TO MANY CONTEMPORARY INTELLECTUALS, especially academics of postmodern outlook, the radical German writer Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) embodies the restless consciousness of the past century. Jewish and Marxist, a critic and philosopher, he was little known during his lifetime. But after his death—he is widely believed to have committed suicide in Spain, as he attempted to flee the Nazis to America—his essays were collected and translated into English in the ’60s and ’70s. These challenging works form the basis for his standing as a leading social critic of his day. His friend and admirer Hannah Arendt called Benjamin “probably the most peculiar Marxist ever.” A connoisseur of esthetics more than an economic determinist, he wrote outside the rigid strictures of the Marxist canon. While his associates Theodor W. Adorno and Bertolt Brecht embraced Stalinism (the former ambivalently, the latter enthusiastically), Benjamin was more interested in the artistic radicalism of the French Surrealists. His essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” has been read by legions of university students; but the last major work verifiably his, an essay entitled “Theses on the Philosophy of History” written just months before he died, represents something more important: one of the most insightful analyses of the failure of Marxism ever produced. Seen by enthusiasts as a kind of latterday Rimbaud, a genius whose work was submerged amid the noise of his capitalist surroundings, and whose life was cut short, Benjamin today—make no mistake—is a superstar. An Amazon search for his name calls up 304 titles—including a memoir by Larry McMurtry, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at Sixty and Beyond. And central to his cult among leftist academics is his suicide. Benjamin died at a hotel in the Catalan town of Portbou in late September 1940, having just crossed the Pyrenees on foot from France with several companions. A manuscript he reportedly carried with him to the end has disappeared. Thus, his death—in Franco’s Spain, as he fled the Nazi invasion of France—is held to epitomize the destruction of the modern intellect by fascism. Yet a careful analysis of the evidence points toward a different conclusion—that Walter Benjamin was murdered by Soviet agents. This conclusion rests not on any smoking gun, but on two lines of detective work: first, showing how tenuous in all its particulars is the generally accepted story of the suicide; second, showing how thoroughly plausible is the deliberate liquidation of such a man in that time and place. To make this case requires an excursion into the murky world of leftist-intellectual intrigue in wartime Europe. In a feature in the Times Literary Supplement of February 9, 2001, Lesley Chamberlain, a writer on Freud, reviewed the essentials of the accepted account of the suicide. “Benjamin’s famous fate,” wrote Chamberlain, “was to fall afoul of the Spanish police . . . who determined to put him on a train [back] to France the next day. Ill, exhausted, and hearing that he was beginning a rail journey that would surely lead to his death in a concentration camp, he overdosed on morphine. Shocked by his demise, or confused as to their orders, the Spanish police allowed the remaining party to continue.” Comments Chamberlain, “The history that murdered Benjamin was brutal and nonsensical.” Apart from Benjamin’s fear of the Nazis, none of Chamberlain’s factual assertions can be confirmed. Momme Brodersen, author of Walter Benjamin: A Biography, published in English in 1997 and incorporating recent research, concedes this. “None of the new evidence contradicts [the suicide story], although it does not categorically confirm it either.” Documentation of Benjamin’s death by a Spanish judge shows no evidence of the presence of drugs. A doctor’s report states that a cerebral hemorrhage, perhaps aggravated by the exertion of crossing the Pyrenees, killed him. Strangely, the New York German Jewish weekly Aufbau, two weeks after his death, printed an account in which Benjamin committed suicide by swallowing poison “before the horrified eyes of his four women companions.” One of those women, Henny Gurland, is the source of the only contemporaneous document purporting to support the suicide theory, a document often referred to as the “suicide note.” Just how Gurland and Benjamin had met is not clear, but they crossed into Spain together, along with Gurland’s son and several other refugees they encountered on the way. An extreme leftist with, according to recent research, a faulty memory, Gurland wrote a letter to her husband, Arkadi Gurland, within two weeks of Benjamin’s death. In the letter, she recalled that the morning after they arrived in Portbou, in the hotel where they spent the night, she was summoned to speak with Benjamin “around seven o’clock.” She continued: “Benjamin told me that the night before, at 10 P.M., he had taken a massive dose of morphine, but that I should say that he was gravely ill. He gave me a letter for myself and another for Adorno. Then he lost consciousness.” Can we believe that a “massive dose of morphine” required nine to ten hours to take effect? The death register at Portbou places Benjamin’s demise at 10 P.M. on September 26, at least 14 hours after this alleged discussion with Henny Gurland. The chronology, moreover, cannot be established with certainty. Brodersen’s account, apparently garbled, places both the mountain crossing and Benjamin’s death on September 26, but a visit by a doctor, Ramón Vila Moreno, to Benjamin at the hotel in Spain on September 25. Further confusing the chronology, Lisa Fittko, the amateur guide who led Benjamin and the others into Spain, asserts in a memoir that Benjamin first appeared at her door in Marseilles on September 25, but that the trip to the border and the crossing itself were delayed by at least a night. As for the letters that Gurland says Benjamin gave her, she also claimed that she destroyed them, then later reconstructed their content in the form of a single communication of postcard length, in French, dated September 25, 1940. This appears in The Complete Correspondence of Adorno and Benjamin (published in English in 1999). It reads in full: “In a situation with no way out, I have no other choice but to end it. It is in a little village in the Pyrenees where nobody knows me that my life will be finished. I ask you to transmit my thoughts to my friend Adorno and to explain to him the position in which I saw myself placed. There is not enough time to write all the letters I would have liked to write.” There are several problems with this text. Portbou is not a “village in the Pyrenees,” but a fairly large municipality on the coast. Then there is the oddity of a German, at death’s door, choosing to communicate with two Germans in French. Above all, this “suicide note”—cited by Broderson as “the only ‘conclusive’ proof” for the suicide theory—is nothing of the kind. Whatever Walter Benjamin may have written on the day he died has not survived. The author of this message is Henny Gurland. To step back and follow the trail leading up to the death of Walter Benjamin, we must return to the fall of France in June 1940. German troops entered Paris on June 14. Some two million people, French as well as foreign, among them many anti-Nazi intellectuals, had begun a mad rush south ahead of the invader. This frantic exodus was not the first such journey. When the desperate multitudes approached the Spanish border, the human stream seemed to have reversed a tide seen just a year before: In the spring of 1939, half a million Catalans, many of them anarchists defeated in the Spanish Civil War, had walked through the passes of the Pyrenees and poured into France. Among these Spanish Republicans there had been many foreigners. The French government had herded them into camps. With the onset of World War II in September 1939, they were joined by thousands of German, Austrian, Czechoslovak, and Hun
garian refugees living in Paris, who were ordered interned by the French authorities. Walter Benjamin was one of these; for three months, he was held at Vernuche in the Loire valley. In November 1939, he returned to Paris, where he remained until the arrival of the Nazi armies in the capital. Then he joined the tramp southward. But progress was slow; he arrived in Marseilles in August. Although the American visa that had been arranged for him should have allowed him to transit Spain safely, he decided—for reasons never elucidated—not to enter Spain by train but to cross the border on foot, through the mountains. In the meantime, a relevant development had taken place in New York. At a luncheon on June25, the Emergency Rescue Committee had been established with the mission of finding leading Jewish and anti-Nazi intellectuals in France and transporting them to North and South America. The chief organizer of the effort was an Austrian leftist exile, Karl Borromaeus Frank, alias Paul Hagen. Hagen’s representative on the scene in France would be a young American liberal journalist, Varian Fry. Fry, the subject of a recent film, Varian’s War, as well as a biography, and the author of two volumes of memoirs, succeeded in saving numerous leading European cultural figures. These included Hannah Arendt, the artists Marcel Duchamp, Marc Chagall, and Jacques Lipschitz, leading surrealists including the poet and essayist André Breton and painters André Masson and Max Ernst, and dozens more political thinkers, sociologists, and psychologists. Fry was a hero, and the Emergency Rescue Committee saved many lives, but it had its dark side. Paul Hagen was by all accounts a dubious character. He had been a leading figure in a clandestine Leninist organization, New Beginning, that had infiltrated the German and Austrian Socialist and Communist parties in the 1930s. During and after the war, New Beginning alumni showed an uncanny ability to insert themselves, and to function as agents of influence, wherever important decisions were being made. And Hagen was devious. He received money to float the Emergency Rescue Committee from a particularly nasty Soviet agent in California, Mildred Edie Brady. He managed to slip in and out of Nazi Germany unmolested on underground missions. Andy Marino, a biographer of Fry, strongly suggests that Hagen tried to persuade Fry to let him take the American’s passport and impersonate him in Europe. In all he did, Hagen gave priority to the interests of his Leninist network. The first individuals he asked Fry to track down and smuggle out of France were not leading intellectuals but four completely unknown New Beginning cadres. Fry complied, dedicating resources and incurring risk to save these four ciphers. Something strange was afoot. Hagen and New Beginning may have fallen under the control of the Soviet secret police. According to anti-Communist research- er Herbert Romerstein, documents in the Berlin archives of the German Communist party indicate that Hagen served as an agent for Moscow. When Hagen came to the United States in the late 1930s, his visa was sponsored by a Soviet spy in the State Department, Lauchlin Currie, and he was associated with another Soviet agent, Alfred Stern. In 1942, Hagen would attempt to join the militantly anti-fascist Office of Strategic Services, predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency. But as Romerstein reveals in his new book, The Venona Secrets, Hagen was less than candid with the OSS about his involvement in a notorious incident, the disappearance of socialist activist Mark Rein from Republican Spain. Rein, the son of a famous Russian anti-Communist exile, had vanished from a hotel in revolutionary Barcelona, leading to an uproar among foreign supporters of the Spanish Republic concerned about the widening campaign of terror by Soviet agents behind Republican lines. Hagen told the OSS he had gone to Spain in July 1937 to try to find out what had happened to Rein, a comrade in New Beginning, but he concealed the fact that he had also been in Spain in March of that year, in Rein’s company. Rein disappeared on the night of April 9. Another New Beginning member, author and economist Franz Neumann, is identified in the Venona documents as a Soviet spy inside the OSS, where one of his leading collaborators was Arkadi Gurland, the husband of Henny Gurland. (Neumann’s own widow would marry another OSS colleague, the Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse. In addition, the tentacles of New Beginning extended to the dissident psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich and German leftist politician Willy Brandt. Much research on this topic has been done by a biographer of Reich, Jim Martin, for his self-published book Wilhelm Reich and the Cold War.) Finally, one more associate of Hagen in New Beginning, a Czech agent of Soviet terror named Leopold Kulcsar, had been in Barcelona in 1937, assigned to track down and arrest German-speaking anti-Stalinists and torture them into false confessions of betraying the Spanish Republic. Moscow wanted a parallel, outside Soviet borders, to the infamous purge trials, and the targets of attempts to realize such a judicial travesty included George Orwell. Lest all this seem a digression, an anecdote from the refugee flight from Paris in 1940 is illuminating. Miriam Davenport, a young American who would work for Varian Fry, fled to Toulouse, where she fell in with one Katia Landau, an Austrian anti-Communist leftist who had personally escaped the clutches of Leopold Kulcsar. The Stalinists had twice arrested Landau in Barcelona in 1937. The first time, she had organized a hunger strike and was released within a week. Rearrested “without a warrant and by sheer brute force,” she was confronted by an interrogator who repeatedly asked her—in a jail controlled by the Spanish Left—whether she was Jewish. “He told me, ‘For us it is a question of race,’” she recounted in Stalinism in Spain, published in 1938. “I replied that for us Communists and Socialists the question of race does not come up. But it did remind me of the language of the [Nazis].” What Katia Landau told Miriam Davenport in Toulouse was so alarming Davenport would remember it decades later and include it in a memoir now posted on a website dedicated to her memory. Landau was afraid. She had detected operating among the refugees one of the Russian agents involved in her imprisonments in Spain. She told Davenport, “We are all in danger. He will see to it that the Gestapo knows where to find us. That is how they work.” Landau fled, while Davenport proceeded to Marseilles, where she was horrified to be approached by the same Russian spy, who tried to get her to reveal Landau’s whereabouts. She asked him about the Communists’ attitude toward the fall of France, given that the Hitler-Stalin pact was then in force. He replied, “We are observing a benevolent neutrality.” Her appreciation of such complex dangers was one of the reasons Davenport decided to help Varian Fry. Unquestionably, the Soviet secret police was operating a chokepoint in southern France—sifting through the wave of fleeing exiles for targets of liquidation. These included open anti-Stalinists as well as individuals associated with dissident positions by more tenuous, personal ties. To track down their targets, the Soviets employed agents of many nationalities. As John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr explain in their Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, these agents, “serving as relief officials, would use their freedom of movement among the warring nations of Europe (America was not yet a belligerent), to act as covert couriers for the Soviets.” Thus, in September 1940, Georgi Dimitrov, head of the Communist International, secretly issued an order to Earl Browder, head of the American Communist party. In imperfect English, his instruction to Browder was: “Have some of your peoples not known as members of Party in the organization that have to be organized in your country for various relief to people of Europe.” A month later, Noel Field, a former colleague of Alger Hiss and fellow Soviet spy in the State Department, qui
t his post with the League of Nations. He joined the Unitarian Service Committee, for which he opened a refugee office in Marseilles, working as a secret liaison between Communist leaders in the Nazi-occupied lands. Proof that a Soviet liquidation operation was underway in the area had already come in the summer of 1940, in the case of Willi Munzenberg, an old Marxist revolutionary and creator of the global network of “front groups” that so successfully wooed Western liberals during the ’20s and ’30s. Munzenberg and his main underling, the Soviet secret police agent (and quondam husband of Marlene Dietrich) Otto Katz, had employed the Hungarian-born writer Arthur Koestler and others in distributing Communist disinformation worldwide. But Munzenberg, and then Koestler, broke with the Soviets, the first in 1937, the second a year later. Katz never did. He remained one of the most fearsome terrorist intellectuals in Moscow’s employ. Munzenberg had been arrested and held in an internment camp in southern France until the summer of 1940, when he was released and walked away in the company of two “German Socialists.” He soon was found hanged from a tree near Grenoble. The man who knew the most about Russian disinformation operations had been silenced. Heading south from Paris, Walter Benjamin walked straight into this maelstrom of evil. And, although his acolytes have chosen to ignore it, he was eminently qualified to appear on a Soviet hit list. In Marseilles, in September 1940, the protagonists of the final act in the drama of Walter Benjamin were in place. Varian Fry was there, working for the Emergency Rescue Committee. It is unclear whether he had any direct contact with Benjamin, though he would be informed of the latter’s death. Another supporting character was Benjamin’s friend Arthur Koestler, who, to escape internment, had enlisted in the French Foreign Legion using a fake Swiss identity as “Albert Dubert.” In August, he was sent to a Legion station in Marseilles. Eventually, with the help of Varian Fry, he would obtain false papers authorizing transit to Casablanca. As Munzenberg’s former subordinate and co-defector from Moscow, Koestler was a marked man. Thus, when Alfred Kantorowicz, a Communist propagandist who had worked for Munzenberg, but who remained loyal to Stalin, saw Koestler in the French port, he avoided him. Notably, Walter Benjamin didn’t. Indeed, he and Koestler sat in a café, exposed to the world, and discussed their future. Recounting their meeting in a memoir, Scum of the Earth, published in 1941, Koestler would contribute to the legend of Benjamin’s suicide. He said that Benjamin— “one of the most bizarre and witty persons I have ever known”—showed him a hoard of 62 sedative pills he had kept since Hitler’s takeover in 1933 to maintain the option of ending his own life. Koestler had no such supply, and Benjamin “reluctantly” divided the seven-year-old pills with him, keeping only 31 tablets for himself. Koestler wrote, “They were enough. . . . At Portbou the Guardia Civil arrested him. He was told that next morning they would send him back to France. When they came to fetch him for the train, he was dead.” Koestler was not infallible on points of detail. In Scum of the Earth, he stated Benjamin’s age as 55, when he was only 48. In a later book, The Invisible Writing, he seemed to say that Benjamin began with only 30 pills before sharing them. And in a much later translation of Scum of the Earth, he gives the original number of pills in Benjamin’s possession as 50. However, Koestler knew very well something else about Benjamin. The two men had lived next door to each other in Paris in the period after Willi Munzenberg’s split with Moscow, and had frequently joined Otto Katz in poker games. What may have been revealed in loose talk around the poker table can only be guessed, but it would have caused Katz and his superiors in the Soviet secret police to see Benjamin as dangerous. Indeed, Koestler, Benjamin, Katz, Munzenberg, and at least one other ominous figure—Rudolf Roessler, better known as the operative “Lucy”—had a history together that scholars of Benjamin have glided over. Benjamin may have come to know much too much. Consider his ties to Roessler. This extraordinary German exile had opened a publishing house in Switzerland. After Hitler came to power in Germany, Roessler and Benjamin had maintained a literary relationship. In 1936, Roessler had published a book of classic letters edited by Benjamin (under the pseudonym Detlef Holz) entitled German Men and intended for sale in Germany. As Momme Brodersen notes, Roessler was “a specialist in subversion, . . . a genuine secret agent.” Indeed, he was one of the most famous spies to serve in World WarII, transferring crucial information from the German high command to Soviet operatives in Switzerland. Benjamin may have known compromising facts about Roessler. Finally, there was Lisa Fittko, an exiled German leftist in her early thirties and a newcomer to Marseilles. Benjamin had met Fittko’s husband Hans a year before in the French internment camp at Vernuche, and she considered him a “friend.” Just how Benjamin came to choose Fittko as his guide across the mountains is unclear. In her confusing and self-contradictory memoir Escape Through the Pyrenees published in 1985, Fittko admits she had “scouted a sure route across the border” mere days before. She also claimed that Benjamin had already made an unsuccessful attempt at escape, stowing away aboard a freighter dressed as a sailor. Certainly, he was in a hurry to get out of France. But Benjamin, Henny Gurland, and Gurland’s son were Fittko’s first clients as a Pyrenees guide. Further, her method of selecting a path through the mountains was strange. She relied on a crude diagram drawn from memory by a French contact, claiming to have been directed more or less casually to the “Lister Route.” In the memoir, she notes insouciantly, “General Lister of the [Spanish] Republican army had used it for his troops during the Spanish Civil War.” This comment conjures up yet another menacing element of the landscape into which Benjamin had wandered. Enrique Lister was not a general in the Spanish Republican army; he never rose above the rank of colonel. He was, however, one of the most fanatical and ruthless Soviet agents in Spain. He had been trained in Moscow, and took control of a section of the Spanish Republican Army that was used to execute dissident anarchist peasants. His route was a way his terrorist comrades took in and out of Spain. Lister was so extreme a Stalinist that in the 1970s, when the Spanish Communist party adopted reformist “Eurocommunism,” he directed an ultra-Muscovite schism headquartered behind the Iron Curtain and subsidized directly by the KGB. I encountered veteran Listerite cadres in Spain years afterward and can testify to their ultrasectarian and even violent mentality. Lisa Fittko’s choice of the Lister Route had other troubling aspects. The Spanish border was honeycombed with anarchists, as well as members of the dissident Marxist POUM, or Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification. These Catalan refugees—”impoverished heroes and hotheads,” as one Spanish historian calls them—functioned with great effectiveness smuggling Jews, other anti-Nazis, and British service personnel out of France. They too were terrified at any mention of Lister. Curiously, neither Lisa Fittko nor the Varian Fry network made contact with these mountaineers for many months, until nearly the end of Fry’s operation, when Fry became dependent on them. Lisa Fittko was well aware of the political intrigues in the subculture of refugee rescuers in Marseilles. She knew, for example, that Varian Fry’s first mission—to save the four New Beginning cadres—was “a big secret.” After Benjamin’s catastrophic passage, Fittko’s husband joined her. She recalled his telling her, “All the people from New Beginning have gone abroad by now, so there’s no more need for secrecy.” Soon the Fittkos were recruited by Fry, who rechristened the Lister Route the “F Route.” Weirdly, altho
ugh Fry said he wanted to find “guides who knew the mountains,” he settled in the short term for Lisa Fittko, whose sole journey of this kind had resulted in Benjamin’s death. On that trip, Lisa Fittko, Benjamin, and the Gurland youth lugged the writer’s heavy briefcase, containing his “new manuscript,” along the mountain paths. Four decades later, Fittko quoted Benjamin as saying, “This briefcase is most important to me. I dare not lose it. The manuscript must be saved. It is more important than I am, more important than myself.” What could the lost manuscript have contained? Given the disillusionment with the extremist Left explicit in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” written earlier that year, it is possible the new work comprised an even sharper critique of Marxism. Hannah Arendt commented that Benjamin was “rather afraid of the opinion and reaction” of Adorno and others in the Institute for Social Research, the famous Frankfurt school, to his “Theses.” But Jewish historian and philosopher Gershom Scholem recalled, in his Walter Benjamin, The Story of a Friendship, that Benjamin had declared himself “finished with Russia for good.” The lost manuscript may also have contained privileged information Benjamin possessed about his erstwhile poker partners in Paris, including Otto Katz. (On this score, it is depressing to note that several reviewers of a book published in 2000 by Harvard University Press mistook it for Benjamin’s lost work—even though the editors themselves made no such claim. In fact, the Harvard volume, The Arcades Project, is the translation of an unwieldy collection of notes, articles, and quotations Benjamin left behind when he fled Paris. It is ludicrous to imagine that he would have laboriously copied all this out in the days before Xerox machines and carried it with him into exile. The manuscript lost on the Spanish border has never been found.) After many hours, the travelers reached a cliff overlooking Portbou. There Lisa Fittko left them, pointing the refugees toward the town. At some point, the Spanish authorities, apparently out of bureaucratic arbitrariness, decided to send Benjamin back to France the next day. He entered the hotel in Portbou in anticipation of being expelled. He may simply have failed to find an official susceptible to bribery. But there were definitely Gestapo agents in the town, possibly in the hotel. There Benjamin died. After his death the Gurlands and the other refugees who had joined them paid a bribe and proceeded on their way through Spain. Koestler received belated news of Benjamin’s “suicide” in Lisbon. By his own account, he reacted by attempting to kill himself, presumably using the pills his old poker partner had given him. But his stomach rebelled, and he vomited up the poison. Was this reaction motivated by depression or despair? Or did Koestler know something about Benjamin’s situation that made the latter’s suicide a cause for fear or guilt? The Fittkos eventually quit the Fry network and escaped to Cuba via Lisbon, assisted by Spanish anarchists. Henny Gurland, author of the “suicide note,” went on to marry the psychiatrist Erich Fromm, and died in 1952. Her ex-husband, Arkadi Gurland, the recipient of her account of Benjamin’s death, was linked during the 1950s to an East German agent in West Germany, Viktor Agartz. After World War II, German Socialists prevented Karl B. Frank—alias Paul Hagen, the malign background presence in the Varian Fry network and throughout these events—from returning to Germany. He remained in the United States, where he died in 1969. The poker-playing agent Otto Katz came under Soviet suspicion during the war for his association with British spies and was hanged in Prague in 1952. Rudolf Roessler, a k a Lucy, was arrested in Switzerland in 1953 and convicted of spying for Czechoslovakia; he died in 1958. Koestler emerged obsessed with suicide, and expired in a death pact with his much younger wife in 1983. The Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo, noting the disappearance of the manuscript “for which Benjamin was prepared to sacrifice his life,” asked for a “rigorous investigation as to what happened to it.” No such investigation has ever been completed. The last word may remain with Hannah Arendt, who pointed out that Benjamin died during the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact, “whose most feared consequence at that moment was the close cooperation of the two most powerful secret police forces in Europe.” I do not pretend to have established how, why, or at whose hands Walter Benjamin died; it is clear, however, that few of the widely accepted details of his death can be relied upon. Three lessons emerge from this inquiry. First, “rigorous investigation” must continue, unfashionable though it be in the academy. Historians must abandon their politically correct prejudices. These biases prevent them from recognizing the truth of the Cold War insights of Koestler and others and understanding the monstrous evils of Stalinism, from the recruitment of intellectuals for terrorist tasks, to Moscow’s practice of eliminating inconvenient witnesses. Second, Vladimir Putin has made noises about closing the Russian archives that were opened to local and foreign historians in the wake of communism’s fall. Not only must these archives remain open, but many more should be made available to researchers—for Benjamin’s is far from the only case still shrouded in mystery. Juliet Stuart Poyntz, an American Communist, disappeared from her New York apartment in 1938 and was never seen again. Like Marc Rein, José Robles, the translator and friend of the American author John Dos Passos, vanished in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. The Russian defector Walter Krivitsky was an apparent suicide in Washington in 1941. The anarchist labor leader Carlo Tresca was shot dead on a Manhattan street in 1943. Otto Ruhle, biographer of Marx, died in Mexico City in a murky situation the same year. The anti-Stalinist writer Victor Serge and the Yugoslav-American historian Louis Adamic perished after the war in questionable circumstances, the first in Mexico, the second in the United States. And so on. After decades of concealment and deliberate obliviousness, the truth of such cases cries out to be revealed. Mr. Putin, open these files! Finally, there is much nostalgia among intellectuals for the 1930s, but the history recounted here is terrifying. Nearly every protagonist lied, knew lethal secrets, or had a hidden agenda. One night recently, after spending a day in the Library of Congress researching this article, I came out into the cool evening mist of Washington, capital of the Free World. My sense of relief was so intense I felt as if I had escaped from hell; I recalled the words at the end of Dante’s Inferno: “E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle”—We came out and looked up at the stars. Stephen Schwartz’s latest book is Intellectuals and Assassins: Writings at the end of Soviet Communism.
