping the very flesh from your bones?
And then, what are bones?
At the beginning of the 1920s they had studied the movements of money in their evening gatherings, its way of fluttering about, and the arbitrary power it was gaining over humankind.
Today, inflation can destroy a person more thoroughly than an E. coli infection, G. had said.
Then, fifteen years later, something began to flutter about and gain power over humankind, something that none of her friends and neither her husband nor she herself could put a name to. Had the time so quickly come to an end when words themselves were reality, just as real as a bag of flour, a pair of shoes, or a crowd being stirred to revolt? Was it the case now that reality itself consisted of words? Whose eyes would piece together the letters she was writing into words, and the words into meaning? What would be called her guilt, her innocence? Did every word matter? What are bones?