Margarita admired her dedication and her faith in the Revolution and thought about the sacrifice of her mother who refused to betray the cause.

  Every martyr is a witness to the truth.

  15.

  Willi Munzenberg wasn’t a man to rest on his laurels. He had already come up with a clutch of fresh ideas to advance the cause, and Margarita’s next task was to arrange a symposium, to be held over a weekend, for the intellectuals to thrash out a definitive analysis of the international situation – and whoever else she invited, it was vital that Kai-Olaf be included.

  Acting on a suggestion of Vicky’s, Margarita rented a house out in the country, on the outskirts of a small village to the north of Torgau, on the banks of the river Elbe. The two of them travelled there together on the train from Berlin one cloudy February day. They were arriving a day before the others to make the beds up, get in supplies of food and drink and other necessities, and make sure the place was aired. Smoking incessantly, Vicky was uncharacteristically quiet during the journey, staring out through the train window. Margarita tried to start up a conversation with her, but got no further and so let her be.

  When they arrived at the house, Margarita was enchanted by the place. The trees were still bare but she thought the winter seemed to have loosened its grip a little and that there might be a sniff of spring in the air. After living so long in Berlin, she’d forgotten how silent and dark the country could be at night, the high sky above her head as clear as an angel’s mind.

  Vicky was clueless when it came to cooking, so while Margarita prepared some fried liver and potatoes she sat by the table smoking away, still uncommunicative.

  ‘Are you thinking about tomorrow?’ Margarita asked.

  ‘No. I’m thinking more about yesterday.’

  She looked a little pained and Margarita felt it indelicate to probe any further. She finished cooking and served the food. Even when she was eating, Vicky had a lit cigarette to hand by her plate.

  ‘This kitchen hasn’t changed a bit. The same beams, the same cupboards, even the cups and plates are the same. Just like the last time I was here. I recognise the crack in this cup… look.’

  ‘When were you here before?’

  ‘A few years ago.’

  Vicky never went on holiday, and Margarita was curious what had brought her here.

  ‘I came here on my own. Apart from when Emerick visited.’

  ‘Who’s Emerick?’

  ‘He was my husband.’

  After they’d eaten, Vicky told Margarita about him. Vicky and Emerick had been members of the German Independent Socialist Party. This was the party which came into existence because the Socialist Democratic Party had failed to do enough to oppose the 1914–1918 war, but by 1920, there was a growing tension in the ranks as more and more of the membership – following the Russian Revolution of 1917 – wanted to join the Comintern.

  When a formal offer came from Moscow to establish the KPD, there had been strong opinions on both sides, and fierce disagreement. The danger was that the Independent Socialist Party would split in two. Emerick had been firmly against accepting Moscow’s conditions, but Vicky, far less sure of the best way forward, and anguished in trying to reach a decision, became desperate for some quiet time to herself, away from the hurly-burly of her working life.

  ‘That’s when I decided to come here on my own – to give myself time to think, away from the noise of everybody arguing.’

  She’d go to sit by the riverbank and listen to the sound of the frogs in the bulrushes, trying to clear the muddle in her head. After dark, she’d return to the house, but would often still be lying fully awake as dawn broke, listening to a couple of cockerels in the distance challenging each other. In the end, she’d decided the best way to order her thoughts would be to write a pamphlet. In the tranquil kitchen, with the Moscow Comintern’s twenty-one conditions in front of her on the table, she’d put her mind to work. The most important thing was to be honest with herself and everybody else and to face up to the mistakes of the past. She’d reviewed everything that had happened since the start of the 1914–1918 war. The truth was that the 1917 revolution had been a success. A communist government was, by now, well established in Russia, while the efforts of German workers had come to nothing. What was the reason for their failure?

  The German proletariat were just as determined, that was clear – but they weren’t as ruthless. Vicky thought back to January 1919, not long after the Kiel sailors had raised the red flag, in that period of activity when the first soviet committees were being established the length and breadth of Germany. She’d remembered arresting Frankfurt’s chief of police, the Kaiser’s man through and through, a hater of socialism. What had she done? Locked him in the cellar of a hotel, and tried to reason with him, tried to appeal to him with logic. What would Lenin have done? Shot him in the head without wasting another minute on him. He was an enemy of the cause, nothing more.

  After a week on her own, Emerick had visited and told her he’d be very reluctant to accept the Comintern’s twenty-one conditions. What about the Independent Socialist Party’s right to independence of opinion? How would that be preserved? And without that independence, what dignity remained, forever more at the mercy of the whims of the bigger Russian party? Such a system wouldn’t represent the supremacy of the working class at all, but supremacy over the working class by a distant bureaucratic clique in Moscow, with no knowledge of the political situation in Germany.

  ‘Moscow is the last city of Asia,’ he’d said.

  ‘The first city of Europe,’ she’d replied.

  They couldn’t even agree on that, let alone anything else. He’d left the next morning, leaving her with Rosa Luxembourg’s pamphlet on Lenin to read.

  But Vicky’s own pamphlet soon went on sale. Her main argument was that if the German Independent Socialist Party failed to join with the Comintern, it would gradually decline and become irrelevant. At best, it would become a safe little party of reform instead of a truly revolutionary movement. Emerick had been furious and became even more so when Vicky had started to visit the local branches of the Party to make her case, which was that the only way to bring about a revolution like 1917 was to accept the Comintern’s conditions and create a Communist Party in Germany.

  In Emerick’s opinion, the days of utopian romancing were at an end – if they had ever existed. Hadn’t Karl Marx himself argued that the best hope for a socialist revolution lay in the developed capitalist countries, and not in a poor Russia with its primitive way of life? There wouldn’t be a need for a dictatorial soviet party if a strong industrial working class existed in Russia. The experiences and traditions of the workers of Western Europe were very different, and it would be a step in the wrong direction to follow Lenin. Far better to follow an independent path towards socialism and social justice, even if that made it necessary in the short term to accept the capitalist system and work for change from within it, step by step. Unlike Vicky, Emerick did not regard reform as a dirty word.

  Vicky for her part had seen this as the inadequate response of a party which, while sincere in its aspirations for social justice, was too ready to compromise. Yes, there were people with a clear vision within the Independent Socialist Party, who wanted to use the state to remedy social ills, but it also contained hypocritical and ambitious petit bourgeois who viewed socialism as nothing more than a ladder to high office and privilege.

  It all came to a head in the October congress of 1920. With the future of the German Independent Socialist Party at stake, feelings were running high. It was a momentous occasion, a fateful hour – Zinoviev himself had come all the way from Moscow, and his address to congress lasted four hours. The Menshevik, Yury Martov spoke against him but he was a sick man, a shadow of his former self.

  Vicky and Emerick, both prominent, respected members of the Independent Socialist Party, had taken their places at the front of the stage, as much in disagreement with each other as two people could be.

  Husband and wife.

  Emerick had spoken from the heart.

  Vicky had spoken from the heart.

  They had walked off the stage apart.

  When the motion had gone to a vote, the vast majority had been in favour of accepting the Comintern’s conditions, and from that moment in Halle, a new party was born – the Kommunistische Partei Deutsch. The German Communist Party.

  16.

  Some of the faces were familiar to Margarita from the IAF conference, but there were other comrades that she didn’t know. The first through the door was Fritz Globig. Small, but with a self-important air, he had a reputation for creating bad feeling and dissent, and thoroughly revelled in his ability to stir up a hornet’s nest. Vicky had warned Margarita about him, and she decided to give the owner of those knitted brows and pugnacious expression a wide berth.

  The next over the threshold was Peter Maslowski, clean-shaven, straight-backed even though he was well into his sixties, followed by his latest girlfriend, Ulrike. She was younger than him by almost forty years, though she had already married and divorced. When Margarita greeted her with a kiss by the door, she smelled of face powder.

  There were several delegates from the Baltic countries – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – and one from Luxembourg. Yannick was a tall youth, thin but broad-shouldered, with fair hair that looked as though it hadn’t seen a brush in quite a while. He had a voice to split rocks, well used to shouting its way through arguments.

  The rest came in twos and threes. Kai-Olaf was the last to arrive. He had the bluest eyes Margarita had ever seen in her life, and his head was as bald as an egg. By now, Margarita was experienced enough to know that Kai-Olaf wasn’t his real name, but his name in the Comintern. According to Vicky, Kai-Olaf was a highly experienced agent.

  ‘What kind of experience exactly?’ asked Margarita.

  ‘You’ll hear that from him I expect,’ came the reply.

  Nobody had much inclination for sleep that first night. They talked long and late, and time slowed and quietened, the moon high in the sky.

  Margarita was the first up the next morning, and was just starting to collect the dirty glasses and overflowing ashtrays when Kai-Olaf padded barefoot into the kitchen. She was a little tongue-tied around him, and realised that she felt a little shy. He offered to make her some coffee, and she managed to say that she was surprised to see that he was so full of energy after such a late night, and his long train journey from Italy to Torgau the previous day.

  ‘Travelling is so tiring,’ said Margarita as she sat down to roll herself a cigarette with the tobacco from Vicky’s little tin.

  ‘I’m never tired.’

  ‘Lucky you.’

  ‘Yes, I am lucky.’ And he smiled at her.

  There was nothing shy about him: he was an extraordinarily confident young man.

  ‘I do some calisthenics, to keep fit.’

  ‘And they tell me you write poetry as well?’ Margarita asked tentatively.

  ‘They?’ He brought the coffee pot to the table and smiled again.

  ‘Vicky.’

  ‘You mustn’t listen to everything Hedwig says about me.’ He poured the coffee into two cups. ‘I haven’t written any poetry in a long time. Wish I could, but I have no time, unfortunately. To write poetry, a man needs to be left in peace.’

  Margaret held her cup in both her hands and sipped her coffee, waiting for him to continue.

  ‘Then again, I don’t know if poetry is relevant to anything anymore. When I read the stuff that’s being published, it seems so old-fashioned and sentimental. I often ask myself, do these people live in the real world? Don’t they have eyes? Ears? Poets should be stung into writing poetry and excited by the world around them. But the vast majority of them just wallow in the past, because that’s safer. Anyway, political action is much more important. Do you agree?’

  ‘Yes, I do…’

  ‘Good.’ He smiled again.

  Kai-Olaf was convinced that Europe would be facing another war before long. ‘Within five years, perhaps less. Unless we manage to stop the capitalists from starting it.’

  Vicky was next to appear, as Margarita and Kai-Olaf were preparing breakfast for everybody. She looked exhausted, and was coughing badly, though the first thing she did was light a cigarette. Peter and Ulrike were the next two to join them. He too was bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, and accepted the coffee Margarita offered him gratefully.

  Over the following two days, they discussed the situation in the Soviet Union, as well as the revolutionary possibilities in other countries – Germany, France and China in particular. Kai-Olaf gave a presentation on the fragile underground Communist Party in Italy. The essence of fascism, he told them, was to wage war against freedom. Mussolini had even claimed that people were sick and tired of freedom, and yearned for order and purpose. He said that the best freedom for the Italians was freedom in chains. In a nutshell, he argued that freedom must be sacrificed to protect freedom, as only the fascists were capable of stopping communism. Mussolini’s revolution was a nationalist revolution, and the main objective of nationalism was always to oppose the unity of mankind in the name of some narrow concept of liberty.

  ‘We’ve a long way to go yet before we beat them,’ Kai-Olaf told them sombrely.

  He explained how capitalism had succeeded in re-establishing and strengthening itself throughout Italy in the wake of the imperialist war, in spite of many difficulties. Then, he turned to Germany. He mentioned the Spartacist Uprising of January 1919, and Rosa and Karl’s murder at the hands of the Freikorps. How the Treaty of Versailles had placed a huge burden on a people already struggling, with its requirement of the payment of crippling reparations. C’est l’Allemagne qui paiera, as the politicians of the Quai d’Orsay had proclaimed – the Germans were to pay for everything.

  After every individual presentation, they split up into smaller groups for further discussion. Margarita found herself in the same group as Peter and Ulrike, though she would have preferred to be with Kai-Olaf. She could see him in the adjoining room, sitting on his haunches. Vicky was there too, and Margarita heard her open the discussion by stating that no revolution would succeed without the army on its side, and asking whether there was a realistic chance of that happening in Germany. But it was as much as Margarita could do to concentrate on all the arguments and counter-arguments of her own group.

  That evening, it was Margarita’s turn to make a presentation. She chose ‘Women and Communism’ as her title, and it was largely based on the writings of Alexandra Kollontai. For Kollontai, socialism meant far more than the nationalising of heavy industry. The strongest emotion in Europe for a century and more, she argued, was fear: fear of new ideas; fear of change; fear of the enfranchisement of women. This accounted for why some men remained tied as tightly as ever to the apron strings of old certainties, such as Catholicism or Calvinism. Socialism, on the other hand, sought to transform people’s relationships with each other. It called for the eradication of the traditional pattern of the family: the paterfamilias, who owned everything, and the wife, who wasn’t even allowed to own her own opinions.

  Margarita’s presentation received a warm reception, and that night after dinner, the men agreed they should be the ones to wash the dishes.

  17.

  A hungry-looking young man named Paul chaired the plenary session the next day. He had a little white mouse with pink eyes with him, which scampered all over his back and down his shirt. Paul adored his little mouse, and called her Rosa. Margarita knew him slightly from those Sundays in Berlin spent knocking the doors of Neukölln and Wedding. He was an unemployed printer, originally from Düsseldorf, and spent every second of his time working for the KPD. He was the most committed of all of them and had sacrificed his entire life for many years to the communist cause. He had no other relationship – apart from Rosa – and he could be extremely impatient and sharp-tongued, especially if he thought somebody was slacking, and so had offended many comrades. Although he had never criticised her personally, Margarita had never warmed to him and felt the feeling to be mutual.

  If the discussion threatened to drift, Paul was the one who brought it back to the core issue. They were discussing the situation in France that morning, and he was highly critical of the French Communist Party, who, as far he was concerned, was a sieve, losing members as fast as they poured in. Lack of discipline was to blame, with everybody coming and going as they liked.

  ‘In contrast to our French comrades, I expect one hundred percent from everybody,’ declared Paul, ‘including Rosa.’

  ‘Mr One Hundred Percent,’ became his nickname. That afternoon, Ulrike wrote 100% in chalk on the back of his waistcoat.

  ‘Why are you laughing? What’s the joke? What’s so funny?’ he said irritably, to suppressed snorts of laughter. ‘Come along, come along. The revolution will never happen like this.’

  Margarita had noticed how, from that first night when Kai-Olaf walked through the door – ducking to avoid hitting his head on the low lintel – Vicky’s eyes were constantly fixed upon him, following his every move. As Vicky never had more than a coffee and a cigarette for her own breakfast, Margarita couldn’t help asking her if she had her eye on Kai-Olaf. Vicky answered sharply, ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘Just the way you behave around him.’

  ‘You don’t understand anything. The cause is more important to Kai-Olaf than any woman’s love.’