Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (22 page)

Hirschmann’s Spanish Civil War was a different one. He was there when the POUM headquarters at the Hotel Falcón on La Rambla became
the epicenter of a rush to defend republicanism and workers’ control. This spurred the hastily organized militias to hold the line against Nationalist advances. Until the Communists began to assert leadership, most international volunteers had room—and took risks—to fight alongside and under the command of Spanish socialists and anarchists, many of whom thought that foreigners knew more about war than they did. This made for mayhem. There were no uniforms, at best corduroy knee britches, which were about the only gesture toward uniformity. Black or red handkerchiefs around one’s throat gave away one’s anarchist or socialist affiliations. Training consisted mainly in marching drills with some basic instruction on how to fire rifles, which jammed in the dust and mud. Most militiamen did not get a weapon until they reached the front, often taking a gun from the soldier they were relieving. Such was the chaos that when the main Catalan anarchist column left for the Aragonese front by train on July 24, they were several hours from the station when they realized that they had forgotten their munitions. Command at the front, if it can be called that, was in utter confusion. Bereft of training and supplies, what the volunteers lacked in preparation they made up with enthusiasm, a resource they would come to rely upon to endure the summer heat and dust, fleas and lice, and the comradely boredom of filthy and chaotic barrack life.
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These were the conditions under which Hirschmann went to war under the POUM flag. The Italian and German volunteers cut their initial teeth at the Battle of Monte Pelato. On August 28, 1936, after weeks of dithering and reorganization, the Ascaso Column, formed only ten days earlier, went into battle along the Aragonese front. Outnumbered and underequipped, it held the line against advancing Franco forces. Given the scorching heat, firing began in the relative coolness of dawn and ended before 10:00 a.m. to allow troops on both sides to scramble for water and food. When the smoke cleared, the Freemason commander, Mario Angeloni, and several other
giellisti
were dead; Rosselli was also shot, but alive. Was Hirschmann at Monte Pelato? We cannot be sure, but it is likely. This was the sector that was the only one conducted by an independent, mainly Italian fighting force during the time he was in Catalonia, and it
was under the affiliation to which he naturally gravitated. His most detailed disclosure, from an unnamed US government agency around the time of his 1943 petition for naturalization, was a signed declaration that places him in the Zaragosa sector of Aragon from August until October 1936 and that says his units “suffered enormous losses” and “engaged in heavy fighting” before the remnants were sent back to Barcelona.
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What he recounted subsequently of the nature of the fighting and the enemy is also consistent with what occurred at Monte Pelato. He recalled that his enemies were Black Francoists from the Moroccan divisions. He also remembered the endless crawling in the Aragonese dirt. After a chaotic exchange of screaming and bullets and tumbling about in trenches, he looked down at his trousers and found them soaked. At first he thought he had been hit—only to discover that his wine flask had broken and that he might have involuntarily relieved himself in fear. It could have been wine, urine, or both for all he cared; he was alive—slightly injured, but alive.
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While the column lost 10 percent of its fighters, it gained in reputation. In Paris, among the émigrés, the battle was heralded as a triumph against fascism; in Barcelona, the Italians’ commanders were invited to the war councils. This may have been a decision the Spanish Loyalists came to regret, for Rosselli, in spite of his injury, was keen to play a leading role and quickly got into a tussle with Spanish and Italian anarchists over control. It was not just that the adrenalin of war, especially after so many years of waiting, had gone to Rosselli’s head; there was a vacuum in the whole structure of the Catalan command. This would worsen in September, as Communists entered the scene. But for the time being, Monte Pelato stood out in what was then still a low-intensity war as both sides got organized and began to stockpile weapons and dig trenches.
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This is as much as we know about Hirschmann’s experience on the battlefield. On the whole, he was reluctant to discuss the Spanish Civil War after he left Catalonia. His wife Sarah—who met him years later—found him silent on the topic, and sensing his unease, she didn’t press him for details. Once, when they went to a film together about the Spanish Civil War, as they left the theater Sarah turned to Albert and asked him:
“Was it like that?” He replied evasively, “Yeah, that was a pretty good film.” When I asked Sarah about this reserve—on both their parts, his to speak, hers to press—she was somewhat philosophical: “You know, I’ve always felt through these long years perhaps that that’s
my
secret: how I could stick with one person for that long [and not know]. I think everybody has a right to their own memories.” Tightly guarded recollections were part of a pattern when it came to bad memories, which he preferred to keep to himself: “I felt this kind of reticence [sometimes] in Albert,” she confessed. “He’s had quite a few areas like that. I never tried to force him [to talk].” Still, the scars on his neck and leg made it impossible for her to forget.
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One reason why Hirschman preferred silence was because Spain was a source of sorrow, of disenchantment with an ideal. It was not his propensity to fret about utopias destined to fall short of peoples’ high hopes. Nor was he one to hang onto miserable situations that had no solution; “
Lascia perdere
,” he often said of pointless efforts, let it go. But Spain was different. The endless debate rehearsed in Berlin and Paris over left-wing tactics was more than a farce, it was a tragedy of epic proportions, one which left the discrete hero wordless. He watched the ideological hardening as the Communists moved into the fray; he witnessed the first internecine fighting and initial fear of reprisals. Hirschmann grew frightened that the Catalan coalition would not be able to remain independent of Communist controls; he was by now hardening his stance on Stalin. It was not something he had full insight into, as he later recalled, nor was the extent of the cruelty and cynicism yet on full display, as it would be for Orwell, but it was most certainly in the air. Within the POUM there were heated discussions about how much to fold into the Communist-led front; some leaders echoed Rafael Abramovich’s skepticism about Stalin’s intentions, a position with which Hirschmann increasingly aligned.
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It was hard to stop Stalin, especially once it was clear that the war would not end quickly and that Loyalists desperately needed his weapons and support. The price they paid was to cede autonomy. In September, the Loyalist forces were being reorganized into volunteer divisions under Communist command. Within months, the NKVD had its agents across
the Loyalist territories and was beginning to assert control, fueled by the arrival of Communist militants or sympathizers from around Europe and North and Latin America. The French Communist Maurice Thorez and the German Willi Münzenberg proposed in September that the Comintern order the formation of International Brigades for the foreign volunteers like Hirschmann. At the end of that month, Italian and French Communists were folded into a column, putting pressure on other leftists to join the better-trained and better-supplied forces. It was decided that Hirschmann should go to Madrid to join the International Brigades. He was having misgivings about the politics behind the lines and was appalled at the manipulations and controls of Communists; fearing that the brigades would become another of Stalin’s pawns, he refused. This was a decisive move—for while he still believed in a left-wing coalition, he was not willing to submit to Communist authority and give up his autonomy. Beside, among his Italian friends in Barcelona, he was told that the antifascist movement in Italy was also ramping up its activities and that Eugenio was taking a leading role in Trieste. As Rosselli had prophesized, a new front was opening up against fascism elsewhere. The
giellisti
were on the move. Leaving Spain, therefore, was like joining another antifascist struggle, freer of Communist machinations.
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Hirschmann decided to decamp, his wounds mended, at the end of October; he took a train from Barcelona along the Mediterranean coast, bound for new activist horizons.

Hirschmann’s departure coincided with an influx of new international volunteers, who walked into the midst of deteriorating relations behind leftist lines. While the brigades fought heroically in the defense of Madrid, the atmosphere in Barcelona, where the POUM had its stronghold, was venomous. One of the new arrivals was George Orwell, who stumbled into the struggle almost by accident, only to leave behind a memento of heroism and betrayal. Another arrival, albeit less famous, was Mark Rein, who had tipped off Otto Albert in the first place with his list of Neu Beginnen contacts and whom OA had hoped would catch up with him in Catalonia. Mark’s saga was less well known than the somewhat self-dramatizing account of Orwell. Mark arrived on March 4, 1937,
began to work as an electrical engineer in a radio factory, and followed his father’s footsteps as an activist journalist, serving as a correspondent for the Swedish
Social-democraten
and Abramovich’s New York–based
Jewish Daily Forward
. Some of his articles criticized the Communist trade-union manipulation. He did not fight; his work was as a journalist and technician. But his writings created a paper trail to a target. A little over a month after his arrival, he vanished from the Hotel Continental while he was on a trip to Madrid—lured, apparently, by a woman who’d offered him inside information on the Communists and invited him to an interview. Given his father’s prominence in the Socialist International and close contacts with the Léon Blum government in Paris, Mark’s disappearance soon became an international cause célèbre. Inquiries by the French police, the young German journalist and former associate of Hirschmann’s in the Berlin SAJ, Willy Brandt, and Richard Löwenthal and the Neu Beginnen militants and desperate efforts by Rafael Abramovich, who immediately moved to Barcelona to spearhead the investigation, yielded nothing more than rumors. In all likelihood, Mark was captured by Stalin’s agents, determined to exact revenge for Rafael’s publicity of the terror in the Soviet Union. One fellow prisoner testified that Mark was still alive as of May 22. He was probably executed in the following few weeks. We know also that the NKVD went on a high alert in May in Madrid and Catalonia, taking out Communist militants it did not like and anarchists and socialists it mistrusted, using them as cannon fodder in untrained militias in Huesca and Zaragoza in the effort to gain control over the Spanish Republican cause.

Ursula and Otto Albert were in Trieste when the news arrived of Mark’s disappearance. Sitting in the Piazza Unità, OA had bought a newspaper, was having his breakfast, and happened upon a small notice about the disappearance and presumed death of Mark Rein. He went white and read the note aloud to Ursula. They were crushed, shaken. But even their grief got entangled in the internecine scheming. Soon, their thoughts turned to Rosa in Paris, a surrogate mother. Desperate to convey their sympathies, Ursula asked one of the militants who was shuffling back and forth between Paris and Trieste to take flowers of condolence to
Rosa. This was Eugenio Curiel, a militant Communist, asked to now trespass into the home of the “enemy.” Oblivious of Abramovich’s standing in Stalin’s eyes, Curiel expedited the favor but soon found himself caught in the fog of suspicion that swirled around all Communist circles in Paris, but most especially among the Italians whose leanings were fuzzy. Having spotted him outside the Abramovich flat, in late 1939 the Comintern ordered that Curiel be secretly investigated as a disguised “Trotskyist.” This file—now declassified—is yet another glimpse into the paranoia that saturated the Comintern. Among Curiel’s primary sins was his association with Otto Albert Hirschmann—“a scoundrel” and a “Trostkyist.” Look, the report urged accusingly, at the fact that he traveled all over Europe with a German passport! He was a close friend of Abramovich and “his scoundrel son” as well as the “boyfriend” of his daughter! Hirschmann was toxic; Curiel got infected.
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For Hirschmann, the shock was more personal than political; by then he was well aware of the lengths to which the Comintern would go to assert control. Show trials were in full force in Moscow. Later, when he got back to Paris, he went immediately to visit Rafael to share his condolences; over dinner they pieced together the clues—all of which pointed to the arms of Stalin’s persecutory machine. Sophocles once said that the worst tragedy is when parents have to bury their children; the Reins faced the rest of their lives not knowing if Mark was alive in a gulag or dead. To Hirschmann, it brought an end to any faith or trust in Communism. “It was no surprise that the Nazis were awful,” he noted. “But to see people whom one expected to contribute to one’s own struggle turn into the opposite was in some sense worse.” Hirschmann had to struggle to make of his painful loss a spirit to guide by example, not a phantom to haunt him.
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The wounds went deep, but there was now some time to recover. Trieste, a city of over a quarter million on the borderlands with the Balkans and the old port for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, had become part of Italy after World War I. Built on a series of slopes, it looked over a beautiful Adriatic harbor. Sunny, filled with open-air markets brimming with fresh produce and pastry shops on nearly every corner, Trieste was a far cry from Catalonia’s shortages. Its central square, with the elegant Verdi
Theatre on one side and Lloyds Bank on the other, was lined with coffeehouses looking out on the sea and was a contrast to Paris’ somberness. Another big difference was that it was a fascist city; Mussolini enjoyed enormous support in the old ethnic borderland between Italy and the Balkans. When Hirschmann’s train pulled in from Venice, the city was enthralled by the news of Italian troops’ conquests in Abyssinia; having driven Emperor Haile Selassie from his realm, Mussolini proclaimed the nascence of a new Roman Empire. Hirschmann had to ignore all this and head to his sister’s apartment; the first thing was to write to Mutti and let her know he was fine. “Back from Spain!” he said. But he left everything to his mother’s imagination. “I just now arrived healthy and happy at Ursul’s and Eug.” “That was certainly the most interesting trip that I have ever taken,” he ended vaguely. At this point in the letter, Ursula seized his pen to add: “He just moved to the table to eat, sweet bread, tea, apricot marmalade. He looks marvelous. He is only a little tired from the trip.… Now I will properly fatten him up first thing.” Then he took a nap. Eugenio, who had been at work, went to see his sleeping brother-in-law. When OA awoke, he found Eugenio standing over him; his “heart stopped”—and then he leaped into a fraternal embrace.
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