The 2^nd Annual Dymphna Clark Lecture – the 2^nd Canberra Weekend of Ideas Session 4, Saturday March 8^th – WOMEN, HISTORY, SCIENCE AND ETHICS: Identity in Diaspora – a case study of the refugees from fascism in the 1930’s

by

Professor Katerina Clark

Department of Comparative Literature and Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Yale University.

Anne is someone I have always been a little in awe of ever since she was my school captain at Ainslie primary. And I’m just waiting for her to remind me the my topic today is Women, History, Science and Ethics but I am not talking about women, science or ethics, especially not about the weekend’s main topic science - unless you take science in the broader sense of meaning knowledge in general.But, as if in compensation, I am going to dedicate this moment to two women.Firstly offcourse my mother for whom this lecture is named. I chose this particular topic because it is a part of my work she began to help me with before her death. Mum was the consummate scholar and had a formidable mind. She gave up her academic career to become a devoted wife and mother of six children but she nevertheless didn’t sight of scholarship completely as her six books attest. The other woman to whom I dedicate this talk is Ann’s late mother, Ella Butsworth, who was left a widow in the 2^nd World War and obliged to take the opposite route from my mother, the route from an 8:30 to 5 grind in the Public Service and yet she was still able to do a splendid job as a mother, as we all appreciate today.Nevertheless Ella, despite the impressive way she overcame her particular adversity, stands in our memory as a reminder that the costs of war are with us for life.

In recent years scholars in a variety of fields have been interested in the phenomenon of diaspora. Many have sought ways to analyse the impact on cultural, ethnic or rational identity when large numbers of people from one ethnic group or country find themselves, wether by accident or design, scattered over many other countries.The classic diaspora was offcourse that of the Jews after they fled their homeland.But I am looking at those Germans who in the 1930’s fled their homeland after Hitler came to power.

Just a bit of background. The Nazis came to power in Germany in stages over the months January to March 1933.On February the 22^nd the Reichstag, the parliament building, burned down. The Nazis accused the communists of starting the fire and arrested a group that included a Dutchmen and 3 Bulgarians led by Georgi Dimitrov, the Comintern leader in Berlin and conducted a famous trial against them.An international defense effort was mounted which unbelievably succeeded and most of them were aquitted. But the fire became an excuse for mass arrests and murder of leftists.160,000 communists were arrested in the first year alone. And so people began to leave in droves, especially left inclining intellectuals and there were an awful lot of them, plus other categories of anti-fascists or people persecuted by the Nazis including offcourse the Jews.Many of them were also leftists.Often had been hounded out of their positions in the universities, the arts, law or commerce.

That was the diaspora and they scattered all over the globe. Some went to other parts of Europe where German was spoken such as Prague, Vienna or Zurich, some to Belgium, Holland, Palestine or Latin America. Brecht and others went to Denmark. Some, like the famous theoreticians of literary history, Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer who were Jews, could still get academic jobs in Istanbul, a German sphere of influence, as did the famous chemist F. G. Arndt, father of A.N.U.’s Heinz Arndt and grandfather of Bettina. Very few came to Australia. At the Evian conference on 1937 about the Jews Australia refused to take any on the grounds that that would cause racial tensions – mutatus mutandis things don’t change much – and we had to wait for the arrival of the Dernia in with a famous boatload of Jews extradited from England.

The two centers of the diaspora were Paris and Moscow. The Soviet Union was quite tough about taking in these refugees, too, and essentially accepted only Communists. Nevertheless by 1936 there were 4,600 of them living there and many more came after Austria and Czechoslovakia fell to the Nazis. But France in the mid thirties, the time of the Popular Front an alliance of leftist and anti-fascist parties under Leon Blum, was fairly open to accepting them and there were, variously estimated, 10 - 30,000 there at its height. But after Blum resigned in 1938 and Hitler began to occupy ever more of Europe and it became harder to gain entry to France and in many cases the refugees had begun to leave for America, mostly for New York or, for several leading writers, Hollywood. But Paris was always the intellectual center of the diaspora, though many of the organizations and events there were secretly bankrolled by the Soviet Government. Moscow was also important as the place that published more texts by the diaspora than anywhere else – up to 250 titles a year in German, plus three major periodicals that were contributed to and circulated throughout the diaspora.

Although, then, the people in this diaspora were very different both ethnically and culturally than most we see in the world today, and the causes of the anti-fascist diaspora were in many cases different from those of today which sometimes are largely economic, still many of the experiences and problems are similar.

Obviously I can’t cover all of this today so I am just going to touch on a couple of general features of this exodus diaspora before going on to cover that central problem of all diasporas – thinking through some notion of identity in their new and scattered locations.

The first of these, very familiar today as Australians are particularly aware, was the problem of borders. How to get across them, how to get visas to get some sort of temporary travel document or legal residence. Crossing borders was offcourse also a psychological and existential problem. Many agonised over wether, for instance, they should take out citizenship in the country else they happened to find refuge, and a lot of literature generated in the diaspora touches on the poignantly of crossing borders especially crossing the border of Germany recalled as a moment of both nostalgia and liberation.

But now, since it is after all the late afternoon, an anecdote, or rather a true story, about how one of the anti-fascist exiles crossed the Australian border. In 1934 the Australian branch of the international group The Congress against War and Fascism decided to hold a congress in Melbourne and invited as the star attraction the famous Czech born journalist Egon Eruin Kisch who came from Europe to address it. But there was a small problem, in 1920 the Immigration Act had been amended to prevent the entry of communists and anarchists and he was a communist. He was given a visa in France but Australian officials were alerted to who he was. They decided to wait until Kisch’s boat, the Strathaird docked in Freemantle, search his cabin, and if they found communist agitational material to deny him entry. But they didn’t find it. By the time the Straithaird berthed in Melbourne, however, they were better prepared. Kisch was administered the infamous dictation test. Since he knew quite a few European languages they gave it to him in Scottish Gaelic. He failed and Menzies, then Attorney General, addressed the Parliament in the words, “I declare for the third and last time that he shall not set foot on the soil of the Australian Commonwealth.” The Victorian High Court dismissed an appeal lodged on Kisch’s behalf and the Straithaird quickly pulled out of Melbourne. But a determined Kisch leapt from the ship 18 feet down to the wharf, spraining his ankle. He was gathered up and returned to the ship. However Kisch then leapt a second time, this time breaking his leg painfully in two places. Again he was placed on the ship and proceeded to Sydney in agony with his leg unset. In Sydney the political climate was more favourable and Evatt was an activist for the Kisch cause at the High Court. There the argument was made that Scottish Gaelic should not be considered a European language in the terms of the Immigration Act since in 1747 George II, in the aftermath of that particularly brutal battle of Culloden, had banned the language. Kisch was allowed to enter but was not able to attend the anti-fascist congress and had to agree to leave Australia promptly, but the result of this was much more publicity for the Congress that was well attended.

The case of Kisch provides a particularly dramatic example of travel and closed borders. Accurately it could be seen as an example of the central role played in the story of the exiles of transcending borders. And this gets at the heart of the general pattern of diaspora activity, and also at its dilemmas. The exiles were forever travelling, forever on the move. Brecht said of them, “We change countries more often than we change out shoes.” But travel was not just a practice, a fact of the diaspora, it was also a value. Central to their ethos was the dream of a trans-national community, letter as the community of the diaspora, scattered over many lands or, more idealistically, a trans-national community of those opposed to fascism, sometimes a sort of imagined international community of the left. And indeed the members of this community were chronically on the move, wether to the interminable international anti-fascist pow-wows, which for the leftists were essentially a version of the Grand Tour, or on a visit to the Soviet Union which had become a necessary component of one’s socialist upbringing. The two biggest pow-wows of these years were both billed as, Congress for the Defense of Culture, the first held in Paris in 1933 and the second held in Valencia in 1937, and in Madrid as Franco’s bombs were falling all around. Australians like Nettie Palmer and Katherine Susannah Pritchard were among the many delegates. One aspect of this travelling mode among the anti-fascists was a somewhat Bohemian life style. Many of them kept mistresses, and offcourse every port of call offered another opportunity for another mistress. The women, though often servicing the men so to speak, were more monogamous about it.

This brings me to the one women who I can use as a major example of the anti-fascists, the German journalist Maria Osten who became the mistress of the leading Soviet journalist Mikhail Koltsov. Koltsov was also the head of the biggest publishing conglomerate in the Soviet Union, that published newspapers, magazines, books and also the lead of the Foreign Commission of the Writers Union. Maria, thanks to this liason, became a leading player in the anti-fascist cause and an international jet setter. She and Koltsov might be described as international adventurers, except that they were also Soviet bureaucrats. During the Civil War Malroux had them both flown into Republican Spain illegally in a gun-running plane and there they became close friends of Hemingway who included them in For Whom the Bell Tolls where Kolstov features as Karkov. But all the time Maria was administrator facilitating the trans-national fraternity of the anti-fascists. She also created, as it were, a trans-national community in minature in her private life. In 1934 when she and Kolstov were visiting the Saar she adopted a young boy from a Communist family, Hubert, and in 1936 while she and Kolstov were travelling she plucked a baby from the smouldering ruins of a bombed house where his parents had been killed and named him Jose, or in Russian Osya, short for Joseph – Joseph guess who. This trans-national family each of the members of which came from a different country had no legal connection to the others, a family truly in the idealistic spirit of the anti-fascist movement, unravelled tragically in the late 30’s when Kolstov was purged, Maria was then in Paris. Hubert threw out his adoptive mother but nevertheless failed to save himself and Osya from the camps. Maria, after tending the dying Margarete Steffin (one of Brecht’s multiple mistresses) during his Moscow visit en route for the U.S., was herself arrested and perished.

Despite such pitfalls and setbacks to the movement, intransigent borders, lack of cash, changes of government and the Soviet purges, despite their very peripatetic existence, people of the diaspora, or more particularly its intellectual leaders, kept trying to rethink cultural identity in their new trans-national context. Given such complexities, questions of identity and allegiance were particularly fraught. How were they to define themselves? What would be there new mission? Were they to be a part of the larger, international set of anti-fascist intellectuals such as particularly emerged at the time of the Paris Congress, and therefore not specifically German? (A typical authorative characerisation of this transnational group, after the Paris Conference, was writers of international significance like Gide, Malraux, Barbusse, Nexo, Huxley, Heinrich Mann, and Feuchtwanger.) Or were there exiled intellectuals primarily outcasts defenders and preservers of the true German cultural heritage? Or, again, perhaps in reality they were essentially subjects of Moscow’s communist Empire.

To varying degrees the exiles might be characterised as all of the above. They belonged, simultaneously, to different groups, each defined by one of the above possibilities. The exiled intellectuals were, negotiating, shifting and competing forces of reality. Obviously there were economic considerations involved as these exiles sought to continue intellectual activity in emigration. The opening up of the main German-language periodicals in the Soviet Union as outlets for the emigration enabled many to publicize their ideas and ameliorated their economic situation. At the same time the periodicals increased the economic dependence of many of them on the Soviet Union. There were other émigré periodicals published in other major cities of Europe, but most of them struggled to continue publishing and few lasted more than a year. Contributors to the Soviet periodicals who resided overseas received their royalties in gold rubles. This made publication highly desirable to writers, most of whom were otherwise struggling.

Leon Feuchtwanger, a prolific producer of novels that mediated on the fate of the successful Jew in a range of historical periods, from Roman times through several periods of German history to the exile of the present day. The Soviets published these novels in Russian translation, giving them generous print runs, and Feuchtwanger became one of the most popular novelists in the Soviet 1930’s.

Most of the intellectuals of this group sought to think through new versions of identity that ignored ethnic particularly and would, of course, stand in stark contrast in that regard to the platform of the Nazis, their arch-rivals as formulators of cultural identity, most were Jews but this fact rarely entered into their discussion of identity. An exception would the exiled Jewish intellectuals including Feuchtwanger sought a secular cultural identity, essentially a secular faith. Its mantras were foregrounded at the 1935 Paris Congress for the Defense of Culture which, on broad terms, defined the platform of a transnational cohort of anti-fascist intellectuals for the Front years. The anti-fascist writers stood for Reason, Humanism and Culture; the Nazis represented, in their counterposed characterization, Unreason (or an obtuse irrationality not unlike that which abounded in the Middle Ages) and barbarity (Barbarei). They were destroyers of cultureKulturzerstorer, even subhuman creatures, beasts of preyRaubriere.

But the noble ideals the anti-fascists championed – culture, humanism, reason – were all too general, as was perhaps inevitable in a tenuous alliance such as the Popular Front in culture. The challenge was to specify: which culture? Which humanism, Some paid lip service to supporting the culture of the oppressed and colonised from what was later called the Third World, some countries of which were represented at the Paris Congress, others championed a Soviet humanism which has nothing in common with bourgeois humanism. But more frequently their formations were concerned with a culture somehow related to Germanness.

A key dilemma for the anti- fascists was how to define their mission, to define that secular religion known as culture, given that they were essentially transnationals, diasporic, and stateless. It is widely believed that [c]ultures are intrinsically incomplete and need the supplement of the state to become truly themselves. Yet Germany, which might be seen as potentially these exiles’ nation, the locus and guarantor of their culture, has never been a well-defined geopolitical entity, as was especially apparent when the Nazis were laying claim to the greater Germany. For these Germaphone exiles defining their own nation was particularly problematic because they formed a diaspora of individuals from different countries (Germany, Austria and to some extent Hungary and Czechoslovakia). In their efforts to transcend the Blut und Boden particularly and racial essentialism of Nazi culture, they constantly faced the danger of veering off into the vapid generalisation of the Boden-less.

One solution, for some was to define culture and nation in terms of assimilation into Stalin’s Soviet Union. Recurrently – and especially in articles published in Deutsche Zentral-Zeitung and in poetry and fiction published in Das Wort – the exiles made declarations about how the Soviet Union was their true Heimat. Such psychological conflict was always available to resolution by seeing the Soviet Union as a higher-order Heimat, the true home of Marxism where the class struggle had been waged and won, making it, as Willi Bredel put it in a 1937 editorial for Das Wort, “national in a higher sense”. Fritz Heckert, in a 1935 article entitled Moscow, the Center of Communist Thought, poised am imaginary line from Trier, the birthplace of Marx, to Moscow, where the communist world of ideas gave Marx a deeper and broader reading. A more elaborate version of this kind of grafting of the German tradition onto the Soviet Union can be found in one of the most canonical sources among these émigré publications for a definition of humanism, Alfred Kurella’s 1936 Birth of Socialist Humanism, published in Internationale Literatur in 1936. Kurella saw the origins of socialist humanism in a bourgeois humanism that reached its flowering in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries in the writings of figures like Goethe and Schiller who, in his account, urged men to return to more humane ideals of man as a counter to the politics of commerce. Then a major step forward in the understanding of humanism came with the early Marx, or more specifically with his Economic and Political Manuscripts of 1844. The manuscripts deal with the problem of alienation, and, by stressing that point in his discussion of it, Kurella was able to identify the proletariat as the bearer of true humanism and to proclaim the Soviet Union its spiritual Heimat.

Another problem was the assimilation, and especially linguistic assimilation, many resisted this. Most striking in this respect was Johannes Becher, the chief editor of Internationale Literatur from 1933 to 1945. Although he lived in an apartment building for Soviet writers, Becher refused to learn Russian because he wanted to remain German and did not want Russian to affect his work. In consequence, every morning Hugo Huppert was expected to come to him and report on events in the Soviet Union he had learned from the day’s newspapers. Yet the same Becher who, at the Paris Congress for the Defense of Culture in 1935, maintained:

This Congress is not a world congress because such and such a number of countries have sent people to it, but rather because it expresses a world force: the best of the past has been united with the struggle of the working class… we speak different languages and, despite all our divisions and differences, yes, there is something higher, binding and common to us all.

A different version of this position was presented by Theo Balk, a German delegate to the next international Congress for the Defense of Culture, held in Valencia, Madrid, and Paris in the summer of 1937 as the Spanish Civil War was in progress. My brigade, he reported speaks 20 languages, and yet we all share an international language.

These sorts of statements appear not only quixotic but also at cross purposes with one of the heartfelt causes of the exiled German intellectuals – to preserve German culture and language, saving it from the desecration and distortions of the Nazis. The Germans were trying to keep together their version of what is called a diaspora nation. Becher articulated their hopes in the very same speech to the Paris Congress. The word of writers can return those who are separated.

Traditionally, Germany has reckoned the right of citizenship in terms of blood, not possession of the language. Yet the émigrés made language the criterion for membership in the diaspora nation. In a 1937 speech that the playwright Ernst Toller made to the German émigré community in New York, he declares:

In reality, no dictator robs a writer of his native country. The language is an organic part of the native land [Heimat], the earth that nourishes it, the earth in which it grows. An artist is responsible for the values of his culture. It is his task to awaken a spontaneous sense of humanity, freedom, justice and beauty, and to be their advocate… he should not nationality but the unity of nations. As long as we émigrés remain true to our ideas… we will earn that Deutshtum we believe in… On your soil grew Goethe and Beethoven, Schiller and Holderlin, Bach and Buchner, Lessing and Marx.

We will note here the same problematic tension between the call of the national and that of the international that plagued the rhetoric of the entire Popular Front in culture. Significantly, perhaps, recent theoreticians of diaspora have begun to react against the shrill binarism of much postcolonial theory arguing that there is no necessary contradiction between the call of the national and what they prefer to call the call of the cosmopolitan rather than the international. An important source for this position, a 1998 collection of articles edited by Pheng Cheuh and Bruce Robbins, is called Cosmopolitics, but subtitled Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation. In his introductory letter to this article, Cheah asserts that cosmopolitanism …primarily designates intellectual ethic, a universal humanism that transcends regional particularism, but now, with globilisation, [c]osmopolitanism is no longer merely an ideal project but a variety of actually existing practical stances. The contributors to the volume explore in different ways what it is to have complex, multiple identities, a simultaneity of attachments and memories. Others have also explored this phenomenon. Jonathan Boyarin’s work on the Jewish diaspora, for example has led him to point out that it often entails, multiple experiences of rediasporization, which do not necessarily “succeed” each other in historical memory but echo back and forth. Paul Gilroy, in his seminal 1993 work The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, analyses the black cultural tradition as historically decentered, a tradition that cannot be reduced to any national or ethnically-based origin, in part because so much of its history involves migration, exploration, interconnection, and travel.