Koch, Stephen Source: Partisan Review; Fall98, Vol. 65 Issue 4, p664, 4p Document Type: Book Review Subject Terms: *BOOKS Reviews & Products: MAN Without a Face (Book) Abstract: Reviews the book `Man Without A Face: The Autobiography of Communism's Greatest Spymaster,' by Markus Wolf, with Anne McElvoy.
Koch has written an entertaining book on Willi Munzenberg, the Comintern and the US and European left intelligentsia.
Wolf in Wolf's Clothing., By: Buruma, Ian, New Republic, 00286583, 7/14/97-7/21/97, Vol. 217, Issue 2/3 Database: Academic Search Premier
Even the most revolting regimes usually have at least one dapper little charmer in their highest ranks, the type of guy who gives wickedness a human face, a well-mannered, well-dressed, well-educated diner with the devil. Such figures--Albert Speer, say, or Zhou Enlai--hold a special fascination for many people. They perform a triple function. For a start, they make it easier to justify one's own fellow-travelling follies. If Maoism was good enough for a nice man like Zhou, why then should I feel bad about having admired the little red book myself? Or, a variation on the theme: if Maoism was good enough for a nice man like Zhou, it can't have been all bad.
Then there is the glamour attached to the elegant rogue. The suave gangster with impeccable manners and a fine library is a sexier, more mysterious figure than the uncouth thug. The exquisite exterior, hiding a heart of darkness: What greater frisson can one desire? And the third reason for our fascination with these smoothies is that they make us wonder what such sophisticates are doing in the company of gangsters, murderers and oppressors. The perplexity, of course, is naive. After all, why should murderers or oppressors be men without breeding or taste? Hans Frank, the Nazi slavemaster in Cracow, is said to have played Chopin beautifully. Still, our belief in the redeeming power of culture keeps us wondering.
Not every member of the former East German Ministry of State Security (Stasi) was a gangster, but most were certainly less than couth. This is why the subject at hand, the man whose face we now know well, General Markus "Mischa" Wolf, stands out. He is the Speer, the Zhou, the Dapper Don of the Stasi. By most accounts this smoothest of operators, who was East Germany's spymaster for almost forty years, is excellent company. So what was this nice, thoughtful, cultivated, handsome man doing with all those fat-necked "heads of concrete"?
There is a magical moment in Marcel Ophuls's November Days, his documentary about the fall of the Berlin Wall, when he interviews Wolf at the great spy's dacha. Wolf waves away any suggestion that he knew anything about the building of the Wall, or about torture in Stasi jails, or about blackmailing people. All that was done by others. He, Wolf, was a gentleman doing his duty. Ophuls then decides, quite deliberately, to play the Jewish card. Both men grew up in Germany, with Jewish fathers, who were forced to escape the Nazis--Wolf's father, Friedrich, took his family to Moscow; Marcel's father, Max, took his family to Hollywood. Ophuls tries to shame Wolf by comparing him to Klaus Barbie. The ploy doesn't work. Wolf simply denies that he ever used, or countenanced the use of, violence. Quite the contrary, he says. The trouble with him is that he was always too naive, too trusting. He smiles sweetly, accepts a cigarette, sits back and prepares to launch into an amusing anecdote about compromising an enemy of the people with a girl. Ophuls watches him quietly, sadly, and we hear the music from one of his father's Hollywood movies. "Listening to you," he says, "I think to myself, Marcel, how lucky you are. Our fathers had the same ideas. Who wasn't on the left in the Weimar Republic? But how lucky I am that the film director, Max Ophuls, decided to move West instead of East."
But this lets Wolf off the hook too easily. It suggests that he was entirely a victim of circumstances, a man whose life was plotted for him, a helpless refugee trapped in Stalin's empire. You almost forget that there were many other communist refugees who left the Soviet bloc (if they hadn't been killed in some purge), and few, if any, of them became Stasi generals. Yet the idea rather tickles Wolf's own fancy. Yes, he says, Ophuls might well have a point. Wolf, in his book, which serves no one so well as himself, is always the humble servant of a kind of moral force majeure: superior orders, the higher call of duty, patriotism, idealism, and so forth. But here he gives his tale a particular spin, clearly aimed at hooking our sympathies: it is the argument of Man Without a Face that the story of Markus Wolf is the story of a good Jew who spent his whole life fighting fascism.
The dishonesty with which Wolf presents this case is almost childish. In the opening chapter, we are told that, although his mother was a Gentile, Wolf was "Jewish enough to have been categorized and persecuted under the Nuremberg racial laws promulgated in 1936...." He goes on to say that although his ideology and "the ruptures of the Cold War" should have made him an enemy of Israel, he always retained "an interest in Jewish affairs." Never mind that the Nuremberg laws date from 1935, and that Wolf would have been counted as a Mischling, a somewhat safer category than a Jew. The point here is that his victim status is meant to excuse his role in persecuting others. "Jewish affairs," he says piously. What Jewish affairs? If Wolf felt such a bond with the Jewish people, what was he doing training PLO terrorists?
Near the end of his book, Wolf repeats his main apologia: "Hitler's long shadow was one of the reasons I agreed to the idea of working for a secret service." West Germany, you see, was still full of ex-Nazis, whose plots to revive the Third Reich had to be stopped by whatever means possible. Earlier on, however, Wolf gives a more plausible explanation for his peculiar career move. It could be summed up in that fine German phrase: Befehl ist Befehl. In 1952, he was a young communist on the make in Berlin, and Walter Ulbricht ordered him to run his spy operation. As Wolf puts it, "refusal would have been impossible, given my understanding of duty, Party discipline, and the demands of the Cold War."
The antifascist cause hoodwinked a great many people. Yet I do not believe, after reading Wolf's book, that he was really taken in. It is true that many Germans, including some prominent Jewish artists and intellectuals, believed that the German Democratic Republic would be the "good" Germany, which would purge the nation of its Nazi past. Since Hitler declared war on Bolshevism and attacked the Soviet Union, communism gained respectability as the vanguard of antifascism. To some deluded Europeans--the Cambridge spies, for example--Moscow was the only hope against the Nazis. True believers, encouraged by Soviet propaganda, concluded that any enemy of communism had to be a fascist.
This attitude had a profound influence on the cold war, especially in Germany. West German leftists and liberals, many of whom came of age around 1968, reading Marcuse, Adorno, and Chomsky, were haunted by the idea that the capitalist state was dominated by ex-Nazis, that the Fourth Reich was just around the corner. West German capitalism was seen by the "antifascists" as a disguised continuation of Nazism. Wolf's Stasi did everything to promote this notion by publishing the names of old Nazis whenever they popped up in the federal government. (And some did pop up.) Many young West Germans were also filled with displaced guilt for their parents' lack of resistance to, or active liking of, Hitler. They would not make the same mistake. They would resist fascism wherever it reared its nasty head--in Germany, of course, but also in Israel, Vietnam or Latin America. The main enemies of Markus Wolf's state were Zionism, American imperialism, and West German capitalism. Since Wolf's state was fighting "fascism," all his enemies were ipso facto fascists.
It is not surprising, then, that West German "antifa" circles were the perfect breeding ground for Wolf's recruits. His insights into the mentality of such people are invariably interesting. One of his best spies in the West was "Gaby" Gast, the highest-placed woman in the West German intelligence service. Typically, Wolf first sent one of his men to seduce this rather pathetic woman, but there was genuine political sentiment there to exploit. Gaby once sent a book to Wolf about Nuremberg, inscribed with these words: "The Old still lurks beneath the facade of the New. Thirty Years after Nuremberg, the struggle for the New must go on." That was the great thing about communism: it was forever New.
One of Wolf's great assets as a cold war spymaster was his understanding of the psychology of his recruits, perhaps because he shared it to some extent. Thus he observes that Gaby liked the feeling of belonging to a special community. The idea of being part of "an elite, a secretive club fighting for a noble ideal," he says, was "of particular importance to Westerners from upper-middle-class backgrounds with strong and complex personalities." One immediately thinks of Guy Burgess or Anthony Blunt--but also, I guess, of Markus Wolf himself. The potent mix of idealism, secret power and snobbery should never be underestimated.
Wolf's background is undoubtedly on the upper end of the middle class. As well as being a devout Communist, his father, Friedrich, was a doctor and a famous playwright. Where did the idealism come from? Once again, Wolf brings up the Jewish factor. His father's "journey from humanitarian to communist," he says, "was strongly influenced by his social awareness as a German of Jewish ancestry." Well, I wonder. To be sure, communism had an egalitarian, internationalist appeal to many Jews, starting with that well-known anti-Semite Karl Marx. But the story of Friedrich Wolf strikes me as more German than Jewish. His conversion to the communist creed took place long before Hitler became a figure on the scene. In fact, Hitler, so far as one can see, had nothing to do with it.
Friedrich Wolf was the son of a smalltown haberdasher. According to Markus, his grandparents were pious Jews who wanted their son to be a rabbi. This may be yet another attempt to tug at our heartstrings. There is no evidence for this story. Quite the contrary, Alexander Reichenbach, one of Markus Wolf's biographers, found that Friedrich's parents pressed him to become a doctor--also a Jewish tradition, but a less exotic kind. As a student, Friedrich developed enthusiasms that might sound a bit cranky to us, but were common in the Germany of his youth. He became a fervent lover of nature, of simple, natural folk with simple, natural folk culture. To escape from the decadent materialism of urban civilization, he started a Wandervogel group with fellow naturalists. They studied folkish ways, went on long walks, sang folkish songs, ate only vegetables and did a great deal of open air gymnastics. Later, Friedrich gained fame as a naturalist with a book called Nature as Healer and Helper, richly illustrated with photographs of Friedrich striking nude poses with spears, or engaging in calisthenics. In those pictures you may see also the future Stasi general in the nude, riding his father's well-toned thighs.
The author of an East German hagiography observes that Friedrich's folkish, naturalist zeal rather lent itself to fascism, but that he chose to be on the side of the proletariat instead. World War One came. Friedrich was keen at first, but the shock of the battlefield carnage convinced him that only communism would defeat militarism and guarantee world peace. This insight dawned in 1918, but he became an official member of the German Communist Party only ten years later. Before that date he had glimpses of alternative utopias: Tolstoy in particular was an early guru. Markus must have inherited some of his father's weakness for woolly philosophers. He refers to Daisaku Ikeda, a ruthless operator who runs the Soka Gakkai, a shallow, semi-Buddhist organization, as a "great contemporary Japanese philosopher."
In the 1920s, Wolf wrote ideological plays about the rottenness of bourgeois society and the glorious proletarian future. He also saw the sun shining from Moscow. Already in 1925, he wrote to his mother that he felt "drawn east." The fact, then, that he decided to seek refuge in the Soviet Union, when Hitler came to power, was not a coincidence. Although he remained a patriotic German, Moscow was his Mecca. Markus does not disguise the price that his father paid for this, when the family moved there in 1934. This was not a good time, after all, to be in Russia. Wolf describes, rather delicately, how many of his schoolteachers "disappeared" during Stalin's purges. Even his own father, the playwright who had extolled Soviet Union communism as the path to future paradise, was terrified. "When the doorbell rang unexpectedly one night, my usually calm father leapt to his feet and let out a violent curse. When it emerged that the visitor was only a neighbor intent on borrowing something, he regained his savoir-faire, but his hands trembled for a good half hour."
This, you might think, would be enough to put a person off communism for life. But Wolf explains that he was incapable himself of seeing "our socialist system" as a tyranny. He overlooked Stalin's crimes because the family had been rescued from the Nazis. But this doesn't explain the commitment of his father, whose conversion happened earlier and lasted to his death. Friedrich Wolf remained a dreamer. Despite Stalinism, the purges, the millions of deaths, he kept the faith. The interesting question is whether the same is true of his son.
In his book, Wolf says that he still believes in Communism. His concluding words are: "A demain, Karl. Until Tomorrow, Karl." It sounds like a bad line in one of his father's plays. Wolf still cannot bring himself to believe that there was anything wrong with the theory itself. All that was wrong was the manner in which the theory was put into practice. Stalin's crimes, he says, in the tired old refrain, "were not the logical outcome of Communist theory, but a violation of communism." Maybe this is more than a self-serving justification. Maybe Wolf really believes it. It would be polite to give him the benefit of the doubt. Still, as he himself remarks, "one of the perils of being a spy chief is that you are not believed even when you do come clean."
Wolf's book does not leave me with the impression that idealism is what drives him. Political ideas do not seem his forte, or his main interest. If there is one sentence in the book that sounds completely credible, it is this one, about his father, who congratulated his son on acquiring Soviet citizenship in 1939, the very year that Hitler made a pact with Stalin. "... [A]s I grew older, I realized that my father's infectious utopianism was not my natural leaning. I was of a more pragmatic temperament." This is Markus Wolf, the ambitious technocrat, the shrewd climber up any available ladder, speaking. From the Soviet Young Pioneers to the Comintern School, from the Ministry of State Security to the talk show circuit and the book tour, Wolf has convincingly demonstrated one thing: he knows how to operate.
Far from being naive or trustful or idealistic, Wolf comes across as an essentially cynical man who knows how to manipulate people to his own ends. That is what made him a superb spy chief. It is also, I suppose, what makes him better company than the fanatical ideologues or humorless drudges with whom he spent much of his working life. The mover who knows how to get on in any regime can be witty and worldly-wise. But that doesn't make him in any way less reprehensible.
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Ex-Stasi Spy Chief Markus Wolf Hired By Homeland Security?
Prison Planet | December 6 2004
Political analyst Al Martin, who has in the past proven accurate in getting ahead of the news curve, is reporting that Homeland Security have hired former Stasi head, the 'Silver Fox' Markus Wolf.
SNORT. Al Martin is a far right crank, http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/december2004/061204wolfhired.htm
http://cicentre.com/BK/BOOKS_Melton_US_1.html
Markus Wolf reads the updated Ultimate Spy book
by CI Centre professor Keith Melton
Updated with 32 new pages and photos and new foreword written by Richard Helms and Markus Wolf.