106
ERIC BENTLEY
Official Communism and official Anti-Communism are both bank–
rupt. Yet my friends tell me that pronouncing "a plague on both your
houses" is too negative. Too negative for what?
Am
I to minimize the
shortcomings (i.e., crimes and outrages) of one of the two sides, just
to enabl'e myself to become a hypocritical champion of the other? Isn't
that too positive by half? Surely the main objection to Stalinism yesterday,
as to "Johnsonism" today, is that, in the name of an uncertain moral
result, it asks us
to
accept, deny, and conceal the certain immoral means?
A "purely negative" attitude might well be preferable
to
any choice
between such positive alternatives. But is it necessary to be purely nega–
tive? That would be to assume the Wall is solid and perpetual. Actually
there are cracks in it. Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse, as I was saying, is one of
the cracks.
About five minutes walk from the Bahnhof, on the East side, lives
Wolf Biermann. Now there's a Communist, if you like, though hardly
the Parisian fellow-traveler type, cleverly justifying every twist and turn
of official policy, or deftly shifting the subject to "how about the Negroes
in the South?" Strictly speaking, Biermann is an ex-Communist, but
then too he says he wouldn't "choose freedom" and go West if the Wall
were opened to him and the streets of welcoming West Berlin were
covered with gold.
Biermann
is
a poet and singer. "He
has
had the best publicity East
Germany could give any man," said the friend who guided me to his
apartment. "What's that?" I asked. "Walter Ulbricht," was the reply,
"publicly read Biermann out of the Party, and if that wouldn't bring
a poet to th'e attention of the public I don't know what would." Wolf
Biermann sang for me. He writes both the words and the music. There
was an "American" song-Woody Guthrie-Pete Seeger style, a littl'e mixed
up-about the Civil Rights worker William L. Moore who was murdered
in the South. That's routine, of course, for any radical songster. Far
from routine is Biermann's song about the Communist who escaped from
Buchenwald in 1939, got to Moscow, and there was shot by Stalin on
information supplied by the Nazis. Far from routine is the song about
the East German citizen who was beaten up by the police for dancing
free style. Far from routine, his address:
TO THE OLD COMRADES
1.
Look at me, comrades
With your tired ryes
With your hardened eyes
Good-natured eyes
See me dissatisfied with the age
