Beaten But Not Defeated Read online

  So here I am writing my father’s biography, with the help of Richard Kirkwood and Irene Fick. It is a biography which focuses on the man in the public sphere, not of my father as I knew him, but inevitably some of Siegi as father and also as a husband is included. It should not be forgotten that it is his daughter who is writing this and while this gives me a unique view of the man, my view of Siegi will inevitably be affected by my sympathies for and conflicts with him, and may at points have the too close-up view of a daughter.

  It has not been possible to fill all the holes in knowledge about him. My parents never talked to me of themselves, in the past or the present. So some of this biography will be written as a search for my father’s past. But then, no biography, or indeed autobiography, can ever be complete. My father was right on that one. It’s impossible to tell the truth about oneself, he had also insisted.

  There has to be an attention here to records which are partial, both because at least some of the records are hidden away, if they exist at all, in the Moscow and ex-East German archives, partly because of the inherent nature of records, particularly from such a politically tumultuous 80 years. The people who knew my father are almost all dead, too many of them murdered. Some of the material has been gleaned from MI5 records, some from the, very limited, family records. The partiality of the information here has been forced upon us by the unavailability of sources.

  It is time to rescue my father’s life, because it is the life of a man forged into a revolutionary by the struggles in 1920s Germany, who becomes deeply involved in the activities and debates around how to stop the Nazis and who saw agit-prop theatre as one means of winning over the working class. He had to start a second life and learn a second language in the UK, became deeply disillusioned with some of his previous beliefs, but never gave up his socialist opinions.

  But it is not just my father’s life I am rescuing. The history of the revolutionary left in Germany between 1918 and 1939 is remarkably unknown, even in Germany but more so in the UK. The Comintern’s zigzags have been thoroughly studied as has the KPD’s official twists and turns, but not the rank and file. Certain acts of heroism have made it into the history books or been given media attention, for example the Bavarian White Rose student group, the attempt on Hitler’s life in 1944, or some people who ‘saved Jews’ but, in fact, these acts of bravery have almost nothing to do with the revolutionary left, working class activities or the resistance from 1933 onwards.

  Why did the East German government, who had a culture of celebrating their heroes, and who if anybody did, should have inherited the mantle and memory of the German working class revolts and resistance, not celebrate more fully both the early attempts at revolution in 1918 and 1923 (beyond Luxemburg and sometimes Liebknecht) and later those who had stood and fought, and too often died, opposing Nazism? I suggest that the East German government, who were theoretically in a coalition with the Social Democrats from 1948, were not always in sympathy with the politics of the earlier 1918-1923 revolutionaries and the often less than ‘respectable’ members of the resistance. This government preferred to honour those who had visibly contributed to the fall of Nazism rather than the thousands who were working underground and largely out of sight and who, after all, ‘failed’ to stop Nazism. No doubt the erratic opening of the Moscow and East German archives will now facilitate further research.

  The other reason is to do with the other side of the Cold War, where a belief in ‘our side’ held an ideological influence over academia as well as politics, which only started to significantly reduce in the mid-1960s (though there were some brave early swallows). The Allies did not honour revolutionaries or often even the resistance. Amongst the ‘leaders’ in World War Two, Churchill was an exception in holding to the tactic of building up a group (the SOE) who worked with resistance fighters across Europe. Roosevelt and many of the top-brass in the British military preferred a more conventional war.1 Add to that, that we are here discussing the ‘enemy’, the Germans, even if these were the ‘good’ Germans, and the lack of recognition and attention becomes easier to understand. Moreover, these men and women were often Communists and often working class, and, during the academic freeze which so often went along with the Cold War, ‘on the other side’.

  Two of the few authors who write in English (Rosenhaft,2 and LaPorte3 ) which look at the grass-roots politics in the German working class during this period will be referred to frequently in this text. So this study of my father I hope will help illuminate the grass-roots activities and fates of those brave men and women who worked for a revolutionary Germany after the end of World War I and in particular stood up against the rise in Nazism.

  This book’s structure in part reflects this dual purpose. In Part 1 which takes us up to 1933, there are chapters which are specifically about my father, two early separate chapters which address the political background in Germany, and a final chapter which combines the two. People who want to keep to Siegi’s story may want to miss out the political chapters, although readers will find they do provide a background to Siegi’s activities.

  I was also exceedingly fortunate in being given the opportunity to interview in autumn 2011 three very old members of the KPD who had been activists in the 1930s, who I refer to as the Berlin 3, and who gave me the insight one only gets from talking to people who actually were there and allowed me to get some sense of what my father’s Berlin had been like. I refer to their observations intermittently throughout this study. Not much work has been done on the experience of the third period on the ground. Almost all studies have been of official KPD policies, and of its many vacillations and zigzags. It is in this context that the interviews with the three Berliners was so valuable in that it gives a long distance but intimate view of what was happening on the ground between 1929 and 1933 and the degree to which the Berlin 3’s political activities were as much driven by their experiences as by the Party line.

  I am not writing this biography as an academic historian and do not delve into the - interesting - debates about how to interpret this period of history - whether it is better top down or bottom up. My perspective is moreover decidedly anti-Stalinist and I do not give time or credit to a Stalinised historiography. I also do not read German - a serious limitation when studying German history and I have to thank Irene Fick for her generous translations from German into English on my behalf. Nevertheless, I have largely depended on English translations and texts and what they have to say about German sources. So, for example, I depend on secondary sources to know that Weber, a key German left-wing writer about the German revolutionary left and the KPD up to 1945, demonstrates the Stalinisation of the KPD4, a position LaPorte suggests has limits. I have taken what fits the story of my father and do not get into the rights and wrongs of the different positions.

  In the last season of Siegi’s life, he returned to his earlier writing, pouring out lyrical left-wing poetry and musing on how to bring about change. He remained a socialist till the end. As he lay dying, I sang him the International (to the horror of the nurses used to a more reverential atmosphere by the bedsides of the dying) and, by now unable to speak or virtually to move, he wiggled his toes to the beat.

  End-notes

  1. I owe this point to Steve Cushion.

  2. Rosenhaft, Beating the Fascists? The German Communists and Political Violence 1929–1933

  3. LaPorte, The German Communist Party in Saxony, 1924-33: Factionalism, Fratricide and Political Failure, 2003; and Bolshevism, Stalinism and the Comintern. Perspectives on Stalinization, 1917-53 (with Kevin Morgan and Matthew Worley).

  4. Weber’s argues in ‘Wandlung des deutschen Kommunismus’ (1969), that by the 1930s the KPD had been transformed into a disciplined and centralised instrument of Stalinism. (See Appendix for further details.)

  Chapter 2

  1904 - 1928 Early life. The makings of a revolutionary

  1904-1928

  Siegi was born into a knot of contradictions, which framed him from a
n early age. Born in Munich, on the 19th September 1904, he was the second son to Johanna and Albert Moos. We know that Albert lived at a variety of addresses during Siegi’s early childhood (at the time as now, any move in Germany had to be registered, so it is possible to check Albert’s many addresses). Not all was well in the Moos household.

  Albert was a joint owner of a factory in Ulm, but kept moving, ending up near to Monte Carlo, where he gambled compulsively, before leaving for Paris where he died, aged 45 (from family correspondence). Albert, Siegi’s father left his wife to look after herself and their two young boys.5 Siegi was only six or seven. My father’s passing suggestion to me once that his father was some sort of bohemian artist was somewhat economic with the truth! Siegi’s mother was left to struggle alone to bring up the two little boys and, most probably, without any regular source of income. Thus Siegi was marked from an early stage by emotional disruption and material poverty.

  Siegi’s aunt, Rosa, his father’s sister, had married into a well-off Bavarian family. Hermann Binnswanger, Rosa’s husband, Hermann, and his two brothers ran three highly successful liqueur and vinegar factories (Likoerfabrik zum Magister) across Bavaria. Rosa and Hermann had no children. Though it is impossible to now know exactly how close the relationship was, it appears that Rosa and Hermann unofficially took over some of Siegi’s care, a pattern more common at this time when, if needed, childless couples would ‘adopt’ a brother or sister’s child.6 Certainly, there are a variety of photos of a beaming Hermann posing with the young Siegi in his lush garden at their summer house outside Munich. In later life, Siegi used to talk to me as if Hermann’s house was his home. Siegi had told me of how easy it was to ‘steal’ some of the booze as a child and how he would then go to sleep in the barn. Indeed, I was startled to discover this was not the full story. I had been allowed to believe that Siegi grew up in an opulent household, which made wine and liqueur for its living.

  But Siegi did spend some time with this mother. Siegi told me that towards the end of the First World War, when he was around twelve years old, he had lived on turnip stew, turnip jam and stewed nettles, which he had foraged from local farmers’ fields.7 Whatever the exact nature of the different relationships, Siegi went between his mother’s ‘social need’ housing, and his uncle’s opulent houses. It cannot have been easy for him. This contrast between poverty and affluence may well have radicalised the young boy.

  Siegi told me that when still quite young, he went to pay homage every year at the memorial to those who fell in the German revolution of March 1848 (which forced King Ludwig of Bavaria to abdicate). I now suspect that this was probably in Augsburg. One piece in the complicated jig-saw of Siegi’s early life is that at least one part of his adopted family, the Binnswangers, seems to have belonged to the radical – and ‘modernist’ - wing of the bourgeoisie. Gabriel Binnswanger, it appears, played a minor role in the 1848 German uprising, and is noted to have taken down a notice placed by the state on the 1st May 1849, which he trampled into the ground. Siegi probably saw himself as paying homage to a member of his own family, his great-uncle, but was also supporting the general cause of those early fallen revolutionaries. Hermann’s later letters to Siegi once he was in the UK (considered in Appendix 1), also show a deep humanism and sympathy for his revolutionary, wayward and brilliant nephew.

  Aged only 14, Siegi was in attendance when sailors declared a Soviet republic8 from the steps of Munich Town Hall, an event he described to me in some detail. Later in life (and this will be considered in a subsequent chapter on the 1970’s), he wrote an excoriating article against Ebert’s betrayal of the 1918/19 revolution, written with the passion and knowledge of one who was there. Siegi’s presence on the steps of Munich Town hall tells us that he was already at least interested in radical politics. Having grown up under the wing of Hermann and Rosa, radical minded representatives of the Bavarian haute-bourgeoisie, and also presumably influenced by Germany’s defeat and the victory of the Russian revolution, Siegi seems to have developed an early attachment to revolutionary politics.

  Even Siegi’s schooling raises issues over identity. His mother had moved the children from Munich to Amberg, where Siegi attended the Humanistische Gymnasium (equivalent to a grammar school). This was a Catholic school, run by Catholic priests. Yet the original inscription next to Siegi’s name in the school’s entry book, where religion had to be stated, has ‘Judische’ scratched out and ‘Protestant’ overlaying it.

  Why he was finally registered as a Protestant cannot now be known nor why he was sent to a Catholic school, though one can guess that it was because it was the best available. Certainly, although the Hermann household were secular Jews, Jewishness was not a concern, indeed is not mentioned at all in Hermann’s many letter to Siegi. (We do not know about Siegi’s mother.) Siegi certainly told me he was brought up as a Catholic, and would quote parts of the Catholic catechism at me. (You can always recognise a Catholic, he informed me on several occasions, by the look of guilt in their eyes.) But later, while still in Bavaria, he is documented as choosing to relinquish his Judaism, indicating that he saw Judaism as his original ‘faith’ and that he took this sufficiently seriously to need to reject it. Maybe he took this decision because he was no longer a believer, maybe he never was. Maybe he already saw religion ‘as the opium of the masses’. But this flurry of religious identities probably discouraged a belief in any particular religion (and led to his active role in the Freethinkers.) The rest of this biography will consider Siegi’s later politics. But, with such a background, it is not surprising that Siegi showed an early political awareness.

  He did not do especially well at secondary school and went to study for an Economics degree at Munich’s Technische Hochschule (equivalent to a cross between the old FE colleges and polytechnics)10, maybe staying with Hermann. But he did not finish his degree. Though continuing to study Economics in the evenings at Munich University proper, he went to work at the biggest Bavarian bank: ‘Bayerische Vereinsbank’, where he stayed for over five years, working his way up to Head Office. Then he joined the management of his uncle’s factory, ‘Likoerfabrik zum Magister’, where he stayed for another two and a half years. Finally, he moved to Berlin in 1928, still only 24, to work at the liqueur factory: ‘Hermann Meyer.’ It appears from a great-uncle’s letter, he also worked for a paper: Neue Zeit.

  The late 1920s is also the time his brother commits suicide. My father never mentioned that he had a brother. I was only to find out when I emptied out my parents’ possessions from their house, to discover his brother, Adolpho’s, christening mug and ring, lying in the drawer in which my father kept his cheque books, a drawer my father went into probably once a day. Then I also found, buried deep under my father’s papers in his study, Adolpho’s christening book. The letter, which I now possess from Adolpho, suggests he killed himself over a failed love affair. Another part of Siegi’s world must have fallen apart.

  End-notes

  5. Although the history of my father’s family is fragmentary as happens when families are either dispersed or/and murdered, some distant relatives, in particular Rudolph Moos, have put much effort into reconstructing a family tree. But nothing is known of Siegi’s mother. I tried to trace her but had no luck. My father never mentioned her and I do not know for sure how she died, though my mother told me (never a reliable source on causes of death as I was to discover) that she died young of breast cancer. In the photo albums I acquired when I cleared their home, there appears a beautiful young woman, white ruff round her neck, eyes softly out of focus. I assume it is Siegi’s mother.

  6. Siegi was the chosen one, his brother, Adolpho seems to have been left in the care of their mother. Adolpho committed suicide in his early 20s.

  7. Turnips were the only food my father banned my mother from cooking! But Siegi did show me on his and my occasional walks together how to pick nettles so that they didn’t sting.

  8. The Bavarian or Munich Soviet Republic, based in Munich, was a
part of the German Revolution of 1918/19, led by Eisner, .The sailors, who were deeply engaged in resisting the continuation of war by their leaders were probably in Munich, which is far from the sea, on their way home to now revolutionary Austria (Harman). This event is discussed further in Chapter 3.

  9. Apparently, Munich University, even during Weimar, did not welcome Jewish or socialist students of Economics (C-D Crohn, 178, 1996.) It is still notorious for its association at this time with its fencing clubs. Whether all this influenced which university Siegi went to, can only be guessed at.

  10. Apparently, Munich University, even during Weimar, did not welcome Jewish or socialist students of economics (C-D Crohn, 1996.) It is still notorious for its association at this time with its fencing clubs. Whether all this influenced which university Siegi went to, can only be guessed at.

  Chapter 3

  Bavaria: the early stamping ground of the Nazis; KPD resistance

  This is the period when Siegi’s politics are developing, and it is therefore not the main focus of this study. Nevertheless, the activist from the early 1930s had his political birth in Munich; indeed I would argue that his later acute awareness of the threat of Nazism was born out of his experiences in Bavaria, where, and we will see, he will have witnessed and probably experienced the early growth of the Nazis, their influence over the Bavarian government and their lethal activities against the left.