Antonio Molina - Sepharad

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.