Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949 -1962. Doris Lessing

Walpurgis Night. It was like Bosch. It was horrible. For years these scenes stayed in my mind, and then I returned to Hamburg after thirty years and told my publisher what I remembered, and he said, Impossible; nothing like that has ever happened here. You must be thinking of Berlin, or Munich.

      And indeed I saw the ruins in Berlin, miles of them, and I stood where the Brandenburg Gate had been. Much later, thirty years later, I went back and there was not a sign of ruins; you’d think the war had never happened. I met people who had been children just after the war in Berlin, and apart from being permanently hungry, what they remembered was playing in the bombed houses. They thought that was what a city was – streets sometimes whole, sometimes in ruins. Later they went to undamaged cities. One of these, who as a child had been half starved, had survived because his mother was working for the Americans; he saw a film with Orson Welles in it and said, ‘One day I’m going to eat as much as I like, and I’m going to be as fat as Orson Welles.’ And that indeed came to pass, and then he was in trouble with his doctor and had to go on a diet.

      I went on a trip with Jack to southern Germany. It is recorded in ‘The Eye of God in Paradise’. The mood in Germany was so bad then, so low, so angry. The experience depressed me, and so did writing the story. Some Germans have reproached me for writing it, but the point of the story is not Germany but Europe: it was all of us I was thinking of, Europe building itself up, knocking itself down, building, destroying, building…

      The nastiest of my recollections of Germany was of a woman coming up to me on a railway platform to complain that Germany had been divided. Her fatherland was cut in half. Did I know of this injustice? Was it fair? What had Germany done to be punished in this way? Other people came to join her, all assaulting me with voices full of the insincerity that goes with a consciously false position.

      Jack went to Germany partly out of political conviction. As a Marxist he refused to believe in national characteristics, national guilt, but this was the country that had murdered nearly all his family.

      I was full of conflict. I had been brought up on the First World War, and a good part of that was my father’s passionate identification with the ordinary German soldiers, who were victims of their stupid government, just like the Tommies. I had been married to a refugee from Hitler’s Germany. I had been brought up to believe that Hitler and the Nazis were a direct result of the Versailles Treaty and that if Germany had been treated with an intelligent generosity, there would have been no World War II. I believed – and still do – that the Second World War would have been prevented if we, Britain and France, had had the guts to stand up to Hitler early and had supported the anti-Nazi Germans, whom we consistently snubbed. Being in Germany then was so painful: I was divided, sorry for the Germans, and yet hearing German or seeing a sign in German still reminded me of the fear I felt in the war, though I believed this reaction to be stupid and irrational. There was a day, or rather a night, when, standing on a railway platform in Berlin and realizing that every person on it was a cripple from the War – legless men, armless men, eyeless men, and all drunk, in that particular way of being drunk in war or bad times, a bitter drunkenness – I said to myself, Enough, stop tormenting yourself: this is like voluntarily rubbing one’s nose in one’s own vomit. What am I doing this for? What good does it do to me – or the Germans? And I did not go back to Germany for decades. And then Germany was whole again, and that landscape of misery and destruction had vanished. Please God, for ever.

      And now I have to record what was probably the most neurotic act of my life. I decided to join the Communist Party. And this at a time when my ‘doubts’ had become something like a steady, private torment. Separate manifestations of the horror that the Soviet Union had become were discussed, briefly, in lowered voices – the equivalent of looking over one’s shoulder to see if anyone could hear. I do not remember one serious, sit-down, in-depth discussion about the implications of what we were hearing. Rather, sudden burstings into tears: ‘Oh, it’s so horrible.’ Sudden storms of accusation: ‘It’s just anti-Soviet propaganda anyway.’ Marital quarrels, even divorces.

      People complain that old Reds ‘try to justify themselves’. These are nearly all young people, for older ones understand exactly why it was natural to be a communist. To explain, to ‘bear witness’, is not to justify.

      To spell out the paradox: All over Europe, and to a much lesser extent the United States, it was the most sensitive, compassionate, socially concerned people who became communists. (Among these were a very different kind of people, the power-lovers.) These decent, kind people supported the worst, the most brutal tyranny of our time – with the exception of communist China. Hitler’s Germany, which lasted thirteen years, was an infant in terror compared to Stalin’s regime – and yes, I am taking into account the Holocaust.

      The first and main fact, the ‘mind-set’ of those times, was that it was taken for granted capitalism was doomed, was on its way out. Capitalism was responsible for every social ill, war included. Communism was the future for all mankind. I used to hear earnest proselytizers say, ‘Let me have anyone for a couple of hours, and I can persuade him that communism is the only answer. Because it is obvious that it is.’ Communism’s hands were not exactly clean? Or, to put it as the comrades did, ‘There have been mistakes’? That was because the first communist country had been backward Russia; but if the first country had been Germany, that would have been a very different matter! (The fact that the Soviet Union had inherited the oldest and most successful empire in the world was decades away from being noticed.) Soon, when the industrially developed countries became communist, we would all see a very different type of communism.

      I have been tempted to write a chapter headed ‘Politics’, so that it could be skipped by people who find the whole subject boring, but politics permeated everything then; the Cold War was a poisonous miasma. And yet it is hard from present perspectives to make sense of a way of thinking I now think was lunatic. Does it matter if one woman succumbed to lunacy? No. But I am talking of a generation, and we were part of some kind of social psychosis or mass self-hypnosis. I am not trying to justify it when I say that I now believe all mass movements – religious, political – are a kind of mass hysteria and, a generation or so later, people must say, But how could you believe … whatever it was?

      Belief – that’s the word. This was a religious set of mind, identical with that of passionate religious True Believers. Arthur Koesder and others wrote a book called The God That Failed, and now it is a commonplace to say that communism is a religion. But to use that phrase is not necessarily to understand it. What communism inherited was not merely the fervours but a landscape of goodies and baddies, the saved and the unredeemed. We inherited the mental framework of Christianity. Hell: capitalism; all bad. A Redeemer, all good – Lenin, Stalin, Mao. Purgatory: you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs (lagers; concentration camps, and the rest). Then paradise … then heaven … then Utopia.

      Yet I was far from a true believer. For one thing, Jack, the most serious love of my life, embodied the conflicts or, if you like, the ‘contradictions’ of communism: eleven of his closest friends, his comrades, his real family, had been hanged as traitors. When I said to Jack I was thinking of joining the Party, he said I was making a mistake – and it must have hurt him most horribly to say it. Yet he knew, having been through all those mills himself, it was a waste of time saying it. ‘You’ll grow out of it,’ was what I could have heard.

      Arthur Koestler said that every communist who stayed in the Communist Party in the face of all the evidence had a secret explanation for what was happening, and this could not be discussed with friends and comrades. Some of the communists I knew had decided that yes, the reported crimes were true – though of course not as bad as the capitalist press said – but that Comrade Stalin could not possibly know about what was going on. The truth was being kept from Uncle Joe. My rationalization, my ‘secret belief – and it certainly could not be discussed with anyone but Jack – was that the leadership of the Soviet Union had become corrupt but that waiting everywhere in the communist world were the good communists, keeping their counsel, and they would at the right time take power, and then communism would resume its march to the just society, the perfect society. There was just one little thing: I didn’t realize Uncle Joe had murdered them all.

      And then there was this business