Fear of Mirrors. Tariq Ali
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different David. A young man in patched trousers and tattered shoes. Gertie had prevented him from wearing his only suit. They noticed that he spoke in plebeian accents and, worst of all, was not in the least embarrassed by his poverty. The kindly Dr Meyer and his even kinder wife decided that the boy was cheeky. What they really meant by this was that David was not deferential. They decided to teach him the rudiments of civilized behaviour by subjecting him to an insolent inquisition. Who were his parents? Where were they from? Was his father a socialist? Where did they live? How large was their apartment? How had David got into the university?
Gertrude was horrified. She could not see that her parents were simply expressing a fear of the other and worried about losing their daughter. She saw it as a display of decadent, bourgeois philistinism. She told me that it was a side of her parents that she had, till then, sought to ignore and repress.
David registered only mild amusement. He had replied to each and every query with impeccable dignity, while simultaneously trying to warn Gertie with his eyes to calm down and avoid a tantrum at all costs. It was no use. Your grandmother was too far gone by that stage. She was livid. Ashamed of her parents, ashamed of their house, ashamed at the presence of uniformed maids, who couldn’t keep their eyes off David, and ashamed of herself for belonging to the Meyer family.
She never asked David to visit her again. Instead, she began to spend more and more time with his family. It was in the Stein basement, where she spent most of the days of her vacation that December, that Gertie learnt of the significance of the Russian Revolution.
David’s father thought that Lenin was fine for Russia, which had no tradition of political parties and trade unions, but not for Germany. He had little time for the revolutionaries of the Spartakusbund who had split the great German Social Democratic Party, accusing even Karl Kautsky of treachery. When David pointed out that the great German party had voted war credits to the Kaiser while the Russian party had not simply refused to support the Tsar, but had instead suggested to the workers that their real enemy was at home, his father nodded sadly. He, too, had been unhappy with the SPD policy of supporting the war, but he remained adamant on the other question. Germany was not prepared for Lenin’s revolution. The old tried and tested methods of the German party were the only hope.
‘There is an old German proverb,’ Herr Stein told David and Gertie one evening. ‘A silk hat is indeed very fine, provided only that I had mine. But Karl and Rosa are a long way off yet …’ For Herr Stein, the Spartacists lived in an unreal world.
David, not wishing to upset his parents, had refrained from telling his father that he and Gertie had started attending Spartacist study classes in Munich. This was not so much because of their differences. David knew how much his parents had sacrificed in order to educate him. They would be worried that his new-found interest in politics would take him away from the university and his career.
When, a month later, in January 1919, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered in cold blood by the Freikorps in Berlin, the whole Stein family went into mourning. Did you know, Karl, that one of the officers involved in the murder was a man called Canaris, later Hitler’s admiral and someone greatly admired by certain Western leaders during the war? They thought they could have done business with him. They were right.
David’s father wept loudly as he shook his head. He was sad and angry. He had heard Rosa and Liebknecht speak at many meetings before the outbreak of war. He had raised funds for them when they were imprisoned for opposing the war, but despite his admiration for the slain revolutionaries, he still could not defend their decision to launch an uprising.
‘Crazy dreamers,’ he told David and Gertie while the tears were still pouring down his face. ‘That’s what they were. The workers will miss them in the years to come. Rosa should have known better. We have to act now. We can’t sit still. If we don’t move, the Junkers will kill us all. Spartacists, Independents, Social Democrats. We’re all the same for them.’
David embraced his father, but did not speak. Old Stein was wrong. The Junkers knew the difference between the groups only too well. And Field Marshal von Hindenberg knew that in Friedrich Ebert, he had found a German patriot who would not flinch from the task that confronted him. Without the support of the Social Democrat leaders, Ebert, Noske and Scheidemann, the Junkers could not have drowned the Berlin uprising in blood.
Perhaps, Karl, you should persuade the Ebert Foundation to fund a commemoration of the uprising and the murders in 2018. Your SPD can claim that Ebert is the Father of German Democracy. My PDS, if it is still there, will argue that the Berlin tragedy of 1918-19 paved the way for the catastrophe of 1933. Engels once remarked, in a letter to a friend, that history is the result of conflicts of many individual wills, who have been affected in different ways by a host of particular conditions of life. The final result is often something that no one willed. As a general statement I think he’s right, but Hindenberg and Ebert wanted to crush the revolution in Berlin. And they did.
So you see, Karl, my century began with a tragedy and is ending on the same note. Our generation was brought up on stories of how it might have all been different if the revolution had triumphed in Berlin. You might think I’m still trying desperately to cling on to something, to anything, even if it is just the debris of failed revolutions. You might even be right but, if only for a few minutes, forget I’m your father. Let me assume the guise of a professor of comparative literature and suggest that you read one of the great novelists of this century.
Even though Alfred Döblin was not a favoured author of the DDR commissars, I often used him in my lectures at Humboldt. I read passages from his works and had the following proposition by him put up in large type on my noticeboard:
The subject of a novel is reality unchained, reality that confronts the reader completely independently of some firmly fixed course of events. It is the reader’s task to judge, not the author’s! To speak of a novel is to speak of layering, of piling in heaps, of wallowing, of pushing and shoving. A drama is about its poor plot, its desperately ever-present plot. In drama it is always ‘forward!’ But ‘forward’ is never the slogan of a novel.
Döblin was not simply the author of Berlin, Alexanderplatz. He wrote two other epic novels. When you have some time you should try and read A People Betrayed: November 1918: A German Revolution and its sequel Karl and Rosa: A German Tragedy. I’m not alone in this opinion. Your very own Gunter Grass, the lyric poet of German Social Democracy, is in full agreement with me on the Döblin question. He has acknowledged his own debt to Döblin, putting him on an even higher pedestal than Mann, Brecht and Kafka. I’m not sure that Grass likes the two novels I want you to read. I’ve not read anything by him on them, but don’t let that bother you.
Like Brecht, Döblin found refuge in Los Angeles during the bad years. He worked under contract to MGM, waiting impatiently for the end of the Third Reich. Brecht returned to the East, Döblin to the West. Much of this you’ll find in Schichsalreise, his memoirs, which affected me greatly thirty years ago.
Read him, Karl. Read him. It will make a refreshing change from those interminable Bundesbank reports which are clogging your brain. Of course, you have to study them in order to feed the jelly-fish who employ you, but give yourself a break.
Gertrude and her lover, David Stein, were making plans to run away together. They were thinking lofty thoughts. Your generation does not understand this, but for most of this century there have been millions who thought lofty thoughts. In those times large numbers of people were prepared to sacrifice their own future for a better world.
David and Gertrude were obsessed by the fate of their comrades in Berlin. They knew that the survivors of the Berlin massacre were traumatized. People from other cities were needed to help rebuild the Berlin organization. People like them.
Even as they were mapping their future, a revolution erupted in Munich. The very thought is unthinkable today. Bavaria? Which Bavaria? The land of beer cellars where Hitler’s audiences became intoxicated on hatred and which later became a fascist stronghold or, in our own post-war times, the fiefdom controlled by Franz Joseph Strauss? I’m talking of another, older Bavaria.
In November 1918, Kurt Eisner, leader of the Independent Social