You might as well live.
—Dorothy Parker
ERICA GLASER WALLACH’S life, a parable of the violent past century, is yet another tangled thread in Noel Field’s journey. Accustomed to making her own decisions, trusting only her own judgment, Erica’s tough shell enabled her to survive two seismic dislocations. “I was against everything,” she said. Though the Fields’ dogged devotion softened her resentment of them, nothing could soften her rage at the Nazis. Twice they had made refugees of her family: forced them to flee their homeland, Germany; and then destroyed her second home, Spain. The Nazis had turned Erica into a stateless migrant. They had to be defeated—by any means.
In 1942, Erica, a headstrong twenty-one-year-old, fell in with a group of Communist students at the University of Geneva. Unlike Noel, who embraced Communism as a faith that imbued his life with meaning, for Erica the appeal of Communism was not ideological; it was a way to fight the Nazis. “I was perfectly willing to help the Communist Party,” Erica said. “They were the only ones actively fighting the Nazis. We were all naïve,” she said.
Through Noel she met Leo Bauer, a German Communist in Swiss exile. Bauer pulled Erica into serving as a courier between Field and underground party members. With Noel, she smuggled Communists across the French border into Switzerland. Some of those Communists were also part of Allen Dulles’s network. Erica, however, was unaware that Field was himself a Communist. “He knew Communists from Spain,” she said, “where he went from hospital to hospital making lists of every foreigner on the Republican side . . . and naturally he met practically every Communist there.” This much she knew. She also recalled Noel studying Marxist tomes on doctrine and ideology. “Noel was completely without intuition,” Erica said. “He arrived at everything with pure, tortuous thought. He plodded through volumes on ideology.” But she considered herself more radical than her foster parent, whom she regarded as a woolly intellectual. Noel Field as Moscow’s agent? Impossible.
As the Red Army approached Berlin, and the Allies continued to roll back the Wehrmacht in Western Europe, Erica was eager to get back to Germany, “to set up a new democratic government,” she said. “Without me, it couldn’t be done!” she recalled with a self-deprecating laugh. Through Noel, she found a job as secretary to Dulles’s deputy, Gerhard van Arkel. Her friend Leo Bauer instructed her to tell him if she heard “anything interesting.” “Why not?” she thought.
But by April 1945 Hitler had committed suicide in his bunker and the glue that temporarily held the Moscow-Washington alliance dissolved. In Yalta, a gaunt and frail Roosevelt faced a resolute Stalin. His armies occupied Central and Eastern Europe, and they had no intention of budging. Quite the contrary; they were about to unroll Moscow’s blueprint for postwar Europe. Those Communists who had spent the war in Moscow, not Switzerland, were streaming back to take control of Communist Parties in Prague, Budapest, East Berlin, Warsaw, and elsewhere.
The early shoots of the coming Cold War were sprouting—nowhere more than in Berlin, where Moscow and the Western powers were joint occupiers. Collaboration between the OSS and the German Communist Party was no longer possible. Erica was instructed by the Central Committee of the German Communist Party to quit her job as OSS secretary. In her typical, blunt style, she pronounced such advice “stupid.” Nevertheless, by 1946, bowing to party pressure, she did resign her OSS position, and formally joined the German Communist Party.
For the next year, while studying law at the University of Frankfurt, she edited a German Communist magazine. “I often did not like the way things were written,” she said, “and thought it was just silly . . . too much the Moscow or the Berlin Party line. So I would rewrite it. I had a lot of fights, and the more time went on, the less I agreed with the policy, which had come from Berlin. Well, the stronger this policy of anti-Americanism grew and a 100 percent defense of everything Moscow did or said—the worse it got for me, and the less I could actually work under those conditions.”
Soon, her personal life became as tangled as her politics. In 1946, Erica met and fell in love with US Army captain Robert Wallach, a boyishly handsome Virginian posted to Germany. “Of course,” Erica said, “as far as the Party went—that was pure treason. I thought that it was my private life, and it’s nobody’s business. I was going to see Americans as long as I wanted to.” As she and Wallach became more seriously involved, her role as editor of the Communist publication became less and less tenable. “I was thinking of getting married,” she said, “and thinking of having children, and I was thinking of just withdrawing from all this [political engagement], and having a peaceful and quiet life.”
Unlike the Fields, Erica was never blinded by her faith. “The Communist Party policy of attacking everything American and saying everything that comes from Moscow is just gospel,” she said, “I considered ridiculous. Surely there can be things with which you disagree and have different opinions.” But there was no room for a scintilla of disagreement in the newly empowered German Communist Party. By 1947, “all these things came together,” Erica said, “and made me decide that I was in the wrong boat. My decision was to leave that boat.”
The boat, however, was not ready to leave Erica.