John E. Tashjean
BORKENAU: THE REDISCOVERY
OF A THINKER
"Not long after my return from Spain," Gerald Brenan
reports in his
Personal Record 1920-1972,
I had got to know an Austrian sociologist called Franz (von)
Borkenau , who hadjust brought out a brilliant book,
TheSpanish
Cockpit,
on the early months of the Civil War... . During the
next few years Borkenau paid us several visits, and we became
good friends. He was the son of an Austrian civil servant and did
not learn that he was of Jewish origin until he was grown up .
The discovery was a great shock to him, and his reaction to it
was to become a Communist and to take employment in the
Comintern. After some years of this he became disgusted by the
lack of political realism shown by the Party as well as by the total
failure of the Russian Revolution to implement its ideals. So he
left the Party.... He was an uncouth , clumsy man with an ab–
surd moustache and little aptitude for getting on with people. A
Nietzschean romantic rather than a Marxist, he always thought,
like a Prussian professor, in terms of force and power. In conver–
sations his judgements were often wild, and it was only when he
sat down to write that his intelligence and his sense for reality
came out. . . . He was a courageous man, as his book shows, but
so extraordinarily nervous that he could not sit or walk without
con tinually turning his head to see if he was being watched or
followed. We called him "the spy" because he looked like a comic
cartoon of one by Herve.
Here, then, is a psychobiography waiting for its author. Car–
toons and thumbnail sketches aside, who is Borkenau and why does
he matter?
Not very often the work of a powerfully original cultural his–
torian becomes current a quarter of a century after his death. Al–
though known as the father of Kremlinology and as a historian of
communism, few of our intellectuals were familiar with his writings
Editor's Note: Copyright
C
1983 by John Tashjean
