Sepharad

münzenberg

I SIT UP UNTIL VERY LATE, fighting back sleep in order to read a little more, to learn more about the life of this man I had never heard of before yesterday, Willi Münzenberg, who at the beginning of the summer of 1940 is fleeing west along the roads of France in the great flood of people occasioned by the advance of German armored cars. Now that he is seeing things quietly and with clarity for the first time in the fifty years of his life, and has acquired enough experience and courage to do openly the things he should, nothing matters and there isn’t enough time. This isn’t the first time he’s fled, but it is the first time he’s fled on foot, with no resources and without a place to go, knowing that on whichever side of the front lines he tries to find refuge there will be people ready to betray him and turn him in, if he isn’t machine-gunned — unknown and unidentified — among a line of hostages chosen at random, or blown up by a bomb or mine. He will be executed if the Germans capture him, but he will also die if his former comrades and Communist subordinates come across his trail. If he tries to reach England, a nearly impossible proposition, he knows that there too he will be arrested as a spy, and that surely the English will use him as a pawn in an exchange with the Soviets or the Germans. He had everything, and now he has and is nothing, although someone says, no, he had two thousand francs in his pocket, which he planned to use to buy a car and escape to Switzerland.

He knows that even the little that’s left of him, this fleeting shadow on the roads of France, is unacceptable to many, an irrelevant or harmful witness whom it would be very good to eliminate. What he thought to be his strength, his life insurance, is actually the reason for his sentence. He knows something more: in the English secret services there are Soviet moles who will send news of his presence in England to Moscow, so that he won’t be safe there even if the British government offers him asylum.

MY EYES CLOSE, the book nearly slips from my hands, as Münzenberg walks on among the throngs that flood the highways and scatter into nearby fields like a swarm of insects every time the low-flying German fighter planes swoop down over them. First comes the sound of engines in the distance, then the metallic silhouettes glinting in the June sunlight, and finally their shadows, huge raptors with fixed, widespread wings, machine-gunning a convoy of retreating military vehicles, dropping bombs on a bridge where escaping soldiers are clustered around a broken-down truck. Scurrying insects are what the pilots see from the air: tiny figures, oblique black scrawls. But each of those little creatures is a human being, having a name, a life, a face unlike that of any other person. Münzenberg is trying to blend in, to be a nobody and escape the claws and gullet of the cyclops. But the eye of the cyclops he knows best and fears most, Joseph Stalin, sees everything, scrutinizes everything, will not allow anyone to save himself. Not even by shrinking to the size of the most insignificant insect can a marked man escape his hunters, not even in a fortress in Mexico protected by high walls, barbed wire, armed guards, lookout towers, and iron gates, could Trotsky escape a pursuit that lasted more than ten years and encompassed the entire world.

Who among the masses fleeing around him could imagine Willi Münzenberg’s story? A corpulent foreigner, badly dressed and unshaven, who has spent the last few months in a concentration camp, one of those camps in which the French government is incarcerating the refugees and stateless persons who according to the criminal logic of the times have most to fear from the Nazis: if war breaks out against Germany, the German refugees living in France become the enemy, so they must be locked up even though it is the Nazi regime they want to escape. Once imprisoned, they are perfect prey for the German army and the Gestapo they believed they eluded when they fled to France. In 1933 this man, Willi Münzenberg, came to Paris with the first wave of fugitives from Nazi persecution after the fire in the Reichstag, where he had held a seat as a Communist deputy. That time he escaped in a large black Lincoln Continental driven by his chauffeur, not on foot, like now, when he has nothing and is nobody, when he doesn’t know where his wife is or if she’s alive or if he will see her again. Both of them are caught in the chaos of the war, she too a tiny figure among the fleeing multitudes, in the uncountable census of the displaced and deported, the millions of people forced onto the highways of a Europe suddenly thrown back into barbarity. Crowds wait on train platforms, on the docks of seaside cities, line up on sidewalks outside the closed doors of foreign legations to get the passports, papers, visas, and administrative seals that can stamp on their destinies the difference between life and death.

I HAVE PUT THE BOOK on the night table and turned off the light, and as I lie here with my eyes open in the darkness, the sleep that only moments before was sweeping over me now evaporates. I’ve missed falling asleep the way you miss a train, by a minute, by seconds, and I know that I will have to wait for it to return and that it may be hours before it comes. The last time Münzenberg was seen alive was at a table in the town café, sitting with two men much younger than he and speaking with them in German. It’s possible that they too were fugitives from the camp, and that one of them killed him; maybe they’d been sent to the camp as prisoners to win the confidence of the man they’d been ordered to shoot.

I lie quietly in the dark, listening to your breathing. Münzenberg flees in advance of the German army, accompanied by two men, and he doesn’t know they are Soviet agents who have been watching him ever since they arrived in the camp as prisoners, with others whose executions have been assigned to them. Or maybe he knows but doesn’t have the strength to escape, to keep pushing on in an exhausting and futile flight, the dragging out of a hunt that has lasted several years. Past the balcony, across the rooftops, I see the great face of the clock in the Telephone Building, which from this distance suggests a Moscow skyscraper, maybe because it isn’t difficult to imagine that the red light at the pinnacle is a huge Communist star. Years ago, before I ever went to New York, I saw in my dreams an enormous building of black brick with a large red star at its pyramid-shaped peak, and someone beside me, someone I couldn’t see, pointed and said, “That’s the Bronx star.”

When I can’t sleep, the ghosts of the dead return, the ghosts of the living as well, people I haven’t seen or thought of in a long time, events, actions, names from earlier lives, laced not with nostalgia, but rather with regret or shame. Fear returns too, a childish fear of the dark, of shadows or shapes that take on the form of an animal or a human presence or of a door about to open. In the winter of 1936, in a hotel room in Moscow, Willi Münzenberg lay awake and perhaps was smoking in the dark as his wife slept by his side, and every time he heard footsteps in the corridor outside their room, he thought with a shudder of clearsighted panic, “They’ve come, they’re here.” Out the window he saw a red star, or a clock with numbers in red, glowing at the pinnacle of a building above the vast darkness of Moscow, above the streets where nothing was moving at that hour but the black vans of the KGB.

My grandmother Leonor — may she rest in peace — whom I can scarcely remember now, told me when I was a boy that her mother appeared to her every night after she died. She didn’t do anything, didn’t say anything, didn’t evoke fear, only melancholy and tenderness and a sense of guilt, although my grandmother never used that word, guilt wasn’t part of her country vocabulary. Her mother would look at her in silence, smile so she wouldn’t be afraid, make a movement of her head as if to point to something, ask for something, and then she disappeared, or my grandmother would fall asleep, and the next night she would wake and see her again, motionless and faithful, at the foot of the bed, which is the same bed you and I are sleeping in now.

“Mama, what do you want? Do you need something?” my grandmother would ask her, as solicitous as when her mother was alive and very ill and would stare at her without speaking, her face pale against the pillow and her eyes following her daughter around the room.

The ghost repeated this nightly gesture, like someone who wants to say something but has lost the use of her voice. One Sunday morning in church, my grandmother realized what it was her mother wanted to say. She was so poor, and had so many children, she hadn’t been able to pay for masses for her mother, and although she wasn’t a dedicated believer her remorse wouldn’t leave her in peace; a mute uneasiness developed that she shared with no one. Without the masses maybe her mother hadn’t been able to get out of purgatory. My grandmother managed to scrape a little money together by borrowing from a sister-in-law, and with the coins and worn five-peseta bills wrapped in a handkerchief she went to the Church of Santa María to schedule the masses. That night, when her mother visited, standing by the bars of the brass footboard, my grandmother told her not to worry, soon she would have what she needed. Her mother never came again, there was never another “visitation,” as my grandmother said in her language from another century. She felt relieved, but also sad, because now she would never see her mother again, not even in dreams.

The bed you and I are sleeping in now is the one my mother was born in. My parents were surprised that we wanted to bring this cumbersome old bed back to Madrid with us after all the years it sat in the attic. It was against those same bars I can see outlined in the dark, now that my eyes have adjusted, that my grandmother’s mother rested her pale hand, my great-grandmother, from whom some part of me comes and whose name I don’t even know, although I must have inherited from her some of my face, or character, or erratic health. How strange to live in places where the dead have lived, to use things that belonged to them, to look in mirrors where their faces were reflected, to look at oneself with eyes that may have the shape or color of theirs. The dead return during the sleepless hours, people I have forgotten and people I never knew, all prodding the memory of one who survived a war sixty years ago, telling him not to forget them, to speak their names aloud and tell how they lived, why they were carried off so early by a death that could have claimed him. Whose place in life have I taken? Whose destiny was canceled so that mine could be fulfilled? Why was I chosen and not another?

During nights when I lay in the darkness, waiting in vain to fall asleep, I have imagined the sleepless hours of Willi Münzenberg, the insomniac who couldn’t sleep when he began to understand that the time of his power and pride had come to an end, and that all he had before him was running without hope of respite or possibility of safe harbor and finally dying like a dog, a hunted and sacrificed animal, just as so many friends of his friends had died, former comrades, Bolshevik heroes transformed overnight into criminals and traitors, into insects that must be crushed, according to the harangues of the drunken and demented prosecutors of the Moscow trials. Executed like a dog, like Zinoviev or Bukharin, like his friend and brother-in-law Heinz Neumann, director of the German Communist Party, who was living as a refugee or trapped in Moscow and who died in 1937, perhaps shot in the head, as unarmed and surprised before his executioners as another accused man, Josef K., whom Franz Kafka invented during the feverish insomnia of tuberculosis, unaware how prophetic he was. But it has never been ascertained exactly how Neumann died, how many weeks or months he was tortured, or where his body was buried.

In the death camp of Ravensbrück, Neumann’s widow listened to stories her friend Milena Jesenska told her about Kafka. During many sleepless nights, Babette Gross lived minute by minute the torture of not knowing whether her husband was dead or in one of Stalin’s prisons or in a German concentration camp. Years later, when she finally was told the truth, she imagined his hanged body in a forest, swinging from a tree branch, swaying back and forth until the branch or the rope broke and his body fell to the ground to rot without anyone’s finding it, and all that long time she couldn’t sleep, wondering whether she should or shouldn’t think of him as a dead man. With autumn, falling leaves began to cover him.

You were sleeping beside me, and I was imagining Willi Münzenberg smoking in the dark as he listened to the quiet breathing of his wife, Babette, a stylish bourgeois blond, daughter of a Prussian beer magnate, an undoubting Communist in the early twenties, who lived much longer — nearly half a century — than he, an ancient woman who on the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall received an American historian and whispered into a tape recorder stories of a vanished time and world, images of the night the Reichstag burned, of the first parades of the Brownshirts through German cities, and of Moscow in November 1936, when she and her husband waited for days in a hotel room for someone to come for them, waited to be called and given a day and an hour for an appointment with Stalin, a call that never came, until they heard pounding at the door: the men who had come to arrest them.

There are people who have seen these things: none of it has sunk into the absolute oblivion that claims events and human beings when the last person to witness them, the last person to hear a certain voice or meet a certain pair of eyes, dies.

I know a woman who wandered lost through Moscow the morning Stalin’s death was announced. Eight months pregnant, she went back home because she was afraid that in the throng of people in the streets the creature kicking in her womb would be crushed. As I speak with her, I feel the vertigo I would feel crossing a soaring bridge of time, almost as if I were experiencing the reality she has seen, a reality that would be no more than a description in a book for me if I hadn’t met her. I know a man who won an Iron Cross in the battle of Leningrad, and when I was very young I shook the hand of another whose pale, skinny forearm bore the tattooed identification number of a prisoner in Dachau. I have spoken with someone who at the age of six clung to his mother in a cellar in Madrid, terrified of the air-raid sirens, and of the airplanes and exploding bombs, and at ten he was interned in a barracks in Mauthausen. That man was small, polite, and detached; his name was half Spanish, half French, though he didn’t really belong to either country. The black hair, combed straight back, the strong features and coppery face were Spanish, but his behavior and language were as French as those of any of the writers talking and drinking at that literary cocktail party in Paris where we met briefly, the beginning of my friendship with Michel del Castillo.

By chance, the way you meet a stranger at a party, I met Willi Münzenberg in a book I’d been sent. Begun half-heartedly, it turned into my insomnia. At some moment in the reading, without my knowing, there came a shift in attitude, and the person who had been nothing more than a name, an obscure and minor character, struck me as a powerful presence, someone intimately related to me, to the things that matter most to me, to my deepest being. You are in large part what others know, or think they know, about you, what they see when they look at you; but who are you when you’re alone in the dark and can’t sleep and your inert body is anchored to the bed and your untrammeled imagination confronts the intolerably slow pace of time? You don’t know the hour but don’t want to turn on the light and wake the person sleeping beside you; it might be the middle of the night or near the first light of dawn.

FROM AMONG THE GHOSTS of the living and the dead rises the specter of Münzenberg. He was with me that sleepless night, and he has returned often since; unexpectedly, over the years, I find him in the pages of other books, or he comes to me in my thoughts. All his life was a game between show and invisibility, between veiled power and the weightless splendor of appearances, and in the end he was invisible, erased from history by the same powerful people he served so well, the ones who in early June of 1940 hanged him from a tree in a forest in France.

Just yesterday I discovered that I had an excellent photograph of him. I found it in the second volume of Arthur Koestler’s autobiography, Invisible Writing, published in London in 1954. Coincidences suddenly fall into place: I had bought that volume with the red binding and coarse yellow paper in a secondhand bookstore in Charlottesville, Virginia, one winter day in 1993. The store was in a red wooden building that reminded me a little of a cabin or a barn, at the edge of a snowy woods. One day as I flipped through the book, looking for the publication date, I saw something I’d never noticed: on the inside cover was an illegible signature, and beside that a place and date: Oslo, January 1959.

I hadn’t remembered the photograph either, which has that chiaroscuro of portraits from the thirties. Münzenberg looks directly into the viewer’s eyes, with arrogance and firmness, perhaps with a hint of loss and anticipated desperation, and with the sadness witnesses to some terrible truth exhibit in photographs. He is a strong man, rough, but not vulgar, with a thick, strong neck and broad shoulders, slightly lifted chin, shrewd eyes ringed with fatigue, broad brow, carelessly combed hair, a sign either of constant activity or the beginnings of neglect. He is dressed in a formal but very modern mode: suit jacket with a fountain pen in the upper pocket, vest, tie, and a shirt with an attached collar. Koestler says his face had the solid simplicity of a wood sculpture, but was lightened by an open and friendly expression. Koestler worked on behalf of Münzenberg in Paris during the period the photograph was taken: a short man, squarely built, robust, with the look of a small-town cobbler, but one who nevertheless projected such an hypnotic air of authority that Koestler saw bankers, diplomats, and Austrian dukes bow before him with the obedience of schoolboys.

Münzenberg was born in 1889 to a poor family in a proletarian suburb of Berlin. His father was a brutal, drunken tavern keeper who blew his head off while cleaning his shotgun. At sixteen Münzenberg was working in a shoe factory and taking advantage of the educational activities of the unions. He had always shown intelligence and had a talent for organization as well as an energy that instead of being depleted by controversy and hard work seemed to thrive on them. To avoid serving in an army involved in a war whose internationalist principles he repudiated, he escaped to Switzerland, where in the refugee circles of Bern he met Trotsky, who was immediately taken with his intelligence, his revolutionary passion, and his organizational skills. Trotsky introduced him to Lenin, and soon Münzenberg was part of Lenin’s most loyal inner circle. One author reports that he was one of the Bolsheviks who traveled to Russia with Lenin in a sealed railroad car on the eve of the October Revolution. Dear friend, it’s said he told Lenin, you will die of your convictions.

But he was always a little different from his Communist comrades. There was something excessive about him, even when he was most orthodox. He liked the good life, and having been born into and lived in poverty, he had an appetite for grand hotels, expensive suits, and luxury automobiles. He was made of the same stuff as the great American plutocrats who rose out of nothing, energetic impresarios of railroads or coal mines or steel who had grown rich because of their clear vision and villainy, but especially because of the compelling force of a practical intelligence joined with a resolute and merciless will. Those who knew Münzenberg say that had he chosen to serve capitalism instead of communism, he would have been a Hearst, a Morgan, or a Frick, one of those colossal entrepreneurs never satisfied by any possession, no matter how excessive, and who never lose their rough edges; age or power or wealth do not slow their ardor for acquiring, and despite boundless wealth, they remain jovial boors.

During the first years of the Soviet Revolution, when Lenin, hallucinating on the country estates of the Kremlin, intoxicated by his own fanaticism, surrounded with telephones and lackeys, still imagined that at any minute all Europe would explode in the flames of proletarian uprisings, Münzenberg understood that world revolution would not happen immediately, if ever, and that communism would spread in the West only in an oblique and gradual way — not with the loud, crude, and monotonous propaganda that pleased the Soviets but, rather, through seemingly neutral and apolitical causes and with the complicity, in great part unwitting, of intellectuals of great prestige, unaffiliated celebrities who would sign manifestos promoting peace, culture, and goodwill among nations.

Münzenberg invented the political technique of enlisting wealthy intellectuals with flattery, of using their self-idolatry and their minimal interest in reality to manipulate them. Not without scorn, he referred to them as the Club of Innocents. He sought out moderates with humanitarian inclinations and bourgeois solidity, if possible with the added virtue of a patina of money and cosmopolitanism: André Gide, H. G. Wells, Romain Rolland, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Einstein. Lenin would have shot such intellectuals immediately, or consigned them to a dark cell in Lubyanka Prison or to Siberia. Münzenberg discovered how enormously useful they could be in making attractive a system that to him, in the incorruptible inner core of his intelligence, must have seemed frightening in its incompetence and cruelty, even in the years he considered it legitimate.

Little by little he was becoming the impresario of the Comintern, its secret ambassador in the bourgeois Europe he was so fond of, the same bourgeoisie to whose destruction he had dedicated his life. He founded companies and newspapers that served as covers for handling the propaganda funds sent from Russia, but he had such an innate talent for business that each of those ventures prospered, multiplying clandestine investments into rivers of money with which he then financed new projects of revolutionary conspiracy. His audacious business ventures ceased to be covers and became true capitalist successes.

He was a director of the Third International, but he drove through Berlin, and later Paris, in a large Lincoln, always accompanied by his blond wife swathed in furs. He invented grand and noble causes that no one of goodwill could fail to support. The measure of his triumph is equaled only by that of his anonymity: no one knew that the international movements of solidarity and the international congresses of writers and artists promoting peace and culture were the brainchildren of Willi Münzenberg. From his own experience, he knew that hard-nosed Bolsheviks like Stalin, or Lenin himself, would rouse very little public affection in the West, so to attract a Nobel laureate in literature or a Hollywood actress to the cause was a formidable coup in public relations. He discovered that radicalism and distant revolutions were irresistibly attractive to intellectuals of a certain social position.

His first success in large-scale organization and propaganda was the world campaign to ship foodstuffs to the regions of Russia devastated by the great famines of 1921. The international fund for aid to workers, which he directed, was responsible for delivering dozens of shiploads of food to Russia and also for creating a powerful current of humanitarian sympathy around the world for the suffering and heroism of the Soviet people. The indifferent charity of other times was transmuted into vigorous political solidarity in which a benefactor could always feel he was a comfortable step away from active militancy. Münzenberg contrived seals, insignias, and propaganda fliers illustrated with photographs of life in the USSR, color prints, paperweights with busts of Marx and Lenin, postcards of workers and soldiers, anything that could be sold at a low price and would allow the buyer to feel that his few coins were a gesture of solidarity, not charity, a practical and comfortable form of revolutionary action.

In 1925, with countless committees, publications, marches, and images in movie newsreels, he plotted and created the great wave of support for Sacco and Vanzetti. In the terrible years of inflation in Germany, the Japan earthquake of 1923, the general strike in England in 1926, he filled the coffers of resistance and organized soup kitchens, schools, and shelters for orphan children. It was the need to print and distribute massive numbers of political pamphlets that awakened his interest in publishing. In 1926 he owned two mass-circulation dailies in Germany, an illustrated weekly magazine that had a circulation of a million — and was, says Koestler, the Communist counterpart to Life—as well as a series of publications that included technical journals for photographers and magazines for radio and movie fans. In Japan, directly or indirectly, his organization controlled nineteen newspapers and magazines. In the Soviet Union he produced films on Eisenstein and Pudovkin, and in Germany he organized the distribution of Soviet films and financed the vanguardist spectacles of Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht. All around the world, film clubs, sports clubs, reading clubs, touring societies, and groups of activists in favor of peace became unimpeachable branches of the Club of Innocents.

With Hitler’s arrival in the chancellery, Münzenberg lost everything he possessed or controlled in Germany. But he was like those American magnates who suffer horrific bankruptcies only to claw their way up out of nothing and create new fortunes with the same invincible energy. As soon as he arrived in Paris, he bought a newspaper and organized financial support for the underground in Germany. The German Communist Party had believed up to the last hour that the Nazis were minor adversaries and that the true enemies of the working class were the Social Democrats. The disaster of January 1933 convinced Münzenberg that the suicidal sectarianism of his fellow party members had to be abandoned in favor of a great alliance among all democratic forces prepared to resist the sinister tidal wave of fascism. Within a few months, he had published one of the best-selling books of the twentieth century, The Brown Book of Nazi Terror, and achieved his greatest success, the masterpiece of his instinct for mass propaganda, the international campaign on behalf of Dimitrov and others arrested and put on trial for the fire at the Reichstag.

Just as the blackest period of Stalin’s terror and extermination was drawing near, Münzenberg’s flair for publicity ensured that in the eyes of the world’s progressives the Soviet Union was the great adversary of totalitarianism, more valiant and resolute than any corrupt bourgeois democracy.

He never paused, the flow of schemes and proposals never slowed, ideas for books and articles, for new forms of political activism, clubs and committees and campaigns, lists of prestigious names needed for each new cause, aid to workers in the Asturias uprising of 1934 and the protest against the Italian invasion of Abyssinia. He stormed into his offices in Paris like a cyclone, yelled over the telephone at the top of his lungs, smoked his excellent cigars while absentmindedly sprinkling the ash over the broad lapels of his expensive suits, dictated memorandums until three or four in the morning, sent telegrams to Moscow or New York or Tokyo, checked the sales figures for books and print runs of newspapers, improvised the rules for the World Committee for the Relief of the Victims of German Fascism, drew up the list of foods and medicines to go on a ship leased by his organization in Marseilles and destined for striking workers in the port of Shanghai.

He is everywhere, directing a prodigious variety of tasks, feared and obeyed by people working in several countries, and yet he’s invisible, hidden in shadow. Both conspirator and a deputy in the Reichstag, both entrepreneur fond of expensive cigars and chauffeured cars and a militant Communist, a man of the world who enters salons on the arm of a woman taller and more distinguished than he and a critic of the idiocies and depravities of the rich, whom at the same time he admires with the fascination of the poor boy who watches the dazzling lives of the powerful from a distance, who smells the perfumes of women swathed in fur stoles and desires them with a passion fed by social outrage.

IN OCTOBER OF 1936, an emissary presented himself in Münzenberg’s Paris offices, a man whom he had never seen and whom he disliked because of his surliness and obvious air of an informer or jailer. When the man entered, he examined the office out of the corner of his eye, disapproving of the luxury of the carpet, the curtains and paintings, the solid, bold shapes of the furniture, the tubular chairs, the art deco table at which Münzenberg was seated, leaning on his elbows, surrounded with documents and telephones. Without preamble or ceremony, the man told Münzenberg that his presence was required in Moscow.

There is also a traitor in the story, a shadow at Münzenberg’s side, the rancorous and docile, cultivated and polyglot subordinate — Münzenberg spoke only German, and that with a strong lower-class accent — Otto Katz, also called André Simon. Slim, elusive, an old friend of Franz Kafka, Katz was the organizer of the congress of antifascist intellectuals of Valencia, Münzenberg’s and the Comintern’s representative among the intellectuals of New York and the actors and screenwriters of Hollywood, a perpetual spy, the fawning adulator of Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett, Lillian Hellman, all fervent and cynical Stalinists. The éminence grise behind Münzenberg’s grand machinations, he also reported on his superior’s every action and word to the new hierarchs of Moscow.

Münzenberg quickly pledges his loyalty, of course, but in spite of how perceptive he is about character and weakness he fails to detect the edge of resentment beneath Katz’s suaveness, or the meticulous patience with which Katz secretly collects small IOUs for the insults he suffers or imagines, the humiliation that Münzenberg’s uncontrolled and baroque energy has inflicted through the years. Koestler writes that Katz was dark and distinguished, attractive in a slightly sordid way. He spoke and wrote fluently in French, English, German, Russian, and Czech. He had discussed literature with Milena Jensenska in the cafés of Prague and Vienna. He always squinted one eye when he lit his cigarettes or was absorbed in something. During the Spanish Civil War, he directed the official news agency of the Republican government, which entrusted him with secret funds allocated to influence certain French publications and politicians. Münzenberg rescued him from poverty and despair in Berlin, where at the beginning of the 1920s Katz was frequenting the haunts of beggars and drunks and loitering near bridges favored by suicides. In 1938, when Münzenberg was expelled from the German Communist Party, accused of secretly working for the Gestapo, Katz was one of the first to repudiate him publicly and call him a traitor.

That rat Otto Katz gave him the Judas kiss, plotted his death, even if he didn’t personally tighten the noose around his neck.

Many years later, an ancient woman of ninety speaks into a microphone in the dusk of an apartment in Munich. Age has erased the haughtiness from her face but not her imperious bearing or the glitter in her eyes, just as time has not calmed her scorn for that long-ago traitor, who also was eventually expelled and condemned, executed in 1952 in a cell in Prague with a rope around his neck. There was no mercy for executioners either, it seems. “Otto Katz!” says the old woman, pronouncing that name as if spitting it through her tightly pressed lips painted with a ragged streak of crimson.

I also track this woman through literature, seek her face in photographs, browse the labyrinths of the Internet, hoping to find the book she wrote in the 1940s to vindicate her husband’s memory and denounce and shame those who plotted his death. I see scenes, images not invoked by will or based on any recollection but endowed with a somnambulist precision in which imagination does not intervene: curtains drawn in the Munich apartment, in October 1989, the tape whirring with a slight hiss in the small recorder before her, an archive where her voice will be preserved, a voice I never heard, it came to me through the soundless words of a book discovered by chance and read voraciously during a sleepless night.

For two or three years I have flirted with the idea of writing a novel, imagined situations and places, like snapshots, or like those posters displayed on large billboards at the entrance to a movie theater. That these stills were never in narrative sequence made them all the more powerful, freed them of the weight and vulgar conventions of a scenario; they were revelations in the present, with no before or after. When I didn’t have the money to go inside, I would spend hours looking at the photographs outside the theater, not needing to invent a story to fit them together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Each became a mystery, illuminating the others, creating multiple links that I could break or modify at my whim, patterns in which no image nullified the others or gained precedence or lost its uniqueness within the whole.

The creaking of the parquet floor in our new house, or a bad dream about illness or misfortune, woke me suddenly, and I was Willi Münzenberg waking in the middle of the night in his house in Paris or in the icy room of a Moscow hotel, fearing that his executioners were approaching, wondering how long it would be before a shot or knife brought an end to the great illusion and delirium of his public existence, and the long tenderness of his married life with Babette, who lay sleeping at his side, hugging him in her sleep the way you hug me, with the determination of a sleepwalker.

The local train stops at the small station of La Sierra de Madrid: drizzle, hillsides covered with trees and fog, the strong scent of wet vegetation — rockrose, pines, cedars — and steep slate rooftops give the impression that you have traveled much farther, to a hidden mountain retreat where there might be sanatoriums or homes for patients in need of rest and cold, clean air. The train is rapid and modern, but the station building is bare stone and the windows are set in red brick, and the sign with the name of the town is written on yellow tiles. There’s no one on the platform, and no one else has stepped off the train. A scent of forests, of drenched trees and earth, floods my lungs, and the touch of the still, misty air on my face gives me an immediate sense of calm. The train pulls away, and I begin walking along a dirt road, suitcase in hand, toward some farms where lights are just going on. In 1937, fearing for his life, so agitated and exhausted that at times he felt a sharp pain in his chest, the warning of a heart attack, Münzenberg hid for a few months in a clinic in a place called La Vallée des Loups, the valley of the wolves. The name of the director also seemed an indication or promise of something: Dr. Le Sapoureux. But Münzenberg is as ill suited for physical repose as he is for intellectual calm, and the minute he arrives at the clinic he starts spending his nights writing a book. As I step onto the platform of the small train station of La Sierra, alone, I am Willi Münzenberg looking in the dark for the road to the sanatorium.

We have come on a winter afternoon to a hotel in the north, in Vitoria. They have given us a room on the top floor, and when I open the window I see a snow-covered park with little squares and statues and a bandstand and, in the background, above the white rooftops, a gray sky stretching like a receding plain. Münzenberg and Babette succeeded in getting out of Russia, and after a long night on the train they found lodging in a hotel near the station of a Baltic city, still worn out from lack of sleep and the tension of approaching the border, fearful that at the last moment the Soviet guards who inspected their passports would order them off the train.

I walk through Madrid or Paris, and a passing metro train makes the pavement tremble beneath my feet: Münzenberg feels that the world is trembling beneath his feet, that no one but he sees the disaster coming, no one on the terraces of the cafés or walking under the bright lights of the boulevards, as the ground begins to shake beneath marching boots and the weight of armored cars, beneath the bombs falling in Madrid and Barcelona and Guernica that no one in Europe wants to hear, and all the while Hitler is preparing his armies and consulting his maps and Stalin is concocting the great public theater of the Moscow trials and the secret hells of interrogation and execution.

I attend a performance of The Magic Flute, and for no reason, in the middle of the verve and joy of the music, the man sitting beside a blond woman is Münzenberg, and the flight of the hero lost in a forest and chased by dragons and faceless conspirators is also his light. Maybe he slipped into Germany, and although he doesn’t like opera came to this performance of The Magic Flute in a Berlin theater filled with black and gray uniforms to make contact with someone. But that scenario isn’t realistic; Münzenberg could have come into Germany incognito, but in the Berlin opera Babette would have been recognized immediately, the Red bourgeoise, the scandalous and arrogant deserter of her social class, of the great Aryan nation.

REAL EVENTS WEAVE dramas that fiction would never dare: Babette Gross had a sister named Margarete, as romantically enchanted as she with radical politics in the early hallucinatory and convulsive days of the Weimar Republic. Margarete, like her sister, married a professional revolutionary, Heinz Neumann, the leader of the German Communist Party. In early February 1933, when Hitler was recently named chancellor of the Reich, Münzenberg and Babette flee from Germany in the large black Lincoln to take refuge in Paris; Neumann and Margarete escape to Russia. There he falls from favor and is arrested and executed, shot in the nape of the neck; his wife is sent to a camp in the frozen north of Siberia.

In the spring of 1939, when the German-Soviet pact is signed, one of the clauses guarantees that German citizens who fled from Nazism and took political asylum in the Soviet Union will be sent back to Germany. No frontier is a refuge; all close like traps on the feet of the hunted. Margarete is transferred by train from Siberia to the border of a recently divided Poland, and the Soviet guards hand her over to the guards of the SS. After three years in a Soviet camp, she spends another five in a German death camp.

In Ravensbrück, where Communist prisoners treat her like a traitor, she meets a Czech woman, Milena Jesenska, who twenty years earlier was the love of Franz Kafka’s life and who moved in the same radical and bohemian circles frequented by Otto Katz before he emigrated to Berlin and there crossed paths with Münzenberg. In that Ravensbrück camp, Margarete, who never heard of Kafka, listens as Milena tells the story of the traveling salesman who wakes one morning turned into an enormous insect, and the story about the man who without knowing what crime he has committed is subjected to a spectral trial, found guilty before he is tried, then executed like a dog in an open field in the middle of the night. Milena, starving and ill, dies in May 1944, only shortly before news reaches the camp that the Russians are advancing from the east and the Allies have landed in Normandy. But the proximity of the Red Army offers no hope of freedom to Margarete, only the threat of a new captivity, of the repetition of a nightmare. She escapes from the German camp in the confusion of the last days, flees through two European armies — Germans in retreat and Soviets advancing — two hells and eight years that she survived with unbelievable fortitude.

IN 1989, AT NINETY, her sister Babette relates it all to an American journalist named Stephen Koch, who is writing the book about Willi Münzenberg that I will discover by chance seven years later. Babette lives in Munich, alone and lucid, still ramrod straight, the youthful gleam in her eyes undimmed. There is a fanatic intensity in the way she sometimes focuses on the young man, the diabolical determination to live and endure that sustains some extremist elders. Shortly afterward she moves to Berlin, and her apartment is not very far from the Wall; some nights she must have heard the sound of the crowds demonstrating on the other side, and the roar of skyrockets and songs of celebration would have reached her bedroom on the night of November 9 when the Wall finally came down, the world that she, her husband, her sister, and her brother-in-law believed in sixty years before, the world they helped create.

The woman speaks in a low, clear voice, in the accented but perfect English of the upper-class British of the 1920s, and that voice, like her eyes, is much younger than her years. Everything happened so long ago, it’s as if it never happened. Everything she knows and remembers will cease to exist in a few months, when she dies. The face of Willi Münzenberg will be lost with her, the smell of his body and the cigars he smoked, his enthusiasm, and the way he was sapped first by losing faith, then by the suspicion that he was being followed and the conviction that there would be no forgiveness for him. His intelligence, too, was eroded by the discovery that he, the inventor of lies, had himself been deceived, that he hadn’t wanted to see what was right before his eyes — all this he tried to tell in a hastily written, tumultuous book when it was already too late, when the intellectuals he had bewitched, used, and scorned for so long turned their backs on him, and his name was carefully being eliminated from the annals of his time.

Messengers came to transmit the order that he was wanted in Moscow. He invented delays, pretexts for postponing the trip, because it was unthinkable that he would openly refuse to obey. Others he knew had gone to Moscow and never returned; all trace of their activities was erased, even their names, or they were publicly denounced in Party newspapers as monstrously disloyal. Münzenberg knew all too well how a campaign of international indignation was organized, how easily reality could be reshaped with the clever use of publicity techniques such as tedious and relentless repetition.

He couldn’t go to Moscow now, he said, during that first summer of the war in Spain, just when he was called on once again to summon all his talents as organizer and propagandist in defense of the last of the great causes, the one closest to his heart after the fall of Germany: international solidarity with the Spanish Republic, with the government of the Popular Front.

But the messages and secret orders kept coming, briefer and more urgent, more threatening, even as news was filtering through of arrests and interrogations. In November 1936, Münzenberg and Babette Gross traveled to Moscow. He was still a high official of the Comintern and the German Communist Party, but there was no one to greet them at the station. A couple of foreigners dressed in opulent winter clothing stood in the grit and poverty of a Soviet train station, the man in his felt hat and long custom-made overcoat, the woman in high heels and silk stockings, her face powdered and her blond hair peeking from the collar of her fur coat. Beside them were piles of luggage appropriate for deluxe trains and the best cabins on transatlantic steamers, leather suitcases with brass fittings and stickers from international hotels, trunks, makeup cases, hatboxes: they are a portrait for an ad printed on the glossy pages of a 1930s magazine, one of those publications Münzenberg dreamed up and directed.

No one waits at the hotel they were assigned to, and there is no message for them in their room. From the window, from one of the top floors of an enormous hotel only recently constructed but already dark and depressing, where uniformed, armed women stand guard at the end of the corridors in a silence uninterrupted by voices or ringing telephones, Münzenberg and Babette can see in the distance, high above the dark rooftops, a red star shining at the very top of a skyscraper. This is the world they have dedicated their lives to, the only country to which it was legitimate for an internationalist to swear loyalty. It is so cold in the room they don’t take off their coats. There is a black telephone on the night table, but it’s disconnected or out of order. Even so, they look at it with the hope, or the fear, that it will begin to ring. As is routine, their passports were taken from them as they entered the USSR, and they have no tickets or return date.

The only word Münzenberg has received is that he is to wait. He will be received and heard in good time. His inability to do nothing at all makes the waiting worse than the fear. The man and the woman, accustomed to the good life, to the brilliant social activity of Berlin and Paris, are left alone and confined to a Moscow hotel, reluctant to step outside into the wintry streets that seem so gloomy compared with the lights of the capitals of Europe where they have always lived. If they go out for a walk, there will be someone following them. If they go down to the lobby or the dining room, someone will make note of their every move, and if they speak above a whisper, the waiter who serves them tea will remember every word they say. They will be overheard if they make a telephone call, and if they send a letter to Paris, someone will scrutinize it under a strong lamp, inspect it for secret messages, and keep it as material proof of something, whether espionage or treachery.

At the end of several identical days, someone knocks at the door. After an instant of uncertainty, Münzenberg and Babette, tense and pale, find themselves confronting the familiar and yet by now nearly unrecognizable faces of Heinz and Margarete Neumann, the only ones who have decided to, or dared to, visit them. Perhaps they dared because they know they are already condemned, because they too are living the isolation of a contagious illness. Once infected, you can approach only someone who suffers the same illness. The two blond sisters and the two men of working-class origins: four lives trapped together. They speak in low voices, huddled close, all wearing their overcoats in the icy hotel room in Moscow, whispering for fear of microphones, so many things to tell after so many years of separation, so little time to say it all, to exchange warnings, for at any moment men in black leather coats very much like the uniforms of the Gestapo can knock at the door, or kick it down.

They say good-bye, knowing that the four of them will never be together again. Within a few months Neumann is arrested and disappears into the offices and dungeons of Lubyanka Prison, where just outside the front door stands a gigantic statue of Feliks Dzerzhinski, the Polish aristocrat who founded Lenin’s secret police, a man Münzenberg knew very well in the early years of the Revolution.

But the past counts for nothing, it can even become a basis for guilt. Koestler writes that ministers and dukes once bowed before the decisive and rough authority of Willi Münzenberg, but in Moscow no one welcomes him, no one returns his calls. He was everything, and now he is no one: the past is as remote as the bright lights of Paris and Berlin remembered in the gloomy monotony of a Moscow where the only illumination in the streets comes from the black cars of the secret police.

He organized the international campaign that made Dimitrov a hero, not of communism but of popular and democratic resistance to the Nazis. Thanks to him, German judges had to let Dimitrov go free, and now, in Moscow, he is the head of the Comintern. But Dimitrov doesn’t return Münzenberg’s messages; he is never in his office when Münzenberg tries to call on him, and no one knows how long it will be before he returns to Moscow.

The Club of Innocents, the credulous, the idiots of goodwill, the deceived and sacrificed who receive no reward — I have been one of them, Münzenberg thinks during sleepless nights in his hotel room. I helped Hitler and Stalin destroy Europe with equal brutality. I helped invent the legend of their struggle to the death. I was a pawn when in the intoxication of my pride I thought I was directing the game from the shadows.

Maybe his life isn’t that important to him, less important even than all the money, power, and luxury he has had and lost. What matters is that Babette may suffer, that she may be dragged down and have to suffer for the mistakes he made, all the lies he helped spread. To save her, he does not yield, he besieges the directors of the Comintern who once were his friends or subordinates and now pretend not to know him, he brandishes old credentials that now have no currency: his world campaign for aid to Soviet workers during the years of hunger, his early loyalty to the Bolsheviks during the mythological times of the Revolution, the confidence Lenin placed in him. You will die of your convictions. In the sinister and icy mausoleum on Red Square, in a faint illumination reminiscent of a chapel, he has gazed upon the mummy of his former protector, an unrecognizable face with the dull consistency of wax, lids closed over Asiatic eyes. We have come to the kingdom of the dead, and they will not let us return.

At last he wrangles an appointment with a powerful bureaucrat, one of Stalin’s protégés. In Togliatti’s office, Münzenberg shouts, vindicates himself, pounds the table, puts on an impressive spectacle of power and rage, as if he still possessed newspapers that printed millions of copies, and luxurious automobiles. He must return posthaste to Paris, he says, he must organize the greatest propaganda campaign of all time, recruit volunteers, collect funds, medicines, food, he must supply weapons, cement the solidarity of world intellectuals with the Spanish Republic.

Togliatti, who is blunt, quiet, twisted, and cowardly, a hero of the communist and democratic resistance against Mussolini that was almost entirely invented by Münzenberg’s political publicity, agrees, or pretends to agree, to his request; he picks a day for the return trip and assures Münzenberg that passports will be waiting for him and Babette at the office of the station police. Perhaps Münzenberg asks whether he knows anything about Neumann, whether he is able to do anything for Heinz and Greta. Togliatti smiles, servile but also reserved, demonstrating with restrained villainy his present superiority over the former powerful director of the International. He says that he can’t do anything, or that nothing will happen, everything will work out; he implies that this is not a particularly good time for Münzenberg to ask, just as he is about to leave.

Again the man and woman wearing hats and voluminous overcoats stand on the train platform, shoes shined, their great stack of luggage beside them; they look out of place, and insolent, in their broad lapels and fox furs. They cast sideways glances, nervous, uncertain as to whether they will in fact be allowed to leave.

The hour of departure is near, but their passports are not in the police office as Togliatti promised. All around them they sense the net, perhaps with the next step they will fall into it, perhaps each moment of delay is a planned stage in the culmination of their sentence. But they are not going back to that hotel now that the train is ready to depart, they are not going to give up, lock themselves in a room, keep waiting. Münzenberg grips the arm of his wife, so tall and graceful at his side, and guides her toward the steps of the train as he gives instructions for their luggage to be taken to their compartment. If they are going to be arrested, let it happen now. But no one comes near, no one stops them in the corridor of the train, which slowly begins to pull away at the announced time.

At each station stop, they look toward the platform, searching for the soldiers or plainclothes officers who will come on board to arrest them, ask for their passports, shove them around, and make them get off the train, or maybe surround them without a word, lead them away quietly in order not to create unnecessary alarm among the passengers.

“It was the longest train trip of our lives,” Babette Gross tells the American journalist fifty-three years later. In the dim light of the second morning, they come to the border station. “We thought they would be waiting for us there, prolonging the hunt to the last instant.” With a firm step, as the other travelers fell into line on the snowy platform to have their passports checked, Münzenberg strode toward the police office, the belt of his overcoat drawn tight, the lapels of his coat turned up against the cold, the brim of his hat snapped down over his rustic, fleshy, German face.

Both passports were waiting in a sealed envelope.

I feel their anguish, I lose sleep imagining it was you and I on that train. I am terrified by documents, passports, certificates that can be lost, doors I can’t open, borders, the inscrutable or threatening expression of a policeman or anyone wearing a uniform, displaying authority. I am frightened by the fragility of things; the order and quiet of our lives always hangs from a thread that can snap so easily; our everyday, secure, familiar reality can suddenly shatter in a cataclysm.

The remaining years of Münzenberg’s life are spent on the defensive; he doesn’t give up, but lives with the awareness of approaching horror; his light-colored eyes dilate with fear, though his intellect is still sustained by a relentless will. In 1938 he is expelled from the German Communist Party, accused of being a spy and of working for the Gestapo, and no one comes forward in his defense. He has enough energy left to found another newspaper, to denounce in its pages the dual threat of communism and fascism and urge popular resistance against them. Let all the democracies that have abandoned the Spanish Republic and tolerated the aggressive rearmament and brutality of Hitler, to whom they have handed over Czechoslovakia, hoping to sate his hunger, to appease him at least temporarily, awake from their idiotic and cowardly lethargy. In his newspaper he predicts that Hitler and Stalin will sign a pact to share domination of Europe, and also that after a brief period Hitler will turn against his ally and invade the Soviet Union, but no one reads that newspaper, no one gives any credence to the ravings of a man who seems mad.

AS STRANGE AS THE FACT that this man once existed is the fact that there is almost no evidence of his sojourn in the world. Perhaps no one now lives who knew him and remembers him. Babette Gross, who lived so many years after his death, is a shadow herself. On the tape recorded by Stephen Koch you can still hear the sound of her voice, speaking English exquisitely. Her memory of that man fires a gleam in eyes recessed in sockets that already betray the shape of her skull.

There is a final part of the story that this woman didn’t know and that no one can ever tell, unless the man still lives who in the spring of 1940 tied the rope around the sturdy neck of Willi Münzenberg and hanged him from a tree branch in the middle of a French forest. There are no witnesses; no one ever learned who the two men were who were with him the last time anyone saw him, when one mild June afternoon he was sitting at the door of a café in a French town, drinking and talking, giving every appearance of naturalness, as if the war didn’t exist, as if German armored cars weren’t racing along the highways toward Paris.

The three men left the café, and no one remembers having seen them, three nameless strangers in the great floodtide of the war. Months later, in November, at the first light of dawn, a hunter walks deep into the woods with his dog, which is sniffing excitedly, muzzle to the ground, following a scent to a place where he roots out a corpse half hidden under the autumn leaves, a body pulled into a peculiar position, knees to chest, skull half split by the rope that bit into it during the process of decomposition. Staring into the darkness of insomnia, I imagine a faint light, bluish gray, hazy in the fog, the sound of the hunter’s boots swishing through the leaves, the panting and grunts, the impatience, the choked breath of the dog as it noses the soft, loamy dirt. I wonder how Willi Münzenberg’s identity was attributed to that disfigured and anonymous cadaver, and whether the fountain pen I’ve seen in the photograph of Koestler’s book was still in the upper pocket of his jacket.