Snowbound

Spare, high-domed Alfred Kantorowicz was one of East Germany's leading intellectuals, onetime intimate of Heinrich Mann, Romain Rolland and Ernest Hemingway, the founder of a guild of anti-Nazi writers in exile, the author himself of half a dozen books, including a lively portrait of the 21-nation battalion he commanded in the Spanish Civil War.

A Communist for 26 of his 58 years, he fled before Hitler's conquering armies to safety in the U.S., returned to East Germany after World War II. as did his Communist friends Gerhart and Hanns Eisler,* to revile the country that had granted him asylum. "Kantor," as he was called, put out a highbrow Marxist review called Ost und West, and peddled the rest of his poison in the Soviets' German-language newspaper Taegliche Rundschau. The Taegliche Rundschau saluted Kantor, the saturnine lecturer on German literature at East Berlin's Humboldt University, as "a pioneer, a pathfinder of the future German democracy."

Off the Path. But somewhere along the twists of the post-Stalinist line. Kantor got off the path to East Germany's future. Like so many other satellite intellectuals, he had kicked off his snowshoes in the cultural thaw that followed Khrushchev's attack on Stalinist tyranny. In June 1956. at a time when the rest of the world was yet only dimly aware of the courageous activities of dissident writers of Budapest's Petofi Club, Kantor gave them guarded support in the Communist Berliner Zeitun'g. After the Petofi protest became the Hungarian revolt, all Eastern Europe was buried under the snowdrifts of renewed cultural repression. Bleakly, Kantor declined to sign a petition ordered by Party Boss Walter Ulbricht condemning the role of the Petofi Club in touching off the Hungarian revolt. The trial last March of his fellow professor. Wolfgang Harich, and the arrest and trial later of four other intellectual deviators put him on notice. And when Khrushchev's visit last month sealed Ulbricht's party control over literature. Kantorowicz finally took the path to West Berlin.

The Last Illusion. Over Radio Free Berlin he explained: "I postponed this decision for years and years in the desperate hope that the surfeit of rudeness, stupidity, violence and injustice, the flooding lies and suppression of spiritual freedom were only convulsions of a transitional period." But "the Hungarian tragedy--so heart-sickening and nerve-rending, particularly for old Communists," had destroyed "the last hope, the last illusion. While we believed we were fighting for freedom and right and against fascist barbarism, fascism and barbarism have risen again behind us, in word and deed and spirit."

Many are the refugees who stream across to West Berlin to freedom, and Communist East Germany's general reaction is good riddance. But Kantorowicz's broadcast seemed to bother the Communists very much. Seven tame literary idols, among them Anna (The Seventh Cross) Seghers, were trotted out to condemn their comrade's "stab in the back." Nonsense, retorted Kantor easily, "most of those writers feel the same way I do."

* Gerhart last week solemnly proposed that Russia be given a "peace prize" for developing an intercontinental ballistic missile.

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