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- Herausgeber: Reading Essentials
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
A bestseller in 1941, selected by the Book of the Month Club for a special edition and described by Book of the Month Club News as: “...an autobiography the like of which has seldom been.”
Richard Julius Herman Krebs, a.k.a. Jan Valtin, rose both within the ranks of the Communist Party and the Gestapo. Krebs dedicated his life to the Communist Party, rising to a position as head of secret service, only to flee the Party and Europe to evade his own comrade’s attempts to kill him. As a professional revolutionary and spy and would-be assassin, Krebs traveled the globe from Germany to China, India to Sierra Leon, Moscow to the United States where a botched assassination attempt landed him a stint in San Quentin State Prison.
From this spell-binding account of artful deception to gain release from a Nazi prison and his work as a double-agent within the Gestapo, to his vivid depiction of working as a secret agent within the Communist Party fraught with intrigue and subterfuge, Krebs gives an unflinching portrayal of the internal machinations of both political parties and both spy agencies.
Writing at age 36 under the name Jan Valtin, Krebs here lays bare a young life filled with idealism and devotion - disillusionment and loss - in a world full of revolutionary promise gone immeasurably wrong.
”An exciting, real book...”—H.G.Wells
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Out of the Night
by Jan Valtin
First published in 1940
This edition published by Reading Essentials
Victoria, BC Canada with branch offices in the Czech Republic and Germany
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except in the case of excerpts by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
OUT OF THE NIGHT
by Jan Valtin
[i]
[ii]
[iii]
[v]
[1]
Book One
THEY CALLED IT DAWN
[3]
Chapter One
LUMPENHUND
I am a German by birth. But the years of my childhood were scattered over places as far apart as the Rhine and the Yangtze-kiang. My voyage began at the point where the Rhine suddenly sweeps westward to bite its course through the mountains before it curves north again to flow, broad and swift, past the Lorelei and the towers of Cologne. One day in 1904 my mother, then on the way from Genoa to Rotterdam to join her husband, who had come in from the sea, felt that her time was near at hand. She interrupted her journey and went to the home of people who knew her, in a little town near Mainz. There she gave birth to her first son. And before I was one month old, she carried me aboard a steamer, bound down the Rhine to Rotterdam.
My father had spent most of his life at sea. But despite his roamings, he had the devotion of a wanderer for the land of his birth, a devotion which I did not learn to share. During the decade preceding the World War my father was attached to the nautical inspection service of the North German Lloyd, in the Orient and in Italy; it was a shore job which allowed him to take his family from port to port at Company expense. One result of this nomadism was that by the time I was fourteen I spoke, aside from my native language, fragments of Chinese and Malay, and had a smattering of Swedish, English, Italian and the indomitable Pidgin-English of the water-front. Another upshot was that I acquired early a consciousness of inferiority toward boys who had had the privilege of experiencing their boyhood in one country. In the face of the challenging bigotry of those who had taken root,—“This is my country; it is the best country,”—I felt a certain sad instability. I retaliated by regarding with a childish contempt the healthy manifestations of nationalism.
Invincible wanderlust was another result of our life on the water-fronts. I ran off on hot afternoons to explore the harbors and to[4] watch maneuvering ships and toiling stevedores. I knew the smells of godowns and of ships’ holds; when the wind stood right I could distinguish the aroma of jute or copra or tropical woods a quarter of a mile away from the wharves. I liked to read books of exploration and bold voyaging. I never played at being a soldier. I was either a skipper, a boss of longshoremen or a pirate. I liked to sail the little boat I had when I was twelve through squally weather in the estuaries of the rivers Weser and Elbe. I had my proudest moment when the master carpenter at the boatyard pointed me out to a colleague with the words, “That curly-head, he sails like the devil.”
My father rarely spoke of his adventurous past of which tattooings of anchors, barques, and exotic wenches with enormous hips on his arms and body, as well as ponderous silver decorations bearing the Chinese dragon and the Persian lion, gave an inkling. Like most German craftsmen of the period, he was conservatively class conscious. He belonged to the Social Democratic Party, was a loyal trade-unionist, and considered the Kaiser as a superfluous clown. He was militant in a quiet way, yet capable of sudden eruptions of temper, and he firmly believed in a just and beautiful socialist future.
My courageous and deeply religious mother had a dream of her own: a house on some hill, with a garden and a sprinkling of birches around, a friendly anchorage to which her four sons, all of whom were destined to follow the sea, would flock for a holiday after every completed voyage. She was a native of Schonen, the southernmost province of Sweden, and she shared the natural hospitality and a respectful love for all growing things which seem to be the characteristics of the Swedish.
The first school I attended was the German school of Buenos Aires. I remained there but a little over a year, and my memory of it is vague. Two years at a British school in Singapore followed. It was here, in an atmosphere of equatorial heat and British world domination, that I first became aware, shamefacedly, of the vast gulf which separated me, the child of a worker, from the sons and daughters of colonial officials and the white merchants of the East. I had no access to their parties, and the bourgeois arrogance of their parents made them shun the humble home of my family. We had but two Chinese servants, while they had fifteen and twenty. Because my father saw no harm in my association with the off[5]spring of his industrious Eurasian aides, the little “imperialist” snobs of my class coined a nickname for me which even made some of the grown-ups smile. It was Lumpenhund, which means “ragged dog.” I was awkward and too big for my age. The teacher, a genteel but slightly battered Englishwoman, suspected, I fear, that her discriminations against her only proletarian pupil and her genuflections before the sires of the well-to-do escaped my attention.
In 1913 my father was transferred to a temporary job in Hong Kong, and later the same year he was called to supervise the outfitting of newly-bought ships in Yokohama and Batavia. In all these travels his family went with him—traveling second or third class on chance steamers of the North German Lloyd. I well remember the officious deck steward of the liner Kleist who hustled me from the promenade deck to a deck considerably nearer the water-line.
“Sei nicht traurig,” my father had consoled me. “Wir sind nun einmal Menschen der zweiten Klasse.”
People of the second class! The family grew larger from year to year. A sister was born in Hong Kong. Another aboard a ship between Suez and Colombo. A brother was born in Singapore; it was he who later became an officer in the Nazi air force to find his death through an act of communist sabotage in 1938.
The year 1914 saw us in Genoa, Italy, where the company needed an expert on stowage to help the agent in charge in the dispatching of the so-called “macaroni liners,” the huge ships of the Berlin type engaged in carrying vast numbers of Italian emigrants and harvest hands to New York and the South American wheat and beef metropoles. It was in Genoa that the War overtook us. German shipping came to a standstill.
We continued to live in Genoa until Italy declared war on Germany in the following year. The intervening nine months savored of a protracted nightmare. They taught me what mass hatred and chauvinism in its ugliest forms could be. Every news kiosk was plastered with pamphlets and posters showing German soldiers nailing children to tables by their tongues, or tearing out the tongues of beautiful young women. I could not go into the harbor, which held for me a fascination I am at a loss to explain, without being assaulted and trounced by bands of Italian hoodlums. On the way to and from school, and even in the garden adjoining our cottage on the slope of the Righi, I and other boys suspected of being German, were bombarded with stones and manure of mules,[6] beaten with sticks, spitten into our faces and hounded even through the broken window-panes of our homes. I had little respect for Italian boys as fighters. Banded together and armed with solid clubs, six Austrian, Swiss or German boys could easily, I believed, put ten times their number of youthful salita wolves to flight.
Had my father called these Italian super-patriots traitors and Schweinehunde, I could have understood the situation and sung the Hohenzollern anthem; but he fervently condemned this war. Because he believed in an active socialist internationalism and workers’ solidarity above and beyond the borders of nations, he also condemned the socialist leaders of Germany when they declared a social truce and voted for war credits in August, 1914. All this left me puzzled, frightened, distrustful, and somewhat mutinous against the might-is-right slogans of the time.
When Italy finally declared war, my father, to avoid imprisonment as a naval reservist, had disappeared toward the northern frontier together with scattered groups of compatriots. An official in a flaming uniform entered our home and demanded that we leave Italian soil within twelve hours, taking only such belongings as we could carry. Abandoning by far the larger portion of our possessions, mother and children boarded the Milano express and crossed the Alps into Germany overnight. We entered the Fatherland like refugees from abroad. After all, to the older of us children Germany was like an alien land.
Beginning with the third year of the War we lived in Bremen. My father served in the Imperial fleet. His first assignment had been aboard a Heligoland patrol boat; now his post was in the forward torpedo room of the battleship Thueringen, stationed at Wilhelmshaven and for periods at the Kiel naval base. My mother fought incredibly hard to keep her brood alive on the meager allowance allotted to families of men in the service. I wore clothes made of paper, my shoes were made of wood, in summer I went barefoot, and our staple food consisted of turnips and dismal bread, with potatoes rare and horse meat a luxury. They were years in which we came to know the meaning of steady hunger, and in the winters, of fierce cold. We collected beech-nuts in the woods to have oil, and acorns to have coffee. Like a pack of wolves we boys would prowl at the edges of the estates and the fields and the army depots, stealing wood, potatoes and tinned food, and scavenging for precious coal in the vicinity of factories and railroad yards.[7] Repeatedly I was caught by an elderly forest-keeper or gendarme. Since I saw nothing wrong in such petty depredations, I arrived at a point where I regarded everyone who wore a badge of authority as an overbearing foe.
In school my marks were below the average. The haphazard training I had received at the foreign schools did not enable me to meet the rigid requirements of the German educational system. My teacher, a man named Schlueter, had lost both his sons in France, whereupon his wife had killed herself with gas. He reacted to his own misery by beginning and ending his days at school with most brutal beatings of his pupils. At the slightest provocation he used to haul them across his desk, in front of a class of fifty, and flog them with a cane until they were unconscious. I became his frequent victim because my personal heroes were neither Bismarck nor Ludendorff, but Magellan, Captain Cook, and J. F. Cooper’s “Red Rover”—foreigners all as, indeed, I was myself.
This teacher would pound into our heads the famous catchword “Hold out!—Hold through!—Hold your tongues!” and tell us that the British blockade was to blame for the plight of all Germans. But my father, and other sailors, home on furlough with a load of filched sugar and Kommisbrot, blamed the Kaiser and the munition makers. With the sons of other rebellious workers I sat in secret cellar gatherings and sang:
In September, 1918, when I was almost fourteen, an older friend who was a journeyman to a master chimney sweep brought me into one of the youth groups of the Independent Socialists. These groups, which already used the name of Spartakus Jugend, were, I was told, illegally organized by young revolutionists from Berlin.
A scraggy band of child rebels, we met secretly in attics, in abandoned houses and even on roofs. We were taught by men who claimed they were deserters from the navy to hate the rich, to tell the poor that they must rise in a body and fight, to disrupt patriotic school meetings with itching powder and stink bombs which were given to us packed in candy boxes, and to sabotage the war chest[8] collections of old metal parts, bottles and felt hats which were conducted through the schools. This we did, and more, acting out of our own zealous initiative. We drew caricatures of the Kaiser hanging from a gallows and passed them furtively from hand to hand. We gave articulation to our contempt for established authority by hurling dead rats through the open windows of police stations.
From my father and other sailors, when they came home for a monthly two-day leave, we heard much of what was going on in the fleet. Mutiny brewed. The men, crammed into narrow quarters a thousand and more on a single ship and ridden by hunger, hated the officers for their arrogance and the champagne and butter they consumed. The Kulies of the Fleet wanted more than an end to the war; they talked of revenge for all the degradations of the past. On several ships secret action committees of the sailors and stokers had been elected. The latrines in the shipyards became the centers for clandestine revolutionary meetings. Desertions increased; sailors sold their uniforms and decamped inshore. Several ringleaders from the warships had been court-martialed and executed by Imperial firing squads.
Not a week passed that we did not have a deserter staying overnight in our dingy apartment. Usually they left at dawn, clad in civilian rags, on their way to Berlin or Munich and on to Saxony and Silesia. Most of them brought service pistols into the houses of workers. My mother abhorred arms. But I knew that several families in the same tenement had fire-arms hidden away in the basement, under floor boards, in window casings, and stove pipes. People were silent and sullen. No one in our block or the next believed that the end of the war was near.
Once a sailor returning from Petrograd was our guest. Tall, gaunt, to my eyes a rather adventurous figure, he stood in a corner of the living room and told about the victory of the Bolsheviki and the first workers’ government in the world. He drank great quantities of bad, black, unsugared coffee, and talked until he was hoarse. The room was full of people. They kept on coming and going. They asked questions, shook their heads, argued, and many eyes shone. When it was time to go to sleep he became afraid to stay; someone might have informed the police, he thought. I led him to the family of a friend on the other side of the river. This sailor slunk into a doorway or into a side street whenever he saw a police[9]man under the street lights ahead. In the end I was a little disgusted. I had a fairly low opinion of policemen. For two long hours we trudged through the night, the sailor and I, without exchanging a word.
Toward the end of October, 1918, my father wrote that the High Seas Fleet had received orders for a final attack against England. No secret was made of it. The officers, he reported in his blunt fashion, reveled all night. They spoke of the death-ride of the Fleet. Rumor had it that the Fleet was under orders to go down in battle to save the honor of the generation that built it. “Their honor is not our honor,” my father wrote.
Two days later the Fleet was under way. The people in Bremen were more surly than ever.
Then came stirring news. Mutiny in the Kaiser’s fleet! Young sons of the bourgeoisie who had been sporting sailors’ caps now left them at home. I saw women who laughed and wept because they had their men in the Fleet. From windows and doors and in front of the food stores sounded the anxious voices: “Will the Fleet sail out? . . . No, the Fleet must not sail! It’s murder! Finish the war!” Youngsters in the streets yelled, “Hurrah.”
Details filtered through. Aboard the Thueringen the mutineers had seized the ship. They had dropped the anchors, smashed the lights and disarmed the officers.
A shout went up: “Down with the Kaiser! Down with the war! We want peace!”
Passing men shook their heads and said the penalty for mutiny was death. A deserter from a mine sweeping flotilla carried further news. The battleship Helgoland had followed the example of the Thueringen. The stokers had doused the fires and killed the steam.
The Fleet did not sail. The Fleet returned to port.
Five hundred and eighty mutineers from the Thueringen and the Helgoland, among them my father, were arrested and jammed into cells in the ships.
At home we spent two dreary nights. My mother prayed. The younger children shivered in their beds. There was no coal and no food. I remember wondering why I could not get excited over the possibility that my father would have to face the firing squad. The arrest of the mutineers, however, was only an incident. With help from outside they smashed the doors, stormed the ships, and took control. The officers gave way. Aboard the Helgoland a chunky[10] young stoker yanked down the Kaiser’s flag and hauled the red flag to the masthead. By November 7 the whole Fleet was in revolt.
That night I saw the mutinous sailors roll into Bremen on caravans of commandeered trucks—red flags and machine guns mounted on the trucks. Thousands milled in the streets. Often the trucks stopped and the sailors sang and roared for free passage. The workers cheered particularly a short, burly young man in grimy blue. The man swung his carbine over his head to return the salute. He was the stoker who had hoisted the first red flag over the Fleet. His name was Ernst Wollweber.
In front of the railway station I saw a man lose his life. He was an officer in field gray who came out of the station the minute it was surrounded, and was seized by the mutineers. He was slow in giving up his arms and epaulettes. He made no more than a motion to draw his pistol when they were on top of him. Rifle butts flew through the air above him. Fascinated, I watched from a little way off. Then the sailors turned away to saunter back to their trucks. I had seen dead people before. But death by violence and the fury that accompanied it were something new. The officer did not move. I marveled how easily a man could be killed.
I rode away on my bicycle. I fevered with a strange sense of power. I did not know that it was part of the mass intoxication which, like the chunky stoker from the Helgoland, had risen from the depths to take charge of minds and events. Not far from Hillmann’s Hotel a band of civilians was trouncing a policeman who tried to forbid them to ride on the outside of a tramcar.
I circled toward the Brill, a square in the western center of the town. From there on I had to push my bicycle through the throngs. The population was in the streets. From all sides masses of humanity, a sea of swinging, pushing bodies and distorted faces was moving toward the center of the town. Many of the workers were armed with guns, with bayonets, with hammers. I felt then, and later, that the sight of armed workers sets off a roar in the blood of those who sympathize with the marchers. Singing hoarsely was a sprawling band of demonstrating convicts freed by a truckload of sailors from Oslebshausen prison. Most of them wore soldiers’ greatcoats over their prison garb. But the true symbol of this revolution, which was really naught but a revolt, were neither the armed workers nor the singing convicts—but the mutineers from[11] the Fleet with their reversed hatbands and carbines slung over their shoulders, butts up and barrels down.
The City Hall of Bremen fell without real fighting. No one rose to defend the toppling Empire. The masses did not want bloodshed, not even revenge; they were war-weary and now they were determined to stop the spook. Late that night tens of thousands of workers filled the marketplace. Among them was a sprinkling of soldiers and the inevitable sailors from the warships.
At the foot of the Roland statue a frightened old woman crouched. “Ach, du lieber Gott,” she wailed piercingly. “What is all this? What’s the world coming to?” A huge-framed young worker who gave intermittent bellows of triumph and whom I had followed from the Brill, grasped the old woman’s shoulders. He laughed resoundingly. “Revolution,” he rumbled. “Revolution, madam.”
Speaker followed speaker in proclaiming the new epoch from the balcony of the City Hall; a lanky soldier, a representative of a newly elected workers’ council, a large-bodied official of the Social Democratic Party, and in between the thick-set ringleader of naval mutineers, Ernst Wollweber.
Wollweber hurled his words like rocks into the masses.
“We stripped the Kaiser of his boots,” he ended. “Now let us finish off the capitalists. Long live the German Soviet Republic!”
The masses responded. They roared until it seemed their faces would burst. The compulsion was irresistible. I roared with them. The upsurge spread from the coast to the south, with sailors as the spearhead of revolt. The Prussian government gave way. Bavaria was proclaimed a republic. In Hamburg, traditionally the reddest town of Germany, Soviets came to power. The Kaiser bolted to Holland, and two days later the Armistice was signed.
I did not see my father again. I was told that he had been elected to the revolutionary workers’ and soldiers’ council of Emden. Later my father went to Berlin. The Independent Socialists sent him to Brunswick. Meanwhile I spent the better part of each day on my bicycle, running errands for a sailors’ committee which had established headquarters in the Weser Shipyards. I did not understand the quarrels between the various workers’ parties, but I easily acquired the contempt with which the former mutineers regarded the moderate politicians. Each day in Bremen saw demonstrations[12] and counter-demonstrations of rival proletarian blocs. A semblance of unity came to pass only when the field gray troops flooded back from the front, still under the command of their old officers. I was among the multitude who met the returning regiments 75 and 213 on the north-western fringe of the city. The soldiers were silent and plastered with mud. The officers had their swords drawn and they answered the shouting masses with sneers and threats.
“We’re going to clean up here,” was their threat.
Once in the city, the soldiers from the front were surrounded by revolutionary sailors and shipyard workers entrenched in machine gun nests on roofs and balconies. The troops were trapped; everyone expected a massacre. However, they were disarmed and disbanded without bloodshed. A few days later the first signs of the existence of newly formed nationalist bands were in evidence. Posters shouted from the walls, “Destroy the November Criminals.” Squads of workers tore them off. Tired horses, abandoned by the troops, were butchered at night in the streets by flocks of determined women.
In January, 1919, disunity led to open battle. The Ebert-Scheidemann-Noske forces, right-wing socialists, enlisted the aid of nationalist divisions under the command of officers from the Western Front to head off the attempts of the Spartakus Bund to seize power. Hundreds died in the streets of Berlin. Karl Liebknecht and the heroic woman who shared his leadership, Rosa Luxemburg, were murdered by a camarilla of such officers. Rosa was torn to pieces and flung into a canal, and the monarchist rabble rejoiced in a new song which began:
“A corpse floats in the Landwehr Canal. . . .”
In Bremen the sailors were still optimistic. As one of them put it, “As long as we have a machine gun, a loaf of munition bread and a liverwurst, we have no cause for worry.” There was street fighting in Munich, in Hamburg, in Silesia. In Bremen the moderates were shoved aside. Soviets ruled the city, and proclaimed it an independent republic.
On January 20 came the news that my father had died in a hospital in Wolfenbuettel. That gave me a fearful shock. My mother, almost out of her mind with grief, left at once for Brunswick. The younger children were left in charge of a neighbor. On January 22[13] my youngest brother, five years old, was found dead in his bed. No one saw him die.
Since the middle of November, 1918, I had ceased going to school. The Young Spartakus group to which I belonged was quite active. Each morning we went to the Red House on the left bank of the Weser and got packs of leaflets from the secretary of a fierce hunchback who had somehow come to power in the councils of the revolutionary sailors. The leaflets we distributed in the harbor, at the factory gates, and in suburban tenement districts.
In the first days of January, 1919, the Spartakus Bund constituted itself as the Communist Party of Germany, but we had taken such pride in the old name of our organization that we did not call ourselves Young Communists, but Young Spartacists. On January 27, on the Kaiser’s birthday, sailors with red armbands organized us boys into squads of twenty. All day we spent in breaking up the Kaiser Day meetings arranged by the principals of gymnasiums and high schools. We armed ourselves with clubs and stones and burst in on the meetings. We tore the Imperial flags from the pulpits and subdued the singing of “Heil Dir im Siegerkranz” with the German version of the Marseillaise. The teachers did not dare to interfere with our rowdyism. The better-dressed and better-fed boys we drove out into the streets.
Came February. The tragedy that had been enacted in Berlin—the crushing of fighting revolutionary minorities by the young Reichswehr under the command of War Minister Gustav Noske, a social democrat,—was repeated in many outlying cities. Rumors spread in our ranks that Berlin was sending reactionary troops to suppress the Soviets in Bremen. On February 3, people clustered around posters announcing that General Gerstenberg’s division was approaching the city from the south. All revolutionary workers were called to arms. The sons of the bourgeoisie evacuated the city. In long drawn-out columns they raced away on skates over the frozen moorland to join the on-marching troops.
The somewhat less than three hundred members of the Young Spartakus League were mobilized to serve as messengers and dispatch riders. Many of us were supplied with new bicycles which had been taken from the stores. The Revolutionary Defense Committee used boys and girls as couriers because youngsters were less likely to be suspected and halted by advancing Noske troops. All[14] through the day I watched sailors and workers place field cannon on covered spots along the river front and machine guns on strategic house-tops. Spartacist detachments were marching toward the outskirts of the city. Most of the marchers were young, under twenty. They were all badly clad. Some wore rags in place of boots. They had their rifles slung butt-end up over their shoulders and their hands buried in their pockets. Their faces were pale, and blue with the cold.
The night from February 3 to February 4 I did not go home. A mixture of self-destructive defiance and hectic fatalism, a mood that sprang from the tireless little horde of sailors, seemed to dominate all of us, old and young. I heard men talk of annihilating the counter-revolution. They could not fool me; I knew what was in their minds. They themselves faced annihilation and they realized it, but their fever and their self-respect and their sensitivity toward ridicule did not permit them to give up a position already as good as lost. I half slept through that night on the ground floor of the Stock Exchange building.
The large hall was cluttered with young men and a few young women. Scores of bicycles leaned against the walls. Firearms were stacked near the doors. On heaps of straw people snored or conversed in whispers. Big pots of bad coffee steamed on kerosene stoves. It was still dark when we were roused. Several sailors ran among us, leaping over the debris, kicking the sleepers right and left, and shouting.
“All up! Reise! Reise! The Noske guards are coming!”
On Market Square the undersized hunchback, a huge sailor, and a young man with spectacles were issuing orders. From the left bank of the river drifted the thump of artillery and the hard chatter of machine guns. With five other boys I was ordered to proceed to the central savings bank on Kaiser Street. We were to serve as dispatch riders between the bank and the Weser Shipyards in the west.
Three of our courier group deserted at once. I doubt that their motive was fear. They simply went off to get closer glimpses of the battle. All that day curious mobs were dodging around street corners, undeterred by bullets whining past their ears. Two times during the forenoon I made the journey between the bank and the shipyard with a scrawled report of the comrade in charge of[15] defending the entrance of Kaiser Street, a thoroughfare that led from the river to the central railway station. At that time the western portion of the town was still outside the zone of fighting. Barricaded stores, shattered windows, patches of pavement torn up and heaped to form barricades were landmarks all along the route. There seemed nothing more to do after the second trip. Since I had never been inside of a bank I proceeded to explore the building. Not a window was intact. Doors had been broken. Desks, chairs, filing cabinets and rugs were piled up against the windows, ready to be hurled on the heads of attackers in the street below. At some of the windows snipers were at work. No one stopped me; any spy of the counter forces could have walked into the building to reconnoiter the forces of the defenders. Finally I came to rest in a large room on the top floor. From Hein Rode, a sailor with whom I was acquainted, and from what I saw, I gained an understanding of the rudiments of the most bitter form of combat—house-to-house fighting in the streets.
There was a machine gun firing from the largest window. Two sailors and a youth about my own age served it. By this time the whole city reverberated with the sounds of battle.
Snipers fired at soldiers crawling over distant house-tops. The field pieces along the river roared intermittently. The vicious hammering of machine guns was continuous. Men were shooting from speeding lorries and from doorways. Several houses were afire. Down in the Brill inquisitive pedestrians ran for their lives. Fragments of rock and much glass littered the streets. Then came prolonged explosions of such violence that the building rocked as if under an earthquake.
“A direct hit?” I asked excitedly.
“Mines.” Hein Rode said calmly. “They’re using mine-throwers.”
Advancing along the Meter Strasse, the Noske guards were nearing the left side of the river. I saw them leap from doorway to doorway, while others came simultaneously across the roofs and garden fringes. From half a mile off they looked like animated toy soldiers; in reality they were veterans of the Western Front. The thumping of the mines increased. The southern bridge-head of the Kaiser bridge swarmed suddenly with field-gray shapes under steel helmets.
At the window the machine gun jammed. A sailor turned and[16] said, “Hang on now, the comrades are blowing up the bridges.”
An instant later he cursed: “Verdammt, why don’t they blow up that bridge?”
There was a lull in the firing. The Noske guards stormed the bridge. As they ran, they shouted. And abruptly the machine guns opened in merciless bursts. I saw many soldiers fall. Death was commonplace. That day it evoked in me no other emotion than would a fascinating show. An instant later we all ran from the building in a panic. The thunder of exploding hand-grenades was less than two hundred yards away. Shells exploding in the air ripped chunks of rock out of the towers of the cathedral. A dispatch rider coming from the direction of the marketplace roared something about armored cars.
Angry shouts went up. “The bridges are taken!” There was no sign of discouragement. But there was a hideous confusion. A rumor spread that Knief, the revolutionary teacher, and Fraczunkovitz, the hunchback, had escaped by plane.
“Better get going.” Rode advised me. “Save your skin.”
I mounted my bicycle and rode away, unaware at first of the direction I was taking. Dead men sprawled grotesquely here and there, and in many places the snow was splotched with blood. I reached the moat, a natural line of defense encircling the inner city. It too had been deserted. Red Guards were retreating to the railway station. Several times I was stopped by Noske Guards, but seeing that despite my height I was only a child, they let me proceed. Everywhere lorries loaded with soldiers in field gray advanced slowly. I fled the town, following a detachment of retreating mutineers. After three days of wandering I reached Hamburg.
From the railway station I wrote a postcard to my mother to assure her that I was alive. She wired me what little money she managed to scrape up. Next day she arrived in Hamburg, looking like a ghost.
“I don’t want to go back.” I told her. “I’m going to sea.”
For a long while she was silent. Only her patient gray eyes widened and filled with fathomless sadness. Finally she said, “But our country has no ships. They were all taken by the British.”
“I shall sign on as deck boy under some foreign flag,” I replied.
In the following days my mother sold the remnants of family silver she had brought with her, and bought me oilskins, sea-boots, blankets and a few other necessities. She also gave me a small Bible,[17] and she arranged with Wolfert, a shipping master with crafty blue eyes in a drinker’s face, that I could live at his boarding house until he had procured me a ship.
When the train moved out of the Hamburg station I saw her standing at the window, frail, shabby, sad and invincibly loyal.
“Fair winds,” she called to me. “May God be with you.”
[18]
Chapter Two
SAILOR’S WAY
It was springtime in Hamburg. I wanted a ship, a job at sea, and a chance to work myself up to a captain’s rank. For weeks I haunted the water-front, but the great seaport was a sleeping giant. Except for coastal trade and a few food ships from America, the Hamburg harbor was dead. The British blockade was still in force, although it was months after the signing of the Armistice. It was springtime in Versailles, too, where the peace that was to haunt the world was being perfected.
I would awake hungry, and was still hungry when I went to sleep. Hunger wiped out the lines between adolescents and full-grown men. A sack of flour was worth more than a human life. When a fruit cart of a peasant from Vierlanden was turned over in the street and a middle-aged man tried to shoulder me aside in the scramble for the winter apples, what else was there to do but to stand up and hit him in the face? I was in my fifteenth year.
I took part in the plundering of a wholesale fish store in Altona. Tons of fish were dumped on the cobble-stones, and people grabbed the fish and ran. When a policeman interfered, what else was there to do but to slam a ten-pound codfish into his face? When for a fish or a piece of leather cut out of a stolen transmission belt, a boy could have the body of a girl not older than himself or be instructed in lewd practices by a soldier’s widow turned prostitute, what meaning was there in all the pratings of the need for law and order and a decent life?
When one is thrown adrift in a polluted stream, with no dry land in sight, what escape is there? I took no active part in the political riots of this Hamburg spring, but my heart was with the revolutionary workers, perhaps because it was their side which always lost in the end. Whenever I saw a policeman level his rifle against a civilian, I felt the same hatred as at the sight of a teamster cruelly mistreating his emaciated horse. Each day armed workers skir[19]mished with the police. Night after night the sounds of desultory firing echoed over the city. Yet the news that a trawler loaded with flounders or herring was steaming up the river moved the people more than stumbling against a dead man in the gutter, or encountering a lorry piled high with crude coffins, or coming upon a barricade manned by a few determined-looking youths.
I hunted for food and work. But the struggle to conquer and defend power seemed the essence of life. In the Grenzfass, a large beer hall in the St. Pauli district, I heard and met for the first time Herrmann Knueffgen, an incarnation of all the political adventurers of our century. Surrounded by a singularly well-knit assortment of revolutionary toughs, Knueffgen radiated an atmosphere of indestructible aplomb. Of medium height, slight of build, with a mop of almost colorless hair, his pale eyes gleaming with reckless deviltry, he was no more than twenty-two or -three at the time. Early that morning, at the head of his Rollkommando, he had successfully raided a basement arsenal of the Buergerwehr, a counter-revolutionary organization of armed citizens. Knueffgen made a speech. The hall was full of workless dockers.
“The rich must die so that the poor may live,” he cried. There was a thunder of cheers. The sailor’s Messianic fervor fired my imagination, yet there was nothing bloodthirsty about him as there was about many others who had risen from the depths. Shortly after this stirring meeting in the Grenzfass, Knueffgen embarked on an enterprise that made him the idol of water-front radicals the world over. A delegation of the Communist Party of Germany was scheduled to go to Moscow at a time when Russia was closed to the West by the civil war. Herrmann Knueffgen was commissioned to bring this delegation to Moscow dead or alive. He stowed himself and the delegates away in the fish-tank of an out-bound trawler. Once at sea, he emerged with a revolver in each hand, imprisoned the captain and the crew of ten, and took possession of the vessel which he then navigated around the North Cape to Murmansk. The delegation arrived in Moscow to confer with Lenin, and Knueffgen, upon his return to Germany, was convicted and jailed for piracy on the high seas. No prison, however, could hold him long.
The faithful shipping master Wolfert, through his acquaintance with former sailship masters, at last found me a ship. One morning,[20] half drunk as usual and bullying his frightened wife, he thrust a letter into my hands and shouted at me to report to the Shipowners’ Association for duty aboard the former Africa liner Lucy Woerman. As if by sudden magic, I was signed on as ordinary seaman and the following day I packed my canvas bag and went aboard. The ship hulked gray and mournful at her wharf, her flanks covered with creeping rust. The thought of being able to make my living on the good clean sea made me weep with joy.
The ship was bound for South America. She was loaded with crews who were to man and bring home the large fleet of German vessels marooned in the ports of Chile and Peru during the war. Desperately anxious to leave the hunger-ridden Fatherland, thousands schemed and bribed to get a berth aboard the Lucy Woerman. Scores of the nearly four hundred who were signed had been among the mutineers of the Imperial navy; scores of others had never been aboard a ship before; once at sea none manifested the slightest intention of bringing German ships back home, or of ever returning to Germany.
The ship was infested with stowaways. Three boat-loads of them were returned to shore off Cuxhaven. Before the red rock of Heligoland was abeam, five prostitutes were discovered in the boatswain’s locker, and three other young women, who proved to be the wives of former storekeepers, among the crew. All of them were transferred to home-bound fishermen. But many others, found later, remained aboard.
Soon after the Cornwall capes had slipped out of sight astern and the Lucy Woerman bucked westward over the Atlantic rollers, gambling centers and even a brothel set up in business in mess-rooms and cabins overnight. Tattooing booths, bands of musicians, instructors in English and Spanish and jiu-jitsu began to flourish. Spartacists, anarchists and self-styled missionaries launched discussion circles. Gangs of hoodlums assaulted and robbed the more prosperous voyagers. One old man was found with his throat cut. Another elderly man put on holiday clothes and at sunrise jumped into the ocean.
The ship’s officers, reinforced by a few loyal mariners of the pre-war school, barricaded themselves on the bridge and in the engine room. Elsewhere conditions bordering on madness reigned. A Pirate’s Club sprang up, announcing as its purpose seizure of the ship for a journey to the South Seas. Off the Azores, however, such[21] leadership as there could be fell to a man named Herrmann Kruse.
Kruse, an old member of the Spartakus Bund, called a general meeting of his followers aboard the Lucy Woerman and emerged as the head of a newly elected ship Soviet. He formed a ship Tcheka, and by sheer terror subdued all independent marauders in our midst. Kruse, about twenty-five years old, was blond, bearish, quick-tempered, and had a flair for oratory. He brought some order out of the confusion and now he demanded control of the ship. The skipper armed his officers with pistols for the meeting with Kruse’s Soviet. By way of retaliation Kruse’s strong-arm squads seized all available provisions and began a hunger blockade against the bridge and the engine room. Most of the time the steam was kept low, and at times the ship wallowed helplessly without steam at all. In sight of the green shore of Jamaica a passing oil tanker, apparently suspecting trouble aboard the Lucy Woerman, signaled.
“Can I give you assistance?”
“Thank you. I have a cargo of lunatics,” our skipper answered.
But the officers succeeded, despite all difficulties, in bringing the vessel to Colón. One faction on board planned to scuttle the ship in the Panama Canal, to desert, and to walk through the jungles to Mexico or the United States. Herrmann Kruse and his guerrillas, armed with clubs and belaying pins, opposed this. Kruse’s plan was to allow the Lucy to pass through the Canal, then to overpower the officers. After that, we were to steam for the Galapagos Islands, establish a Soviet Republic, and ask Moscow for protection, supplies and women.
Opposing factions shrieked their protest. “Kruse wants to be a dictator! Down with Galapagos! We land right here!” Little did the American authorities at Colón suspect what a mess was passing into the Canal. In defiance of Kruse, “debarkation squads” were hastily formed as we steamed through the Canal. The rush to reach a shore that looked inviting from a little way off was contagious. As a matter of course, I joined one of the squads.
We packed our belongings, put on life preservers, and lined up along the rail for the plunge. The captain shouted from the bridge for us to desist, but he was greeted with laughter. Group after group heaved their bundles overboard and jumped after them. The Canal waters were soon dotted with swimming men.
I, too, jumped. I felt the water rush upward, smooth and warm,[22] and then I swam for dear life, pushing with all my strength to get away from the deadly propeller. Several of my fellow-deserters were cut to shreds. The shore was much farther away than it had seemed from the ship. Close behind me, as I swam, struggled a middle-aged shoemaker. “Das ist schoen,” he kept saying to encourage me, “now, ho! for America!”
Together we finally reached the muddy bank and ran for the green cover less than fifty yards away. The ground was soggy, and the underbrush dense. But we pushed forward. Soon we came on four other deserters, and the six of us proceeded in single file, carrying our water-soaked bundles and streaming with perspiration. Our leader was a stoker who had once served on Amazon River steamboats. Sometimes the underbrush was so thick that we could not penetrate it; at other times we were confronted with swamps which seemed to stretch out for miles. Once in a while the Amazon River stoker climbed a tree to look around. All he could report was jungle all around, a few hills, and steamers passing in the Canal. The passing steamers looked as if they were threading their way through the tree-tops.
After walking in circles for four or five hours, we struck a lake. We tried to skirt the shore of the lake, but soon ran into swamps. The Amazon River stoker cursed almost without interruption. The shoemaker chattered happily. He told us he had all the tools of his trade in the bundle he carried, and he looked forward to a prosperous existence in some American city. Suddenly our leader halted.
“Look—a railroad,” he exclaimed.
Ahead of us was a railroad embankment, neat, compact, dry.
Someone said: “Let’s stay here and dry out our bundles. When they’re dry, they’ll be easier to carry.” We all agreed.
We opened our bundles and spread the wet things over the tracks: shirts, pants, papers, tobacco. The stoker sent one man a hundred yards in each direction to watch for oncoming trains. We stripped off our clothes and spread them out to dry. The second youngest of our group, who had been a metal worker’s apprentice, had found some wild bananas.
We munched bananas and relaxed in the sun. Our hopes rose. The shoemaker wanted to ride the next train into Panama City. He was anxious to start himself in business without loss of time. The stoker spoke of a foreman’s job in a vast banana plantation.
It was agreed that the men who stood guard on both sides of the[23] tracks should whistle when a train approached. But when a train came from the Atlantic side, the guard did not whistle. Naked, his pants and shirt jammed under his arm, he came running toward us down the tracks. Behind him rumbled the train.
It was too late to save our things. Our leader yelled, “All hands take cover.”
We dived into the jungle. The train ran over our belongings. Then it stopped. Men in khaki uniforms jumped from the train, and began to comb the jungle.
We separated. I crawled through broad-leaved bushes, moving on hands and knees, and when I rose I confronted a grinning soldier.
“Come on,” he said, grasping my shoulders. “You can’t run around here with no clothes on.”
He led me to the train. All my companions had been caught. I put on a shirt which had been cut under the armpits by the train, and a pair of trousers which had but one leg. My comrades did not look much better. We were herded into the train and taken to a station. From there we were marched to a police post. The Americans treated us hospitably. They fed us and plied us with cigarettes.
Before nightfall we were all loaded into a motor launch and returned to the Lucy, which was anchored in Panama Bay. The ship weighed anchor and shaped a course down the west coast of South America, calling at Callao and ports to the south. The majority of the men on the Lucy Woerman refused to man the ships for the voyage home. There were strikes, arrests by the Chilean police, jail breaks. Herrmann Kruse became known all along the Nitrate Coast as the “Commissar from Hamburg.”
I deserted the ship at Antofagasta. Seven months I lingered on the Chile coast. Here I found a freedom I had not known in Europe. The world of political strife, of cold and hunger, seemed as distant as Saturn. Employers and officials asked neither for references nor for papers of identification. I worked in a rigger’s gang engaged in refitting a number of old sailing vessels in the roadsteads of Antofagasta and Iquique, and thus acquired a working knowledge of old-fashioned seamanship and of Spanish. After that job gave out, a labor agent of Antofagasta recruited me for the Chuqui copper mines high up in the barren Andes. My work was that of a splicer of wire cables and my pay was high beyond all expectation—ten pesos a day, for good splicers were rare. Life in the mining[24] camps was rough, particularly after paydays when gambling bouts frequently ended in a flash of knives. Much of the bestiality was due to the absence of women; all but the hardiest prostitutes from the coast shunned the trade with the rabble of the Chuqui mines. Many of my fellow workers had been more or less forcibly conscripted from the jails of the larger towns; they were of many nationalities, a hard-working, hard-drinking, unruly crew. The vision of a Chilean girl, Carmencita, with whom I had become friendly, drew me back to the coast. I arrived in Antofagasta on a copper train, with more than three hundred pesos in my pockets, only to find that Carmencita had become the companion of a jobless Norwegian second mate.
I traveled south as a deck passenger aboard a slow coastwise steamer, and after a few aimless days in Valparaiso, I decided to visit the nearby capital, Santiago de Chile. Here I found work in a candle factory under a domineering British foreman. It was inside work which I detested heartily. In a café I met a young American who had come from Argentina and spoke enthusiastically about the lusty life in Buenos Aires. Next day I threw up my job of packing candles and bought a trans-Andean railway ticket to Buenos Aires. I arrived in the La Plata metropolis with two pesos and sixty centavos. Mounted carabineros were rounding up beach-combers in large batches, belying Buenos Aires’ reputation as the ideal haven for castaways from all the world. After three days of dodging the energetic carabineros, I signed on as a full-fledged sailor aboard the barque Tiljuca, a supply ship for the Norwegian and British whaling bases on the Antarctic island of South Georgia, and manned entirely by Russians and Germans. Toughened as I was, compared with the toughness of the Tiljuca tars, I was a mere infant. One of them ate his salt pork, seasoned with tobacco, raw. Another answered a letter from his mother, imploring him to come home after so many years, by writing that he would come home as soon as he had found someone rich enough to be killed for his money. They gloried in their toughness. Thoroughly soaked with vino tinto, none of them hesitated to rob an itinerant hawker or to rape an immigrant girl come aboard to beg food, but all of them showed an almost sentimental affection for the Tiljuca’s mongrel dog and the forecastle canary. Perhaps only that combination of life on the Buenos Aires Boca and on the forbidding Antarctic seas is able to produce such types. One four months’ voyage to the[25] bleak island of South Georgia killed off my ambition to become an Antarctic whaler. I left the Tiljuca on her return to Buenos Aires for tramp-ship journeys under the flags of Britain, Norway and Greece which landed me in the fall of 1921 in the negro quarter of Galveston, Texas. I was seventeen.
The black folk were friendly to me. An elderly master painter treated me as if I had been his son until, by a stroke of luck, I found a berth on what, I believe, was the finest and largest sailing ship afloat at that time. It was the Magdalene Vinnen, a four-masted barque, which eventually brought me back to Chile.
One of my shipmates had broken a leg off Tierra del Fuego. The captain of our ship refused to have the injured man transferred to a hospital. There was a near mutiny on board in which I had a hand. To avoid arrest by the Chilean harbor police, I deserted at night in the captain’s gig and repaired to familiar haunts in Antofagasta. Christmas Eve of 1922 found me celebrating with other stranded sailors on the green lawns of Plaza Colón, toasting Mrs. Bready, the chesty female shipping master of Nitrate Coast, who generously had supplied a keg of wine. For a fee of six pounds sterling Mrs. Bready found me a berth aboard an ancient barque, the Obotrita, Captain Dietrich, bound with nitrate around Cape Horn to Hull, England. I paid off in Hull in the early spring of 1923. From there I bought passage to Hamburg.
I came home to study navigation, with the intention of obtaining an officer’s ticket. But the minute I set foot on German soil, I found myself sucked back into a whirlpool of hate and distress even more fierce than the one I had left. I found that my family, my mother and the three younger children, stripped by the cyclonic inflation, badly needed what little money I had.
I saw an aged woman standing at a curb, burning thousand-mark bills, and cackling at the silently watching crowd.
“What’s the matter with the woman?” I asked a bystander.
“The matter?” the man said. “She’s crazy.” And he added: “The country needs a good revolution.”
I walked away. The country was sick. During my years at sea, which had almost made me forget the old hates, my country had had no peace. In 1920, the militarists under Kapp had struck at the Weimar Republic. Ministers of the Republic had been assassinated. In 1921, armed insurrections in Saxony and Thuringia had been crushed without mercy. In January, 1923, French and Belgian[26] armies had invaded the Ruhr to enforce payment of war reparations. Separatist bands rioted in the Rhineland. Inflation stalked the land with giant strides. Foreign scavengers descended upon Germany in droves, exchanging for a pittance the products of native toil. Prices leaped ahead of wages in a mad dance.
Between the city of Hamburg and its great harbor flows the river Elbe. I was at the ferry landing when the thousands of dockers returned from work. The dockers were met by their wives and daughters who seized their day’s pay and rushed to the nearest stores to buy food because next day this money would be worthless.
On the ferry landing stood a squad of customs officials and harbor police. Each worker, before he was allowed to pass, was searched for contraband by the officers. One worker had concealed under his coat a small bag of flour he had taken from some ship’s hold.
A policeman held the bag with flour aloft.
“You are under arrest,” he said.
“I took this flour from a broken bag,” the worker protested. “It was spilled into the hold anyway.”
The officer snapped: “I know all about your broken bags. You fellows rip open the bags with your hooks. Come on, now.”
He took the worker by the sleeve to lead him away.
The worker tore himself free. “Give me back my flour,” he demanded. “It’s mine!”
Two other policemen stepped up and tried to put handcuffs on the worker. A scuffle ensued. Another stevedore stepped in. “You fat-necked parasites,” he roared at the policemen. “Let my friend go. Give him his flour back.”
“Nothing doing. Keep moving.”
Other dockers joined the struggling group. The policemen drew their rubber truncheons, formed a skirmish line, drove the workers back from the wharf. A worker, young and lean, with the five-point star, the emblem of the Communist Party, on his blue cap, sprang on a bitt and shouted:
“Down with the police. Down with the lackeys of capitalism. Throw them into the harbor!”
That night, on my way to the dingy room I had rented in a tenement in the water-front district, I was accosted by two women. One was about forty, the other barely over sixteen.
[27]
The older woman tugged at my sleeve and said, “You have a good face. Please help us.”
They were refugees from the Rhineland. The older woman’s husband had been a member of a sabotage brigade against the French. He had helped blow up a railway line to prevent shipment of German coal to France. He had been arrested, convicted to twelve years of penal servitude by a military court, and had been carried off into France. His family had been told to leave the zone of occupation within twelve hours. Their house and their garden were seized. They had wandered for weeks, pushed on from town to town by unwilling authorities. The older woman was terribly emaciated.
“It’s bitter cold,” she said. “Please give us a place to sleep.”
“I have only a small, cold room,” I explained.
The woman’s eyes lit up. “We can sleep on the floor,” she said. “We are thankful just to have a roof over the head.”
I hesitated. I thought of giving her some money, but then I remembered that the stores were closed, that the hotels demanded foreign currency, that the money would be useless. It was German money.
“All right,” I said. “You can come with me.”
I took them to my room and we had a supper of tea and black bread.
The woman said: “My daughter can sleep with you in the bed and I will sleep on the floor.”
I was not astonished. In their home town they had been respectable people. But it was the custom all over the land, in the degeneration of post-war years, that refugee girls had to peddle their bodies for bread and a place to sleep.
I looked at the girl.
“I am not afraid,” the girl said. “I’ve had to do it before.”
I said no. I thought of their man languishing in some distant French prison. He had blown up a railway. In such times, it seemed to me, the best thing one could do would be to blow up the whole world. I told the women to use the bed. Then I walked down to the street. There a group of young workers were busy pasting posters on the walls.
“Communism alone brings national and social freedom,” the posters said.
“Can I help you?” I asked.
[28]
The leader of the group brought his face close to mine. He seemed satisfied.
“Sure,” he said.
For two hours I helped the young workers put up posters. Often we climbed on one another’s shoulders to place the posters so high that they could not be torn off. Very little was said. Three of us worked, and two stood at the corners watching for police. Twice police patrols surprised us. They came running, swinging their clubs. But we ran faster and escaped.
“Some day,” the leader of the Young Communist group said, “we won’t run. We’ll have guns and fight them on the barricades. Ten dead policemen for every dead worker.”
His eyes blazed hate.
