A Ghost Walks

THE OWL OF MINERVA (375 pp.)--Gustav Regler--Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($5).

If Gustav Regler's autobiography reads as if it were ghostwritten, it is probably because it was written by a ghost. The ghost is Regler himself, in his time a noisy political poltergeist. With a good man's dedication to his delusions, he played a man's part in inhuman situations throughout three dreadful decades.

Like a German Malraux, but endowed with less literary talent and less luck, he touched all wars, all revolutions, all causes; born a Roman Catholic in 1897, he was by turns a boy soldier in the Kaiser's army, a student Freikorpsmann, i.e., pre-stormtrooper, a follower of the doomed German left, an anti-Hitler refugee in Paris, a political commissar with the Red forces in Spain, a refugee again in Mexico. Now this richly wounded hero of the class war, living in Mexico and blacklisted by both left and right, has returned to haunt an affluent generation that does not believe in ghosts but is scared of them.

Fate and temperament tangled Regler's life in the great philosophical confrontations of this century and their bloody outcome. Therefore, unlike the autobiographies of happier men, his depends on an understanding of the forces of which he made himself a servant. This understanding is often missing, or at best offers the cold comfort of wisdom after the event. As his first political experience--when he was a boy of five in his home town in the German Saarland--Regler recalls watching a policeman drag the local tailor by the ear up the town hall steps to face judgment for some obscure misdeed. From that moment on, compassion for any victim whose ears were twisted by authority animated Gustav Regler--but also led him to join political forces that knew no compassion.

False Monastery. Regler's nature--his excess of pity, turning to rage when frustrated--would have given him a hard time in any society. In the chaos of Germany after World War I, it marked him for the Communist Party, which he joined with the simple feeling that "things can't go on like this." There is a good deal of spiritual agonizing and plain blundering before he winds his way out and comes to terms with reality. But, unlike so many other ex-Communist apologias, this is not an exercise in self-justification; Regler does not claim to have been "betrayed," but painfully pinpoints his own moral ambiguities as a pious prisoner in the "false monastery" of Marx.

Doubts had been with him all along, but as so many Communists have managed to do, he carried them like an unwelcome letter one postpones opening. A particularly doubt-provoking occasion was one he shared with Andre Malraux in Moscow in 1934. At the time, both men were prize exhibits in the Communist cultural front--Malraux, already a rising novelist (Man's Fate) and touring revolutionary. Regler, a noted refugee writer living in Paris (he had fled Germany just after the Nazis seized power in 1933). Cultured Comrades Regler and Malraux had to listen while Maxim Gorky key-noted a writers' jamboree with piffle that reached the lower depths of unreason. Gorky's dialectical materialist account of Greek mythology defied parody, e.g., Icarus was not a parable of hubris but a prototype of the Soviet rocket, and poor God himself "an artificial summing up of the products of labor."

"Monsieur is a trifle behind the times,"

Malraux whispered to Regler as Gorky droned on.

Graduation Gift. Both men took their doubts to be washed away in Spain's blood, but the pilgrimage worked for neither. They drifted back to France, trailing disillusion both with Red brutality and inefficiency. In 1939, after the Stalin-Hitler pact, the French interned Regler at Vernet, a camp set up for political exiles. As usual, pity for others rather than for himself marked his term there. He tried to ease the lot of some Orthodox Jews, and indiscriminately, of anyone in trouble. "Why do you worry about those clochards?", Fellow Inmate Arthur Koestler asked loftily. Helping "bums" was sentimental and thus bad politics.

But when Regler was released in 1940, he was proud of a graduation gift from the "bums"; it was a certificate: "By your departure, the camp is impoverished, but liberty is enriched." In the camp, too, he had heard Communist Gerhard Eisler presiding in a latrine over a party kangaroo court--an experience that afflicted him with further doubts, and diarrhea.

Regler sweated out the rest of World War II in Mexico, to receive the usual reward of those who give their non serviam to Communism--ostracism by friends, charges that he was in the pay of Washington, or of the Gestapo. Ironically, he was denied a U.S. visa, while Eisler, the latrine lawgiver, spent years in the U.S. as an unwelcome visitor.

The Pepper Gun. Through this tortured political tale runs a beautifully unexpected thread--a true love story. Marie Louise Vogeler, born into a bohemian-utopian-socialist circle in Germany, was first Gustav Regler's mistress, then his wife, and always his real conscience. As a young girl on the family farm, she knew left-wingers as loquacious loungers who would cut down a walnut tree under which Rilke had written a poem rather than walk farther for firewood--and knew at the same time that nothing good would come of that lot. Through her beauty and her faith in the things unseen, Regler eventually came to see his politics as stale and inhuman.

Her painful death, apparently of cancer, in Mexico in 1945--the final scenes accompanied by Mozart's Eine kleine Nachtmusik played by a visiting string orchestra--is described with more good faith than taste; her death seems to have liberated Regler from bitterness and the wish to judge. As a gesture against political bullies back home, Marie Louise once carried a bamboo blowpipe to puff pepper into the eyes of German police; pity had made her, too, willing to blind someone. Symbolically, Regler buried the pepper gun with her in her coffin.

Regler's book is an important memoir for anyone with a serious concern for the moral and political history of the last 40 years. Those who make themselves responsible for every fallen sparrow--or the twisted ear of every tailor--give themselves godlike rank but inevitably end in quite another echelon. This, if there is one, is Regler's message to his generation.

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