The Rereading of Willy Münzenberg's and Margarete Buber-Neumann's Lives in Antonio Munoz Molina's Novel Sefarad (2001)

Abstract

ADOLF Endler, in his journal Tarzan am Prenzlauer Berg (1994), mentions a picture album belonging to the poet Kurt Barthel, from 1952 to 1954 president of the East German Writers' Organization and notorious for his enthusiastic support of Stalin. In some photographs, consisting mainly of group pictures of Barthel with other communists from former periods of his life, some of the faces are missing: Kuba [Spitzname fur Kurt Barthel] hatte tatsachlich aus all diesen Beweisstucken fur seinen 'Aufstieg' in den vierziger, funfziger Jahren all jene beruhmten Kopfe heraustranchiert [...], welche sich seiner oder der Meinung der Partei zufolge als Verrater entpuppt hatten, als Renegaten und Revisionisten, kurz als 'ekles Geschmeiss' [...] / (Kuba [nickname for Kurt Barthel] had indeed cut out from those pieces of proof of his 'career' in the 1940s and 1950s all the famous heads that according to his or the Party's opinion had turned out to be 'traitors,' 'renegades' and 'revisionists,' in short 'disgusting beasts' [...]). (197, all English translations are mine) That Kurt Barthel had cut out the faces of some of the famous communists from the photographs is symbolic of the discourse of orthodox Marxism as it was practiced mainly in the GDR and in the Soviet Union before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. For instance, names like Willy Munzenberg, a renowned German communist who was considered a traitor by the Communist Party, were excluded from the history of the Communist movement. This note will show that Antonio Munoz Molinas's novel Sefarad inserts back some of the missing faces into the history of German communism, especially those of Willy Munzenberg and Margarete Buber-Neumann. The great value of the novel consists not only in a subtle and sensitive reading of the lives of different European Jews during the years of the Holocaust, but also, intertwined with it, a reading of German victims of both Nazism and Stalinism. The author renders personal stories of people whose lives were deeply influenced by the politics and history of the twentieth century and attempts to describe how they felt certain historical events. Among those people are Willy Munzenberg and Margarete Buber-Neumann, who were communists and, at the same time, victims of the witch-hunting for the heterodox within the Stalinist system. Buber-Neumann, who lived in exile in the Soviet Union, was even turned over to Hitler after the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939 and barely survived the Ravensbruck concentration camp. As a consequence, until the end of the Cold War, Munzenberg's and Buber-Neumann's lives were largely excluded from orthodox Marxist discourse--as if speaking of them would have been politically incorrect. Antonio Munoz Molina, by crossing geographic and cultural borders, succeeds in breaking this taboo. The novel Sefarad with the subtitle novela de novelas / (a novel of novels) consists of seventeen chapters, which, at first glance, seem to be completely unrelated. They tell stories of Jews, of communists, of people from Andalusia who feel homesick living in Madrid, of drug victims, or of the narrator's feelings of exclusion during his childhood--in short of human beings who are exiled or feel exiled in one way or another. Only one chapter describes the expulsion of the Jews, whose Spanish name is Sefarad, from the Iberian Peninsula and their later fate. Therefore, critics called the structure of the book a cajon de sastre / (box of the tailor) (Neuschafer 158) in which you put everything that is unorderly lying around at the moment. However, a closer look reveals that, as Sabine Friedrich stated, im Kontext des Romans wird Sefarad [...] zum Inbegriff fur die verlorene Heimat, nach der sich die Exilierten zurucksehnen / (in the context of the novel, Sefarad becomes a symbol for the lost home to which the exiled are longing to return) (316). This note will examine chapter seven of the novel, which deals with the existential uprooting in the lives of Willy Munzenberg and Margarete Buber-Neumann. …