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PARTISAN REVIEW
catastrophe in the history of German Communism took place in Mexico
City between 1942 and 1945. It appeared in the pages of the Commu–
nist journal
Freies Deutschland.
Paul Merker, a non-Jewish German
Communist and member of the KPD politburo was the leading advocate
of Communist support for restitution to Jewish survivors and later for
the new state of Israel. Leo Zuckermann, who was Jewish, offered legal
justifications for such policies. Their articles and arguments in wartime
Mexico stood in sharp contrast to the marginalization of the Jewish
catastrophe by Walter Ulbricht and Wilhelm Pieck in the radio and press
propaganda they conveyed to German POWs from Moscow.
The German Communists in wartime Mexico City argued that Jews
and Communists, especially in the face of Nazi persecution, were natural
allies. Yet Stalin had declared that the Jews, lacking the prerequisites of
common territory and nationality, were not a genuine nation. German
Communists in Moscow gave primacy to the defense of the Soviet
Union. Moreover, Stalin's ascendancy was associated with a growing dis–
trust of the "cosmopolitan" connections of Jews within the Communist
parties.
While in the West, critical discussion of the Popular Front generally
focused on the gullibility of Western liberals in the face of Communist
tactics, Stalin had similar fears about Communists who fled to the West
during World War II, that is, that they would become infected by the
spirit of liberal democracy, and bring these dangerous ideas back into the
Soviet bloc after 1945. The Soviet historical narrative after 1945 was one
of triumph and historical vindication. The catastrophe of European
Jewry found no place in this forward-looking dialectic. Though Stalin
had declared in 1913 that the Jews were not a nation, they refused to
disappear. Finally, in 1948, with the intensification of the Cold War,
those Jews and non-Jews who had returned from wartime emigration in
the West fell victim to a new and dread charge: cosmopolitanism.
The catalogue of sins of cosmopolitanism was nourished by a familiar
list of hatreds and resentments including an excessive concern for money,
lack of rooted national identity, contempt for patriotism, and subordi–
nation of national concerns to international conspiracies. In East Ger–
many this language and this discourse recalled the traditional terms of
German and European anti-Semitism. The Cold War discourse of anti–
imperialism and anti-capitalism overlapped with the older terms of the
German
Sonderweg,
the special path that contrasted with and was op–
posed to the liberal West. In this sense as well, postwar German Com–
munism restored older traditions.
In East Berlin, though the active purge of the cosmopolitans was
