Sepharad (18 page)

Münzenberg invented the political technique of enlisting wealthy intellectuals with flattery, of using their self-idolatry and their minimal interest in reality to manipulate them. Not without scorn, he referred to them as the Club of Innocents. He sought out moderates with humanitarian inclinations and bourgeois solidity, if possible with the added virtue of a patina of money and cosmopolitanism: André Gide, H. G. Wells, Romain Rolland, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Einstein. Lenin would have shot such intellectuals immediately, or consigned them to a dark cell in Lubyanka Prison or to Siberia. Münzenberg discovered how enormously useful they could be in making attractive a system that to him, in the incorruptible inner core of his intelligence, must have seemed frightening in its incompetence and cruelty, even in the years he considered it legitimate.

Little by little he was becoming the impresario of the Comintern, its secret ambassador in the bourgeois Europe he was so fond of, the same bourgeoisie to whose destruction he had dedicated his life. He founded companies and newspapers that served as covers for handling the propaganda funds sent from Russia, but he had such an innate talent for business that each of those ventures prospered, multiplying clandestine investments into rivers of money with which he then financed new projects of revolutionary conspiracy. His audacious business ventures ceased to be covers and became true capitalist successes.

He was a director of the Third International, but he drove through Berlin, and later Paris, in a large Lincoln, always accompanied by his blond wife swathed in furs. He invented grand and noble causes that no one of goodwill could fail to support. The measure of his triumph is equaled only by that of his anonymity: no one knew that the international movements of solidarity and the international congresses of writers and artists promoting peace and culture were the brainchildren of Willi Münzenberg. From his own experience, he knew that hard-nosed Bolsheviks like Stalin, or Lenin himself, would rouse very little public affection in the West, so to attract a Nobel laureate in literature or a Hollywood actress to the cause was a formidable coup in public relations. He discovered that radicalism and distant revolutions were irresistibly attractive to intellectuals of a certain social position.

His first success in large-scale organization and propaganda was the world campaign to ship foodstuffs to the regions of Russia devastated by the great famines of 1921. The international fund for aid to workers, which he directed, was responsible for delivering dozens of shiploads of food to Russia and also for creating a powerful current of humanitarian sympathy around the world for the suffering and heroism of the Soviet people. The indifferent charity of other times was transmuted into vigorous political solidarity in which a benefactor could always feel he was a comfortable step away from active militancy. Münzenberg contrived seals, insignias, and propaganda fliers illustrated with photographs of life in the USSR, color prints, paperweights with busts of Marx and Lenin, postcards of workers and soldiers, anything that could be sold at a low price and would allow the buyer to feel that his few coins were a gesture of solidarity, not charity, a practical and comfortable form of revolutionary action.

In 1925, with countless committees, publications, marches, and images in movie newsreels, he plotted and created the great wave of support for Sacco and Vanzetti. In the terrible years of inflation in Germany, the Japan earthquake of 1923, the general strike in England in 1926, he filled the coffers of resistance and
organized soup kitchens, schools, and shelters for orphan children. It was the need to print and distribute massive numbers of political pamphlets that awakened his interest in publishing. In 1926 he owned two mass-circulation dailies in Germany, an illustrated weekly magazine that had a circulation of a million—and was, says Koestler, the Communist counterpart to
Life
—as well as a series of publications that included technical journals for photographers and magazines for radio and movie fans. In Japan, directly or indirectly, his organization controlled nineteen newspapers and magazines. In the Soviet Union he produced films on Eisenstein and Pudovkin, and in Germany he organized the distribution of Soviet films and financed the vanguardist spectacles of Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht. All around the world, film clubs, sports clubs, reading clubs, touring societies, and groups of activists in favor of peace became unimpeachable branches of the Club of Innocents.

With Hitler's arrival in the chancellery, Münzenberg lost everything he possessed or controlled in Germany. But he was like those American magnates who suffer horrific bankruptcies only to claw their way up out of nothing and create new fortunes with the same invincible energy. As soon as he arrived in Paris, he bought a newspaper and organized financial support for the underground in Germany. The German Communist Party had believed up to the last hour that the Nazis were minor adversaries and that the true enemies of the working class were the Social Democrats. The disaster of January 1933 convinced Münzenberg that the suicidal sectarianism of his fellow party members had to be abandoned in favor of a great alliance among all democratic forces prepared to resist the sinister tidal wave of fascism. Within a few months, he had published one of the best-selling books of the twentieth century,
The Brown Book of Nazi Terror,
and achieved his greatest success, the masterpiece of his
instinct for mass propaganda, the international campaign on behalf of Dimitrov and others arrested and put on trial for the fire at the Reichstag.

Just as the blackest period of Stalin's terror and extermination was drawing near, Münzenberg's flair for publicity ensured that in the eyes of the world's progressives the Soviet Union was the great adversary of totalitarianism, more valiant and resolute than any corrupt bourgeois democracy.

He never paused, the flow of schemes and proposals never slowed, ideas for books and articles, for new forms of political activism, clubs and committees and campaigns, lists of prestigious names needed for each new cause, aid to workers in the Asturias uprising of 1934 and the protest against the Italian invasion of Abyssinia. He stormed into his offices in Paris like a cyclone, yelled over the telephone at the top of his lungs, smoked his excellent cigars while absentmindedly sprinkling the ash over the broad lapels of his expensive suits, dictated memorandums until three or four in the morning, sent telegrams to Moscow or New York or Tokyo, checked the sales figures for books and print runs of newspapers, improvised the rules for the World Committee for the Relief of the Victims of German Fascism, drew up the list of foods and medicines to go on a ship leased by his organization in Marseilles and destined for striking workers in the port of Shanghai.

He is everywhere, directing a prodigious variety of tasks, feared and obeyed by people working in several countries, and yet he's invisible, hidden in shadow. Both conspirator and a deputy in the Reichstag, both entrepreneur fond of expensive cigars and chauffeured cars and a militant Communist, a man of the world who enters salons on the arm of a woman taller and more distinguished than he and a critic of the idiocies and depravities of the rich, whom at the same time he admires with the fascination of the poor boy who watches the dazzling lives of the powerful from
a distance, who smells the perfumes of women swathed in fur stoles and desires them with a passion fed by social outrage.

 

IN OCTOBER OF
1936, an emissary presented himself in Münzenberg's Paris offices, a man whom he had never seen and whom he disliked because of his surliness and obvious air of an informer or jailer. When the man entered, he examined the office out of the corner of his eye, disapproving of the luxury of the carpet, the curtains and paintings, the solid, bold shapes of the furniture, the tubular chairs, the art deco table at which Münzenberg was seated, leaning on his elbows, surrounded with documents and telephones. Without preamble or ceremony, the man told Münzenberg that his presence was required in Moscow.

There is also a traitor in the story, a shadow at Münzenberg's side, the rancorous and docile, cultivated and polyglot subordinate—Münzenberg spoke only German, and that with a strong lower-class accent—Otto Katz, also called André Simon. Slim, elusive, an old friend of Franz Kafka, Katz was the organizer of the congress of antifascist intellectuals of Valencia, Münzenberg's and the Comintern's representative among the intellectuals of New York and the actors and screenwriters of Hollywood, a perpetual spy, the fawning adulator of Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett, Lillian Hellman, all fervent and cynical Stalinists. The éminence grise behind Münzenberg's grand machinations, he also reported on his superior's every action and word to the new hierarchs of Moscow.

Münzenberg quickly pledges his loyalty, of course, but in spite of how perceptive he is about character and weakness he fails to detect the edge of resentment beneath Katz's suaveness, or the meticulous patience with which Katz secretly collects small IOUs for the insults he suffers or imagines, the humiliation that Münzenberg's uncontrolled and baroque energy has inflicted through the years. Koestler writes that Katz was dark and distinguished, attractive in a slightly sordid way. He spoke and wrote fluently in French, English, German, Russian, and Czech. He had discussed literature with Milena Jensenska in the cafés of Prague and Vienna. He always squinted one eye when he lit his cigarettes or was absorbed in something. During the Spanish Civil War, he directed the official news agency of the Republican government, which entrusted him with secret funds allocated to influence certain French publications and politicians. Münzenberg rescued him from poverty and despair in Berlin, where at the beginning of the 1920s Katz was frequenting the haunts of beggars and drunks and loitering near bridges favored by suicides. In 1938, when Münzenberg was expelled from the German Communist Party, accused of secretly working for the Gestapo, Katz was one of the first to repudiate him publicly and call him a traitor.

That rat Otto Katz gave him the Judas kiss, plotted his death, even if he didn't personally tighten the noose around his neck.

Many years later, an ancient woman of ninety speaks into a microphone in the dusk of an apartment in Munich. Age has erased the haughtiness from her face but not her imperious bearing or the glitter in her eyes, just as time has not calmed her scorn for that long-ago traitor, who also was eventually expelled and condemned, executed in 1952 in a cell in Prague with a rope around
his
neck. There was no mercy for executioners either, it seems. “Otto Katz!” says the old woman, pronouncing that name as if spitting it through her tightly pressed lips painted with a ragged streak of crimson.

I also track this woman through literature, seek her face in photographs, browse the labyrinths of the Internet, hoping to find the book she wrote in the 1940s to vindicate her husband's memory and denounce and shame those who plotted his death. I see scenes, images not invoked by will or based on any recollection but endowed with a somnambulist precision in which imagination does not intervene: curtains drawn in the Munich apartment,
in October 1989, the tape whirring with a slight hiss in the small recorder before her, an archive where her voice will be preserved, a voice I never heard, it came to me through the soundless words of a book discovered by chance and read voraciously during a sleepless night.

For two or three years I have flirted with the idea of writing a novel, imagined situations and places, like snapshots, or like those posters displayed on large billboards at the entrance to a movie theater. That these stills were never in narrative sequence made them all the more powerful, freed them of the weight and vulgar conventions of a scenario; they were revelations in the present, with no before or after. When I didn't have the money to go inside, I would spend hours looking at the photographs outside the theater, not needing to invent a story to fit them together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Each became a mystery, illuminating the others, creating multiple links that I could break or modify at my whim, patterns in which no image nullified the others or gained precedence or lost its uniqueness within the whole.

The creaking of the parquet floor in our new house, or a bad dream about illness or misfortune, woke me suddenly, and I was Willi Münzenberg waking in the middle of the night in his house in Paris or in the icy room of a Moscow hotel, fearing that his executioners were approaching, wondering how long it would be before a shot or knife brought an end to the great illusion and delirium of his public existence, and the long tenderness of his married life with Babette, who lay sleeping at his side, hugging him in her sleep the way you hug me, with the determination of a sleepwalker.

The local train stops at the small station of La Sierra de Madrid: drizzle, hillsides covered with trees and fog, the strong scent of wet vegetation—rockrose, pines, cedars—and steep slate rooftops give the impression that you have traveled much farther, to a hidden mountain retreat where there might be sanatoriums
or homes for patients in need of rest and cold, clean air. The train is rapid and modern, but the station building is bare stone and the windows are set in red brick, and the sign with the name of the town is written on yellow tiles. There's no one on the platform, and no one else has stepped off the train. A scent of forests, of drenched trees and earth, floods my lungs, and the touch of the still, misty air on my face gives me an immediate sense of calm. The train pulls away, and I begin walking along a dirt road, suitcase in hand, toward some farms where lights are just going on. In 1937, fearing for his life, so agitated and exhausted that at times he felt a sharp pain in his chest, the warning of a heart attack, Münzenberg hid for a few months in a clinic in a place called La Vallée des Loups, the valley of the wolves. The name of the director also seemed an indication or promise of something: Dr. Le Sapoureux. But Münzenberg is as ill suited for physical repose as he is for intellectual calm, and the minute he arrives at the clinic he starts spending his nights writing a book. As I step onto the platform of the small train station of La Sierra, alone, I am Willi Münzenberg looking in the dark for the road to the sanatorium.