"Communazis"

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

The New York Times
January 28, 2001, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section 7; Page 25; Column 2; Book Review Desk
HEADLINE: Big Brother
BYLINE:  By Martin Jay; Martin Jay is chairman of the history 
department at the University of California, Berkeley.

"Communazis"
FBI Surveillance of German Emigre Writers.
By Alexander Stephan.
Translated by Jan van Heurck.
Illustrated. 350 pp. New Haven:
Yale University Press. $29.95.

A round the time of the collapse of Communism, a German historian 
sought access to government files kept on prominent intellectuals and 
artists suspected of sedition. He found some 14,000 documents, 
revealing a wide pattern of surveillance.  Taken as a whole, the 
evidence shows a government obsessed with the beliefs and personal 
lives, as well as political actions, of those who might challenge its 
legitimacy.

It was not, however, East Germany's Stasi who did the spying, and the 
Germans under surveillance were not its citizens.  Instead, the files 
examined by Alexander Stephan were compiled two generations earlier 
by agencies of the American government and devoted to refugees from 
Nazi Germany whose role in enriching our cultural life has earned so 
much posthumous acclaim.  The extent and duration of the government's 
obsession with some of these aliens has not been made clear until now.

"'Communazis'" takes its title from the neologism coined after the 
1939 Hitler-Stalin pact by a disgruntled faction of the emigre left 
and then adopted by the F.B.I. to stigmatize those refugees whose 
alleged potential for subversion matched that of America's official 
enemies during World War II.  Although the F.B.I. was a prime mover 
in surveillance of the emigres, it was not alone; Stephan cites 
dossiers from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Office 
of Strategic Services, the Office of Censorship, the Central 
Intelligence Agency, various military intelligence services, the 
House Un-American Activities Committee and its California State 
Senate counterpart.  Well before McCarthyism, indeed while the United 
States and the Soviet Union were allies against Hitler, the mind-set 
and apparatus were firmly in place for the cold war hysteria that 
followed.

Some recent literature on that era has tried to strike a balance, 
claiming that among the innocents there were real witches who 
deserved to be hunted, genuine spies who did serious damage to this 
country's national interest.  In the case of the refugees considered 
by Stephan, however, such a charge is hard to sustain.  For most were 
literary figures -- like members of the family of Thomas Mann, Lion 
Feuchtwanger, Bertolt Brecht, Oskar Maria Graf, Anna Seghers -- who 
may have romanticized Stalin or excoriated capitalism, but had no 
access to military or diplomatic secrets.  Occasionally one of them, 
like Mann's daughter Erika, would be a willing informant; yet 
Washington kept files on them as well.  After 1943, their potential 
to foster a postwar policy toward a defeated Germany more 
accommodating to Soviet than Western interests seems to have been the 
main justification.  Ultimately, however, they played scarcely any 
part in the formulation of that policy.  Indeed, so little came of 
the excessive surveillance that only one emigre, Gerhart Eisler, was 
interned and deported; a handful were denied naturalization, most 
notably Feuchtwanger; and none lost citizenship already granted or 
were hindered from returning to Europe.

In retrospect, there is something absurd about the whole enterprise 
-- Walt Disney ratting on Thomas Mann to the F.B.I., J. Edgar 
Hoover's agents fixated on Klaus Mann's homosexual liaisons, Brecht 
pulling the wool over HUAC's eyes before skipping the country -- but 
the costs were very real.  The extent and tenacity of the 
surveillance raises disturbing questions about the fragility of our 
commitment to limiting government intrusion into the lives of 
Americans -- and those who seek refuge on our shores.  Why, one 
wonders after reading this book, when the names of former Gestapo or 
Stasi heads adorn no governmental buildings in Berlin, is the F.B.I. 
headquarters in Washington still named, despite all we now know of 
his sordid career, after J. Edgar Hoover?