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living the truth of his innocence outside the party. Frank was sen–
tenced to and met his death on the gallows .
*
While the Semprun memoir appeared in 1977 , it was that story,
already told by Koestler, Silone, Manes Sperber, and dozens of
others one quarter of a century before , and my own living memory
of Kronstadt , which made me so receptive, when I read them in
1947, to the final pages of Max Weber's "Politics as a Vocation"
(1918). Weber's is the most poignant statement I know of the tensions
of ethics and politics, and a stark description of the choices facing the
individual who commits himself to politics .
I need not repeat Weber's discussion of the "ethic of responsibil–
ity" and the "ethic of ultimate ends," and the corruption inherent in
each path if followed to its completion : the loss of principle through
the constant compromise of "responsibility," and the zealotry of fan–
aticism when the ends are used to justify any morally abhorrent
means. "One cannot prescribe to anyone," Weber wrote, "whether
he should follow an ethic of absolute ends or an ethic of responsibil–
ity, or when the one and when the other." Weber understood, given
the storms of his own life from 1910 to 1920, the ethical dilemmas
and the ethical paradoxes of these choices . In his later years, when
erotic impulses had broken through some deep repressions, Weber
was drawn to the romantic currents of the time . Yet by upbringing,
by social position, and ultimately by temperament, he followed the
ethic of responsibility . In the unspoken dialogue with Nietzsche that
runs like a scarlet thread through his later work on religion and poli–
tics, Weber is saying: Yes , I, too, would like to go to the mountain
top, like Zarathustra, to stand on Pisgah; but if I go, who would
there be to "mind the store ," to take care of the humdrum, prosaic
tasks of the mundane world?
As Weber knew, after the charismatic eruption there is the dull
day after, with the daily round of tasks anew. "Politics is a strong
and slow boring of hard boards," he wrote. He distrusted most the
"sterile excitation" (a phrase from Georg Simmel that he repeated
twice in the final pages) of the intellectuals in the "carnival" that is
·Semprun did his penance in writing the screenplay of Artur London's
L:Aveu
(The Confession),
the story of the Prague trials, which Costa-Gavras made into a film.
An earlier work,
La Guerre est Finie,
dealt with his underground forays into Spain.
Mr. Semprun was expelled from the Spanish Communist Party in 1964, together
with Fernando Claudrn, for "revisionist" heresies.
