12
PARTISAN REVIEW
joined the strike and thus helped to paralyze the city's transportation
system. Walter Ulbricht, whose rapid rise no one foresaw at the time,
headed the Communist strike committee on instructions from the Party.
The confusion of those November days was to cause an increasing
paralysis of the will to action and produce an apathy which at the
decisive moment bore an alarming resemblance to a tendency to play
possum. In a plebiscite held fifteen months earlier the KP had, on express
orders from Stalin, voted, also at the last moment, to depose the
Socialist coalition government of Prussia, and a year later the KP had
called for a general strike in favor of the reinstatement of the same
government. And was one now supposed to join with the Nazis against
the working population of Berlin? "Teddy" (which is what Ernst
Thalmann was called) must know best. People like us can't have an
overall view. It simply is like in wartime: Shut your trap and keep
serving." That was what the members of the KP told themselves and the
way the leaders of their cell, the organizational and political leaders of
the subdistrict, explained it to them. In their newspapers they read that
the social-fascist capitalistic lackeys would once again get their heads
bloodied in their assault on the strategy and tactics of the KP. Did the
"lower functionaries" and the furious newspaper articles and leaflets
convince the thunderstruck adherents? Where was their sound common
sense, and why did the Berliners allow their proverbial clearheadedness to
be muddied?
There were several political and even more numerous psychological
reasons for this. In the first place, the Communists, who were constantly
engaged in a total, absolute opposition, had proclaimed a crisis in the
midst of prosperity and demanded the destruction of a system which, they
claimed, was bound to cause even greater misery for a growing number
of people . Since 1929 their propaganda had been repeating that the
Communists had been right, which certainly was convincing. In the sec–
ond place, in the entire world there was only one country without un–
employment-the Soviet Union, one-sixth of the earth, which the Bol–
sheviks had liberated from the capitalistic yoke. Thus it was necessary to
learn from them in order to follow their example. Since the leadership
of the KPD was doing exactly that, people should trust it, and it was
going to lead the German proletariat to victory via the most direct
route.
In addition, there were reasons that made even skeptics shrink from
leaving the Party. Anyone who had belonged to an industrial or
residential cell for any length of time rightly feared that, if he broke
away, he would first be treated as a renegade, then as a parasite, and
finally as an enemy - and by the very people who constituted his
