"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?