THE ORIGINAL SIN OF THE INTELLECT
53
tested an insult by one of the German emigrant instructors, he called
me to his study. Had he been present when that breach of discipline
occurred, he said, he would have asked the Soviet commander to
incarcerate me on the spot for three days. The present Minister
for State Security has never been able to disguise in himself the
Prussian lieutenant of the First World War; again and again he refers
to the "iron discipline" of the Soviet Army. At that time he empha–
sized that my personal NKVD file would be kept up in every labor
camp, or if I should ever return to Germany, just as it had been
kept up till then. "We will not let anyone drop out of sight who ever
attended this school. So all possibilities are still open to you."
Zaisser's deputy school director, Hanna Wolf, discussed anthro–
posophy and Marxism with me month after month. Today she is
the director of the SED Party Academy "Karl Marx" and a candi–
date for the Politburo. She is one of the most intelligent women
I have ever met, even in the German universities.
As
a middle-class
student she had come to the YCL only because of her Jewish back–
ground; fanatic without precedent, she emigrated to the Soviet Union
very early. Like the overwhelming majority of the Communist in–
telligentsia, she refutes in her own biography the thesis of predestina–
tion through social origin. Nevertheless, she does not surrender her
belief in this doctrine, which plays the same role in the Soviet system
as does the racist theory in fascism.
Hanna Wolf knew better than anyone else how to influence me
intellectually, above all by the "dialectic" of her confessions. She
attempted, for example, to explain the contents of anthroposophy in
materialistic terms, insofar as she could not deny them, and she
pestered Professor Jansen of Leningrad to give a philosophic lecture
on the phenomena of extra-sensory perception, clairvoyance, tele–
pathy, etc. But .as recently as this year she confessed to me in her small
study in Klein-Machnow that she had just failed to give a logically
faultless philosophical definition of the concept "matter" in the
Stalinist sense to a bourgeois philosophy student. She gave me the
Party assignment of writing a comprehensive treatise on this topic.
Her main philosophic argument, like that of the propaganda division
of the Central Committee, was always the supposed confirmation of
the Stalinist dialectic by the findings of modern natural science. In
proving the objective truth of the dialectic, science also proves the
