The Perennial No

In the Paris Offices of the Communist Party in 1935, the Austrian Manès Sperber helped the German Gustav Regler wage a propaganda battle against Hitler. Both belonged to the army of intellectuals who after the First World War started a crusade against the world in which they were born and reared. This brilliant group of gifted and cultured men and women formed the vanguard of the European Left.

Versed in literature, art, history and psychology, compassionate and dedicated, these embittered rebels had in the twenties and thirties enabled Communism to appear as the world-wide cause of all warmhearted and right-minded people. Communism was by and large a Russian affair until Koestler and Malraux, Barbusse and Heinrich Mann, Spender and Toller, Picasso and Gide had, through their personal prestige, their pens, their culture, added Western legitimacy to Moscow’s power.

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Gerhart Niemeyer

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In the Paris Offices of the Communist Party in 1935, the Austrian Manès Sperber helped the German Gustav Regler wage a propaganda battle against Hitler. Both belonged to the army of intellectuals who after the First World War started a crusade against the world in which they were born and reared. This brilliant group of gifted and cultured men and women formed the vanguard of the European Left.

Versed in literature, art, history and psychology, compassionate and dedicated, these embittered rebels had in the twenties and thirties enabled Communism to appear as the world-wide cause of all warmhearted and right-minded people. Communism was by and large a Russian affair until Koestler and Malraux, Barbusse and Heinrich Mann, Spender and Toller, Picasso and Gide had, through their personal prestige, their pens, their culture, added Western legitimacy to Moscow’s power.