The Aesthetics of Resistance Volume 2

by Peter Weiss

  When I spoke to Rosalinde about these hours, the work that had been assigned to me was already sitting inside of me like a block encased in silence. Participation in conspiratorial activity had something simple, self-evident, to it and didn’t seem to involve risks. I carried out the job with confidence, according to Bischoff’s rule, like a pedestrian who refuses to be blindsided by any unforeseen incidents, staunchly insisting on their legality in the face of any questions that might arise. My assignment immediately slotted into an everyday routine. Perhaps during my conversation with Rosalinde it still possessed a trace of novelty, but this manifested itself at most in the thought that I would never say anything about it. If the undertaking originally placed me in a state of tension, it was only because it reinserted me into a larger context. We were walking through the city in the heat of the final days of August. Alongside me I was pushing my bicycle, which I had bought for ten kronor at the lost and found office at the police station down on Drottninggatan. Rosalinde resisted my assertion that the tangled confusion of our days could be surmounted with sober judgment; that the horror, the faulty circuits and shocks could be picked apart like normal events. She refused to see anything desirable in the ability to adapt to this twisted situation. To treat this like something valid—that would be giving in, capitulating in the face of this campaign of terror against thought. If a war comes, she said, it won’t come because we have failed to sufficiently adjust to the distortions but because we have made far too many compromises with them. I brought up her father’s struggle. His pacifism, I said, his decades-long attacks against the militarists and chauvinists, were a component of the greater effort to overcome the drive for annihilation. Tens of thousands stood beside him, and they were still not strong enough. The phantasmagoria could only be torn down once it had been pierced by reason. I conceded that, through continual interaction with sick regimes, disfigurements were also bound to develop within us as well, but this was the price we had to pay if any resistance at all were to take place. It wasn’t simply about fighting fascism. Even if the violence of fascism displayed itself most clearly, it remained only a single element in a worldwide plan of destruction behind which were the switchgears of cartels and trusts. All continents were rife with thievery, enslavement, and exploitation, and the powers that sought to terrify and paralyze us were no phantoms but could each be called out by name. The tiniest sign of surrender on our part helped to promote their growth, and our knowledge was too limited to confront their ever-increasing depredation. If war were to eventuate, the most terrible thing would be the fact that it would not yet be a war for the creation of justice but a war between business giants, not a revolutionary war to topple the exploiters but a war for raw materials for the capitalist market. And now, said Rosalinde, millions of working people have to let themselves be dragged into this mayhem because the politicians who call themselves progressive were unable to explain their situation to them clearly, because for twenty years, instead of making use of their supposed knowledge, they had been bickering with one another and wasting their time tearing each other to pieces. They had never wanted the unity about which they had expended so many words; they were only ever interested in advancing their position. The people leading the parties are monopolists, like the leaders of commerce. As ideologues, they cannot be distinguished from the speculators on the stock markets. Nothing new can come from their world, for they refuse to relinquish their washed-out criteria, they cling to their privileges, their sense of superiority, their envy, their thirst for validation. What sort of analyses was I on about, she asked. And I heard within me the doubts that I myself was trying to fend off. Was it not mere verbiage, I asked myself, when the Communist Party ascribed the blame for the threat of war to the British barons of finance, the French banker families; were not Communists and fascists equal to one another in that they both locked up in prisons and camps anyone who didn’t toe the line; was not their final word always the liquidation order, had they not, because they wanted the same paternalistic system, again ended up at war, the most enduring argument in their common language. But everything on our side was aimed at preventing war, I said, countless people were still fighting in the underground to change the situation. I mentioned Spain, but in Spain of all places, she said, the remaining will to revolt had been crushed by the machinations of the powerful. I tried to explain that the shift in perspective, the apparent inconsistency of our politics was necessary, but she stuck to her position that nothing could be achieved any longer with rhetoric and pretense. She parried my objection. How is politics supposed to help us, she said, when it is politics that has got us into this hopeless situation in the first place. Again she interrupted as I went to answer. You believe in reason as if it were a miracle, she said. As if it were still possible for reason to suddenly sprout from an epoch of idiocy. Yes, she said, her understanding of the situation was limited, but she couldn’t help but see what I called the politics of reason as a mere red herring that kept us shackled in self-deception. Everything that had value for us, she said, lay buried beneath an avalanche of commonplaces. Our personal reactions cannot achieve anything at the moment, she said. The only thing we can do in this fragmentary landscape is pick out the pieces that can best be brought into alignment with our intentions. She didn’t understand, she said, how I could freely submit to that kind of reduction of my self, that it contradicts everything I had previously told her about my work plans. Accepting limitations in the political arena, I said, did not preclude the demand for integrity in artistic work. Such a desire for freedom, she countered, could only be laughable to those who determine our fates from above. I too sensed the inadequacy of my statements, for I knew that my relationship with art and with politics could not be separated from one another, and that the ongoing uncertainties in the field of politics also impeded the clarification of my artistic intentions. My background hung from me again like a weight; as with my every attempt to find my way to myself, I continually ran up against this basic condition of disenfranchisement, voicelessness. When Rosalinde now spoke of Toller, it was in all likelihood to stress to me that she didn’t expect to get the help she needed from me. She clung to the idealized figure of this dead man; her imagination was filled by his warmth, benevolence, and spontaneity, his understanding for the hardship of others. She portrayed him to me like a lover, dressed up as the father she wished she’d had; but he didn’t even know how to help himself, I said, he killed himself because he could no longer see any way out politically. Is that supposed to be the solution then, I asked, to be sunk by the mourning of our powerlessness, the incomprehensibility of events. Angrily she said he had lived for the revolution, had spent five of his best years in prison, had fought against the narrow-mindedness of party politics. All of his work, she said, was a condemnation of the disempowerment of the individual; sick, psychologically shattered, he had stood up for the weak, he didn’t spare himself for a single day, he never attempted to make peace with makeshift solutions or half-measures; yes, she said, he had to allow himself to be crushed, and yet in his vulnerability he was still more honest than the others who hid themselves behind their composure. I have no doubt, she said, that someday, when we have made it through this time, we will recognize him and his like as the most insightful. Now, and once again came this yes, which was like a loud groan, now you all see them as lost souls, because they hang themselves, because they drink poison, put a bullet in their heads; perhaps later on you lot will recognize in this a dignified response to an all-encompassing extortion. What use is their despair, their flight, I said. But the sallowness of her face terrified me. We stopped still, on the corner of Kungsgatan, in front of Stureplan, the blue trams rattling past. Had there been more of them, she said, and had people listened to them and not only to the others, with their regurgitated slogans, the world would look different today. My demurral sounded hollow; I paused. I thought about the other person whom I had left a few hours ago, the gray-haired gnome in the narrow room on Upplandsgatan. He sat
with the curtains drawn shut, muttering as he filled folio pages with his scrawling, sitting up every now and then, whistling and humming in his Viennese intonations as he read through what he had written. A member of the secretariat of the Comintern, smuggled into Sweden covertly, commissioned by Dimitrov to prepare the weekly paper, the first edition of which was to appear in September. Lager, editor of the Party paper Ny Dag [New Day], member of the Politburo, had briefed me on my duties. I went to visit Rosner with German and Swedish newspapers bought at the train station, announced my arrival with a special knock, translated the Swedish news for him, provided him with the supplementary information that he needed, took the old newspapers with me, cut-up sheets divided into small amounts, in order to toss them into the next wastepaper basket, the next trash can. His dwarf-like body with its large head disappeared behind the reams of paper on the table that stood perpendicular to the window. The modest room in which he resided was no more than three and a half meters long and two meters wide. It was located beside the kitchen, with panes of glass set into the doors. In the front corner, next to the door to the hallway stood a white tiled stove; crumpled maps of Europe hung against the greenish wallpaper. Newspapers and books lay stacked on the floor, the chairs, the sofa. The comrades who were harboring Rosner were not there during the day; the man was a taxi driver, the woman a waitress at Café Tranan, just down on Odenplan. Peering through the slit into the courtyard, I asked if the closed curtains didn’t arouse attention in the neighborhood. At most during the first week, he answered, then people grew accustomed to it. The apartment was on the ground floor; directly to the left, the tower-like stairwell rose up, jutting out from the body of the building; off in the distance, behind the walls that broke up the row of courtyards, tall façades limited the field of vision, and sparrows chirped in the ivy on the walls of the building opposite. The courtyards also extended to the right, with tool sheds, metal frames for beating rugs, bicycle racks, and wash houses. A cast-iron fence with lance-shaped bars divided the junkyard of the neighboring plumber’s workshop from the adjacent yard. Everything was gray, dreary; the windows, lined up above one another in endless rows over four, five stories, looked opaque. Nobody could suspect that, way down here, these floral curtains could conceal the editor of a periodical that sought to disseminate the directives of the Communist International. No place corresponded less to the title of the publication, Die Welt [The World], than this room in this unseemly building on Upplandsgatan. Yet he brimmed with pride as he uttered the name. The whole world lay out there, and he was connected to it through the lines he penned. The newspaper, comprising thirty-two pages, would be produced on the Party’s printing press in a run of a thousand copies. The printed word, he said, beaming at me from behind the thick lenses of his glasses, has a power that no walls can withstand; there is always a crack somewhere that it can penetrate. He asked me to look for Jewish names in the telephone book so as to add them to the register of people who were to be sent sample copies of the paper. He refused to believe that the Jacobssons, Danielssons, and Rosengrens had deep Swedish roots. Jakobsohn, Danielsohn, and Rosenzweig, he said, shaking his head of tousled hair, and the Lewins and the Blumenbergs—you’re telling me they’re Christians in this country. From my very first visit he had afforded me unmitigated trust. He never doubted that the people sent to him by the Party to deliver materials and pick up the finished manuscript pages were absolutely reliable. This interdependence also produced a feeling of security in me. I accepted my work as the continuation of a test, the beginnings of which could be traced back to my time together with Coppi and Heilmann. Thus, as I walked with Rosalinde to Humlegården, past the strategic corner between the Royal Library, where I copied out excerpts from the international press, and Sandberg’s bookstore, where I could leaf through the international new releases in the reading room, I saw Rosner’s laughing face, his short-sighted gaze, heard him sing through the gap in his teeth of the city of his dreams. Rosalinde was on her way to the suburban train that would take her to Viggbyholm, where in the afternoon she had to work in the laundry of the boarding school. I couldn’t help her, didn’t know what to say to console her. I could have told her about Rosner. The fact that I was prohibited from saying anything about it made the gulf between us even wider. Rosner had asked me to track down a dentist who could fit him for a set of dentures. I was also supposed to get a radio for him; he wanted to listen to music in his hermitage. An appointment was arranged with Doctor Wolff; Rosner felt safe in his projection of a shared confession with the Jewish doctor. Pettersson, the comrade who was putting him up, would pick him up one evening after the surgery had closed. I saw myself on my bike, on my way from Rosner’s, gliding down the long, straight Upplandsgatan, that virtually empty street on the northern edge of the city, the street which people called Siberia and on which the houses possessed that uniformity and anonymity that illegals look for in a hideout. I could feel the air stroking past me as I rode along Karlbergsvägen, past Odenplan, Tegnérlunden, where Strindberg sat on the hill, naked and muscular, his arms jammed into the ground behind him, and approached the copper-green roofs and cupolas overlooking Norra Bantorget. I calculated how many hours I had left in which to visit Brecht. It was four o’clock. Twelve hours had passed since the beginning of the morning shift. The eight-hour working day, my time with Rosner, and the hour with Rosalinde formed sealed entities. Before me, a half-hour trip to Lidingö. Two to three hours in Brecht’s studio. A half-hour journey back. I had to be home by eight at the latest. A hasty meal in the kitchen. Potatoes, tinned meat, a glass of milk. I needed at least seven hours of sleep to get through the coming day. I had my right hand wrapped around the handlebar of my bike and my left hand holding Rosalinde’s. We had arrived at the stop at Engelbrektsgatan. Everything we were lacking was palpable as Rosalinde leaned out of the train window and, full of exhaustion, said that, soon, she too would be left with no alternative but to follow Toller’s example.