Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

anniversary of the October Revolution, Funfzehn Eiserne Schritte (Fifteen Iron Steps). I have it still in its simple sand-coloured hardcover designed by John Heartfield, and on the flyleaf a quotation in my youthful hand (naturally in the German version) from Lenin’s ‘Left-Wing’ Communism, an Infantile Disorder. Together with the half-decayed paper booklet of Unter roten Fahnen: Kampflieder giving the texts of revolutionary songs, it is the oldest record of my political commitment.

Rolf Leder was a man who saw himself as out of place in the bourgeois environment of our school. He had, he claims in his autobiography, joined the Young Communists on the street not much more than a year before he recruited me, and was proud to have won acceptance in the streetwise milieu of young Berlin working-class reds by ‘proving himself’ in the ‘time of latent civil war’ when the comrades faced the cops and the brownshirt stormtroopers. ¹ However, he did not suggest that I should join the KJV but a distinctly less proletarian organization, the Sozialistischer Schulerbund (SSB), designed specifically to hold secondary-school students. I did so, and he went his own way. I never saw him again after I left Berlin. He died in 1996.

Yet our lives remained curiously intertwined. Many years later, in a West German work on writers and communism, I discovered that a rather prominent member of the literary establishment in the German Republic, the poet Stephan Hermlin, was actually called Rudolf Leder. He had, I later discovered from his autobiography, stayed on illegally in Germany, refusing his family’s offer to send him to Cambridge, suffering some months’ imprisonment in a concentration camp. In 1935 he had been in France, he fought in Spain and later in the French Resistance, before returning to the Soviet-occupied zone in 1946 and a distinguished literary career in what was to become the GDR. From what I have read of his work, I think he was a good rather than an outstanding poet, probably better as a translator and adapter of other poets, and his brief, allusive memoir Abendlicht is widely admired. On the other hand, as a prominent figure on the cultural scene under a philistine and authoritarian regime he behaved well, protesting and protecting, and using his friendship with Honecker against the Stasi (secret police). This is an instance when the old German phrase ‘Guter Mensch, schlechter Musikant’ (‘good guy, bad musician’) should be read not as a disparagement of the artist but as praise for the public man. I wrote him a letter, presumably care of the Writers’ Union, to ask whether he was the Leder I had known, and received a brief answer, saying he was, but he could not remember me. Nor did he react later, when friends in Berlin mentioned me to him. However, the brief connection between two Berlin schoolboys in 1932, both of whom, in different ways and countries, became well-known figures on the cultural left, seems to fascinate both journalists and readers in post-1989 East Germany. At all events I have frequently found myself asked about it.

There is a curious coda to the episode of Rudolf Leder. Shortly before his death, Karl Corino, a West German literary bloodhound hostile to Stephan Hermlin, followed the trail of his public biography, and discovered that most of it was romance sometimes only tangentially connected with reality. ² He had not abandoned a wealthy, cultured, art-collecting and music-loving household of the Anglo-German high bourgeoisie for the struggle of the workers. His father was a Romanian and later stateless businessman, married to a Galician immigrant to Britain (and therefore with a British passport), who had known a brief era of financial glory in the inflation years, followed by collapse. The father had not served in the First World War, nor died in a concentration camp, but in 1939 had reached safety in London. Hermlin himself had not been in a concentration camp, even briefly. He had not been to Spain. There was no evidence of work in the French Resistance. And so on. It was a highly effective and, in spite of the evident bias of the author and some of his sources, a convincing hatchet-job.

Of course Leder is not the only autobiographical writer who has cast himself (or herself) in a more romantic or important role in the affairs of the world, and modified the scenario of his life accordingly. Especially if we accept the investigator’s evidence that much of his actual life before the return to Berlin in 1946, including his school career, had been disappointing. After all, for most of the time he did not so much invent as embellish or turn intention into reality. He had, indeed, left his job in Tel Aviv (the official Hermlin did not insist on the brief emigration to Palestine) declaring that he was going to join the Brigades in Spain, and he might well have gone there but for an operation whose consequences were almost fatal; and by the time he could leave Palestine, his wife was pregnant. His father had, after all, been a millionaire briefly, who did collect art, and had had his wife painted by Max Liebermann and himself by Lovis Corinth. Moreover, the career of any frontier-crossing German Jewish refugee in the 1930s and 1940s provides plenty of opportunities to improve reality on forms to be filled and questionnaires to be answered, and plenty of incentive to do so. And there is no question that, from sometime before I knew him in 1932, he had been a communist, and remained devoted to the Party until it ceased to exist with the end of the GDR, and that he had paid a price for his communism. Curiously, this brings our lives together again. For if Corino is right, Leder got himself formally expelled from his Gymnasium for writing an inflammatory article in the January 1932 issue of the paper published by the Sozialistischer Schulerbund, to which he was about to recruit me, the suitably named Der Schulkampf (Struggle in the School). If this had happened at the Prinz-Heinrichs-Gymnasium in the school years between 1931 and 1933, it is inconceivable that I would not have heard about it. Most likely he was expelled from another Gymnasium , and only joined the PHG in 1932–3 after that. Both of us were thus birds of passage in our school. How and why he left it, I cannot say. ³ He certainly did not graduate.

The organization I joined has only a shadowy place in the history of German or any other communism, unlike its inspirer, Olga Benario. This dynamic young woman, daughter of a prosperous bourgeois family in Munich, had been converted to revolution after the shortlived Munich Soviet republic of 1919, in which a young teacher, Otto Braun, with whom she was to be linked for some years, had taken part. In 1928, at the head of a team of young communists, she broke into the Berlin courtroom where Otto Braun was being tried for high treason and liberated him. Both were spirited away and, now permanently illegal, joined the Comintern and Red Army operational services. In Moscow Benario was to be attached as adviser to Luis Carlos Prestes, a Brazilian officer who had led a group of military rebels for some years in a celebrated long march through the backwoods of his country and was now about to join and lead the Brazilian Communist Party. She married him, helped to plan and took part with him in the disastrous insurrection of 1935, was captured and returned to Hitler’s Germany by the Brazilian government. In 1942 she was killed in Ravensbruck concentration camp. Meanwhile Otto Braun had gone east rather than west to become the only European actually to take part (with a marked lack of enthusiasm for Mao Ze Dong) in the Long March of the Chinese Red Armies. Retired in East Berlin, he published his memoirs in the 1980s. When I joined the SSB to serve the world revolution, I was unaware of the historic bonds that would link the organization to some of its most dramatic battles, although I had no doubt that those who became communists in the Berlin of 1932 faced a future of danger, persecution and insurrection.

A less dramatic aspect of Benario’s devotion to world revolution was the SSB itself.⁴ This organization seems to have originated in Neukolln, one of the reddest districts of working-class Berlin, with politically organized social-democratic and communist working-class pupils in the so-called Aufbauschulen – the schools supported by the Prussian government, where selected children would make the transition to full secondary education and eventually the Abitur. Arriving in Neukolln as a dynamic new agit-prop cadre in 1926, Benario inspired school Young Communists to form a ‘communist secondary fraction’ (Kopefra)⁵ in the Aufbauschulen on the analogy of the already existing ‘student fractions’ (Kostufra). Since these schools contained students from both working-class parties, it was decided to form a wider association covering both, the SSB. Inevitably, when social democrats became ‘social fascists’ for the Communist International, not much of this spirit of unity remained. The SSB had become a dependency of the Communist Party. By 1928 it had also extended outside the red areas of Berlin, with groups in Zentrum and Westen – that is to say in middle-class schools such as mine – and indeed into other parts of Germany. It also published the newly founded Schulkampf.

By the time I joined it in the autumn of 1932, the SSB was pretty well on its last legs, largely, it seems, because financial cuts during the economic crisis made life increasingly difficult for the Aufbauschulen, which were still its main support. Several groups ceased to exist in the second half of