IN 1970, I began to look eastward. If Willy Brandt were to make history, that was where it would be made. But it was also from that direction that we heard the rumble of anti-Semitism, growing disturbingly loud.
When the German elections were over, I phoned Mr. Dmowski, a Polish diplomat who a few months earlier had invited me to visit his country. I was ready to go; I was interested in seeing the sights, of course, but I also wanted to communicate with the youth of Poland. I wanted to speak at Auschwitz. Though I called him several times, the invitation never came to fruition.
Not long before this, on October 5, 1969, I was invited to East Berlin for the celebrations commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the creation of the German Democratic Republic. There was a series of receptions. I wore a white cocktail dress—stylish but modest—that attracted the attention of the gathered Communist leaders. This was one of the rare circumstances where I felt genuinely seductive, probably because I was one of very few women allowed into this small circle of men. There was one moment I particularly savored: seeing the looks of stupefaction, almost of bitterness, on the faces of the West German Communist Party leaders and the leaders of the ADF, when an official came to find me in the large reception hall of the State Council and led me to the VIP section where Walter Ulbricht and the Politburo were welcoming the leaders of the socialist countries.
Ulbricht warmly shook my hand. The attention I received from this little man, the embodiment of Communist Germany, was due to the intransigence I had shown toward Kiesinger. A member of the Central Committee told me that he had been present when Ulbricht was informed about the slap: “It was November 7, the anniversary of the Soviet revolution. We were in the middle of a meeting in Ulbricht’s office when a secretary came in and whispered to the president that you had just publicly humiliated Kiesinger. Our discussion then turned to that subject. I vividly remember what Ulbricht said about you: ‘That is a courageous woman. We must support her.’”
After two years of clashes and hostility, I could not relax completely in the company of politicians. The compliments and friendly smiles bestowed on me by these East European leaders—Stoph, Honecker, Brezhnev, Husák, Zhivkov, Kádár, and others—made me feel good, but I did not belong to this system. I remained convinced that the German nation could only express itself through acts of political morality.
It was a very enjoyable evening all the same, the kind of evening young girls dream about, the kind of evening I had dreamed about myself. I was filmed dancing in the arms of a white-haired Soviet marshal in full uniform. The six-year-old German girl who had watched in terror as the Cossacks invaded the village where she and her mother had taken refuge in 1945, could she ever have imagined that one night she would find herself waltzing with one of the leaders of the Red Army? Commitment to a cause can never be absolute; it always leaves a small breach through which you can follow your own adventure, like a mildly fascinated spectator.
* * *
IN OCTOBER, I returned to Berlin for two conferences: the first on the NPD and the second on what stance to take regarding Willy Brandt. I shared the opinion of most of the student movement’s members that we should immediately bring an end to our infighting. However, some more radical left-wingers—among them my lawyer, Horst Mahler—were opposed to this idea. Serge tried to bring them round, but in vain.
At the end of 1969, I decided to start writing about non-French subjects for DVZ. I went to The Hague for the European summit. I wanted to be there for Brandt’s entrance on the international stage and to let the Dutch people know that the youth of Germany were behind their chancellor.
The first inter-German summit was due to take place in Erfurt on March 19, 1970. I absolutely wanted to be present for that historic moment. But my foreign-press authorization from East Berlin was late in arriving. Very few foreign journalists were allowed to attend this conference. In desperation, I flew to East Berlin at my own expense and insisted on gaining access until I was finally given the precious piece of paper. I then hitched a ride to Erfurt with two journalists from the Gamma agency. I helped them get through police checks, as neither had received their accreditation.
On the platform of the train station in Erfurt, I stood only a few yards away from Willy Brandt and the East German prime minister Willi Stoph as they shook hands like two men who respect each other and are reunited after a long separation. It was an exhilarating moment for me: the meeting at Erfurt put an end to Bonn’s claims to exclusively represent the interests of Germany. It was also a point of no return on the path that led to the legal recognition of the GDR as a sovereign state by Bonn and the West—a landmark on the journey toward reunification.
As Brandt came out of the station, I was so close to him that he happened to see me—and his serious expression broke into a smile.
In the afternoon, I followed Brandt to the Buchenwald Memorial. It was extremely cold, and snowing. The monument is located on a small hill above the city of Weimar. Brandt was accompanied by the East German foreign minister Otto Winzer. They headed toward the commemorative tower, which had been wrapped in the East German flag, and then toward the crypt. Some soldiers from the East German army had formed an honor guard in front of the monument. There was a military band, too. Brandt, preceded by soldiers carrying flowers, went down into the crypt while the band played the West German national anthem—for the first time, I believe, on East German soil. Brandt and the East German leaders honored the dead for the same reasons: these were Germans who had fought against Hitler. For both sides, this was no mere ceremony but a genuine return to their roots.
After Brandt had left the crypt, I went down there, my arms full of flowers handed to me by East German leaders. As I placed the flowers next to one of the walls, I read this phrase engraved upon it: THE DESTRUCTION OF NAZISM AND ITS ROOTS IS OUR AIM.
* * *
ON MAY 24, 1970, I was in Kassel, West Germany, for the second summit between East and West Germans. This thaw in relations between the two republics did not take me by surprise. My logic was simple enough: no great people has ever remained divided indefinitely; the Jewish people were able to recover their homeland after two millennia, despite being persecuted and small in number; therefore, the German people would also be united once again.
My vision was not utopian. For that reason, I had to remind people in the East, as I had done in the West—and not only with words but with acts—that they were subject to urgent moral imperatives with regard to their ideological commitments. After what happened under Nazism, shouldn’t every German feel a duty to combat anti-Semitism, to help keep former Nazis away from positions of power, and to prevent the “rehabilitation” of Nazi criminals?
That was why I went to Austria on May 15 to oppose the presence of Hans Schirmer as the West German ambassador in Vienna.
A Nazi Party member (number 3143496) from May 1, 1933, Schirmer had worked in Goebbels’s propaganda ministry and had been Kiesinger’s superior from 1939 to 1943. He had also been the director of the Radio Mundial agency, an international propaganda broadcasting network that disseminated the idea of a “new Europe” all over the world.
Walter Scheel, the West German foreign minister, had declared, “The Austrians have already forgotten the Anschluss.” And he was right. No matter how much I stirred up the Austrian press or questioned Chancellor Kreisky at his press conference, nothing had any effect. Bruno Kreisky replied to me that refusing an ambassador was an act of hostility toward the country he represented and that it was the responsibility of the host country to verify its diplomats’ pasts and decide if they were acceptable.
I tried again on June 17, at the Austrian Socialist Party’s congress. This time, I had brought some leaflets with me—as well as Arno, since my mother-in-law was staying in Bucharest with her sister.
We were outside the front door for the opening ceremony of the congress. It was raining, and we were soon soaked. Arno was horsing around in the rain, so in an attempt to calm him down I gave him a few leaflets and asked him to help Mama by handing them to people. Instead, he had great fun soaking them in puddles, scrunching them up into wet paper balls, and throwing them at the delegates.
I was hoping the Austrian socialists would take a stand against Schirmer, but the exact opposite happened. During that congress, they protested aggressively against Simon Wiesenthal, who criticized them for letting former Nazis into government. The security guards escorted me from the building. I was furious.
From Vienna, I went on to Bucharest, to introduce Arno to his great-aunt. Ten days later, I had to return to Berlin. All these trips were costing us a fortune, so I went to the East German embassy and pleaded my case. They immediately gave me a Bucharest-Berlin ticket on the Interflug airline. In East Berlin, I was offered a free vacation in the GDR with Arno. This offer had been made to me by the East German government before, but I’d never had the time to take them up on it. This time, though, I accepted—and, from August 5 to 20, the two of us stayed at the Hotel Panorama in Oberhof.
The only trip I’d made in East Germany before this had been in March 1968. For three weeks, I had traveled around the country alone. The East Germans trusted me: I was not forced to follow a particular itinerary but could go where I pleased. In Oberhof, it was very different: we stayed in a palatial hotel surrounded by a very bourgeois East German clientele, wealthy people who expressed no political opinions and with whom I felt no connection whatsoever. My only friend there—and a great love of Arno’s—was a cleaning lady named Marion.
I had plenty of time to think while I was there. In Poland, anti-Semitism had come back into the open, with the blessing of the Polish authorities. For more than a year, I had been promising myself that I would raise the issue of anti-Semitism in front of the Polish youth. Up to now, I had not been able to keep that promise.
In East Germany, too, the nation’s youth had to be armed against anti-Semitism, not through words, but through a trial of strength with the East German authorities. In the GDR, it was not the party leaders who were anti-Semitic but senior civil servants then aged forty-five to fifty-five who had grown up under Nazism. They had not been like Walter Ulbricht, marching alongside the Red Army, or Erich Honecker, locked up in a Nazi prison, or Hermann Axen, a Jew imprisoned in a French camp and then deported. Many civil servants do not resemble their leaders; it was among these people that the anti-Semitic menace was spreading. I had always sensed a faint hostility toward me from them, just as I had from men of that generation in West Germany.
East Germans listened to West German radio stations; they watched West German television. They would hear about my arrest after I carried out my plan, as they would hear about my motives. They would be very surprised, and they would read the East German party’s line in their newspapers. Either that, or the party would make the decision to destroy my reputation through defamatory newspaper articles. Or recognizing the truth of what I was saying about Polish anti-Semitism, they would remain silent on the issue.
Anyway, I was well aware that, after the action I was planning, silence would descend around me in the GDR; that the West German Communists would quickly distance themselves from me; that the newspaper I worked for, DVZ, would do its best to fire me.
What I planned to do was not anti-Soviet or anti-Communist, however; it was not about finger-pointing at the Poles; it was a question of not remaining silent or inactive in the face of tyranny.
I carefully assessed the risk I would run, because I had no wish to be a martyr. As with the slap, I would do all I could to avoid prison. The Poles would never believe that I had acted alone. When they learned about the moral support I had received from East Berlin, there was a good chance they would imagine the GDR was in some way behind my actions in Warsaw. For the Polish government, then, the best solution would be to rapidly expel me from Poland—and I was happy with that, on the condition that Western press agencies would immediately spread the news of my arrest.
* * *
I WROTE A leaflet in German and French, and had it translated into Polish. I then made two hundred copies of this trilingual text.
I also had to get hold of a Polish entry visa. At the Polish military mission in West Berlin, a bureaucrat had me fill out various forms. I exchanged my marks for vouchers that would enable me to pay for my hotel room in Warsaw. Then the same bureaucrat spent a long time examining my French passport. “You’re a journalist?” he asked. That was what I had written on the form. “Come back in two weeks to collect your visa.”
That same day, I went to the Polish embassy in East Berlin. This time, I was more prudent. I took care to engage in a long conversation with the bureaucrat, who knew about my anti-Nazi activities. And yet he still frowned when he spotted that fateful word.
“So you’re a journalist?”
Very quickly, I said, “No, I used to be, during the election campaign, but now I’m just a housewife.”
“Then write ‘no occupation,’” he suggested, and gave me the visa.
* * *
NINE P.M., AUGUST 25. The train moves slowly through the suburbs of Berlin. For the first time, I feel palpable fear. The protest I am planning to make tomorrow morning in Warsaw is very different from all those I’ve organized in Western countries. In Poland, people have rotted in prison for less than this.
There is a man in his forties sitting on the seat facing me. For a few moments, he stares at me. He does not speak until well after our departure. He works in the East German embassy in Warsaw. I breathe a sigh of relief.
“Do you know Warsaw?” he asks.
“No. I’m going there to do some sightseeing for a few days.”
“I would be happy to act as your guide. My family lives in East Berlin, so I have plenty of time.”
This invitation is awkward, because if the diplomat is seen in my company, it could seriously affect his career after what I am going to do tomorrow.
We arrive in Warsaw early in the morning. Again, the diplomat wants to help: Please, let him find me a hotel. I politely refuse.
* * *
TIME IS SHORT. I find a youth hostel, but it has no vacancies. The desk clerks do agree to look after my suitcase, though.
I only have a few hours to alert the Western press agencies. I feel very small and vulnerable as I rush through this unknown city. My taxi driver cannot find the address of the AFP correspondent. The minutes tick by. I ask him to drop me—I’ll find it myself. But I can’t, and in the end I have only one solution: call him. The phone rings and rings. Just as I am about to give up, someone answers. But he does not speak French, and I don’t know a word of Polish. In hesitant German, the man explains that he is a carpenter doing some work in the AFP’s office. Thankfully, I at least manage to get him to give me directions.
After waiting for a good hour, I finally see a short man arrive. He speaks French with a strong accent. So the AFP’s correspondent is Polish? In that case, I cannot possibly tell him about my plan. He questions me.
“I’m a French tourist. One of my husband’s friends works for the AFP in Paris, and he advised me to come and meet you so you could give me some information about the city.”
He appears surprised by this, and not very convinced. I can’t keep up this pretense. I decide to take the plunge.
“Are you French? I mean, do you have French nationality?”
He stares at me wide-eyed. “Yes, but why?”
“That changes everything. I want to let you know about something. Can we talk here?”
“No, no, we’d better talk in my car.”
I feel slightly more reassured when I notice that his car has French license plates. I explain the action that I am planning to carry out around noon. He does not seem too thrilled about this. The punishment is severe. All the same, he does agree to be present. “All I’m asking you is to go there and witness my protest. You don’t have to speak to me, just send the information to Paris.”
* * *
FINAL PREPARATIONS. I go into the restroom of a café to tie a chain around my waist, over my dress. The other end goes through the buttonhole of my coat.
Noon. On the Marszałkowska, in the center of Warsaw, the sidewalks are packed. I carefully choose a tree that looks strong enough. It is close to a stoplight and faces a very wide and busy crosswalk. Perfect. The cars—more of them than I had imagined—come to a halt a few yards from where I stand. Pedestrians walk past on either side of me. It’s time.
Quickly but discreetly, I take out my chain. It almost slips out of my hands. I hadn’t realized I was trembling. I wrap the chain around the tree and padlock it. But what should I do with the key? People are swarming around me. That tiny key in my palm seems to weigh a ton. My first reflex is to swallow it. Dumb idea. Keep it in my mouth? I try, but it’s an unpleasant sensation. I look around for a sewer. Nothing nearby. Clearly I haven’t thought of everything. I could simply throw it on the ground, but what if a passerby were to see it? Only one solution remains: I drop it behind the railings that surround the tree and then put my foot on it.
People are starting to notice me. I move around as much as the chain allows and hand out my leaflets. People slow down to take them from me. In less than ten minutes, all two hundred leaflets have been distributed. I keep one copy and hold it to my chest, so that the others can read what it says:
Polish citizens,
The elimination of the Jews that is still going on in Poland is not part of a struggle against supposed Zionist traitors—it is simply ANTI-SEMITISM. These new persecutions are damaging the reputation of Poland and of socialism all around the world. In reality, they have been engineered by the enemies of socialism, who are trying to seize power by acting like demagogues.
Poland suffered terribly under Nazism, but do not forget that in Auschwitz and Treblinka millions of Polish Jews were exterminated while the rest of the population remained passive. Only the Polish Communists and socialists fought against that genocide in an organized way. Follow their example and demand that your government put an end to its measures, which are forcing the last Polish Jews—among them many patriots and socialists—to flee their homeland. I am not a Zionist, nor even a Jew; I am a German anti-fascist.
B.K.
Lambrakis Medal, awarded in 1969 in East Berlin by the World Peace Council
I spot a policeman going into a phone booth. He comes out, still staring at me. A few minutes pass. A Jeep stops on the sidewalk, and the people in the crowd in front of me are shoved out of the way by two policemen. One of them grabs my arm and tries to lead me away. He doesn’t get very far. Young people smile openly as I show the policeman my chain. Disconcerted, he walks around the tree, then demands the key. Klucz, he repeats five or six times.
Eventually, he goes back to the Jeep and rummages around in the trunk. The second policeman stays close to me. I am careful not to move my foot, in case he sees the key hidden beneath it. People crowd around, and the policeman tries to push them back, in vain. Angrily, he grabs hold of a young man who is reading my leaflet and confiscates his identity papers.
The other policeman returns, with a pair of wire cutters. He frees me without difficulty. While all this is happening, I notice the French journalist on several occasions. I am led away to the Jeep, along with the young man, and we are driven to the police headquarters. There, I am taken to various offices before they find a superintendent who speaks German. The usual interrogation ensues. The police officers are courteous. They do not understand the reason for my public protest.
“Do you have any other leaflets?” they ask.
“Yes, in my bags. I left them at the youth hostel.”
We go there in the car. On the way back, another policeman attempts to convince me that anti-Semitism is no longer a problem in Poland.
Back in the police station, a senior civil servant takes over, telling me unceremoniously, “You have committed a serious crime. As a foreigner, you have protested against a democratic country. You will be taken to court, and you may be sentenced to two or three years in prison.”
“Do what you think is right.”
My lack of anxiety seems to take him aback. He leaves me alone for more than two hours, then returns.
“We have decided to expel you. We have taken into consideration all that you did before the mistake that you made today.”
At the airfield, they take the money from my bag and use it to pay for my ticket to Paris. The superintendent then hands me over to the French pilots. I leave Warsaw sitting in the cockpit of a Caravelle airplane. A few minutes later, the crew invites me to sit in first class and offers me a glass of champagne to celebrate my happy escape. Serge and Arno fly from Bonn to Paris, reaching Orly Airport a few hours after me, and we celebrate Arno’s birthday at home.
* * *
WE DID NOT have to wait long for the first press reactions. A West German Christian Democrat newspaper wrote: “A globetrotter in the name of socialism and anti-fascism, this young woman is perhaps a little eccentric; it is possible to laugh at this Amazon who loves a good fight, but she is always consistent in her political opinions, and she is obviously not biased—because she sees the flaws in Communist countries, too, and denounces them.”
I went back to Berlin, hoping to seize the moment. The main goal of my protest was to win over the youth of East Germany, so I wanted to get a feel for the reaction in East Berlin. First, I went to my mother’s house in West Berlin; I had imagined for an instant that she might change her mind about me, since the right-wing press had written something favorable about me for the first time. Wrong! She seemed to be allergic to any form of public protest whatsoever.
As I crossed the east-west border on the S-Bahn, at the Friedrichstrasse checkpoint, I felt slightly apprehensive: Would they let me through without any difficulties? My fears were unfounded: everything went smoothly, and I went to see one of my friends who worked in radio and who had been the first person to help me establish relations with East Germany. I was about to show him the leaflet I had handed out in Warsaw, thinking it would come as a surprise, but he told me he had already read it. He said that the press agency dispatches had caused a degree of shock among East German journalists, even if they didn’t show it.
Next, I contacted a bureaucrat at the Ministry of the Interior who had helped us when we were researching Kiesinger’s past.
“I wanted to meet you. Could Serge and I come to your office?”
“I don’t think that will be necessary after what you did in Poland,” he replied coldly.
“But why shouldn’t I denounce anti-Semitism in Poland?”
I was trying to start a discussion, so I could explain my position, but it was no good.
“Your view of the issue is from the wrong historical standpoint.”
The conversation was over; the bridges were burned. Would I have better results with the editors of the East Berlin newspaper BZ am Abend, for whom I wrote regular articles? When Serge and I arrived, we saw the head of the foreign-news department, so I asked him if the piece I had sent three weeks earlier was going to be published. “We can no longer publish anything by you,” he replied. “We did not agree with your protest, even if it’s true that there are problems in Communist countries. Our opinion is that those problems should not be exposed, as it provides more ammunition for the capitalists.”
This flat rejection revealed the gulf that had opened up between us. The fear of heresy led to the most cowardly kind of dogmatism.
I tried one last time, going to the East German anti-fascist association. We began with a lot of small talk, as if they were trying to avoid discussing the elephant in the room. When I showed them the leaflet I had distributed in Warsaw, the old Resistance fighters looked embarrassed. One of them said, “Yes, we heard about your protest. Everyone’s talking about it, but only in whispers; not many dare to speak openly about it. Lots of our friends approve of what you did, because there’s been a problem for a long time that shows itself during the memorial ceremonies at Auschwitz or in the Warsaw Ghetto. Only delegations from the Eastern countries attend those ceremonies. We have tried to change things through discussions with our Polish comrades, but it hasn’t made any difference.”
It was during this period that my relations with East Germany deteriorated. I went back one more time with Serge. They made us wait at the border for two hours before finally announcing that we no longer had the right to enter East Germany.
* * *
A FEW WEEKS after my protest, Willy Brandt—the first chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany to visit Poland—chose to kneel at the Warsaw Ghetto memorial, to the great displeasure of the Poles and also of many Germans.
Later, when Brandt received the Nobel Peace Prize after overseeing treaties that normalized the Federal Republic’s relations with the Soviet Union and Poland, tears came to my eyes—and I am not someone who cries easily. Of all the things I have done, one of those that brings me most joy is working on behalf of Willy Brandt and having put my trust, for once in my life, in a politician. Brandt’s vigorous and courageous Ostpolitik and the human relations that he facilitated between West Berliners and East Germans have already earned their place in history.
* * *
THE EAST GERMAN authorities’ sudden reversal did nothing to shake my deepest convictions. I continued to believe that the sole solution to the German problem was the official recognition of both states of the German nation. Germany’s absence from the United Nations struck me as deplorable, too. It was time that East Germany and West Germany joined the UN simultaneously.
I would make my opinion public a few weeks later, on October 23, 1970, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the United Nations Charter, to be commemorated at the UN headquarters in Geneva. At the time I was in West Berlin, and it was a telephone call that made my mind up: Michel Lang’s mother told me that there was a rumor in German far-left circles that I was a CIA agent. Not only that, but our predecessor in the spacious fourth-floor apartment we had just left in order to live with my mother-in-law again—the apartment that would soon be used to shoot Last Tango in Paris—was the head of the CIA in Paris; that, at least, was the claim made in a Soviet pamphlet that gave his name and address. I was appalled. But then, when I thought about it, such an accusation seemed logical. The way in which the different systems—capitalist and Communist—defend themselves against those who denounce their excesses is always pretty much the same. Two years earlier, the far-right press had stated that I was a Stasi agent, in the pay of Walter Ulbricht. The newspapers explained how each time I went to East Germany I would receive my instructions directly from him. Now it was the far left that was attempting to smear me. I would not let this calumny go unchallenged; I would respond in my own style—with a simple, clear, public act, proving that my political beliefs had not changed.
To realize my plan, I needed leaflets and two large German flags. I found the address of a flag-making factory in the phone directory. I was pretty surprised when the flags actually arrived, though: each one was eight feet by five feet. I had planned to attach them to broom handles, but that was obviously not going to work! I had to buy two seven-foot flagpoles. Carrying them on a train from Berlin to Geneva was far from easy!
At the station in Geneva, there were press photographers waiting for me on the platform: I had told them I’d be arriving. Still carrying my unwieldy package—the two flags were wrapped in brown paper—I took a taxi with a convertible roof to the UN headquarters.
I don’t know who denounced me, but the UN’s security staff had been warned about my visit and instructed not to let me enter. Thankfully, they were on the lookout for a young woman carrying two flags, or perhaps a group of students arriving on foot. Consequently, they paid no attention to taxis. That was how I was able to enter the gate without any problems.
As it happened, there was a crowd of delegates on the front steps. Without wasting a second, I unwrapped my parcel. A young man offered to help me. I nailed the two flagpoles, arranged so that they crossed each other, to the façade near the entrance and then immediately began handing out the two hundred leaflets. It did not take long for the UN’s security guards to react. They confiscated my flags, but not before the photographers were able to immortalize the moment.
* * *
IN THE FALL of 1970, I also went to London to protest the British home secretary’s plan to expel Rudi Dutschke. I went to see journalists at all the major newspapers on Fleet Street, pointing out that Dutschke had been gravely wounded by a pro-Hitler fanatic.
Articles appeared, and Harold Wilson—the leader of the opposition Labour Party—promised to intervene. He did so, but it made no difference. Dutschke had to go into exile once more, this time to Denmark, where he would die without fulfilling the destiny he deserved.