In Search of Lost Identities

Maxim Leo’s Red Love is, for me at least, one of those books you think you might like and, on reading, you love because it has opened up an understanding or further understanding of a reality and because it has integrity. The German Democratic Republic is usually one of those realities we cannot speak about without engaging our own ideological baggage, and often we speak about them with little or no knowledge.
 

Leo, like everyone else, has an angle. He’s doing very well in unified Germany and there’s little he would want to change, but he is genuinely interested in trying to understand others – in this case his own family. Normally such autobiographical musings are something I find suspect, but he has a wonderful family and a wonderfully varied family that, I feel, must represent quite a range of what Germany is and was. Perhaps necessarily (they are his family after all) he is sympathetic, even when bemused, in his portrayal of the characters (that is what I have to call them, not because I doubt the author’s truthfulness, but because they come towards you with that roundedness you only find in good fiction).The author’s mother Anne is a communist and daughter of Gerhard, a communist hero who was nearly purged during the Stalinist period, and there were many communists who weren’t so lucky. He remains loyal to the end, and has behind him a remarkable life of courage and generosity, but also compromise with an inflexible regime. Maxim’s father, Wolf, is perhaps the most likable character, though the competition is strong. He is not so much the eternal rebel as the eternal man in his own mould. He makes the small compromises needed to get by, such as the one of keeping one’s trap shut on a few occasions, but he’s not willing to make the big one of joining the party and saying, “You were right all along,” or indeed some lesser but still explicit compromises. His attitude to the post-unification regime is not that different. Wolf is actually a man of his times, and could, it seems, be found on both sides of the Iron Curtain. He was interested not in money but in “doing his own thing”. He was open to ideas, but never got giddy about them.

Wolf’s father, Werner, is fascinating, which is strange because he’s almost absent from most of the book. He was a supporter of Nazism before the war, and Hitler’s Germany took him out of unemployment and he didn’t know or perhaps care about the high price others were paying. Wolf’s mother remembers an idyllic holiday, and these young working people were or felt they were amongst the winners of Hitler’s short-lived new Germany. After the war, following a damascene conversion, he signed up with the Communist Party and became one of its keener supporters at a less exalted level than Gerhard’s. Maxim is very good at not demonising Werner, and explaining the pressures of those times. Werner believed in order and wanted to contribute, and the communist Werner had excised the Nazi Werner from his memory. A whole nation wanted to forget. And yet if you understand Werner will surely understand a great deal about the rise of Nazism: those who didn’t take part in atrocities, but preferred not to notice them. With the rise of xenophobia and Islamophobia in Europe, the lesson is clear.
 
Equally fascinating but even more in the shadows is Dagobert Lubinski, Maxim’s great-grandfather, a communist in interwar Germany, who was thrown out of the party in 1928 because he couldn’t agree with the new theory of “social-fascism” (the idea that there was no difference between the Nazis and the Social-Democrats). He formed a new organisation called the Kommunistische Partei Opposition whose publication, Against the Stream, had the strapline: “He who wants to get back to the spring must swim against the stream.” Dagobert, a Jew as were both of Anne’s parents, would die in Auschwitz fulfilling his tragic role in this emblematic family. There is a strange symmetry between Dagobert and Werner: the latter stayed on the right side of history and the former on the right side of humanity. One was brutally murdered, the other on the whole could prosper – with some difficult times – through a long wave of history.
 
You’ve probably noticed that I have only mentioned the men. This is because the women, all sympathetic figures in their own right, compromised not so much with the state as with their husbands. Their lives were tragic in a less ideological manner. It was Anne who discovered Dagobert, and this came as a relief: there was another communism (one could say “other communisms”) and here was a grandfather she knew nothing about – a hero who didn’t have the amazing good luck of Gerhard who joined the French Resistance and led a charmed, Rocambolesque existence, at least when seen with hindsight but surely terrifying at the time. She has written a book on Dagobert and a plaque has been put up where he was arrested.
 
I could go on! But there’s no room here, and I have to address the theme I’ve chosen (there are many more, and a bookful of underlinings to prove it): what do we feel when our nation disappears? This question is closely related to that difficult historical and philosophical question, “What is a nation?”, which we also don’t have space for. The conclusion of Red Love deals very well with this, and remember that the author is not a nostalgic for the GDR (and they do exist). However he was a citizen of that country, and knew how others saw it, including the characters of this book.
 
Wolf, of course, was the first to feel the pinch: “He missed the friction he got from rubbing up against the state.” Anne “couldn’t imagine being without this country, which had always been there.” And we should remember (as the author often reminds us) that the regime had been changing dramatically for quite a few years. Unsurprisingly, “Werner went on living the way he’d always lived. He spent the summer in a cabin that he’d built in 1970 in the grounds of the Sports Association on Lake Zeesen.” Werner, it seems, knew how to get the most out of life, and this doesn’t mean that he was inherently selfish: he contributed but not always to the right cause. He wasn’t good at discriminating over moral issues, but at the end of the book a photograph (not always reliable evidence) shows an old man who knows how to smile at life. And his too was not an easy life, one that included over a year in a POW camp and forced labour on a French farm.
 
What is surprising is that Maxim himself felt the smallest tinge of regret: “Westerners were starting to get on my nerves. They talked about the GDR as though it were a cholera zone. They said we’d been corrupted by dictatorship, that we had weak characters and were badly educated.” Of course, Eastern European standards of education under real existing socialism were generally much higher than ours, but they were not trained to question things as we once were. We were trained to opine on subjects we knew very little about. There was in Eastern Europeans a certain political naivety, and many embraced Reagan and Thatcher as they had embraced communism. But that now is ancient history.
 
On the other hand, this sense of abandonment is very topical: Remainers like myself are still coming to terms with the fact that we are no longer EU citizens. Like some citizens of the GDR, I am not uncritical of the EU, but I am a passionate believer in it as an entity and as a project for many reasons, not least the avoidance of war. I am tied to Europe by many family links. European Jews were in this sense the first real Europeans, precisely because their family ties often crossed borders (just as the wanderings of the Roma crossed borders too). Jews did have nationalist identities: Dreyfus felt himself to be patriotically French, even though his racist colleagues did not. Many Jews fought in the German army in the First World War and considered it their duty. But many also felt part of something bigger, particularly on the left. Hence their disproportionate number in the communist movement, partly due to the Bund (Dagobert’s surname, Lubinski, suggests a Polish background, though we don’t know how far back). Poland didn’t exist as a state before the First World War, and those lands had been incredibly cosmopolitan. Now all Europeans are following them, and familial ties across borders are increasingly common. Europe, in spite of its abysmal treatment of Greece and now other Mediterranean countries, is something many of us consider essential for Europe itself and for the world at large, but all states or confederacies (which is all the EU is at the moment) have their failings, and their destruction may produce something worse than they were (we’ve had a lot of that in recent years).
 
This leads me to another thought: one that I resist quite a bit, I have to confess. I strongly support Scottish independence because I believe that it will benefit both Scotland and England. It will allow Scotland to pursue its social-democratic agenda and England to get over its post-imperial hankerings. In fact the petty nationalism comes not out of support for independence but out of unionism, which forever talks of Dunkirk when it should be talking about why our doctors and nurses don’t have PPE. Besides Scottish independence in the EU would not have led to a hard border: Ed Miliband’s claim that it would mean his children having to have a passport to see the pandas in Edinburgh was disingenuous. And yet I or we should understand that the disappearance of the British state may cause nostalgia even amongst those whose preference was independence, just as some unionists may take to independence like a duck to water (another lesson of this book). Nations are fragile things and they don’t last forever (how many Germanies have we had in the last century? – well, five to be precise, each with different borders). And yet when one dies, something is lost (I would qualify this statement with the exceptional case of Nazi Germany when nothing was lost, as it had nothing to give to civilisation and had taken so much away). Sometimes a great deal is to gained, but (almost) always something is lost.

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That was a long newsletter this week, but I am duty-bound in these times of closed bookshops to make at least a gesture towards our own list. A tiresome duty perhaps, but a duty no less in our economic system. There is an obvious companion to Red Love, which is Ričardas Gavelis’s Memoirs of a Life Cut Short, a Lithuanian satirical work examining the stultifying Brezhnev years, of which I am particularly proud. There’s much great literature on the Stalinist years and the Thaw produced a great deal of good literature before the censor’s hand came down again. But the Brezhnev years were what finally killed off the Soviet Union, and this is also the principal period examined in Red Love, though it also goes back as far as the characters’ lives can take it.
 
Conscious that many of you may have moved on, I will only add a brief comment on Memoirs, which comes from the biography on the back flap: “[Gavelis] loved beautiful things, good food, drink, and listening to the blues. According to his widow, ‘he played poker with demons and death’, and became known for his bright, intriguing and deliberately provocative prose, which retained something of the scientist’s logic, while coming under the powerful influence of James Joyce.” One of the pleasures of this job is interacting with interesting people often only by e-mail, such as Gavelis’s widow, Nijolė Gavelienė, who wrote that brief résumé of her husband’s life. I corrected her English, but left unchanged “he played poker with demons and death” because I didn’t entirely understand what she meant but really appreciated the suggestiveness of those words that must have meant something important to her and to me, but less clearly.
 
She then added, “He … is remembered not only as a literary figure enjoying international acclaim, but also as a free spirit with an unromantic view of the world.” He may be someone Wolf would have liked to read.

  Allan Cameron, Glasgow, April 2020  

Both books can be purchased by clicking the links below :

Red Love by Maxim Leo and translated by Shaun Whiteside (Pushkin Press, 2013)
 
Memoirs of a Life Cut Short by Ričardas Gavelis and translated by Jayde Will (Vagabond Voices, 2018)