The Return of Lanny Budd

by Upton Sinclair

  Lanny said that he would come. Laurel wouldn’t go this time, because she was keeping that new baby hygienically perfect and wouldn’t risk the dust of highways and the infections in hotel rooms. He would motor, because there was little advantage in flying—it took so long to get to the airport in New York that he would be halfway to Washington by the same hour. He took Rick along; it was a chance to thresh out their problems and be sure of the meeting of their minds.

  The dread series of phenomena known as the cold war was going on without intermission. It was like two boxers in the first round of their bout: they were making passes at each other, feeling each other out, watching each other’s technique; a strange kind of boxing match, in which both contestants insisted that they didn’t want to fight but each was compelled to defend himself against the menacing gestures of the other. You would read in your daily paper that Greece had asked the help of the United States against the marauding bands of Reds armed with Russian weapons who came across the borders from Albania, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria; and then a week or two later you would read that Izvestia was denouncing United States aid to Greece. You would read that the U.N. Security Council had been notified of President Truman’s determination to send aid to Turkey in defence of her eastern provinces, and later you would read that Mr Gromyko had notified the Security Council that such action would ‘gravely undermine’ the authority of the U.N. You would read that the State Department had accused the Soviet Union of ‘unjustified interference’ in Hungary’s internal affairs and had requested a probe by the Allied Control Commission; then you would read that the Soviet Union considered this an ‘unjustified interference’. The day of his trip Lanny read that the United States government had announced its intention to proceed ‘unilaterally’ in setting up an independent government in South Korea; he wondered how many of the auditors of the Peace Programme would recall Professor Alston’s warning about that far-off land.

  VI

  The American chief of R.I.A.S. was extremely cordial to the radio announcer from Edgemere, New Jersey. He said that Mr Budd’s outfit had been doing an excellent job and his own outfit considered themselves tyros in comparison. They were facing a grave situation and doing the best they could with a new project, very little appreciated at home. Berlin, described as an island, was an island threatened with an overwhelming flood. It was completely surrounded by East Germany and the East Germans, and militarily and governmentally the East Germans were completely dominated by the Soviets. They were threatened with intellectual and moral domination as well, for they got their news from a Red-controlled press and from Radio Berlin, which the Soviets had held on to, even though it was situated in the British sector of the city.

  R.I.A.S. was but a feeble voice in comparison, but it was the voice of truth. The little station was making tremendous headway by the simple programme of giving an intellectually starved people the facts of the outside world day by day. Mr Budd could be of help because he knew the Germans and spoke their language fluently. The power of the station had been increased and the programmes were to be greatly expanded; they must have entertainment features and plenty of music; they wanted Mr Budd to come and advise them, meet the Germans whom they employed and judge them, listen to the programmes and take part in them. His expenses would be paid and a salary—but he must understand that all R.I.A.S. salaries were moderate.

  Lanny explained that he had independent means; the income-tax situation was peculiar, and he could charge off all his expenses on his tax return, thus reducing the rate of the tax on his entire income; so really if he took a salary from R.I.A.S. it might cause him a financial loss. What it amounted to was that the taxpayers of the United States would pay the cost, and it would be the same in effect as an increase in the appropriation for R.I.A.S. The chief smiled in his turn and reported that R.I.A.S. could certainly use all such increases.

  VII

  Lanny went home and talked the matter over with his wife who hated to have him go; she had heard so many stories of kidnappings and mysterious disappearances in that war-ravaged city of Berlin. But Lanny said, ‘Masaryk went’, and that was a way of settling any question. That is what a courageous and determined man does to those about him; he makes them ashamed to be weak and hesitant; he makes himself an example, a slogan, a call to duty. Masaryk had gone into the very centre of the lion’s den, whereas Lanny would be outside the bars.

  From the point of view of the welfare of the Peace Programme it was easier for him to be spared. Rick had found a man who could write and was helping them all. Scrubbie was growing up and learning his duties, and Frances was now judged capable of reading letters and sorting out the important ones from those which could have routine answers. Also, Gerald de Groot had got over his mourning over Frances, and his mother had picked out for him a member of last year’s graduating class of Vassar College. This young person wanted a career—they all did apparently, and radio was the most fascinating thing in the world. She had come out to Edgemere, and behold, she was competent; she went right to work and was content with a small salary, plus Gerald. So the programme could keep up with its tasks while Lanny Budd flew to the rescue of the eighteen million people of East Germany.

  So he had to take once more that long flying trip by way of Newfoundland and Scotland. On an ordinary map it looked round about, but in reality it was a great circle route, the shortest possible. Laurel had her special dread of it because of the dream she had had when Lanny was about to encounter his dreadful accident; but this time she had no dreams. Her psychic gifts appeared to be in abeyance; she was too busy with mundane affairs and with the nursing of an infant. When she tried to go into a trance she was tired and fell asleep.

  Lanny packed his bags again and boarded the plane. A book called Presidential Agent had been published not long previously, and its reading had been recommended to agents of the Secret Service and the F.B.I. Lanny read it, and by the time he was through the Army plane had settled gently upon the Tempelhoferfeld. He got his own transportation to the hotel and the next morning was seated in the crowded office of the young and impetuous Rundfunk im Amerikanischen Sektor, hearing its story from the two young men and one young woman who had brought it into the world.

  VIII

  It was, they told him, a most dreadful task, trying to extract appropriations from either military men or diplomats. Military men believed exclusively in guns and saluting; diplomats believed in business of, by, and for diplomacy; their procedure consisted in exchanging elaborately written protocols with other diplomats who bore similar titles and wore similar costumes, even though they might speak the language of guttersnipes and have the morals of barbarians. Neither military men nor diplomats believed in education, except along their own special lines. Education of the masses they called propaganda and treated with condescension; newspapers had long been a necessary evil and radio was a modern intrusion. As a result of this attitude America was spending tens of thousands where it should have been spending hundreds of millions to make its purposes understood by the peoples of the outside world. How much would it be worth to the American people to keep the Soviets from plunging into a third world war? If war were to come, how much would it be worth to the American people to have the Germans on the side of the free world?

  The self-declared new enemy, the Reds, had set out to win over the old enemy, the Germans. Their actions were nationalism but their talk was internationalism; their technique was robbery and violence but their propaganda was working-class solidarity and fraternity. They were pouring out upon the Germans a string of falsehoods and misrepresentations; and to that the people of R.I.A.S. had only one response, the facts. They gathered information about what was going on in the free world, and especially in the American part of that world. They varied the programmes with music and humour, but mostly they gave just plain news. They were forbidden to answer the Soviets directly; they were permitted only to give facts and more facts.

  Give the German people the information that had bee
n denied them for fourteen years, ever since Adolf Hitler had seized power. That was the idea, and it was like opening magic casements upon paradise—a wonderful, new, and shining paradise in which people were free to investigate whatever their curiosity might suggest to them! A history of fourteen unknown years of civilisation! New discoveries in science, medicine, and hygiene; new achievements in the arts, in music, in poetry and fiction; new developments in politics, in the processes of democracy; and, above all, freedom, the very idea of freedom, of being able to attend public gatherings of unlimited size and hear discussions by speakers of opposing points of view, and even to ask questions of the speakers—the open-forum technique. R.I.A.S. was telling the Germans about this development, the American town meeting expanded to a colossal scale and carried on under the title of ‘Town Meeting of the Air’.

  That was what Lanny Budd had been trying to do from Edgemere, New Jersey, and now he told R.I.A.S. about it and the success they were having. Out of his suggestions grew the Schulfunk, a school of the air, and out of that grew the Schulfunk-Parlament, a device to give the young people of Germany practical experience in carrying out the democratic process. There was to be a university of the air, Funk-Universitat. All those ideas, theories, and beliefs which the Reds were banning from East Germany, forbidding in its schools, and tearing out of its libraries were here fed to German students who met in their own rooms at night and gathered close to the radio so as to keep the tone low. One of the policies of R.I.A.S. was never to announce itself or to reveal itself by characteristic phrases, slogans, or musical themes. Everybody would know what it was by the content, and it might be heard in whispers, with the ear only an inch or two from the source of the sounds.

  These ideas and policies were bringing their prompt rewards. The station had tens of thousands of friends scattered throughout all Germany. They came when they could; they came from the Soviet sector of Berlin, and even from the Soviet zone of Germany, at the risk of their lives, to pour out their gratitude, their sense of friendship with this station and with the magic voices that came to them out of the air.

  IX

  Lanny entered joyfully into these activities. It was the kind of thing his own programme was doing, though of course under changed circumstances. He was full of ideas and knew the Germans well enough to be able to judge how these ideas would appeal to them. He took a professional name, Herr Frõhlich, which means ‘joyful’. He spoke the language well; he told them that he was an old friend of Germany, one who had admired and loved the German people since boyhood. He told stories about the Nazi regime and those monstrous figures who had become the symbol of Germany to the outside world. Many Germans had a tendency to look back upon this regime with yearning. ‘We had things better under Hitler’, they would say. Lanny would give them details of the plunderings and the murders done by those Nazi ‘old companions’.

  Then there was the matter of the treasures which those modern pirates—land pirates—had cached. Lanny told what was known about these treasures and promised that those who brought information about the hiding places would be liberally rewarded. As it was, the treasures were being smuggled out to Spain or South America, where the Nazi bigwigs who had escaped would spend the proceeds on their mistresses and their estates.

  Also Lanny bethought himself of the many Germans he had met in the course of three and a half decades. He had known all kinds, from servants and Socialist workers up to the top of the old nobility. Some had died, some had fled to foreign lands, others had never returned from Nazi concentration camps or the Russian front; but many were left, and even the Nazis among them might be useful if they had changed their minds and were willing to talk. What they told could be checked, and if they told the truth it would be used.

  The growing staff of R.I.A.S. of necessity consisted mostly of Germans, and Herr Fröhlich could render a service by meeting them and judging them and giving his opinions to the American administrators. Red-controlled Radio Berlin was constantly reminding all Germans that R.I.A.S. was financed entirely by the State Department; to counter that, R.I.A.S. had to have a warm German tone, speaking to Germans in their own language about freedom, justice, and, above all, truth-telling, from the German point of view and in the German interest. The men who could do that convincingly were labourers worthy of their hire.

  BOOK FOUR

  Such Tricks Before High Heaven

  10 THE ANGELS WEEP

  I

  Bernhardt Monck had been away from Berlin, and Lanny did not see him for the first week or so. Then he came, and they had one of their talkfests together. Monck had an interesting story he was free to tell. An American Army officer of Polish descent had got stirred up on the subject of the so-called Katyn massacres and had got permission to work on the problem. When Hitler began his attack on Poland in September of 1939 he had seized the western half of the country, and there had evidently been some kind of deal between him and Stalin, for Stalin had moved into the eastern half without opposition. The Polish armies had surrendered, and the officers had been sorted out from the common soldiers and placed in three immense concentration camps, Katyn, Ostashkov, and Starobielsk.

  There were fourteen or fifteen thousand of them, and in April, 1940, all communications from the prisoners in these camps ceased. The Polish government-in-exile, which was in London, was insistent in demanding information about these missing prisoners and sent something like fifty notes on the subject to the Russian government. The matter was taken up orally with Vishinsky and other Soviet officials by both Polish and British diplomats; some Soviet spokesmen, including Molotov and Stalin, made verbal statements—and all their replies were lacking in frankness. The mystery remained.

  Almost two years later, when Hitler began his attack on Russia, his armies passed through this Russian-annexed territory and in a heavy forest known as Katyn, west of Smolensk, the Germans discovered a mass grave containing some forty-five hundred closely packed bodies of Polish officers in uniform. The Germans of course were glad to make propaganda against the Russians, and Dr. Goebbels’ ministry called for a world investigation of these mass killings. An international commission was invited, and others came, including American war prisoners brought by the Germans and representatives of Polish organisations brought from Katyn. The fact that the Nazis brought these charges tended to discredit them before the court of world opinion. The Nazis themselves had committed so many massacres that it was generally believed they had committed this one.

  But now the truth was being dug out, Monck reported. The Polish-American officer had been interviewing witnesses and getting their depositions. He couldn’t go into Poland, but there were plenty of refugee Poles in West Germany and elsewhere in Europe. Monck said there could no longer be the slightest doubt that it was a Soviet crime, and sooner or later this would be proved to the world. The burial had taken place in April, 1940, as was proved by newspapers which were buried with the Polish officers. The bodies had been so closely packed and the papers so closely pressed that it was impossible to have put them in later as a plant. Moreover, the heavy winter uniforms, which might have been worn in April, would certainly not have been worn in July when the German armies reached the place.

  When the Germans first made the discovery known to the world the Kremlin set up the claim that the Polish officers had been employed on road work at the time of the German invasion and had been abandoned by the retreating Russian forces. It was important to note that they had set up this claim only after the bodies had been discovered; never before had it even been suggested that the missing men had fallen into the hands of the Germans. Stalin’s motives in the matter were obvious; he had wanted to keep the common soldiers to make them into slave labourers, but he did not want the aristocratic and educated classes to survive. He meant to take over the country and render it incapable of revolt, or even of independent thinking. He meant to do this with all the Central European countries and would carry out the programme without the slightest consideration for the right
s of any human being.

  II

  Monck reported on Fritz Meissner. The boy was rendering worthwhile service but was unhappy about his father and troubled in conscience because he was deceiving a man whom he had both respected and loved. Said Monck, ‘I can understand how he feels, because I went through the same sort of experience. My father was a labouring man, but he was utterly without class consciousness; he thought that Kaiser Wilhelm had been directly appointed as the agent of God to guide the German people. When I expressed the opinion that there was no such God, but that he was an invention of our German tribal arrogance, my father kicked me out of the house—I mean, he physically kicked me. I knew that my mother was grieving, but I never saw her again. I was on my own and had to learn to think for myself’.

  Monck added that he had told this to the boy and thought it had done him good; but Lanny could do more good because he had known Kurt intimately and could assure Fritz that he could never make any impression upon his father. Monck revealed that Kurt had refused to permit his son to quit school, at least not until the end of the scholastic year. Fritz had gone home for his Christmas vacation, and again for Easter, and had gleaned some useful facts on these visits.

  Monck said that without asking permission from his boss he couldn’t tell Lanny what evidence the boy had got; and Lanny said he much preferred not to know. He understood the situation and was not troubled with idle curiosity. If anything were to leak out, he would not want to be upon the list of suspects. Also, it would impress Fritz if Lanny refused to know; he might be tempted someday to confide in a friend and would remember the good example.

  The next time Fritz got in touch with Monck he was told of Lanny’s presence, and they had a secret meeting, carefully arranged. The boy looked older and more grave; he was free to talk about his father as a human being and he said, ‘What troubles me, Herr Budd, is that I see how unhappy he is’.