Double Cross

Double-cross

- “Io sono sludgista” — Carlo Rosselli

“…the intelligentsia are demoralized, confused, even a bit frightened, but I doubt they are yet ready for Sludgeism.”

- Sludge was born in the town of P. in 1904. It was his good luck not to have been born in 1900, since he would have been eligible for call up in 1918, the last year of the Continent wide meatgrinder. The town of P. was in Galicia, which was in the Austro-Hungarian empire. It is now in Poland. Although what does “in” mean here? The atlas in the twentieth century changed more than the heart of a restless lover. The edition of 1914, the edition of 1938, the edition of 1945, the edition of 1989, and then of 1999 — run the cartoon montage of blobbish shapes, see them reshape, nation by nation. Uprootings, ethnic cleansing, flights. The boundaries are laid down, voices thunder over the radio, diplomats, presidents and Fuehrers meet, commissars hide, walls go up and down, towns are here and there though they never moved. Sludge died in the town of Salzburg of a heart attack in 1978. Salzburg remained in Austria, remains in Austria, all of this time, through one blob and the other. It was even safely nestled in the American occupation zone blob that endured from 1945 to 1955 in Austria. Sludge died, in this sense, in his home country, although in another sense, he died another exile, like most of his friends — and enemies. Modernity and exile, the two are inseparable, one from the other.

- From the Red Flag, from meeting Lenin (about which anon), from Red Vienna to the apartment in the Malá Stana in Prague and the anti-Stalin left to Riverdale, Long Island and Henry Luce’s brand of gung ho capitalism, from Joe McCarthy and William Buckley to the John Birch Society and the world of Axel Springer, from a Vermont country house back to Germany and back, back home, Munich, Austria all that river of blood downstream, finally ending up in an obscure monarchist cult around Otto von Habsburg : Sludge was an exemplary Cold War man. He was always editing magazines, writing for newspapers, shaping columns, giving speeches to student groups, warding off attacks, making attacks. Attack — his was a temperamental ideology, or I should say, all his ideologies were expressions of his temperament. And that was obsessed by the idea of attack. And yet, in his last years, he even cast himself as an intellectual descendent of Germany’s martyr to pacifism, Carl von Ossietzky. An odd, reactionary offshoot, perhaps. Yes, a man cannot be reduced to his ideas.

- His heart didn’t stay for the last act of the Cold War dream, the Great Fall of the Wall, when all the kings horses and all the kings men couldn’t put the Soviet Presidium together again. He would have liked the last act. Or maybe not. An older, soured man, he would perhaps have bemoaned the triumph of the trivial, of everything he despised, from the 60s youth culture — getting long in the tooth even In 1978 — to the deluge of mindless TV, entrapping the millions of denizens of old folks home worldwide. World without end, amen.

• P. was the seat of two bishoprics — Eastern Orthodox and Catholic. 46,000 people, give or take the uncounted baby, the tramp in the park, the gypsies on the outskirts, lived there and, distantly, greeted the birth of baby Sludge — as they greeted all births. The communal bond. Born to a prosperous Jewish businessman. “I had always thought of P. as a small romantic hassidic village. She laughed at me: P. was no village, and especially not a hassidic village.” Sludge: the youngest of nine children.

- The Sludge family was housed in a relatively new manse in the Zasanie district, around the corner from Mickiewicz Street. The synagogue in Zasanie was full of modern attitude — prosperous fathers, sons who were all Zionists or socialists or both.

- Galicia, Galicia. Two voices:

1. “He was a peasant. Somewhere in Galicia he had a straw roofed hut, a cow, a pig, a wife and a child. He drove his cow out into the pasture, he raised the pig in its pen, he beat his wife, and he never bothered to think about the child. He was a poor peasant.” This is from Joseph Roth, written around 1920. At the same time Hemingway was reporting from the war in Turkey, perfecting his non-mandarin, non-sentimental prose, Roth was developing his own style, a variant of the Neue Sachlichkeit. Judgement was buried in the detail, the angle that conjoined pig and beaten wife. Roth was born in Brody, in far Galicia, about a hundred miles east of P. He tracked, in his work in the 1920s, the destinies of the products of Galician straw huts and Jewish shtetls, the flight from the East: Vienna, Berlin, Paris, London, New York City and points west.

2. “I first became conscious of the situation and began to keep track of it one afternoon when Father was asleep and I saw my mother going into the tutor’s room. The feelings I had at the time were partly erotic curiosity and partly fear (fear that Father might wake up-I thought no further). From that day on, I constantly played the role of monitor and pursuer, but also that of defender, in the event of a possible surprise by my father. I cannot explain to myself the reasons for my behavior. Either it was my unconscious hatred of Father or the sexual titillation of being party to such a horrible secret that prevented me from telling Father anything. had happened, although I had no way of telling whether or not for the first time.” — Wilhelm Reich

• Wilhelm Reich, unlike Roth, was a close friend of Sludge’s when Sludge came to Vienna in 1919, just 15 but already a prodigy of political attitudes. Both were members of the Association of Communist Youth, one of the numerous youth organizations that drew their membership from bourgeois households, all the sons (and daughters) chafing under the patriarchal yoke, witnesses to what they had seen — or their elder brothers had seen — of traumatic cretinism on the field of battle. Newspapers had lied and lied. Truth tellers had been imprisoned. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg had been savagely murdered. The Bolsheviks had won the Russian Civil war, while the Kaisers had all lost their wars and were in exile, at best. In 1910, the patriarchal yoke produced sexual repression and outmoded art forms. In 1920, you just had to look around to see what that yoke was all about: poverty, disease, war, and the collapse of the order it was so proud of erecting. In the Vienna woods, workers gathered twigs to heat their hovels.

Edith Tudor-Hart

- In Reich’s account, the two young men immediately recognized each other. After a number of ardent discussions, angelic, Dostoevskian nights, Reich saw that Sludge was “a real person!” He was not a gramophone record of received opinion, he was not a cultist zombie with ten or twelve cliches from a radical leaflet, he was a reader of novels, he was funny, he was gemütlich.

- Reich was the product of a wealthy Galician family too, born in the Carpathian mountains, in Dobrjanytschi, 144 kilometers to the East South East of P. Reich was, with his interest in sex, a more typical member of the late Habsburg intelligentsia than Sludge. Sex, perversion, decadence, misogyny and female emancipation danced in a round in the salons and imaginations of the late Habsburg Empire. “The nightclubs, the cabarets, the dancehalls with their dancers and singers, the bars with their barmaids. At every pricelevel and every hour, there was female commodities openly on sale, and it actually cost a man as little time and effort, to by a woman for a quarter of an hour, or an hour, or a night, as it cost to buy a packet of cigarettes or a paper.” — Stefan Zweig. Every great hothouse culture in the ancien regime found its corresponding notorious pornographic novel. For Vienna it was Josefine Mutzenbacker (1907), written by a Viennese feuilletonist and occasional poet, Felix Salten, under a pseudonym.

- “They claim that young whores become old bedsitting nurses. But that isn’t my case. I was a whore from a young age, and went through everything that a woman could possibly go through: in bed, on the table, on stools, on benches, leaning against the stone walls of dark city corners, lying in the grass, in the corners of dark house entrances, in chambres separees, on trains, in barracks, in brothels and in prisons, but I regret none of it.” Josefine! Moll Flanders, Fanny Hill, Justine, Lady Chatterley — man-made heterae arising from the underworld of fucking and sucking, below the sounds and motion of the treadmill of production, the really existing conditions of capitalism. Secretly linked to it, a form of sterile production itself. These figures fuck their way to a dreamworld sovereignty, where the liberating role is played by the dominatrix. These are the last philosophes, and where they pop up the ancien regime still exists, although perhaps dimmed and impotent. What they sacrifice, these Sadean women, is any sense of solidarity. Their emancipation is a zero-sum affair — they take their freedom from their sisters. Although, although — by a magical dialectic, they endowed cinema with one of its great inventions, the femme fatale — from Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel to Gloria Grahame in The Big Heat — and the femme fatale opened up possibilities in every middle class bedroom. “We’re sisters, you and I, beneath the mink,” the Gloria Graham character says, shattering, in her own way, the Feminine Mystique.

- Salten’s other great female figure is Bambi’s mother. Bambi: Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde is Salten’s other claim to fame. It was translated by Whittaker Chambers, while he was a Communist, with a day job at the Daily Worker. “I thought the story rather sentimental…” When Sludge came to America, he became friends, or at least allies, with Chambers. Alfred Kazin, in his autobiography, writes of the way the Luce publications, Time, Life, Fortune, were subdivided into different satrapies in the Chrysler building, with Chambers’ office a Dostoevskian hive of defectors from Communism, plotting to expose the Komintern and roll back Stalin, while Sludge was in another office, whispering in Luce’s ear, tempting him with dreams of a great, thick journal that would combine the snap and jazz of Time Magazine with the intelligentsia legitimacy of Partisan Review. The proposed name for the journal? “Brow”. What could be Luce-ier? After the war, after Chambers and Sludge (Browless, disappointed) had left the Luce empire, they crossed again in the great period of the Scoundrel Time, where Chambers became famous in the drama of exposing Alger Hiss as a communist agent. With William Buckley in tow, the young rich conservative, Sludge was back to his old number of trying to found a magazine, and so Buckley made trips to Sludge’s home in Vermont and trips to Chambers’ 20 acre farm in Maryland and Schlamm made trips to Chambers’ farm in Maryland and among the East Coast crossings and recrossing of the League of Conservative Gentlemen the new Right as it was called was born, or so the story goes. One wonders if, before the fire in Chambers’ kitchen, drinking coffee, Schlamm might have brought up Salten? Surely he knew him. Chambers, for his part, acted as though he were some world weary Mitteleuropaische intellectual. A displaced man, whose biological birth, in Lynbrook, Long Island, was some mistake committed by history. “The Hisses were drawn to him because they thought him a Russian.” Sludge knew from Russians, though. Sludge knew everyone, it was in a way the business of his life. He must have known Salten, back in Vienna, crossed paths with him at the Cafe Greinsteidl, heard the story of how Salten gave the great satirist, Kraus, sitting at a table in the Cafe, two great slaps for some journalist barbs Kraus had emitted in some review of the poor pornographer’s actress lover. Or perhaps he would have told the story of Salten’s end, in exile in Switzerland, while Bambi was coining money for the great Disney machine.

• Part of Sludge’s myth: “Sludge had joined the Austrian Communist party and visited Moscow as a sixteen year old, where he suffered his first disillusionment with communism when a Moscow party member offered to procure a prostitute for him.” This story seems to have woven its way from Sludge’s desk, or dinners at the Crillon with William Buckley, through the stories Sludge told to his American colleagues at magazines (so many American publications — Fortune, New Leader, Freeman, National Review, Human Events, American Opinion a veritable freight train of anti-communist heckling, rollback on the intellectual front ).

- In 1920, there was a famous train that went from Vienna to Moscow, aboard which was the former Soviet president of Hungary, Bela Kun. The train caused such a scandal, when it was reported, that the German government stopped it in Berlin, and sent it back. Behind the back of the reporters, they also extracted Kun from the train, supplied him with a false passport, and let him take ship from Germany to Petersburg. Presumably Sludge was not on this train.

- Perhaps Sludge had reminisced about the convention of the Association of Russian Communist Youth that met in Moscow in 1921, which was addressed by Lenin. Perhaps he had taken time off from his weekly addresses to the Association of Young Communists of Austria, division 5, Siebenbrunnenstrasse (“this week’s lecture by Comrade Sludge: proletarian education”) to travel to Moscow to see the scientific miracle in its early stage, on the more normal schedule of trains not including fleeing members of the late Soviet Republic of Hungary. In the Red Flag, February 2, 1924 — when Sludge was twenty — he wrote a hortatory column about Lenin and the Youth. In which not a word indulged that peculiar vice of individuality, the reminiscence; not for him a description of the Great Man, or even a hint at the flowering of vice even in the precincts of socialist virtue. Sludge’s column is astraightforward book report on how Lenin viewed Youth and Youth viewed Lenin.

“How is it that Lenin, the clearest, most unpathetic, soberest thinking of Marxism, makes such a strong impression on youth? One says that youth get enthused by big words, are inebriated with phrases. How are we to understand this contradiction?”

- Answer: Youth see behind words! Youth long for words to reflect acts and acts to reflect words!

- Lenin’s slogan was: youth to the forefront! At the time, this was Sludge’s slogan too. Sludge took a militant view of things. For instance, he urged the Association of Young Communists to get weapons.

- Chambers: Sludge was heaved out of the Communist Party, I broke out.

- Red Vienna. 1929.Sludge is now all of 25 years old. Two years before, on July 15, 1927, a mass working class demonstration tried to storm the Palace of Justice, and was put down with 85 deaths. This marked the turn towards the right not only in Austria, but in Vienna itself. Now, as the Sixth World Congress of Communism meets, Comrade Sludge militated for a minority view: a, that the Comintern should be independent from Soviet foreign policy, with each Comintern branch in each nation responding to that nation’s situation in the great Capitalist system; and b, that the objective corruption and obsolescence of AustroMarxism — represented by the Social Democratic party — though a fact for intellectual analysis, had not as a fact penetrated the working masses, and thus had to be dealt with sympathetically. Sludge was condemned as a right deviationist, and expelled from the party.

- “He and his charming companion (later his wife) S. celebrated the event in the circle of their friends. We all sang the refrain he had composed for the occasion: “Vom jenseits der Barrikaden an recht schönen Grüss!

2.

- Felix was born to a prosperous Jewish businessman in the town of J. in Bohemia, another part of the world that has been buried under the deluges of nationalism, war, displacement, communism and reaction. Its all gone now, except in the visions of a certain revanchist clique of Sudentenland old boys who agitate fiercely in Germany. Unlike Sludge, Felix was born in what turned out to be an unlucky year, 1895. Boys from J. born in that golden year were apt to find themselves in parade grouping, straight pull bolt-action rifles in hand, in 1914, or 1915, or 1916, years of muck and blood, of impossibly antiquated generals, through which The Good Soldier Švejk wandered as the very spirit of the Mitteleuropaische apocalypse. Felix was a soldier. A selfwounder, some say. His two brothers were also called up, and wounded, or were they killed? Sources differ. Dead heroes or recuperating vets. Felix at some point had enough, deserted and hid or at least followed a policy of discretion in his father’s house in Pilsen. His father had moved on from his earlier manufacturing plant, which produced leather goods, to concentrate on his new manufacturing plant, which processed food.

- At his showtrial, in 1952, Felix said: “I will tell you the truth. I am the son of a manufacturer, educated in the spirit of bourgeois ideology. The working class was alien to me.”

- His biographer entitles the chapter about Felix’s youth “The spoiled Bohemian”. Here is how he describes Felix’s birth and infancy:

“Felix’s mother… died when the spoiled, clever Felix, the youngest of her three sons, was only five years old.|

- In the whole chapter of Felix’s youth, the epithet “spoiled” is attached to Felix with an inexplicable vengefulness. Why is he called a spoiled boy? Compared to his playmates? To other boys in his mileau? What kind of description of Felix’s mother’s death, when he was five, could call him spoiled and clever? Did he do something wrong? Did he do something wrong while he was asleep, perhaps? He dreamed the death of one parent and the other parent dies.

- Malcolm Muggeridge, writing about Philby in 1978, asks how to explain “the fact that favored, pampered children of the Establishment like Maclean, Burgess, Philby and Blunt should have seen fit to betray their country, their culture and their class in order to help advance the power and influence of the most ruthless, philistine and materialistic autocracy the world has ever known.” Favored. Pampered. Betrayers of their culture and class. Out there in the fields, how could they have wavered in their faith in the justice and rightful order of the West? What kind of Western men were these? They were spoiled.

- The apriori judgement. Stalin or the FBI. A bit like the condemnations in Felix’s friend Kafka’s stories — the judgments come out of nowhere, the sentence is scrawled with incisors on one’s chest, the old father in his pissy sheets suddenly gets up in bed and sentences his son to death, the old man has been counter-conspiring behind the new man and knows everything!

- Felix’s biographer recounts a story: when Felix was 14, his older brother brought home a socialist pamphlet, which the teen read. Such is the contagion of Bolshevism that it immediately converted him.

- Here’s another story. Felix’s father, the manufacturer, the paterfamilias of bourgeois ideology, moved his family to Prague after the first wife died. He marries a second wife. They all settle, prosperously, into a suite of apartments on the second floor of one of the new buildings on Pařížská street. A recent innovation in Prague — running water on the top stories of apartment houses. There’s the two bay windows gazing on Široká street. A spacious dining room, a spacious table, father at one end, step mother at the other. Felix, the second youngest now, sits on the left side of his mother. Emile, the youngest, his step-brother, sits on the right. That’s the special occasion meals. He and Emile eat in the nursery room — which is also Emile’s room — on most ordinary evenings.

• But enough of the furniture, the order of the household, these meals which have gone as stale as the bodies that ate them! The story I’m telling here is about the young Felix, twelve years old, discovering the Ludwig Tieck translation of Don Quixote, with 120 illustrations by Gustave Dor . Finding them in Vater’s library. Felix soon felt, instinctively, that the hero of the book was not Don Quixote, never Quixote, but Sancho Panza. Don Quixote, that crazy old knight, was just an excuse for Sancho Panza to play pranks and have adventures. Felix recognized that something in him, some bit of ineradicable anarchy, was represented by Sancho Panza. The irrepressible peasant, whose power plays, behind the romantic knight, would lead to utopia. When, years later, Felix was in the Pankrac Prison, he remembered Doré’s picture of Sancho Panza being asked to whip himself and laughed until he cried.

- It is the episode where Sancho Panza is told that if he flagellates himself with three thousand lashings he would release Dulcinea, the most beautiful of women, from the spell in which she appears to be the ugliest woman in the world.

- “Oh, no!” said Sancho instantly. “Not to mention the three-thousand lashes, I’ll as much give myself three as I’d stab myself three times. What the devil kind of disenchantment is this? I don’t see what my rear end has to do with enchantments.”

- I don’t see what my rear end has to do with enchantments, Felix mouthed to himself. But he confessed copiously nonetheless. He could not bear the idea of them torturing Ilse. He could not, as well, bear torture. We are physically made of easy vulnerabilities. One has dentures, they take them out of your mouth, they crush them under a bootheel.

3.

- In the years between 1929 and 1938, when Sludge and his charming wife, S., landed in New York, were bad years for Europe… terrible years for Jews in Europe… excellent years for the Comintern… and for Fascism. When Sludge was expelled for the Red Flag, he found his footing in the penumbra around the famous thick journal, the Weltbühne. In 1933, the journal was shut down by the Nazis and Carl von Ossietzsky, the anti-military editor, was tossed into a concentration camp. Its other famous editor, Kurt Tucholsky, fled the country. He died, suicide or accident, offstage. Sludge, in conjunction with the wife of the founder and the monetary backing of a chocolate manufacturer, kept the magazine going as the Neue Weltbühne, moving the offices to Prague, Melantrichova Street. A married man of thirty, connected in the leftleaning but non-communist exile community. He published Thomas Mann. He published Trotsky. He published the old Weltbühne crowd, Tucholsky and Polgar. He published himself.

- Sludge and S. lived in a little apartment on the west bank of the Vltava. They ate out and paid the rent on Steffi’s earnings, and Sludge’s writing and the funds available for anti-fascist writers. Occasional checks from Sludge’s family. They rubbed elbows with other exiles, but who knows who would stab you in the back? Cafe Bellevue, Cafe Continental. Sludge’s best friend in Prague was, perhaps, the journalist Milena Jesenská. This was more than ten years after the death of Franz Kafka, with whom Jesenská had an amazingly uncomplicated affair, at least given the history of two people who were well known for complicating their lovelives the way cats complicate yarn. Kafka ran up, with Jesenská, against someone whose existence outside of his projection of her existence could not be annulled by his supreme instrument, the written word. She was not to be trapped by the gift economy of the letter itself, with the return, the timing of the return, the length of the letter all moments in the great fated neurotic struggle. Milena, after all, had been locked up in an insane asylum by her father when she was eighteen. Her father objected to her having sex. And he especially objected to her having sex with Jews. In this case, it was Kafka’s friend, the writer Ernst Polak. They got married, Milens and Ernst, they moved to Vienna, they got divorced, she was so much younger then, it was the twenties — that great sweep of a decade, when modernism, mass consumer goods, and the fox trot were big fads. Milena seduced the fiance of her best friend — although perhaps it was something different than seduction, when these things happen, only later, in the aftermath of hurt, is that word bandied about — and then married him, a leftwing architect, with whom she was not destined to last. She made her way through a number of affairs and alliances as a free woman. She became a communist, then quit the party in disgust. Her ex-husband became a communist, went to the Soviet Union, returned to Prague — quit the party in disgust. In 1936, she had a child and a position on a liberal Czech paper, Přítomnost. Sludge was thirty-two. He wore wireless glasses and had a certain jaunty air. Broad shoulders. He was pretty. His wife, S., was pretty. S. looked a little like a younger Milena, the same rich, thick dark hair, a treasurehouse for a man! Sludge and S. liked Milena and her child. S. saved Milena’s letters, across the continents.

- Milena helped them escape Czechoslovakia before Hitler’s soldiers overran it in 1938.

- Prague’s exiles — from Germany and Austria — tilted towards Stalinist. Publishing Trotsky stirred a lot of rancor in these people. “In Prague alone withing the space of a single month more than fifty articles appeared in which he [Sludge] was smeared and denounced.”

“Sludge, who was driven out of the communist party several years ago, has now had the good fortune to land with the pacifist Bourgeoisie.”

“I know Sludge quite well. An honest, not very intelligent man, and a little “sludgy”.

- In 1937, Sludge published a book denouncing the Show trials and the Stalinist regime. A dictatorship not of the proletariat, but of “lies”. In 1938, he fled to Brussels, then America. He was sponsored by a director and actor who had gotten his start in Weimar Germany and was now making biopics for Warner brothers: William Dieterle. Dieterle knew, as it happened, Felix and Felix’s first wife. Old friends or enemies, so hard to keep track, from Berlin.

4.

- In these same thirties, when he was deep into his career as a Comintern impresario, Felix would sometimes tell this or that target, the journalist over whom he’d draped his arm and led to a bit away from the rest at a cocktail party, the author with whom he was having dinner at a Parisian bistro, that he had fucked Marlene Dietrich. And he would sometimes even say that he’d married Marlene Dietrich, back in the way back. The way back, the twenties, that impossible time in Berlin. And he would sometimes also say he’d discovered Marlene Dietrich. That he knew theater people, film people. These stories were repeated by Claude Cockburn, in memoirs written after Felix’s hanging. A confused version of them appeared in a book about Marlene in 2000, which even claimed that Marlene had a baby with Felix, plainly a mixed up baby story, with the girl Felix had with his wife, Sonja inserted into the story of Marlene, which, oddly enough, Marlene left not one scrap of paper about, one record, one ambiguous hint. These stories were picked up and amplified by Felix’s biographer, who constructed a bubble of inferences on top of a paucity of hearsay evidence. It is the standard methodology of all of these post Cold war journalistic histories, the neo-McCarthyite furies unleashed by the Great War on Terror decade. One wonders if the Marlene gossip wasn’t one part of the collective hook that sold publishers on the biography of a man who was not exactly a swashbuckling spy in the news. Or even a spy, in the usual sense, at all. Star-fucking is so much more saleable than old stories about the Comintern.

• As with all hearsay evidence, it is possible that between Felix’s words and the reports of his words there was some audio, some cognitive distortion, something that happens in history itself as a communicative endeavor, one in which statistics, if they can be found, are tossed together with stories, diary entries, clues, facts, accounts of witnesses, police files. The woman Felix really married back in 1921 or 22 was, in fact, a more celebrated actress at the time than Marlene: Sonja B. She was a greeneyed, “finelimbed” modern woman. In Prague, where they met — perhaps at the famous Cafe Arco, Felix paying for the drinks — she was known not only for stage parts, but for her recitations of Prague’s German writers: Ernst Weiss, Rainer Rilke, Kafka, Brod.

- About Sonja B.: she debuted with the Neue Wiener Bühnein the fall of 1916, and achieved a notable success in the constellation of late Austo-Hungarian theaters. In 1918 she was already playing leading roles, with a sort of proto-acting method approach, in the German Theater in Prague. The reviewer of her role as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet could not quite understand why she was not making the usual Storm und Drang out of the piece. She was visibly “searching her role, but showing in this approach a way to awaken more tension and warmth” than the usual cold routine of sensuality. Still, the reviewer missed the erotic spark.

Look at her — the photo in the Bühne, 1925, announcing her move from Prague to Berlin — a new theater in Kreuzberg — with a photo showing the New Woman in full, short black hair, flashing a smile — caption announcing her recent marriage to Director Felix. Look at her — photo in Der Woche, January 1923, at the Kommandentenstrasse theater, in a scene in a play where she is ultra-Weimar cool, cigarette in hand, her face at an angle, looking quizzically at an array of people outside a barred window. Did she talk with Felix about acting? Perhaps the trick with the cigarette. Perhaps a mysterious way of moving at a party.

- “Back home, as far as anyone now remembers, the only technique Felix cared about was concerned with girls. One of his affairs made Prague too small for both him and the fiancé of a pretty young actress named Sonya B. When Felix won her away, the two of them decided to run off to Berlin. Sonya became his first wife and the mother of his only child, a daughter.” Felix, by the end of his life, had met everybody, and everybody had a story about him. The story that he “stole” his wife from her fiancé was transmuted, in 1960, in a novel that featured a character based on Felix, Leo Lania’s The Foreign Minister. The character is named Karl Munda — the pseudonym Felix used in the United States, in Hollywood, in his glory days in the 30s. Lania was an old friend and enemy, from the Berlin days, a member of Piscator’s court, an enemy during the years of exile in the 40s in Mexico, a renegade, as the non-Stalinist left called itself. In the book, Felix is presented as a sinister mastermind. The foreign minister — Masaryk — remembers when Felix stole the girlfriend of his brother, just for kicks, and his brother committed suicide.

- Lania, like Sludge, had begun his professional life working on The Red Flag in Vienna. Unlike Sludge, Lania remained on the left — when Sludge was attacking Willi Brandt, the SPD mayor of Berlin, in the sixties, Lania ghostwrote his autobiography. Such a small world. Lania worked with Felix in Piscator’s theater collective. There was some bad blood there.

- The Felix character in Lania’s book is a great seducer. “Frances could hardly be blamed for failing to detect the cold calculation with which Karl had mixed the colors on his palette. She was carried away by his eloquence, his expressive, gentle voice, by the paradoxes he did not give her time to analyze. Actually, he expressed only what she and every woman likes to hear said about herself. It was a method which Karl Munda had put countless times to the test, and which he had developed to perfection. And it did not fail him this time.”

- It runs, the seductive strain, through Felix’s third life like a watermark — his life in the press, in autobiographies, articles, and chapters in history books. “Felix was dark and handsome, with a somewhat seedy charm. He was the type of person who, when lighting a cigarette, always closes one eye.”

“But physical features were the least important part of Felix’s equipment. He was a character actor.”

“On women Felix practiced his astonishing power of attraction…”

- The photo of Sonja B. in Die Woche was from a play called Eine Schrei auf der Strasse. It was written by Rolf Lauckner, whose wife, Elfriede, was a painter. Around 1923, she painted a portrait of Sonja B., her nervous, thin hands, steepled before her, her arche-fashionable hat and her permed hair as one unit, her gaze somewhat at an angle from the viewers, slipping away. Elfriede was an expressionist.

- Sonja was also photographed by Sascha Stone, who was loosely associated with the Neue Sachlichkeit — this is the man who put together the photo collage for the cover of Walter Benjamin’s One Way Street. She was photographed by Cecil Beaton, for a Vanity Fair series called “Celebrities in Bed”. The Vanity Fair picture was published in 1935. Perhaps Sonja was visiting America in the entourage of Max Reinhardt? By this time she and Felix had been divorced six years. Didn’t they have fun? Between 1923 and 1928, they had met a lot of celebrities in and out of bed. Perhaps one was Marlene Dietrich. It was Sonja, according to an interview she gave in 1969, who connected Felix, working as the advertising department head at Montag Morgan to Erwin Piscator, who needed a business manager. Piscator made the mistake of thinking Felix could be trusted with money. As it turned out, Felix did like to spend money, and that is as far as you could trust him with money.

- The daughter: Petra. Who remained with Sonja after the breakup. Felix last sees her in 1950.

- According to Eugen Szitmari in the “Book of Berlin (the things that aren’t in the Baedeker)”, Felix, the socialist and his wife frequented the Romanische cafe. Their inclusion in Szitmari’s 1930 book is a wink — they weren’t celebrities, but they knew celebrities. This cafe is where Egon Kisch liked to read his Marx; its where Brecht held court, and where a certain journalistic crowd hung out.

- Eugen Szitmari was one of the 400,000 imprisoned in Hungary in the early 50s. Mátyás Rákosi administered the most widespread and vicious verson of Stalinist terror in Eastern Europe. What did Szitmari do? Whatever. He died in prison in 1953.

- Sonja B. and Felix on a trip to Bandol, a fishing village between Toulon and Marseilles. Piscator is there with Ernst Toller, the radical writer. They all “discussed the possibility of forming their own theater group for exclusively left-wing productions”. “The hotel lies on a big automobile street, with autos rattling, hoping and screeching all day.” Toller was not only a famous writer: he’d been president of the Bavarian Soviet Republic for six days in 1919, perhaps the only Dada government every assembled. Then he’d gone to jail. Then he avoided being murdered. In prison, he wrote a number of plays that enjoyed a lot of success. By the time Felix met him, he was well into his most successful play with Piscator, Hopla, wir leben. Toller, too, was exiled when the Nazis took over.

- Felix and his wife take the train to Marseilles, then take a chauffeur driven car to Bandols. They stay in the Grand Reserve, “a little building on a little peninsula.”

- “In der Französischen Revolution die Aristokraten tanzten im Menuett zur Guillotine.” The tone of Toller’s play was the tone of Weimar Berlin. Substitute for ‘aristocrats” cabaret singers, and the fox trot for the minuet. Sasha Stone did the photomontage for the posters.

- “He related how Dr. Josef Goebbels came to a Berlin theater in 1928 to see a dramatization of The Adventures of the Good Soldier Schweik. Newspapermen were tipped off, and one of them, Felix himself, decided to interview the Nazi leader in a theater box. When Felix asked him what he thought of the play, Goebbels answered curtly: “You will soon find out.” Stink bombs broke up the next performance.” It wasn’t Goebbels who destroyed Piscator’s theater empire, though: it was bad business decisions and taxes. Piscator im Schuldturm — headline in a German paper, 1931. Felix too was on the hook: by some accounts for as much as 100,000, and by others — more plausibly — by 16,000 marks. One story is that Willi Münzenberg, the Comintern’s director, came to the rescue with the money. In this story, Münzenberg is the devil. Or he is the saving grace. In another story, Piscator had already passed Felix onto Münzenberg who used him to run his publishing enterprises. The tax situation made Berlin seem less fun. It was seeming less fun every day. The gang fights in the streets, the targeting of Jews, the S.A. thugs. Felix took the train to Moscow, along with his secretary, Ilse Klagemann. He spent three years in Moscow. The Moscow of Meyerhold and Eisenstein was surely future of theater and film. Felix worked as the production manager in the Soviet studio, Meschrabpom. He met Joris Ivens, with whom he later worked on “The Spanish Earth”, a controversy-laden piece of agit-prop for the Spanish Republic.

- “What he felt about Soviet ordinary life, with its hardships, or the beginning of the Byzantanism of the Kremlin, he kept to himself.”

- So macht man Historie mit Gegenwart. The dream of political theater and the dream of Sancho Panza’s revolution. Berlin was getting close, with its Jew baiting. Moscow was so Stalin cold. Felix memorized his lines. He thought of Danton in Buchner’s play: “I will you will he will. If we live that long, as the old women say”. It is so easy to think: we are at the stage where the revolution must dispose of its revolutionaries. It is less easy to live with the disposed, or to wonder if one will be disposed oneself.

- Ilse is the second wife, the one who travelled with him, who never left him through all the affairs, the hiding, the betrayals, the threats, the lies. Who shared the communist idea. The one to whom the last letter was addressed. Where are her photographs, what artist painted her?

5.

- Sludge was drifting right. His career as a “Publizist” fell into a familiar pattern. From Communism to a soft spot for Trotsky (and denunciation of Stalin) to a un-Marxified socialism to an assimilated Americanism to a rollback anti-Communism. Every drifter checked different boxes: some became anarchists, some became New Leftists, some became beatniks or hippies or pornographers.

- Sludge learned quickly how to write and speak fluidly in English, transferring his Viennese wit to a different medium, with a blunter form of sarcasm. He seemed set to ascend the heights after wooing Luce, the great media magnate. He wrote a book in which one sentence expressed the paradox that would henceforth rule his line: “Extend liberty to everyone who stands for liberty for his fellow creature , but put into a concentration camp everyone who advocates the concentration camp for his neighbor.” This was a sure way of creating a bureaucracy — even a secret police — who would find out if someone were advocating, say, unionizing factories or — really — concentration camps for his neighbor. And as the concentration camps were built for those advocating concentration camps, weren’t the builders… advocating concentration camps? Wasn’t the deed the word?

- In 1953, Stalin died. There were mourners in the red suburbs of Paris, mourners on the streets of Moscow. The anti-communist world, which had been geared towards rollback, paused. What was going to come next? Eisenhower began to de-fund the liberationist anti-communist groups, the emigre groups with their mixture of nationalists, Menshevik liberals, rabid anti-Semites. The message was: Brinksmanship, yes, invading Poland, no. Sludge put two and two together: Eisenhower was soft on communism. The American government was dangerously near the group that advocated concentration camps for their neighbors: they were not seeking to put that group in a concentration camp, or target it with hydrogen bombs.

- Drift, drift.

- After a period of writing for the John Birch journal, American Opinion, Sludge returned to Europe and penned a best-seller: The Limits of the Miracle. The miracle in the title was West Germany’s economic miracle, and the limits were those constraints keeping the West from a war against the communists that the Soviets couldn’t win. The persistent neutralism and weakness in the face of Communism. The persistent calls for peace. Peace, it was an ugly word in Sludge’s book. Peace, what did the Soviet’s want more than peace? For in peace lay corruption, the undermining of order, the envoys to the third world. Was Sludge seriously suggesting military attack, with its attendant exchange of missiles? The question was asked. The question was considered. Sludge’s book put his picture on the cover of Der Spiegel, got him riotous welcomes among various student groups, and put him at the front of press conferences. Where the question was asked. The question was answered sometimes by a clear yes, sometimes with an advocacy of many different kinds of aggression against the Soviet enemy.

- Herman Kahn’s On Nuclear War, which also took the modified “for” position, came out a year after Sludge’s book. Was this a movement? A mode? Was there a name for the love of nuclear war, was it a

-philia? Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove came out four years later.

- “To resist evil, in spite of what such resistance means in quantitative terms of human suffering, is either right or it is wrong. If it is right, then I shall resist evil whether such resistance results in physical terror for “only” 100 million people or whether 200 million people will be maimed. The number of victims has nothing to do with the moral weight of my decision: If to resist evil at the cost of human suffering is wrong, then it would be wrong if “only” a single human creature were committed to involuntary suffering.”

- “Mr. President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks.”

6.

Dates: 1928: In September, the Sixth Comintern Congress makes a hard turn to the left, declaring “social fascism”, i.e. the Socialist and Social Democratic parties, to be the real enemy of the working class. Furthermore, Stalin, aged 49, completes his victory over Trotsky by appropriating Trotsky’s criticism of the New Economic Policy and instituting the 5 year plan of collectivization and forced industrialization. The market and bank system, along with the attempt to devise a socialist credit system, is junked. Foreign exports of Soviet products, on a rebound during the NEP period, peaks in 1930 and collapses thereafter. Stalin’s position — autarky for the Soviet economy, the subservience of all communist parties to the Soviet Union — generates waves of repression within the Soviet Union and the Comintern.

1929. Soviet collectivization begins in the countryside. This will lead to the great famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine. Estimate of the death toll are as high as five million.

February 28, 1933. A fire breaks out in the Reichstag. A considerable portion of it is burned. The Nazis use the occasion to claim complete power, with the Enabling Act of March 23. They put the blame for the fire on the communists and the social democrats, sending more than 100,000 to the concentration camps by the end of 1933. Opposition to the Nazis collapses.

April 1933. Guy Liddell, from British intelligence, arrives in Berlin and coordinates with the head of the German Security Police, gaining access to all intelligence files about Communists and leftists in Germany. It is unclear if Britain promises to coordinate with Germany in return.

June 1935. The British agree to a treaty with Germany that establishes a ratio between the German navy, which is based in Europe, and the British navy, which is worldwide, of 35 percent — but as the Germans have no colonies, this means that the ratio will be 70 percent in Europe. Furthermore, it legitimizes the German naval building increase, against older British ships. In short, the British, either by mistake or through some odd strategic thinking, give Hitler’s Germany an enormous concession. This draws protests from France, Italy and the Soviet Union.

October 2, 1935. Mussolini invades Ethiopia.

1936. Stalin began the Great Purge, which involved mass jailing and execution of accused members of the Communist party, as well as a campaign against “wreckers” in all walks of life. By 1938, a million people will have died.

1936. Elements of the Spanish army revolt against the Spanish Republic, initiating the Civil War. The UK and France refuse to intervene. Germany and Italy aid the army, while the Soviets aid the Republic.

1939. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact is signed. The Soviet Union pledges non-aggression against Germany. The Comintern immediately switches to a violently pacifist line.

- Take these dates as the teeth of giant gears. Imagine these gears grinding to bits millions of people. Felix, among others, operates within these gears. They don’t grind him. He leaps. He stays in the background. He organizes. He works under Willi Münzenberg. Then Willi leaves the party, then Willi is detained in a camp in the South of France, then Willi’s body is found, a noose around its neck, in a forest. The gears took him in.

- The cadaver was “… stretched out on its back, its legs were folded, the left arm lay by his side, the other arm on his chest. The body was dry, the skull exposed. A bit of a three strand rope, 30 cm long, with a sliding knot, adhered to the neck of the victim.” “He is out of the racket now, let him stay out of it”.

- Münzenberg’s racket, when it was going, combined the modernist glamor of the movie star or the avant garde artist with the cause of the international proletariat: he could do the social realism voice and he could insert a Georg Grosz caricature in Die Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung. His media publications made the reader feel that the Communist party was as ultramodern as speeding cars, gangsters, and the naked bisexual dancer Anita Berber — another supposed lover of Marlene Dietrich. Felix, with his experience of theater and film, could have been from casting for Münzenberg, an emissary to the beautiful people, while his Mischpoche aura (our gang — the Comintern) served him well with the journalists, always suckers for afterhours cynicism. His sexual buzz — he was an unfaithful husband to Ilse, but not a particularly bad one in that setting, in that time, across those borders — created an aura about him. This is when the Homeric epithets about his appearance solidified. The face with the dueling scar — although it is not visible in the photographs. The broad shoulders. Later, though, his biographer would detect, in his ID pic, the “face of a hardened Stalinist”. Or perhaps it is the lighting and the inevitable nakedness of an ID pic? It is unlikely that Felix, a man of the theater, was neglecting his skin care.

- In 1933, Felix settled down in Paris. His digs were on St. Honoré. Or were they in a hotel across from the Tuilieries? Or at 10 Rue Dombasle, in the 15th arrondissement? The addresses change, the fox has his lairs, the memoirists and historians slip between the streets. Felix’s first year in Paris, 1933 was taken up with assembling the Brown Book, a propaganda tract that also contained useful information about the Nazi rise to power and use of concentration camps to crush the opposition. The book contains a fanciful account of homoerotic attachments among the Nazi leadership, and the accusation that the Nazis, not the Communists, were behind the Reichstag fire. In the 50s, the Reichstag fire was caught up in Cold War currents. Der Spiegel published an account by a Dutch historian which seemed to prove that the fire was set by one person, Marinus van der Lubbe, who was indeed a Communist — acting on his own. Recently, a document from a Nazi functionary named Hans-Martin Lennings has turned up. Written in 1955, it unfolds a story about bringing Lubbe to the Reichstag on that fatal day, and observes that the fire had already started. Is it true? Round and round the history goes.

- The end of “social fascism” came with the end of the KPD’s ability to block Hitler’s seizure of power. The new line was the popular front of all anti-fascists. Felix had a talent for mixing with the upper crust.

- The rubbing elbows with Hollywood. Where, under the cover name Mulda, he helped create a very pan-partisan Anti-Nazi League. Oh, those communist front organizations, such targets of rightwing rage in the 50s! His partner in this venture was a very Catholic, very aristocratic opponent of Hitler: Hubertus Prinz von und zu Löwenstein. Von und Zu was definitely good enough for cafe society, and for studio chiefs, although common as fish in Newport. Famously, the League was inaugurated at the Victor Hugo Cafe, a piece of swank on the corner of Wiltshire and Rodeo. “The continental lunch is a gourmet’s favorite. First-rate French cuisine.” A hot ticket item, presided over by Mulda and Von und Zu, with the CEO of Bank America as the association’s treasurer and a blessing provided by the right reverend Cardinal of Los Angeles, John Joseph Cantwell. Felix, according to the most colorful account, knelt and kissed the Cardinal’s ring. Other testimonies dispute this.

- “Silky smooth and coolly mysterious, Felix had been a well-known actor in both the experimental theater and street politics of Weimar Berlin.” The more we know Felix, the less we know Felix. From Felix’s letter to the Czech president, on the eve of his execution, 1952: “Once, in 1939, I met Frankfurter, a judge on the Supreme Court, through Thomas Mann’s recommendation. He introduced me to the son of President Roosevelt, James, who was then working in Hollywood and helpmed me collect 15,000 dollars, which was then used to help Geman communists in French camps.”

- Felix was there in Madrid as well, under pseudonyms, among the great writers and the functionaries — Spanish, Soviet — the finance minister, Andres Negrin, the famous American writer, Ernst Hemingway, the Soviet secret policeman, Alexander Orlov. A passing station, in this war, for Lillian Helman. “A slight, weary-looking, interesting man who moved in many circles.” By this time, Felix was running the Agence Espagne in 13 Rue de l’ancien comedie, Paris 75006 — in offices above the famous Procope Restaurant. He was mixed up in the Republic’s affairs. He organized the exposition of artifacts taken from Italian and German military personnel in Spain, at the Spanish Tourist Office, which proved that the French government was lying when it claimed there was no proof of foreign interference in the conflict. The Democracies definitely preferred a right wing authoritarian government to any socialist or radical one. They did nothing about the annexation of Austria, they negotiated the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, they refused any of the pourparlers put out by Litvinov. Hellman and Felix dine at the Procope: “At dinner that night a famous and beautiful German movie star crossed to our table to kiss him and to speak with him in German.” Marlene? Such is the implication. To be so close to stars is to be a star. Comrade star.

- Wars are lost. Franco wins. Hitler’s troops overrun France. The gears mesh, but Felix is ahead of them. He has friends in the States. He has comrades in Mexico City. He is part of the crowd that crowds around Villalongin Street 46. He and Ilse are part of the exile community, they manage the quarrels. Felix has tiptoed his way around the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, writing a book — J’accuse — which concentrates on French political corruption and the missed chances for an alliance against Hitler. Not for Felix the denunciatory pacifist line taken up by his comrades at New Masses.

- Felix’s biographer quotes some bad reviews. He finds the book a Stalinist apologia. Has he read the book? In fact, J’accuse gives proper notice to the work of the extreme right in France. The Cagoule. The extension of rightwing ideology in the armed forces and in the patronat. Although it is a slanted vision, slanted to the left, it is a book that reads well, worth a study if you want a good Comintern functionary’s view of what was happening. The incredible discredit brought the Western democracies brought upon themselves by choosing, time and time again, to concentrate on the red threat instead of the brown one. Felix does not, in the end, take a pacifist line. Compare with the New Masses, where the articles are hysterically pacifist. He nimbly skips around Stalin’s alliance with the Nazis. He never quite comes out and defends it. But there is a limit to how far he will go. Felix never splits with the Communists.

- Wars are won. The Soviet Union is invaded. The UK and the US become allies. In the Southern Hemisphere, or at least Latin America, the FBI and various anti-communist sneaks infiltrate quarreling communist groups. The Trotskyists, the independent Left, the renegades, are in turn persecuted. Did Felix ever see Babette, Munzenberg’s widow, who also fled to Mexico? Ann Seghers writes a friend that she “avoids Babs.” There are mysterious heart attacks. Tina Modotti, the photographer, takes a taxi cab from Villlongin Street 46. “A police patrol found Modotti’s body inside a cab that had been abandoned by the side of the road.” Heart attack? Unnatural causes? Her biographer, Pino Cacucci, writes that “in the last few years an exhaustive study has been carried out to gather scientific data and direct testimony on the street laboratory set up by Yagoda”, the head of the NKVD. Cacucci provides no references. Others have been here. However, all the suspected cases happened in the Soviet Union or its satellites.

- A story, from Felix’s biographer. At Felix’s 50th birthday, he got drunk. He was overheard by one Gunther Reinhold that he’d been involved in paying Italian gangsters in New York to murder Carlo Tresca. True to the neo-McCarthy norm, Felix’s biographer swallows this story wholesale, without even referencing the literature on the assassination of Carlo Tresca. In the neo-McCarthy literature we are often told that Felix was “known for his role in tracking down and assisting in the murder of key soviet intelligence defectors.” His fame in this respect is confined to the literature of “soviet espionage”, written by a rightwing clique — there’s no forensic evidence at all. But here, here finally, if we can trust Gunther Reinhold, we have the word from the horse’s mouth.

- Can we trust Guenther Reinhold? Tresca’s biographer, Nunzio Pernicone, wrote of him that he was “a Walter Winchell protégé, whose resumé boasted spying activities for the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization (forerunner of HUAC) and the FBI, Reinhardt wrote a potboiler in 1952, entitled Crime Without Punishment. Combining sycophantic adulation of J. Edgar Hoover with “never-before-told” revelations about communist crimes…”, Guenther’s account deserves “little if any credence.”

- So much for the argument from one authority. In fact, Guenther Reinhold, little remembered now, was quite a colorful character in his time. In occupied Germany, he was one of the occupied zone’s characters — who he was working for was always in question. The inspector general in a confidential memo to General Clay, chief of Intelligence, European theater, explained that it was “necessary to relieve him of this assignment [as press representative] … because of a displayed lack of tact and common sense, plus a peculiar persistence in breached of security involving discussions of classified military intelligence with unauthorized persons, and by unauthorized contacts with officials of State Department and Military Government, to whom he misrepresented his position and scope of his authority.” [Sayer and Bottig, 1984] According to Sayer and Bottig: “He was not a very popular man with his colleagures. He was, for a start, a sneak. Most recalled hi as a boastful, rather unbalanced character, who suffered from a persecution mania and was prone to exaggeration.” Guenther’s type was all over scoundrel time. He was Roy Cohen. He was Red Channels.

- Felix’s biographer has no problem with this report, making this doubtful bit of eavesdropping into a forensic fact: “While it has remained unclear whether Tresca was killed by the mafia or by the NKVD, it appears from Katz’s drunken remark that it was the former, hired by the latter.” So the methods of the 50s become the methods of the era of the global war on terror.

- The training in Moscow. The consultations with the NKVD about assassinating Stalin’s enemies in Spain. The assassination of Tresca. The assassination of Muenzenberg. The spying for the the French intelligence. The spying for the Nazis. The spying for American intelligence. The spying for Tito. The trial in Prague, the House Unamerican committee. How can the shadow of a man have such a bloody career without, himself, being bloody?

- In 1947, the anti-Stalinist writer, Victor Serge, will die of a heart attack in a Mexico City taxicab. There is a rumor connecting death in the back seat to the communist union of taxi cab drivers.

- Felix comes home. But where is home? He comes back to Czechoslovakia. He becomes the editor of the Party newspaper, Rudé Pravo. He wakes in the night and sees ghosts. Munzenberg, his older brother, who died in a concentration camp. He holds hands with his wife, there in bed. He witnesses the seizure of power by his comrades. He witnesses the Stalinist weather, coming in, freezing. On 9 June 1952 he is arrested. In the trial of the 13 ‘counter-revolutionaries”, Felix, as always, does not have top billing: this goes to Rudolf Slansky, the former head of the Czech party. Always the backchannel man, the man behind the man behind the curtain. It is a show trial, and the defendants memorize their parts. Felix says: “I pledged myself to supply the British Intelligence Service reports on all questions in which it was interested.” Felix says: “In September, 1939, I pledged myself to the French Foreign minister, Mandel, in Paris.” Katz spoke of supplying the British with Czech secret documents, provided by Slansky and Czech president Klementis. Felix says: “I am a writer, supposedly an archict of the soul. What sort of architecth have I been — I who have poisoned people’s souls?” Felix asks to be hung.

- So much hanging in this story. Toller, hanging himself from the doorknob with the soft cloth belt of his hotel supplied night robe. Muenzenberg, hung from a tree in a forest in southeast France. Felix.

- “Let a,a1,…a6 denote the angles made by the several portions of the rope (reckoned from the top) with the horizon.

Let T, T1, . . . T6 denote the strain on each portion of the rope.

Let T7=X be the strain on the lowest or horizontal portion of the rope.” — So wrote Reverend Samuel Haugton, an interested Victorian observer of the science of execution. These equations all describe the crushing of many a thorax. For instance, Felix’s. The breaking strain on his backbone on the morning of December 3, 1952. His body becoming garbage as it hangs there. Do the guards notice? His body was burnt: die Asche der Hingerichteten auf einer vereisten Straße beiMělník verstreut.