Sean McMeekin: The Red Millionaire. A Political Biography of Willi Münzenberg, Moscow’s Secret Propaganda Tsar in the West. New Haven: Yale Univ. Pr., 2003. 397 pp. ill.
Introduction
In the best biographies, writers get inside the skin of their subjects without feeling overly uncomfortable. Where this is not the case, the biographer can end up hating or despising them, which generally makes for a tiresome reading experience. When the bias shows through too clearly, this inevitably calls forth resistance on the part of the reader. What we have in the present case is a thoroughly researched life of a figure the author at the very least disapproves of.
While this book began as a dissertation at Berkeley and is not part of the “Annals of Communism” series, as a publication of Yale University Press it may be said to exist in the penumbra, and features a blurb from “Annals” charter member Harvey Klehr. McMeekin relies on Richard Pipes among others for general background and, for personal details, on the memoirs of Münzenberg’s widow Babette Gross, though he carefully notes whenever she proves unreliable or evasive.
McMeekin does not, however, draw solely on published sources – far from it. He has scoured archives far and wide, even consulting Herbert Wehner’s unpublished memoirs. He has certainly dug deeply, gaining access to police files which throw remarkable light on Münzenberg’s activities in Swiss exile during World War I.
After the armistice, Münzenberg was allowed to return to Germany. In Stuttgart, “Münzenberg’s strategic calculations were fairly shrewd. He rode the wave of unrest as far as it would take him, using the drama of the moment to give a bold speech and launch a new propaganda organ, but he slipped quietly out of sight before being caught in any uncontestable acts of treason.” (pg. 83) This description could apply not only to his activities in the immediate post-war years, but to his entire career. Contrast this with the behavior of two other revolutionary leaders: “Liebknecht and Luxemburg won lasting fame and the admiration of generations of historians by risking their necks in a reckless bid for power in January 1919, but it is difficult to say exactly what was gained, and for whom, by their martyrdom.” (Ibid.)
In the early 1920s, Münzenberg seems to have concentrated less on revolutionary activity and turned much more decisively towards scamming the Soviet government or knowingly employing those who did. “For better and for worse, Münzenberg was now knee-deep in the aid profiteering racket, and there was no going back.” (pg. 135)
Film Commissar
McMeekin professes some surprise that Münzenberg’s involvement in Soviet agriculture, real estate and heavy industry has attracted rather less attention than his film ventures. He manages to do a decent enough job at pretending to believe this, though in the end his performance is unlikely to earn him any Oscars.
The argument advanced here is that Münzenberg’s alleged successes in the movie industry are mostly based on his own propaganda. “If Münzenberg was a poor excuse for an entrepreneur, however […] then it must also be said he was certainly one of the most successful salesmen in film history.” (pg. 175)
For McMeekin, Münzenberg was a wheeler-dealer, not an ideologue, and that may well be true. It is a fatal flaw, however, when a historian has an ax to grind, and the more one reads, the more annoying the sound gets. Long before the end it starts to grate on the ear. Münzenberg is said to have habitually grabbed credit where none is due and to have been disingenuous. (pp. 181-182) His whole film empire was based on a lie. (pg. 184) “Münzenberg could blame whomever he wanted for his failures, but the fact remained that he simply was not very good at distributing or promoting films to broad audiences.” (pg. 185) Typically he masked his incompetence with bravado. “Here, then, was the Münzenberg model of movie moguldom. Let more talented individuals make the films. Get other, cash-richer institutions to pay for them, and, if necessary, distribute them. But make sure to take all the credit for any box-office successes.” (pg. 191) On the whole, it sounds rather like he would have fit into Hollywood without the slightest problem.
McMeekin has done a deep document dive, and his sources for most of the 1920s are financial records. “Profits? Those were for capitalists. In the Communist world, there was always another bureaucrat to pay the piper, so long as he played the right propaganda tune for the time.” (pg. 192) McMeekin evidently disapproves of his subject because he flouted capitalist rules while working for communist paymasters. At the same time he slams him for hypocrisy, saying he was more of a businessman than an ideologue.
McMeekin keeps this hostility towards his subject less and less under control from chapter to chapter. A little more than half way through the book we are told that Münzenberg “was in fact a consummate liar…” (pg. 200), a man driven mostly by personal ambition, whose success was due to his ability to browbeat people into supporting him.
If Münzenberg had had a chance to read this book, presumably he would have liked at least the title; he enjoyed seeing himself styled as “the red millionaire,” and may not have objected to the sobriquet “propaganda tsar” either. On the whole, though, McMeekin accuses him of being splashy but unprofitable, better at making newspapers than making profits, and refers to the “myth of his media genius.” (pg. 210) “If Münzenberg was a media mogul at all, it was through audacious deficit spending and assiduous lobbying for Kremlin bailouts, as opposed to any sort of business acumen.” (pg. 212) “No matter how devoted he was to the Revolution to come, in the present day he was living like a high-powered post-revolutionary commissar, surrounded by devoted sycophants and all of the attributes of power and privilege.” (pg. 213) To top it all off, McMeekin also asserts he was not really a millionaire at all, but only claimed to be one.
Political Entrepreneur
Chapter 13, “Tango with the Devil,” moves away from finance to focus on political maneuvering. Here McMeekin does admit that he was a talented, spellbinding orator, whose propaganda was effective in gaining seats for the KPD in the elections of 1930. On the other hand, his political acumen was faulty; he fully supported Stalin’s line of denouncing social democrats as “social fascists,” thus fatally splitting the left. For a while, Münzenberg’s successful pursuit of this policy led to a grudging mutual respect among KPD and Nazis. “It is significant that the strongest Nazi and Communist gains in the early Depression years were registered among the unemployed, who proved especially susceptible to the no-holds-barred scapegoating practiced by demagogues like Hitler and Münzenberg.” (pg. 233)
The KPD helped enable Nazi success. Hitler’s “most vociferous rhetorical fellow travelers were Communists.” (pg. 238) Münzenberg explicitly urged cooperation with the Nazis in voting against the SPD-led government in the 1931 “Red plebiscite,” though the effort was defeated. On the whole, his propaganda in the early 1930s amounted to “an astonishingly dense farrago of lies.” (pg. 239)
McMeekin ignores the truism that to get money it helps to have – or seem to have – money already. Undeniably, Münzenberg lived well, but he flaunted it at least in part so that donors, actual and potential, would have confidence in him. In the biographer’s eyes, though, he is little more than a swindler. When the record compels him to report on Münzenberg’s successful agitation, he does so in a grudging tone. Crowds for Solidarity Day demonstrations across Germany in 1932, he admits, “were not bad.” (pg. 244)
A “familiar tactic of dissembling” is the way he describes Münzenberg’s local cooperation with the SPD in Berlin while simultaneously toeing the party line and denouncing such cooperation in the pages of Inprecorr, the Comintern’s “turgid official news bulletin” which was “read by few people outside the party bureaucracy.” (pg. 248) One could conceivably admire Münzenberg for finding a way to do the right thing while at the same time protecting himself, instead of denouncing him for knowing how to survive by manipulating the system. What would McMeekin, writing at a comfortable distance in time and space, rather he have done – follow the party line (which he knew to be wrong) or denounce it (which he knew to be suicidal)? Yes, Münzenberg “watched his back” – is McMeekin suggesting that he shouldn’t have? He never tips his hand as to what he thinks Münzenberg should have done instead – throw in his lot with the SPD?
In Exile
For someone as putatively well-connected as Münzenberg, he proved as clueless as everyone else when it came to anticipating that Hitler would be named chancellor on January 30, 1933. The following weeks saw his narrow escape to Paris, aided by the circumstance that when he was hiding out in Mainz, it was Carnival time there and police controls were relatively relaxed.
In France, he threw himself into organizing an anti-Hitler media campaign. McMeekin provides a careful examination of Münzenberg’s greatest propaganda success, the 1933 Brown Book exposé of Nazi machinations, especially the burning of the Reichstag. (For more on this, see Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky: KGB: The Inside Story, 188f.)
Personal note: I spent a memorable night ca. 1978 in the company of a GDR professor of history. If not quite a dissident, he did not always follow the party line, with the result that the history he was allowed to teach kept getting pushed further and further into the past. We struck up an acquaintance in an East Berlin café one night after I had missed the deadline for crossing the border back to the West. With five hours to kill before it reopened, I accepted his suggestion that we take a walking tour of the city, in the course of which he told me the background to the 1933 Reichstag fire – that it had been pinned on the hapless Marinus van der Lubbe in order to implicate the communists (the Dutchman had once been a party member), and that the Nazis themselves were responsible. They had made use of a secret underground passage which led from Göring’s residence to the Reichstag. The Brown Book, which the professor owned a treasured copy of, even had a map showing the way.
McMeekin casts cold water on this version. “The true measure of Münzenberg’s – and the Communists’ – success […] is the fact that until the first serious historical examination of the evidence, Fritz Tobias’s Der Reichstagsbrand, was published in 1962, most historians adopted the Brown Book’s thesis about Goebbels planning and executing the Reichstag fire by sending a team of conspirators through Göring’s ‘secret tunnel.’ ” (pg. 266f) (For more on this, see Richard J. Evans’ review of Burning the Reichstag by Benjamin Carter Hett in the London Review of Books, Vol. 36, Nr. 9, May 8, 2014.)
Finally we come to the mystery surrounding Münzenberg’s death. He might have been many things, but he was not suicidal. He was a “stubborn political survivor” (pg. 290) and possessed an “independent streak” (pg. 292). Probably his only chance would have been to escape, possibly to America, though even there safety would have been far from guaranteed. Instead he stayed in France, ignoring the repeated summons to the USSR while reminding Dimitrov of his old personal ties to Lenin. McMeekin argues that contrary to legend, he never completely broke with Moscow. Rather, he kept agitating for a change in policy that would lead to his rehabilitation – which, who knows, might have happened if he had managed to live long enough, or outlive Stalin. But he could not survive the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. And Stalin would never have tolerated a figure with such independence of mind, not when he had Ulbricht and his group at hand.
Even after his expulsion from the KPD, Münzenberg refrained from denouncing the Soviet Union or its leader. “I hold to the place that I have taken since 1906 at the side of Karl Liebknecht, […] Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin, and […] Lenin.” (pg. 299f.) He foolishly believed he could persuade Moscow to his point of view from outside, when he had failed to do so from inside. Only when the USSR participated in the dismemberment of Poland did he finally proclaim: “socialist Russia is no more.” (pg. 302)
For him personally, this came as a moment of liberation. “It is one of the saddest of ironies in the career of this inveterate propagandist that when he finally stood on his own two feet, publishing his own principled views under his own name, he lost at once his collaborators, his paying advertisers, and most of his readers.” (pg. 302) And again: “He minced no words, for example, in holding Stalin to account for his invasion of Finland and the Baltics, and even published the names of forty German Communists murdered in the Great Terror. But the only readers paying the slightest attention anymore were the NKVD, the Gestapo, and the French police.” (pg. 303)
Like many others, he dithered too long and was caught up in the Blitzkrieg of France. He disappeared in June 1940 while heading towards the Swiss border, probably the victim of an NKVD hit squad. His decomposed body was found hanging from a tree in a forest four months later. In Mexico, Trotsky would be murdered in August 1940; Walter Krivitsky’s body would be found in a NY hotel room in June 1941, though it is still not entirely clear if he was assassinated or committed suicide. “At the least, we may conclude that whether or not Stalin’s agents succeeded in murdering Münzenberg on the exodus road in France in 1940, they undoubtedly wanted to, and they would have gotten to him sooner or later.” (pg. 306)
The notes, bibliography, and index are all outstanding, though it somewhat odd that Solzhenitsyn’s Lenin in Zurich goes unmentioned; it is, of course, a novel, but still very well sourced and even features Münzenberg as a character. The sparse illustrations inside the book are copied from other publications, where the reproduction quality was poor to begin with; the cover picture, though, showing Münzenberg addressing a rally and taken by a Nazi surveillance team, is quite good.
Errata: The name of the German poet Freiligrath is misspelled (pg. 11); a few words are dropped in the middle of page 53; “polices” for “policies” (pg. 162); the German for “conciliation” is usually Versöhnung or Versöhnlichkeit, not Versöhnheit (pg. 216). Not much, all in all.
Update: For a better book that covers much of the same ground, see Stephen Koch: Double Lives, my review of which can be found elsewhere on this site.
© Hamilton Beck
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