62
PARTISAN REVIEW
GPU without ever being tried, the first of the Yugoslavian com–
munists to be so treated . When I received no message from him, and
no one brought news of him from Moscow, I had to conclude that he
had been liquidated .
When I finally broke with communism, it was also on his ac–
count, for the thought that I was on the side of his murderers had
become unbearable.
* * *
The political emigre is in all important respects the very op–
posite of the tourist. While he may act as though the train which is to
bring him home were already gathering steam, he cannot predict
whether he will be going home in a week, in a month, or not for
several years. He also does not know how long he can keep paying
his rent, yet is aware that he, like many of his fellow sufferers, will be
owing an ever lower rent and living ever more wretchedly. He will of
necessity move around a good deal, always seeking the company of
his own kind or other foreigners . The profound indifference of the
Parisians, their determined refusal to be drawn into the life of a
stranger, or to let a stranger intrude on their own existance - this at–
titude allows every individual a degree of personal freedom that one
encounters hardly anywhere else. This attitude was useful to the ex–
iles, but it also made it possible for the poorest, the loneliest among
them to go under in France, as I once wrote, to "drown on the side–
walk, in the open air, in the midst of a throng of people, without a
single passerby's turning around to look at him."
The German emigres were everywhere, but especially in Paris,
only one group among many. Not the most unhappy, not the most
apathetic, and not even the most fragmented . Yet they were the least
liked, because they were German, because they were Jewish,
because they not only made themselves the most conspicuous, but
also got on the Frenchmen's nerves with a warning they kept re–
peating, a warning the French did not want to hear and in any case
planned to ignore. And a common superstition makes the bringer
of bad news suspect; from time immemorial he has been seen as
partly responsible for the calamity of which he brings word, as wit–
tingly or unwittingly an accomplice of those he would warn against.
In Paris Willi Miinzenberg had set up headquarters, along
with Babette Gross and other associates, immediately after Hitler's
seizure of power. In the next few years he accomplished a good deal.
