Flak Magazine: Review of Communazis, 2.10.01

The story told in Alexander Stephan's "'Communazis': FBI Surveillance of German Émigré Writers" has all the makings of a tragic novel. Great authors and playwrights are forced to flee a homeland gripped by a fascist system about to go to war. They move to a country that neither recognizes nor respects them, but instead sends its security services to track their every move. And when they return home, after the war, they are met by a society that would rather forget the past, its artists included. They die, largely, in obscurity.

Unfortunately, this isn't fiction — dozens of world-renowned artists fled Germany after the Nazi takeover, and a number of them settled in the United States, hoping to take advantage of the "American Dream" and, more practically, the country's enormous theater and film industries. What they found, however, was a nation that, for the most part, wanted nothing to do with them — although a few, such as Bertolt Brecht, had successful careers in Hollywood, most were unable to transplant their literary fame.

Instead, German writers were meticulously tracked by the FBI, as well as the INS, the State Department and the precursor to the CIA, the Office of Strategic Services. These agencies, and the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover especially, were convinced that these authors were left-wing radicals, often for the simple reason that they were opposed to Nazism. (The book's title derives from the catch-all phrase for politically active European émigrés; they were either Communists or Nazis, so the thinking went, and for all intents and purposes the two meant the same thing.)

Although German artists from across the creative spectrum came under the watchful eye of the FBI, Stephan focuses only on authors and playwrights, presenting an exhaustive discussion of the files of literary luminaries such as Thomas, Heinrich and Klaus Mann; Brecht; Lion Feuchtwanger; and Erik Maria Remarque. Getting the files was no easy task — Stephan, a professor of German at Ohio State University, filed a Freedom of Information Act request for them in the late 1980s; he finally received a very thoroughly edited set in 1993.

You might think that after all this to-do about secret government files, combined with the rather conspiratorial subject matter, the final product would be a tense and gripping story. Unfortunately, "Communazis" comes nearer to Geraldo's opening of Al Capone's "vault" than a real-life thriller — a great premise, a gripping buildup, but no return.

It turns out that for all its snooping, nothing ever came of the American intelligence community's dogged attempts to catch these writers, er, red-handed. As Stephan himself admits, "I found no indication that any deportation, long-term internment or attempt to revoke U.S. citizenship was ever carried out."

"Communazis" ends up being less a book about G-Men and Communists and more a portrait of the indirect ways in which the modern state security apparatus evolved. Stephan weaves a subtle argument throughout the book — namely, that the entire pursuit of German writers was merely a vehicle, a justification for the expansion of the government's ability to monitor and surreptitiously control its citizens. "The scattered handful of refugees in the United States and Mexico," he writes, "came under fire from the FBI not because they were Germans, and more or less left-wing to boot, but because the Bureau ... was expanding rapidly and needed new enemies."

At times, though, this argument becomes too subtle; the reader finds himself wading through page after page of meaningless verbiage about the contents of Oskar Maria Graf's FBI file. Oskar who? Exactly. Frankly, anyone not fascinated by German literary trivia would do best to put the book down after the first chapter (which is, admittedly, an excellent overview of the position of the FBI within the political and cultural context of the 1930s).

At the same time, while Stephan's dry prose and narrow, bureaucratic focus do a good job mirroring the burgeoning state system it highlights, you also get the feeling that there is a whole lot left out. Most noticeable, of course, are the hundreds of documents containing blacked-out names and even whole paragraphs; logically, that is where the really juicy stuff is, but Stephan sees fit to gloss over that rather inconvenient fact completely.

But the narrow approach of "Communazis" is also troublesome because we never get beyond the names and politics presented in the files. Lots of folks appreciate the stories of Thomas Mann or the plays of Bertolt Brecht, but it's hard to empathize with them when we don't know anything about them as real, flesh-and-blood people.

It is as if, their literary works aside, these writers never really existed outside of their FBI and INS files. And while this may not have been Stephan's intention, it is nevertheless a wonderfully sublime and horrifying comment on modern American society — if someone as creative and illustrious as Thomas Mann can be reduced to a stack of paper, what does that mean for the rest of us?

— Clay Risen (clay@flakmag.com)