Thou livest, report me and my cause aright
To the unsatisfied.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 2
“But who then, at that time [during the Stalinist repression],
protested? Who stood up to shout his disgust? The Trotskyists can claim this
honour. Following the example of their leader, who paid for his stubbornness by
receiving the blow of an axe, they fought Stalinism totally, and they were the
only ones. At the time of the great purges, they could no longer shout out
their revolt except in the frozen vastness to which they were dragged to be
more easily exterminated.”
Leopold Trepper: The Great Game
One of my favourite bookshops is the Amnesty International
in Hammersmith, London. It is neither pretentious nor ostentatious, just a
straightforward second-hand bookshop. I like it because you occasionally find a
gem of a book. One such book was Peter Weiss’s Trotsky in Exile. I usually
steer well clear of books on Trotsky’s life because they are inadvertently
written by writers who are politically hostile to Trotsky and generally not
worth reading, let alone reviewing. However, this play or book is different.
“Trotsky in Exile” is a play by German playwright and artist
Peter Weiss, first performed in 1968. The play is a fictionalised account of
the last years of Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky’s life. Trotsky was
residing in exile in Mexico and under constant threat from Stalin’s assassins.
The play is structured as a series of dialogues between
Trotsky and various figures from his past and present, mostly revolutionaries,
including his wife, Natalia Sedova, his son, Lev Sedov, and his former comrades
in the Bolshevik Party. Through these conversations, Weiss explores Trotsky’s
revolutionary ideology and his views on the Soviet Union under Stalin. The more
Weiss read, the more he became a strong opponent of Stalinism. In 1967, this
led him to meet one of Trotsky’s most important biographers, Isaac Deutscher.
Weiss's portrayal of Trotsky as a complex and conflicted
figure is an honest one. Outside of Trotsky’s writings on the impact of exile
and political isolation on his family, this is one of the few books that examines
his personal life in detail. While being faithful to Trotsky’s politics, Weiss employs
Brechtian theatre devices, such as music and dance, to create a sense of
distance and alienation. This style serves to underscore the play’s political
and ideological themes, highlighting how history and ideology shape individual
lives and experiences.
Peter Weiss (1916-1982 is arguably one of Germany’s most
important artistic figures. He was an extraordinarily talented artist. He
worked as a painter, novelist, filmmaker, and dramatist throughout his life. Weiss
was comfortable in German literary and artistic circles. He was fond of Bertolt
Brecht, seeing The Threepenny Opera and The Rise and Fall of the City of
Mahagonny in 1930.
In the 1960s, Weiss had a friendship with the German-born,
Swiss writer Hermann Hesse. In a letter to his long-time friend Hesse in 1961,
Weiss writes, “I am very preoccupied with the art which first comes about when
reason, rational thinking is switched off. I have been unable myself to resolve
this conflict: sometimes it seems to me that the most essential lies in the
dark and the subconscious, then however it occurs to me that one can only work
today in an extremely conscious way, as if the spirit of the times demands that
the writer does not lose his way in regions of half-darkness.”
Unlike most of his generation of artists, Weiss was deeply
interested in the seminal experiences of the twentieth century – the crimes of
fascism, the October Revolution, and its subsequent betrayal by the Stalinist
bureaucracy.
It is hardly surprising, given the political hostility to
Leon Trotsky and the Trotskyist movement in general, that a play that is
broadly sympathetic to Trotsky and his revolutionary life has hardly been
performed, let alone written about. With 2016 marking the 100th anniversary of
Weiss’s birth, no attempt was made to stage "Trotsky in Exile".
As Stefan Steinberg writes, “To my knowledge, the play is
unique in its attempt to portray Trotsky’s life and political struggle on
stage. The work has its flaws and, on occasion, reveals the influence of
Weiss’s discussions with Ernest Mandel, the leader of the Pabloite Unified
Secretariat. What is striking about the play, however, is Weiss’s valiant
effort to correct all manner of Stalinist falsifications, to restore Trotsky to
his rightful place in history as a leader of the Russian Revolution alongside Lenin
and as the principal Marxist opponent of the Stalinist degeneration in the
Soviet Union.
Of great interest also in Trotsky in Exile is Weiss’s
recognition of the central role of culture in assessing the October Revolution
and Trotsky’s historical significance. Weiss had studied Trotsky’s Literature
and Revolution and devotes a scene of his play to a discussion among Lenin,
Trotsky and leaders of the Dadaist art movement. In Zurich in 1916, Lenin is
known to have met political co-thinkers in the same café frequented by Tristan
Tzara, Richard Huelsenbeck and other leading lights of the Dada movement. With
legitimate poetic licence, Weiss brings the remarkable figures together in a
discussion about the prospects for art in a post-revolutionary Soviet Union. A
later scene features Weiss’s old mentor Breton in discussion with Trotsky and
Diego Rivera in Mexico.”[1]
In the 1960s, Weiss became increasingly politically radical.
One form this radicalisation took was, as mentioned by Steinberg, was Weiss’s
conversation with Ernest Mandel.[2]
Weiss had no fundamental understanding of Mandel’s politics. Mandel broke from
orthodox Trotskyism. As Max Brody points out
“Mandel sought to provide the economic justification for the
rejection by Pabloism of the revolutionary role of the working class. He
claimed capitalism had reached a new stage, in which the imperialist powers had
resolved the inner contradictions that resulted in the barbarity of the early
20th century. He initially referred to this new period as “neo-capitalism. “To
make the central point from the outset, Mandel’s embrace of Pabloism did not
flow from an incorrect economic theory, but the reverse. His economic analysis
was based on his rejection of the revolutionary role of the working class as
the harbinger of capitalism's demise.[3]
Weiss’s inability to understand the differences between
orthodox Trotskyism and the Pabloism of Ernest Mandel was behind his decision
to include Joseph Hansen in his book. However, Weiss did not know that Hansen
was heavily involved in the assassination of Leon Trotsky. However, once
Hansen’s treachery was in the public domain, Weiss should have at least told
his readership of Hansen’s role in the assassination of Leon Trotsky.
According to a document entitled The Role of Joseph Hansen “The initial stages
of the (Security and the Fourth International)investigation uncovered recently
declassified documents, which revealed the conspiracy that prepared Trotsky’s
assassination and the fatal role played by agents who had managed to infiltrate
all the major political centres of the Fourth International. The ICFI uncovered
documents relating to the activities of agents such as Mark Zborowski, who
became the principal assistant of Trotsky’s son, Leon Sedov. Zborowski played a
key role in the murder of Sedov and other leading members of the Fourth
International in Europe.
Another important Stalinist agent, who supplied the Kremlin
with valuable information on Trotsky’s activities, was Sylvia Caldwell (née
Callen), the personal secretary of James P. Cannon; however, the most
significant information uncovered by the ICFI related to the activities of
Joseph Hansen. Documents discovered in the US National Archives and others
obtained through the Freedom of Information Act revealed that Hansen,
immediately after the assassination of Trotsky, sought out and established a
covert relationship with high-level US government agents. One such document, a
letter from the American Consul in Mexico City to an official in the State
Department, dated September 25, 1940, reported that Hansen “wishes to be put in
touch with someone in your confidence located in New York to whom confidential
information could be imparted with impunity.”[4]
Weiss’s radicalism and defence of Leon Trotsky against the
slander of the Stalinists led to his investigation by the East German Stalinist
police, following the publication and production of Trotsky in Exile.
Weiss, in the eyes of the Stasi, had become a traitor.
The Stasi’s “Operational Information No. 551/69” of
September 5, 1969, reported “that the enemy side is making massive efforts to
win over and misuse famous authors for deliberate and destructive ideological
purposes,” and “it should be recognised that the enemy has succeeded in turning
the author Peter Weiss, who has been successfully featured in our theatres. The
Stasi report described Trotsky in Exile as a “clear commitment
to anti-Soviet positions” and made clear it favoured a total ban on the work
and its author in the GDR.
To conclude, as Weiss writes, “ Every word that I write down
and submit for publication is political. It is intended to reach a large
audience and achieve a specific effect. I submit my writings to one of the
communication media, and then they are consumed by the audience. The way in which
my words are received depends to a great extent on the social system under
which they are distributed. Since my words are but a small and ever-diminishing
fraction of available opinions, I have to achieve the greatest possible
precision if my views are to make their way”[5]
Notes
1.
The Heritage We Defend David North, 1988. The
Heritage We Defend was first published in book form in 1988. Its origins lie in
the political struggle waged by the ICFI and the Workers League, the
predecessor of the Socialist Equality Party of the United States, from 1982 to 1986,
to defend Trotskyism against the nationalist opportunism of the ICFI’s former
British section, the Workers Revolutionary Party.
2.
Peter Weiss The Necessary Decision- Ten work
points of an author in this divided world-NLR I/47•Jan/Feb 1968
3.
Hanjo Kesting-The Writer’s Resistance (Peter
Weiss) NLR I/139•May/June 1983
4.
The mechanism of revolution in the documentary
theatre- Gideon Tsunami, The German Quarterly, November 1971, Vol 44 No 4
1
[1]
The false friends of Peter Weiss, German dramatist, filmmaker and novelist-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/10/20/pete-o20.html
[2]
See Mandel's review of Weiss’s Book www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1971/xx/exile.htm
[3]
The ICFI’s exposure of Ernest Mandel’s “neo-capitalism” and the analysis of the
global economic crisis: 1967–1971-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/09/09/rvtn-s09.html
[4]
www.wsws.org/en/special/library/foundations-us/48.html
[5]
2.Peter Weiss The Necessary Decision- Ten work points of an author in this
divided world-NLR I/47•Jan/Feb 1968
