Red Orchestra (7 page)

By 1930, Berlin's collection of four million souls was more eclectic than ever, a heady collision of cultures, languages, generations, and ideologies. This made for rough politics but great literature. Ever since the Rhinelander Johannes Gutenberg refitted his fifteenth-century wine press with movable wooden type, Germans had been passionate consumers of the printed word. It was no coincidence that Adam Kuckhoff and the Harnacks managed to publish their work; there were plenty of opportunities. Germany had more newspapers than the United States (with less than half the population), and more than France, England, and Italy combined.
⁹

Intellectuals like the Harnacks could follow political developments from dozens of different editorial perspectives. Every major political party was represented among the publications owned by the parties or their supporters. The oldest ones belonged to the Social Democrats and the Catholic Center Party, followed by the Communist Party papers, and finally that of the Nazis.
¹⁰
Berlin's independent quality press was dominated by two large publishing houses, Ullstein and Mosse, both of them Jewish-owned. The thriving business in small-town newspapers offered regional diversity, and as of 1928 over eighty percent of the country's papers were family-owned.
¹¹
It was a good time and place to be a journalist.

This was clear to Adam Kuckhoff's young protégé, John Sieg, who approached journalism with single-minded zeal. Many members of Kuckhoff's circle had leftist sympathies, but John was among the few who could lay any claim to actual “proletarian” experience. He also had another exotic quality that fascinated the worldly Berliners: John Sieg was, at least arguably, American.

Ignatius John Sieg was born on February 3, 1903, in Detroit, Michigan, the son of a working-class German Catholic couple who had migrated to America in their youth. His father died when John was seven years old, and the boy was taken to Germany by his grandfather for a visit a few years later. Their return to America was prevented by the outbreak of the Great War, and John found himself attending high school in the West Prussian towns of Schlochau and Krone.
¹²
In 1920, at the age of
seventeen, John, identified as “Johann,” became a naturalized German citizen. In 1923 his education was disrupted once again, when John's grandfather died and his mother summoned him back to Detroit.

He must have gone with some reluctance. He was midway through his studies at a teacher's college in Prussia, and he had a Polish sweetheart named Sophie Wloszczynski. They made an attractive couple. Sieg was a handsome man; compact and energetic, with an easy boyish grin and a thick shock of dark blond hair. Sophie was a few years older than John, with the tiny frame, dark ringlets, and winsome gaze of a young Lillian Gish. Sophie followed John to Detroit six months later. On her arrival, she was hired as secretary to the flamboyant Russian conductor of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Ossip Gabrilowitsch. As one of the perks of her job, Sophie and John Sieg enjoyed symphony concerts twice a week.

John's career was less genteel. In 1924 and 1925 he worked in the big Ford and Packard auto factories—perhaps on the same assembly lines that Greta Lorke would observe as a visiting sociology student a few years later. John worked the night shift so he could attend daytime classes at the College of the City of Detroit.
^*
Ford had introduced the assembly-line method in 1913. Model T's had swept the country, and within five years they accounted for half the cars in the United States. John joined the long line of job applicants at Ford's Rouge auto plant outside Detroit, which would soon become the largest industrial complex in the world. These experiences would provide the seeds of his writing career.

Henry Ford was not an easy master. Assembly-line work was grueling, with a high worker turnover. Ford reacted by shortening hours and raising wages. But many employees bridled at Ford's paternalism and intolerance—he was virulently antiunion, and even more stridently anti-Semitic. Beginning in 1920, Ford took it upon himself to publish the U.S. edition of
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
the notorious anti-Semitic tract that was used to develop Nazi race ideology over the same period.

John Sieg was one of many young workers who leaped into union activism. Sieg was not yet a Communist, but he was fired from his job at
the Ford plant as a suspected Communist agitator nonetheless.
¹³
He managed to stay in college until January 1926, but hard times forced his hand. He moved from city to city looking for work, from the construction sites of Pittsburgh to the slaughterhouses of Chicago, taking in the people and places with a writer's eye.

Finally John and Sophie decided to go back to Germany. They arrived in Berlin in February 1928 to an atmosphere of high excitement. Everything was building up to the month of May, when national elections were held. Of the eight major parties, the Social Democrats were clearly dominant, with 153 out of 491 seats. The Social Democrats and the Communist KPD made modest gains; the conservatives lost a significant number of votes; while the unruly Nazis almost disappeared off the parliamentary map.

But the elections were not the only political action in town. May also brought May Day, when the traditional workers' marches expanded into mass political rallies. These often degenerated into slugfests between Communists, Nazis, and police. John's sympathies clearly lay with the leftist trade unionists. He soon joined Rote Hilfe, a solidarity group that had started off as a relief fund for striking workers, and evolved into a welfare effort for imprisoned and injured leftist organizers.

On May 30, 1928, John and Sophie married in a quiet ceremony in their modest apartment to the north of the city. Money was still tight, but Sophie was able to return to a previous job working as a stenographer and clerk for a Jewish lawyer named Harry Wolff in his office on Pots-damer Strasse.

John had his heart set on writing. He set to work, and within a few months he could boast that he had published an article in Dr. Adam Kuckhoff's prestigious political and literary monthly,
Die Tat.
Kuckhoff decided to try out his new author on a book review. His publisher's firm had just released a book by a contentious writer named Adolf Halfeld.
Amerika und Amerikanismus
portrayed American society as primitive, uncultured, and materialistic. “The American lives and traffics in the present,” Halfeld wrote, “idealist in word, realist in deed.”
¹⁴

Kuckhoff asked John Sieg, recently arrived from the “Amerika” in question, if he could respond to Halfeld's critique. He showed Kuckhoff a series of autobiographical letters and sketches he had written about his
experiences in the United States, and Kuckhoff edited them to address Halfeld's points.

John's letters begin in 1925, describing John's homecoming to Detroit and the flood of childhood memories it provoked. America's vitality makes Germany look like a leaky, sinking ship, he writes. “She's acquainted with the compass, but she doesn't even know she needs a rudder.” But America has its problems, too. John appreciates the vitality of Chicago's Frank Lloyd Wright and Carl Sandburg, but when he goes looking for work in the city's slaughterhouses, all he can think of is Upton Sinclair: “There I saw and understood what ‘the Jungle' really is.”
¹⁵

Back in Michigan in 1927, he notes that some factories have closed. It's a shame for the workers, he says, even though he thinks it's crazy to stand on an assembly line “repeating the same hand motion 8,500 times a day.”

In his final letter, John stares out on the immense New York night, meditating on its essence: the sound of saxophones on the streets of Harlem, the sea of humanity pouring out of movie theaters and concert halls—the gorgeous other face of
Amerikanismus
that must be experienced firsthand.

There is something to the criticisms of America, John concludes. Yes, the factory work can be brutal and alienating, and yes, Americans can be small-minded and infatuated with technology and money. And yet. When John turns his gaze on New York and other great American cities, he perceives an energy and an unexplored potential that the distant German theorists fail to grasp. He doesn't even bother to read German newspapers pontificating on the subject of America anymore, he says; they're ignorant and shortsighted. John has his own beefs about America, but they're based on his personal experience and tempered with considerable affection. “Amerika, my home,” he concludes, “here I leave you.”

John's farewell to America turned out to be a fine entrée to German journalism. Adam Kuckhoff was pleased, and offered him more assignments. In April 1929 he published more of John's American sketches, and the June issue offered John's travel piece, “Southern Wanderings.”

John was in excellent company.
Die Tat's
list of contributors displayed Kuckhoff's ever-expanding reach. It included Leo Schestov, the
Russian Jewish existentialist philosopher; Thomas Ring, a renowned astronomer; and Kurt Grossman, the Jewish general secretary for the German League for Human Rights in Berlin. John Sieg, with his history of assembly-line jobs and community college classes, might have felt a little awed by such august associates.
¹⁶

On the other hand, John's rough edges and real-life experiences were part of his appeal. Kuckhoff was fired from
Die Tat
shortly after, but he and John remained lifelong friends. Kuckhoff introduced his protégé to members of his circle, including Hans Otto, the handsome young actor who had married Kuckhoff's first wife, Marie. As a five-year veteran of the German Communist Party, Otto was active in both party affairs and the workers' theater movement. John Sieg and Hans Otto found they had much in common, including an interest in the Communist Party.

John's articles for
Die Tat
opened other doors. In August 1929 the prestigious
Berliner Tageblatt
published a piece about his experiences working on an American skyscraper construction crew. Hermann Grosse, the city editor of the Communist paper
Rote Fahne (Red Flag),
noticed the piece and approved of Sieg's sympathetic portrayal of the working class. He tracked down the twenty-seven-year-old writer and recruited him to write for his paper. Soon John was a member of the KPD as well.
¹⁷

John was entranced with the German Communists, and they with him. Grosse published a series of his articles, sketches, and stories under the pseudonym “Siegfried Nebel.”
¹⁸
John's proletarian authenticity helped him stand out. “In Grosse's eyes [John] had something of the Jack London about him,” recalled a friend. “A worker who had mastered Marxism, self-taught… A thoughtful man, physically agile but not showy…”
¹⁹

Within a few months Grosse offered John a job on the editorial staff. In the harsh winter of 1929, a job in journalism with a steady paycheck was doubly welcome.

The
Rote Fahne
was now the largest of the fifty Communist papers in Germany. By 1932 its circulation reached 130,000, about the same as the mainstream liberal daily
Berliner Tageblatt. Rote Fahne
was an unapolo-getic party organ, and played a role in undermining the government and promoting political violence. But it also published an impressive roster of
artistic contributors, including both obedient party members and free spirits from the avant-garde, including literary critic Walter Benjamin and composer Hans Eisler, with illustrations by George Grosz and John Heartfield.

John Sieg joined the German Communist Party at a time when its very identity was under assault, although the offensive, unfolding in far-off Moscow, was invisible to most party members in Berlin. The discord between the Germans and the Soviets went back to the very origins of socialism. The German Communists and the Stalinists shared Marxist rhetoric, but the Germans held a proprietary attitude toward Marxism; beginning with Karl Marx himself (who was, after all, born in Germany, the descendant of a long line of German rabbis). Stalinism, on the other hand, began life in the brutal incubator of Bolshevik terrorism; Stalin was so vicious and intolerant that even Lenin—no stranger to violence himself—condemned him as a scoundrel. But Lenin had died in 1924, unable to derail Stalin's path to power. This failure was to have fatal implications for the Germans.

The early KPD was rich in its diversity, including idealistic artists and intellectuals, as well as trade unionists, unemployed workers, and street-fighting thugs who saw communism as an organizing principle for gang warfare. Unlike the Russian Bolsheviks, the KPD functioned as a legitimate party in Germany.

But the German KPD had been a leading member of the Communist International since its founding in 1919. This forum was where the world's Communist parties gathered to discuss policy and strategy. Stalin had little use for their ideas, but he saw a way to use the organization to his own ends.
²⁰
Over the years he brought Communist International under his control and, with it, the various national Communist parties. As historian Alan Bullock points out, “No other Communist party suffered or resented this subordination more than the German.”
²¹

By the time the Sixth Communist International Congress convened in 1928, Stalin's scheme was complete. At his urging, the Congress resolved that all local Communist parties must be subordinate to the Communist International. Stalin then rammed through an additional resolution stating that Communist parties everywhere should view socialist parties as their most dangerous enemies, “more dangerous than
the avowed adherents of predatory imperialism.”
²²
In German terms, this meant that the KPD and the SPD, which had sometimes cospon-sored social legislation, would now be incapable of collaboration.

The stakes were desperately high. In the 1928 German parliamentary elections, the two leftist parties accounted for more than forty percent of the vote in a field of eight parties. (The Nazis, by comparison, had dropped off to less than three percent.) If a working coalition between them had been promoted—instead of sabotaged by Stalin—it could have blocked the juggernaut of the right.