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PARTISAN REVIEW
don't understand... .Strip away the slogans and excuses and verbiage, the
so-called ideology, and you're reading about what one pack of chim–
panzees did to the other."
The conspiracist vision bears traces of nostalgia, even archaism. It
mourns the irretrievable loss of the heroic, that last vestige of pre-democ–
ratic culture. Pipes is right to detect a remarkable consistency in the way
these theories are conceived and elaborated, and to note their immunity to
evolution or development. Conspiracism, in the end, is infantilism, It is
every child's angry demand that the world be rid of all those who make it
more complicated.
SAM TANENHAUS
Wunderkind in Winter
MAN W ITHOUT A FACE:
THE
A UTOBIOGRAPHY OF COMMUNISM'S
G REATEST S PYMASTER. By M arkus Wolf,
with Anne
McElvoy.
Times
Books. $25.00
For something like thirty-four years, the author of this memoir served as
chief of the East German Foreign Intelligence Service, one of the most
feared and forceful institutions in the infrastructure of postwar European
communism. Herr Markus Wolf began his career as a Stalinist
wunderkind;
he was a youth of twenty-eight when first elevated to his tremendous posi–
tion. The year was 1952; the Eastern European purges had crested; and
Wolf's appointment, plainly Soviet-inspired, was designed to tighten Stalin's
grip. But young Markus had been born to power. His father, Friedrich
Wolf, was a German playwright and propagandist dear to the
nomenklatura,
and Markus was raised in the Moscow of the Terror, a coddled child,
Russophile, bilingual, and groomed for the kind of authority that was hand–
ed to him in Germany after the war. There he survived decade upon decade
as one of communism's most enduring grandees.
For most of that time, Wolf did his work in covert omnipotence,
mythologized but unseen. With the collapse of the lie that was his life,
however, he has unwillingly emerged into visibility, and now plays a new
role in a new Europe. Since he was once the keeper of secrets, he is viewed
as a man with history's answers. This has turned him into a kind of
celebrity of cynicism. He regularly appears on the tonier European talk
shows, where with lordly contempt he delivers the last word on the nations
and people he once did so much to ruin. The old spy has become a star.
