Communazis: FBI Surveillance of German Emigre Writers

asked by faithfulone on October 30, 2006 6:41 AM

Thousands of writers, artists, filmmakers, and intellectuals fled Germany in the 1930s. Many settled in the United States, hoping to find allies against Nazism and a safe refuge from Hitler’s Gestapo. But in America nearly all of the exiled authors—among them Nobel Prize recipient Thomas Mann, his brother Heinrich, dramatist Bertolt Brecht, and novelists Erich Remarque and Lion Feuchtwanger—became the subjects of intense suspicion and government surveillance. This riveting book, based on secret FBI files released for the first time to Alexander Stephan under the provisions of the Freedom of Information and Privacy Acts, reveals the disturbing details and the surprising extent of government surveillance operations conducted against German exiles during World War II and the McCarthy era.

Not only the FBI but also the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the House Un-American Activities Committee, and other agencies spied on the German émigrés. Wiretaps were installed, mail was routinely opened and read, records of visitors were maintained. Searches—not always with legal warrants—were conducted, informants hired, and connections to exile writers established (Thomas Mann’s daughter, Erika, volunteered her insights). Stephan sets these activities in historical context and discusses the widespread xenophobia and paranoia that surrounded Nazism and Communism, which were frequently conflated in the public imagination. The author illuminates the relationship not only between German anti-Nazis and U.S. politics of the period but also between intellectuals and the modern surveillance state.

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Reviews

As Hitler consolidated his grip on power in Germany during the 1930s, thousands of intellectuals, Jews, Communists, artists, and dissidents found themselves under increasing pressure to leave. As the Nazis filled the booming concentration camps with their various opponents, many of these justly frightened targets of Nazi repression fled Germany for safer harbors beyond the reach of Nazi influence or control. But as the decade progressed, the sphere of "safe harbors" diminished, and in a decade of Depression, xenophobia, and rising national chauvinism, these refugees faced hostility and suspicion nearly everywhere they went. Among these refugees were writers and poets like Thomas and Heinrich Mann, playwrights like Bertolt Brecht, scientists like Albert Einstein, and a wide range of others including people like Anna Seghers, Herbert Marcuse, and Theodore Adorno. Some of these refugees -- the lucky ones, in light of what happened to many of those who were forced to remain in Nazi Europe -- made it to the United States.

But the United States was also wrestling with a Depression; racism and anti-Semitism were facts of American life, and red scare paranoia already had developed a tradition in this country closely connected to anxieties about immigration and cultural modernism. However bright the intellects with which these refugees might be gifted, or however shining their intellectual and cultural achievements, they remained for J. Edgard Hoover and the FBI dangerously "Other", and therefore dangerous and suspicious. In this book Stephan documents the extensive surveillance, both legal and illegal, that the FBI pursued in attempting to identify the potential national security risk posed by these refugees, who after all were mostly from Germany, although in many cases they were Jews, Socialists, or Communists who had no sympathy with that detested and thuggish National Socialist regime. However, J. Edgar Hoover did not make much distinction between Nazis and Communists as far as the potential security threat was concerned; to Hoover, these refugees might be seen as "Communazis" -- thus the title. It is also depressing to see how some of these refugees turned on others, working as informants for the FBI, intensifying the web of suspicion and paranoia under which these hapless refugees were forced to exist.

As far as I am concerned, this extensive FBI surveillance of refugees and dissidents from a brutal, racist regime was both deplorable and useless (it is telling that Hoover saw the fact that many of these refugees were wanted by the German police as a mark against the refugees -- even if the police were the notorious Gestapo). But even if the reader does not share my view on this, the reader will find in the pages of Stephan's book highly informative. It is a useful documentation of the systematic national police surveillance of private individuals, which occurred as part of the development of the national security state apparatus that emerged during and after the Second World War. Whatever one's views of Hoover and the FBI, one will find this book a valuable addition to studies on domestic police surveillance against real or potential political dissent.

reviewed by soulful on November 24, 2006 3:04 PM

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