MANES SPERBER
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immediate surroundings and to whom he felt all the more bound
because his open espousal of the party line had isolated him from
everyone else - his brothers, his fellow workers, and all his friends. Like
elite corps and secret societies, extremist groups establish themselves as
closed milieus that make defectors anathema. Added to this was the fact
that even in those gloomy November days no Communist sincerely
believed that the Social Democrats would be the enemy in the
impending civil war. Everyone was certain that the most difficult and
most dangerous struggles were ahead and that these would be against the
SA, the SS, and perhaps also the Stahlhelm, a reactionary association of
front-line veterans, and certainly not against the Socialist or the Catholic
workers. That is why anyone who did not want to seem a coward had
to stick with the Party.
I continued my work but gradually decreased its volume, for I
wanted to have time for all contacts that might become necessary from
one moment to the next. Every day I had many meetings with activists of
the youth association, responsible Party people, comrades from abroad
who were working for international organizations in Berlin, Yugoslavs,
and of course with friends, most frequently with Houtermans and his
wife Charlotte, in whose house we often carried on discussions till late at
night. We were particularly concerned with a suspicion that finally
became inescapable: What if that twaddle about the social-fascist enemy
number one was not based on error and delusion? What if the
exacerbation of dissension within the workers' movement amid deafening
calls for a united front was not the result of an addle-brained
misinterpretation of the situation and the true balance of power but, on
the contrary, was the unerring application of a policy that did not have
the victory of the German proletariat as its primary aim but
accommodated itself in advance to Hitler's victory and therefore
refrained from doing anything that might actually facilitate a united front
against him? In that case, but only then , the Nazi-Communist strike was
an excellent move, for now no union and no Social Democrat could
regard the united front as anything but a shamelessly stupid subterfuge.
Yes, but ... But why should the Russians, why should Stalin, not
only prevent a revolution in Germany but wish to abandon the entire
workers' movement to the victorious Nazis? Only to get rid of the So–
cial Democratic Party and the reformist unions?
We regarded ourselves as intelligent young people. Our political
and historical education was above average, and our revolution-minded–
ness was unshakable, but so was our determination to know the truth.
We were still incapable of despair, though for days and weeks we had
constantly been oppressed by the feeling that everything was far more
