MANEs SPERBER
The Unheeded Warning
At
age forty-two Willi Munzenberg was taking giant steps toward the
zenith of his unusual career. His name was already known far beyond
Gennany's borders, and
all
over the world, in the Communist movement
and the countless organizations of sympathizers, particularly among
intellectuals in many countries, this propagandist of the Comintern
achieved the most astounding success under different names and with
variable methods. Lenin, who had come
to
appreciate Willi in
Switzerland during the war, asked him to start a solidarity action in the
Volga areas during the famine. What mattered was not so much material
aid as the propagandistic exploitation of humanitarian endeavors in
behalf of the Bolshevik regime. Thus the Internationale Arbeiterhilfe
[International Workers' Relief Organization] came into being under
Willi's direction. It only appeared to be a competitor of the Rote Hilfe
[Red Aid] , for the IAH was primarily intended to organize the solidarity
aroused by it - that is, to capitalize on it in founding anticolonialistic,
anti-imperialistic, and anti-Fascist associations. In their name Willi's
people then organized international conventions and created publishing
firms, book clubs, newspapers, and periodicals as well as the Soviet film
collective Meschrabpon that quickly became famous.
Berlin am Morgen
[Berlin in the Morning]
and
Die Welt am Abend [The World in the Evening]
were two very skillfully edited dailies that attracted far more readers than
Die Rate Fahne [The Red Flag],
the central organ of the German
Communist Party. Willi placed Romain Rolland, Henri Barbusse, the
widow of Sun Yat-sen, and other well-known figures at the head of
international movements against imperialism, colonialism, war, and
Fascism. The local groups that were spread over the entire world were
supplied with slogans in keeping with a party line that had to be
Editor's Note: These two excerpts are taken from Manes Sperber's three-volume
autobiography,
All
Otir
Yesterdays, Voltime Two: The Unheeded Warning, 1918-1933,
translated by Harry Zohn, published by Holmes
&
Meier, New York, NY, pp. 168-70,
180-89. Copyright
©
1991 Holmes and Meier Publishers, Inc.
