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PARTISAN REVIEW
of the interrogations between Merker and the
Stasi
and NKVD inter–
rogators while he was held in investigative detention from 1952 to 1955.
We also have interrogations of other Communists who knew Merker in
French and Mexican exile, as well as the transcript of the court verdict
in a previously secret trial conducted against Merker in the East German
Supreme Court in March of 1955. They reveal a depth of anti-Jewish
sentiment utterly at odds with the regime's antifascist claims. For exam–
ple, in March 1953, Merker's interrogators wondered why, given that he
was not Jewish, a German Communist like himself would take such pro–
Jewish positions? The only answer his
Stasi
interrogators - and their
NKVD associates - found credible was that he had been bought off by
an international Jewish conspiracy.
The Leo Zuckermann
Stasi
file includes his anguished appeal to the
party Central Committee with which he seeks to justify his support for
restitution and for Israel by referring to the deaths of twenty members of
his family in the Holocaust. Abusch's file includes his 1953 recantation
and self-criticism entitled "My Errors in Mexico and Their Lessons for
the Present" in which he acknowledges his failure to grasp the "enemy
nature" of the ''Jewish chauvinism" inherent in Merker's positions. It of–
fers a telling account of how one saves a career in the midst of a purge
by promises of sincerely intended ideological conformity, along with a
willingness to testify against and inform on the activities of others under
suspicion. While "naming names" in the United States was a defining
feature of the "scoundrel time" of the 1950s, naming names in East
Berlin became a mark of Marxist-Leninist revolutionary virtue. As a
result of the opening of the archives, we can now document the
suppression of the Jewish question as well as the purging of those
Communists who sought to retain wartime solidarity with Jews after
1945 . Further, we have gained additional insight into the terms of re–
entry on which Communists ofJewish origin, such as Abusch, and Albert
Norden, were able to regain positions within the East German
government.
In East Germany, the Cold War drew on older anti-Western re–
sentments which had previously been articulated primarily on the German
right. The Soviet-led campaign against cosmopolitanism of the 1950s
overlapped with old and familiar anti-Semitic associations of the Jews
with international banking and finance. From beginning to end, the East
German regime was dependent on Soviet arms. However, its ideological
arsenal was always more than a Soviet import. Scholars have found no
evidence to suggest that the East German Communists ever told their
Soviet comrades that because of the Nazi persecution of the Jews, they,
