The tale is told that on that zero hour day when the victors mobilized our children to carry mirrors, typewriters and other booty out of our flats and to the trainyard where it could wait in the rain to go to Russia, the Red Guillotine strode into the office of the Soviet military commandant—not a place which most Germans visited lightly—and he received her, drunk and wearing four wristwatches.
What you want, Frau? Frau no pretty; Frau get out!
I speak Russian, she answered in that language.
He looked astonished. She stood before him, waiting. Suddenly he peeled off a watch, thrust it at her, and said: Take it.
Thank you, Herr Commandant.
All Germans hate Russians. Do you hate Russians?
No.
I hate Germans.
That’s the reality.
Good. Drink with me.
And she did.
All right. Now what do you want?
Then she confided to him her dream. She longed to apply to Germany the progressive legal science of our Eastern mother, the Soviet Union.
Go back to 1919, when K. Liebknecht and R. Luxemburg were murdered by rightwing elements. Helene Marie Hildegard Lange, aged seventeen, burst into tears, lost her appetite, and practically stopped speaking to anyone.—But, Hilde, what can one do against such people? demanded her mother. It’s not only dangerous to fight them; it’s useless.
Frau Lange had much on her side: logic, experience, and, above all, love. But at the very moment when the girl had almost been convinced to “go on with her life,” she saw the memorial woodcut to Liebknecht, made by K. Kollwitz from drawings done at the morgue at the invitation of the family. The martyr’s head, thrown back upon the white nothingnesss of the paper, is runneled with the shadows of his final agony. Light shines on his chin and cheekbones. The bulletholes in his forehead have been pitiably concealed, or honored, by red flowers. The mouth’s final grimace is a downcurving semicircular groove. In the half-dozen sketches Kollwitz made, the face is nothing more than what it objectively was: dull, pale, inanimate. In fact, it may well be less. In the very first drawing the flowers have been omitted. Next comes the charcoal study, which retains detail but now, with the same motive and effect of a woman applying makeup, adds the moody smudginess of the medium to the corpse. Here the artist also introduces a line of mourning workers. Old women need more makeup than young; the dead need more still; so this eager-to-please K. Kollwitz next proceeds to an intaglio etching, darkening Liebknecht’s face to such an extent that the ear, eye-socket, cheekbone, hair and forehead are entirely gloomed over. The subsequent lithograph abstracts the scene into lines; the ink wash study, into brush-strokes; finally she settles on the woodcut, whose chisel-marks appear to dissect away every mourner’s face into underlying muscles and tendons; they’re all pale, sorrowing corpses in the darkness around the dead man’s face, a few more planes, crescents and angles of which have been restored to the light but which remain as in those first sketches a portrait of nothingness, now solidified into something akin to an ebony idol. What about the most prominent part of the image, the bier itself? It’s white nothingness—more exactly, it’s a long white mummy-shroud with a few straight ripples of blackness across its edges. In 1960, immediately following the premier of “Comrade Berlin,” there was a banquet in honor of the filmmaker, a certain R. L. Karmen, who in between nibbles of our excellent German cheese informed the Red Guillotine that this daring device of blankness in the Liebknecht memorial sheet had inspired him to something similar in his documentary on the opening of our first blast furnace at Krasnogorsk: he’d omitted the ceremony itself!—As for the Red Guillotine, what effect might Kollwitz’s graphic starkness have produced on her? (We Communists say, if it has no practically measurable effect, it’s not people’s art!) Speaking strictly as an aesthetic critic, not as Comrade Alexandrov, I’d have to reply that what this woodcut teaches us is simplification and abstraction.
And so Fräulein Lange decided to study law at Heidelberg. Her mother asked why. She replied: I believe I will be able to help the victims of injustice.
Please think better of this, darling. It’s one thing to go into law, and entirely another to—
In a steely voice she said: They murdered Liebknecht and his daughter is going into law! That’s why I’m going into law.
Her mother could do nothing with her.
The legend informs us that she was one of the best students, and perhaps the best of all. She sometimes dreamed of a golden box which could not be opened. She was searching for the key. Someday she would find it, and then…
She did piecework in a metal shop to earn her tuition. As the legend tells it, she was practically a member of the working class. Late one night, having finished at the lathe, she locked up and walked to her tram stop, arriving just as a beggar like a troll or kobold, whose few sodden hairs clung to his wrinkled skull, snatched away an old woman’s purse. Fräulein Lange looked on silently. Even then she had a reputation for impartiality.
On 27.2.26 she married Comrade Georg Benjamin, a physician, whom the legend is quick to remind us was also Superintendent of Schools in Berlin-Wedding, a working-class quarter. In 11.27, finally understanding the maxim of Comrade Ulbricht that Social Democracy equals Social Fascism, she joined the only legitimate organization of the proletariat, the Communist Party. Two years later she took on the legal defense of our Red Help organization, to which K. Kollwitz also contributed with her poster-propaganda.
Bourgeois historians, romantics and deviants prefer to remember Weimar Berlin as a concretion of the Princess Café’s private niches, where Georg’s brother Walter and Walter’s poet friend Heinle used to meet prostitutes. They commemorate the old men with canes and tophats at the Prussian Academy, last survivors of a dying class, who considered themselves entitled to “reward” Kollwitz’s achievements when objectively speaking they were nothing more than hypocritically rarefied imitations of the lesbians at Schwerinstrasse-13, who couldn’t stop dreaming about a certain Lina’s pretty knees! Well, let the gentlemen of the bourgeoisie remember Berlin any way they please. As Comrade Khruschev promised us, we will bury them.
From our heroine’s point of view, Berlin was nothing but one chamber after another of the Imperial Labor Court, where she became one of the fieriest accusers of the bourgeois state, inspired by the memory of Comrade Liebknecht. In those days her love for the future was impatient and angry, like the mother’s who brushes her child’s curls a trifle too hard, ignoring its screams, so that it will be perfect for school. She proved particularly uncompromising when she defended strikers against trumped-up charges of disturbing the peace. In the Fourth Criminal Senate, she battled year after year against the malignant Dr. Niedner. The more dissatisfied she became with the world around her, the more convincingly she dreamed. That is why she spoke out so effectively at Party rallies, always advising us to fight the capitalists without compromise; she taught us the slogan Release the proletarian prisoners! As Comrade Liebknecht had done, she called for the organs of the Prussian-German bourgeois state to be replaced by workers’ and soldiers’ councils, for the generals and aristocrats to face justice in revolutionary tribunals. Her mother had bad dreams now; she dreaded that Hilde might meet Comrade Liebknecht’s fate. Hilde stood ready. The legend informs us that in that period, Communist Hilde Benjamin was clear that her most important work was the realization of the Party’s decisions.