Hook, in the excerpt I just sent, notes Ruth Fischer’s ,”Stalin and German Communism,” which I have a cursory acquaintance with, understanding it to be a controversial book.
Ruth Fischer: The Ongoing Fascination of the Ultra-left Ruth Fischer was the chairwoman of the Communist Party of Germany in the mid-1920s, before she became a supporter of McCarthy. Her ultra-left policies continue to provoke discussions among socialists. A massive biography by Mario Keßler offers some lessons for revolutionary strategy today…” https://www.leftvoice.org/ruth-fischer-the-ongoing-fascination-of-the-ultra-left/#:~:text=Ruth%20Fischer%20was%20the%20chairwoman,the%20country%20in%20March%201933. Lou Proyect noted, btw, by this blogger. Ozleft piece, below. “The play Ruth Fischer discusses below is better known in English as *The Measures Taken*, and is still in print in the comprehensive Methuen library of Brecht plays. Fischer’s book, *Stalin and German Communism*, is of great historical interest, particularly to people who may have followed the discussion of the notion of Zinovievism on the Marxmail list. Fischer was a witness to the complex and contradictory development of German Communism, the Comintern and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from the early 1920s through to the total Stalinisation at the end of the 1920s. Her book is obviously a primary source for discussion of the phenomenon of Zinovievism, taken up more recently by Louis Proyect and others. (See *The Comintern and the German Communist Party* <http://www.columbia.edu/%7Elnp3/mydocs/organization/comintern_and_germany.htm> .) The book’s obvious weakness is that it is written, to some extent, in self-justification, and by the time Fischer wrote it her experiences had shifted her to a literate anti-communism. The experiences of Fischer and others like her, however, must be considered in their historical context. A very large number of German Communists perished at the hands of Stalin or Hitler. For instance, Heinz Neumann, one of the protagonists in Fischer’s book, was killed in the Soviet Union. His wife, Marguerite Buber-Neumann, the niece of the well-known philosopher Martin Buber, was first imprisoned in Stalin’s gulag and then handed over to Hitler along with 300 other opposition German socialists and communists as a result of the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1940. Marguerite Buber survived Dachau concentration camp and lived to write a rather sobering autobiography, including her experiences under two dictators. It gives pause for thought that the 300 German Communists (at least the non-Jewish ones among them) handed over to Hitler turned out to be the lucky ones. They were locked up in non-extermination camps such as Dachau. The Nazis didn’t have a policy of total extermination of “Aryan” Communists, just their locking up and so-called Nazi re-education. By way of contrast, the hundreds of thousands of Russian Communists and the thousands of non-Russian Communists had an enormously high rate of execution and death from privation. The survival rate of German Communists in Hitler’s camps was higher, which is a macabre and sobering fact. Another member of this group was Arthur Koestler’s Austrian Communist scientist relative, Alex Weissberg, who was arrested and imprisoned in 1936 in the USSR and only released after a very widely publicised campaign by Koestler in 1952. The shift of surviving German Communists such as Ruth Fischer to the right in the post-war period has to be considered against the disastrous backdrop of the time. *August 10, 2003* ------------------------------ Bert Brecht, the minstrel of the GPU The changed character of the party can be illustrated well in the works of the one gifted poet the German Communists ever had, Bertolt Brecht. Brecht joined the party only in 1930, and his poetry glorifying it was written during the years of the depression; he had never known, he had never participated in, he had not been drawn to Communism in its original form. On the contrary, the young Brecht, the son of an Augsburg paper mill owner, was indifferent, if not hostile, to German Communism as long as it was a fighting and democratically organised body; during the civil war he was a disinterested outsider. He joined the party without previous links to it, with little knowledge of it. His works are the reflection of the transitional period and its finished product, the Stalinist party.1 <https://ozleft.wordpress.com/2003/08/15/brechtgpuminstrel/brechtminstrelgpu.html#Brecht> Brecht was among the young poets who, profoundly shaken by the war and its results in Germany, reacted with negativism; he was one of the poets of Germany’s social disintegration. Discarding realism for avant-garde forms, he attempted to express in his early works the horror and destruction of the time of troubles. His first play, *Drums in the Night*, is a bitter satire on the Weimar Republic. A soldier, long believed dead, comes home unexpected, unwanted, to find his sweetheart in the arms of a black marketeer. The Spartakus revolt and Rosa Luxembourg are mentioned, but only as backdrops, to give colour. The soldier, undecided between Bett and Barrikade, choses the bed with the blue canopy and ignores politics. In a series of works following this, Brecht expressed his nihilism in various and bizarre forms. For him, there are no forms of society, past or present or future, no values, no goods; his message is: there is nothing. In another play, Brecht takes us to Mahogany, one of his imaginary towns, this one situated somewhere in the western hemisphere — a centre of brutal, noisy pleasure business, of drinking and gambling and love-making. Johnny, the Alaskan woodcutter, comes here and spends his hard-earned money. In the final scene he discovers not only that pleasures are empty, but there is nothing to which a man can hold — “da is nichts, woran man sich halten kann”. The climax of this period came with Brecht’s best-known work, *Die Dreigroschenoper* (*The Beggar’s Opera*), which shows thieves and prostitutes as the only people of worth. To the accompaniment of Kurt Weill’s music, this became Germany’s first depression hit. Its climactic line, “Erst kommt das Fressen und dann die Moral” (“First we stuff ourselves and then we think of morals”), became a folk saying. >From this overall negation, from this cynical withdrawal from all values, from this bitter empty nihilism, Brecht collapsed into the polar opposite, the adoration of the discipline and the hierarchical order of the German Communist Party. Hypnotised by its totalitarian and terrorist features, he became the most original poet the party ever possessed. The avant garde critic of society became the minstrel of indoctrination, the medium for transferring party philosophy to the crowd. In this period he calls his works didactic plays or school operas. The German edition includes portions of a discussion on the school opera, *Der Neinsager* (*The No-Sayer*), by students of the Karl Marx School of Berlin-Neukolln, a progressive high school so named by its Social Democratic directors (Bertolt Brecht, *Versuche* 11-12, Berlin, 1931, IV, 308ff). Brecht’s plays were produced with a minimum of props, as abstractly as possible. On a bare stage, with no naturalistic scenery to distract the audience, one symbolic object is pushed into the foreground, almost a member of the cast. They were written to be put on in the open air, in a meeting hall, in a barracks. Frequently the small cast is supplemented by a Greek chorus, symbolising the masses, who comment on the deeds and misdeeds of the actors. The themes are parables, often adaptations of ancient or medieval plots to a modern environment. They are repeated like drumbeats — the sacrifice of the individual to the collective, the substitutability of any individual for another, the non-viability of individual morality with respect to the collective, the necessity and inflexibility of the hierarchical order, the inevitability and the strange beauty of terror. Brecht taught that the individual has not only to sacrifice himself for the cause but also to sacrifice the cause to the higher insight of the hierarchy. Brecht developed a technique of his own, based on the epic drama; events are not reproduced at the time of their happening, but are reported on later, often by flashbacks in the form of plays within the play. In his forms and sometimes in his themes, he shows the conscious influence of Shakespeare; the typical Shakespearian soliloquy summing up the moral of the play is often transferred in Brecht to the chorus. Brecht is fascinated by Chinese philosophy and presents Marx and Lenin as the Classical Teachers, the Wise Old Men. One of the few didactic plays of Brecht was *Man is Man*, the theme of which is that the individual is futile and replaceable. In a prologue, a single actor appears and announces that Bert Brecht is of the opinion that things happen thus. The scene opens on a group of soldiers in Calcutta; by some misadventure, one of them disappears, but is replaced immediately; there is no change in the collective. “Es ist ganz egal auf wen die Sonne shien” (“It doesn’t matter at all on whom the sun shone”). An incident in 1947 Germany reads like the synopsis of this earlier Brecht play. In Potsdam, 12 German prisoners of war are escorted by a Russian soldier, to be shipped to an unknown destination. At the Stadtbahn station the detachment passes a crowd of people hurrying home from work. One middle-aged, ill-clad woman suddenly throws herself on one of the German prisoners; it is her husband, returned from the dead. The Russian guard allows the reunited pair to depart together, followed by the amazed stare of the 11 and the civilians. A young civilian in the crowd, with a briefcase under his arm, is singled out of the crowd. “You come with us,” the guard says. Again the little detachment numbers 12, and it marches off as though nothing had happened. (Reported by John Scott, *Time*, New York, April 21, 1947, p 32.) Those who had been in concentration camps remembered the technique. As Brecht writes in his epilogue, “This was to be demonstrated: QED.”…” More @ https://ozleft.wordpress.com/2003/08/15/brechtgpuminstrel/ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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