124
PARTISAN REVIEW
sharpened his sense of memory. Throughout, he never takes on the
plaints of a victim. On the contrary, he recounts the events of the cen–
tury from the standpoint of an active, participant observer - a person of
the left, who has lived in the maelstrom of the dangerous times he expe–
rienced and who forever is drawing lessons from them, if only to better
understand the future. Sperber pulls no punches, and some of his obser–
vations may be called prescient. For instance:
The downfall of the Hapsburg monarchy set the peoples of the old
empire free. The nationalities transformed themselves into nations,
each seeking to use any means, especially military ones, to safeguard
its new state without delay. People like me regarded this "awakening
of the nations" as revolutionary progress, a triumph of national free–
dom which - so we believed - would in short order be followed by
revolutionary liberation from poverty and class rule. However, it
soon turned out that this hope was quite deceptive.
At the time, Sperber was still an ardent and activist Communist. At
the age of sixteen, he had already given a talk, "The Psychology of the
Revolutionary," for which Alfred Adler sat in the audience. Adler, who
himself was engaged in fusing radicalism with psychoanalysis in an effort
to liberate the masses and help institute a Social Democratic government
by means of education, immediately asked Sperber to join his circle.
Sperber did so for six years, always focusing on the socioeconomic causes
of psychic disorders, whether working with individuals or in youth and
welfare organizations. After a falling-out with Adler - over one of
Sperber's cases - Sperber moved to Berlin in 1927, where he practiced
his own psychology, which focused on "the psycho-logic of power,
both the power striven for and the power exerted by a regime of ter–
ror"
Six years after Sperber joined the Communist Party, the Nazis came
to power. After the Reichstag fire, on February 27, 1933 (it is still not
clear who set it), Hitler came to power. Now, in double jeopardy - as a
Communist and as a Jew - Sperber no longer spent nights at home. He
listened to the radio and argued with friends about tactics for the future
- until the Gestapo arrested him. He was placed in solitary confinement
and tortured. His release was instigated by his parents and diplomatic
friends, and he managed to leave for Vienna. Yet he was not content to
have been rescued. He stayed in Vienna for only a short time, even more
set on helping to change history, initially by doing Party work in
Yugoslavia.
Later on - for his safety as well as for the cause - Sperber was sent
