From the United States to a Socialist Germany That Never Was
The Westemigranten were communists who fled Nazism for the United States, only to resettle in East Germany after 1945. Their biographies are a monument to the hopes of the twentieth-century communist movement — and how they were disappointed by the reality of the postwar Eastern Bloc.
Bertold Brecht (right) and Hanns Eisler at the preparatory meeting of the Academy of the Arts of the GDR on March 21, 1950. (Wikimedia Commons)
I encountered Stefan Heym for the first time in Berlin-Weissensee. At the beginning of George W. Bush’s second term, I started to regularly wander through the hundred acres of ivy and crumbled stone that make up Europe’s largest Jewish cemetery, which happened to be located a straight shot down from my apartment at the Schönhauser–Bornholmer intersection on the (old) 23 Tram. Back then, I would go to pass the hours of the interminable Berlin winter in my own seemingly interminable depression, because you could get pretty lost among the nineteenth-century tombs, because you could fall out of time, because it was so beautiful and very truly old. I saw Heym there by accident. I didn’t immediately recognize his name, but his gravestone was so shocking it arrested my ambling. It was bright and new, minimally adorned with just his signature and birth and death dates, the latter falling just a few years earlier, in 2001.
My thoughts about Heym now — thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall — are occasioned by Mario Kessler’s recently published volume Westemigranten: Deutsche Kommunisten zwischen USA-Exil und DDR (Böhlau, 2019). Heym opens and nearly closes Kessler’s collective biography of the forty-nine communists who fled Nazi Germany, who, after (eventually) finding temporary refuge in the United States, left to (re)settle in the nascent German Democratic Republic (GDR) after the end of World War II.
To be asked for a review of Kessler’s book was initially confounding. Prodigiously academic, at 478 pages (525 including a biographic appendix) and in German, its function and meaning within our — if an us may be presupposed — particular discursive framework is not immediately clear. But as a synthetic, wide-reaching, and in parts compassionate historical account of quite a few mid-century lives and stories that together constitute a cohort, Kessler’s work can help us see the co-experience of political and ideological alienation that attended being a German between Nazism and Stalinism, between the United States and the USSR, and sharing, at some level, communist principles. Kessler’s book evinces a sense of betweenness. Yet it is also far from ambivalent.
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