42
PARTISAN REVIEW
and deputy of the German Politburo in Leipzig. My flight from
Leipzig to West Berlin was accomplished in a single night.
Though I have been back in Germany since September 1949,
my imprisonment has ended only now. The immediate reason for my
escape was a warrant for my arrest issued by the State Security
Police. I did not believe the person who had seen it.
As
an intellectual,
I searched for logic. Just four days before, during the recess of a
Central Committee conference with Pieck and Ulbricht, Wilhelm
Zaisser, the Minister for State Security and a member of the Polit–
buro, had given me some friendly indications that he might soon
visit Leipzig. He had been my teacher at the Moscow Antifa Aca–
demy. It is true that after fifteen months he had sent me back to
the routine existence of the prisoner of war camps instead of letting
me go home. But now, five years later, in this last conversation, he
cited me as evidence that his labors then had not been in vain.
My wife is no intellectual. Moreover, she was once incarcerated
for four weeks for investigation, on the basis of a single denuncia–
tion. While I still wavered, even after a second warning, she was
already packing a suitcase. She did not believe in logic, ideology, or
the friendship of ministers. She believed in our child-and the war–
rant for my arrest. I know that, had I been alone, I would have relied
upon my logic again, just as I did before my capture, only to regret
it for years afterward. Or just as I did when Zaisser rewarded me
with dismissal from his academy instead of repatriation, because I
had deliberated, logically, that the Communist instructors would no
doubt prefer an honest expression of criticism, acknowledging num–
erous points in favor of their system, to a hypocritical acceptance of
its totality. I had not yet recognized that this system is logical only
within its own boundaries. This logic, the Stalinist dialectic, is not a
matter of philosophic thought or of the search for truth; it is a
means to power, eliminating all rivals and declaring its system of
dialectical and historical materialism all-powerful. In the face of this
unique, all-comprehending and all-explaining truth, however, the
individual must choose "all or nothing at all," total submission or
total rejection. Nothing is left out of the system, not even its re–
pudiation; even that has its appointed place within the unerring
total truth-it is explained by the axiom of the "irreconcilability of
class conflicts" and the doctrine of predestination through social origin.
