A

ticklish question

David Caute

`COMMUNAZIS': FBI SURVEILLANCE OF GERMAN EMIGRE WRITERS by Alexander Stephan, translated by Jan van Heurck Yale, £20, pp. 384 ong before the Red Army reached Berlin and stormed the Reichstag, provok- ing America's Great Fear, a plethora of US agencies had been neurotically sifting the garbage bins of prominent emigres seeking refuge from fascism in the land of the First Amendment. Telephone taps, interception of mail, agents parked outside the house, burglary, informers, whisperers — these were common currency in J. Edgar Hoover's America. Hoover's FBI was the most prominent of the agencies involved in the great game, but snooper credits are due, also, to the Office of Strategic Ser- vices, the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS — see below), the State Department, the army's Military Intelli- gence Service, the Office of Naval Intelli- gence, the House Un-American Activities Committee, besides various state legislative inquisitions like the Tenney Committee in California.

All quite deplorable, no doubt, but how bad was it — and to what extent justified by the totalitarian menace? For the past 30 years it has been fashionable, almost obli- gatory, among academics and journalists to deride, denounce and puke upon the Surveillance State. A legitimate concern for civil liberties has sunk into the marzi- pan of standard virtue; and now Professor Alexander Stephan invites us to share his indignation that illustrious German anti- fascist émigré writers like Brecht, Anna Seghers, Heinrich Mann and Lion Feucht- wanger were put under intense surveillance by American agencies before and after they fled across the Pyrenees — or the Urals in Brecht's case — in 1940. Professor Stephan

attributes the surveillance to 'widespread public fear of foreigners' combined with `deep distrust of liberal or socialist ideas'.

This is familiar enough, but how is one to classify Hoover's targets, these idolaters of Comrade Stalin, as 'socialists' or as 'liber- als'? Stephan chortles over Hoover's naive quotes and dire warnings to the Daughters of the American Revolution about 'foreign "isms" but when Hoover insisted that the FBI was neither the Ogpu nor the Gestapo he was right — though liberal scholars habitually quote such claims as if they were so risible as to require no refutation. Con- temptuous of the Hooveresque terms `Communazis,' and 'red fascists', Alexander Stephan dismisses by silence Hoover's entirely accurate point that 'Communism has bred. Fascism and Fascism spawns Communism'.

Stephan also reports that the FBI `expended great money and effort amassing material' to investigate Harry Dexter White, Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs, but does not spare even a footnote to inform us that they were all major Soviet spies. This book amounts to a useful condensation and analysis of a large quantity of partially cen- sored files obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, but agency files by them- selves explain very little. Historians and publishers now seem obsessed by the fetish of the secret government file, the morbid yet bland world of the FBI, CIA and KGB, thus reducing the historiography of the Cold War to a Boys' Own adventure, non- stop conspiracy shoving aside a mature interest in the real people whose culture and convictions are what history is made of. Did we not hear recently that Jackson Pollock and Abstract Expressionism were a brilliant yet dastardly CIA conspiracy? Is Orwell himself not now exposed as an agent of our own IRD? (It may be time to put in a good word for Room 101 and Smersh.)

Was it really so bad in McCarthy's America? Thomas Mann feared that his US citizenship might be revoked under the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act, but in reality virtually no one was expatriated; in the three dozen INS dossiers turned over to Professor Stephan, he found `no indica- tion that any deportation, long-term intern- ment, or attempt to revoke US citizenship was actually carried out'. Yezhov or Beria

would have done better. Another of Stal- in's fans, Bert°lt Brecht, was prominent in the Free Germany movement, which Hoover — correct as usual — believed `has as its aim the establishment of a post- war German government favourable to Soviet Russia'. The Los Angeles office of the FBI was keen to make a case for Brecht's internment as an enemy alien, but Brecht continued to live, write and screw at liberty until he was dragged before Huac, lit a cigar, and fled the country. Even after his death in 1956, the CIA urged the set- ting up of a mail cover on his widow, `Mother Courage' Helena Weigel, who was suspected of teaching American slang to the East German police.

The Jewish novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, it must be admitted, was never granted American citizenship, Stripped of German nationality by the Nazis in 1933, Feucht- wanger was the author of the notorious eulogy to Stalin, Moscow 1937. Whenever interviewed by the INS, this classic fellow- traveller was a model of evasiveness. Even in Moscow 1937, 'I tried to stay away from politics . . I contemplate world history and contemporary history only from the view point of the historian.' The American agents who politely questioned him in his luxurious California home were easily out- foxed:

Q. Can you state briefly as to what por- tion of the theories expounded in Marxist economic theories you agree with?

A. You see, I go with Marx as far as President Roosevelt went with him.

Q. Were you an admirer of Stalin's?

A. It is a ticklish question. He had — he did a lot in order to rescue the world from Fascism.

Q. Mr Feuchtwanger, you said you had sent a congratulatory telegram to Stalin; had you ever sent a birthday greeting to President Truman [or] . . . to President Eisenhower?

A. Probably he doesn't know my name. Professor Stephan concludes with the dark warning that

those in our time who think differently from the majority and who make their views public will not escape monitoring by modern states, not in Mainz or Mexico, not in New York or Berlin.

But what writer is worthy of the name if no one is sifting his garbage?

`My ex-wife got the kids, the house and the big ball of dung.'