The Lesser of Two Great Evils: A Selection from Susan Neiman’s Learning from the Germans (2019)
“In 2003 the historian Tony Judt asked me to co-organize an international conference comparing fascism and communism. He thought it would be good for philosophers and historians to discuss the question together, and he wanted to do so at the Einstein Forum. The Remarque Institute at NYU, which he headed, could put up half the funds if I could find the other. Sitting in a basement restaurant in New York City, we began to plot the program.
‘One difference is this,’ said Tony, who’d been one of the first Western thinkers to criticize East European socialism from the left. ‘I’d sit down at a table with an ex-Stalinist. I wouldn’t sit down with an ex-Nazi.’
Only much later did I reflect that for most West Germans, the opposite was true. As children, they’d been likely to sit at the breakfast table every morning with an ex-Nazi or two; they were unlikely to have ever met an ex-Stalinist. At the time, I could only agree, and suggest an ex-Stalinist to invite.
‘Markus Wolf is a stroke of genius,’ said Tony. ‘Do you think you can get him?’
During most of the many years that Markus Wolf headed the East German equivalent of the CIA, he was known as the man without a face, for he’d never been photographed. He was also said to run the best intelligence agency in the world, with the possible exception of the Mossad. In 1986 he retired and began to criticize the GDR government. He spent the first years of his retirement writing a moving and thoughtful memoir of his extraordinary life.
Born in 1923 in Germany, Mischa Wolf, as he was known, fled to Moscow with his parents and brother Konrad when the Nazis took power. His father, Friedrich, wasn’t religious, but like many others, he would have fallen foul of the Nazis on racial grounds. Friedrich didn’t wait for the Nuremberg Laws but left Germany in 1934, as he was not only a Jew but a communist who had dedicated his life as a doctor to improving health conditions among the poor, and writing antifascist plays on the side.
The family grew up in Moscow, under the shadow of Stalin’s terror but not directly affected by it, unlike many of their friends in the émigré community. (Possibly because Friedrich volunteered to serve as a doctor in Spain, believing, like many, that the Spanish Civil War was a less dangerous place than Moscow at the height of the Terror.) Unlike his younger brother, Konrad, who fought with the Red Army all the way to Berlin, Mischa worked behind the lines building airplanes. When the war was over, the family returned to Berlin, where their history and talents made them part of the GDR elite. Friedrich became the country’s first ambassador to Poland, Konrad became East Germany’s best filmmaker and later president of its Academy of Arts, and Mischa rose to become head of the Foreign Intelligence Service. When the Wall finally fell, Mischa was indicted for treason. After briefly fleeing to Moscow, he returned to stand trial in Berlin, where he was acquitted of all charges. The court agreed with the defense: every nation is entitled to a foreign intelligence service, and he was guilty of nothing but running East Germany’s very well.
Mischa Wolf said he’d be happy to accept our invitation, and asked what he should do for the conference. We’d agreed that informal dialogue would be better than a formal lecture. The question was, with whom? I asked Hans Otto Bräutigam if he would agree to a public discussion with Wolf. He asked for three days’ time to think it over. Wolf was happy to speak with Bräutigam, but as he’d never been allowed inside an English-speaking country, he wasn’t sure his English would be up to the task. I assured him that Tony and I would be happy to translate if the need arose, and that, I thought, was that.
It proved easier to interest historians in the conference topic than it was to engage philosophers; my field isn’t known for much reflection on actual events. But Tony was the sort of person who could persuade the distinguished historian Eric Hobsbawm to attend, even after lambasting his autobiography in The New York Review, so with a superb list of historians and others, I wrote to several German organizations that fund this sort of thing. They all gave the same answer: the conference looks splendid, they’d be happy to fund it—as long as I disinvited Markus Wolf.
I understood why Bräutigam had asked for time to think it over; he knew how controversial it would be. In the end I got the funding from the Open Society Foundation in New York, and the conference, which took place in 2005, was excellent. The discussion between Bräutigam and Wolf produced no earthshaking insights. They agreed on most essential matters; both held that though Stalinism was a perversion of an ideal of equality that began in the Enlightenment, Nazism had no ideals, beyond rampant tribalism, to pervert at all. Under Stalin, at the latest, communism turned totalitarian. But unless you believe states of mind have no meaning, there’s a world of difference between a person who began by fighting for equality and solidarity and one who began from a racist worldview. That’s why Tony was willing to meet with one, but wouldn’t share a table with the other.
Other speakers at the conference talked of differences between ideology and ethics, intention and circumstance, gray zones and accountability. Wolf’s English turned out to be better than he’d feared, and Tony and I were so impressed by him that we wanted to keep the conversation going. At the closing dinner of the conference, Tony invited Wolf to be a guest at the Remarque Institute the following year. Wolf was glad to agree; he’d never been to New York, he had a half brother in the States whom he hadn’t seen in half a century, and they were both getting on in years. Tony and I began to plan another joint event, this time in New York. I still have emails from him brimming with excitement over details.
But Mischa Wolf wasn’t granted a visa to enter the United States of America. After a number of angry inquiries, Tony learned that the refusal came from close to the top. Condoleezza Rice had conferred with Angela Merkel, who was not yet chancellor but the head of the opposition Christian Democratic Union. Both of them decided: no way. Tony protested and went through back channels, but the State Department stayed firm and the party Tony had planned so carefully never happened. Mischa Wolf died in his sleep a year later. He never got to see his half brother.”—Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (2019)
