Swarthmore College Works History Faculty Works History 4-1-2007 A Life On The Left: Moritz Mebel’s Journey Through The Twentieth Century Robert Weinberg Swarthmore College, [email protected] Marion J. Faber , translator Swarthmore College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-history Part of the German Language and Literature Commons, and the History Commons Let us know how access to these works benefits ouy Recommended Citation Robert Weinberg and Marion J. Faber , translator. (2007). "A Life On The Left: Moritz Mebel’s Journey Through The Twentieth Century". The Carl Beck Papers In Russian And East European Studies. Issue 1805. https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-history/533 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. This work is brought to you for free by Swarthmore College Libraries' Works. It has been accepted for inclusion in History Faculty Works by an authorized administrator of Works. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Carl Beck Papers Robert Weinberg, Editor in Russian & Marion Faber, Translator East European Studies Number 1805 A Life on the Left: Moritz Mebel’s Journey Through the Twentieth Century Moritz Mebel and his wife, Sonja The Carl Beck Papers in Russian & East European Studies Number 1805 Robert Weinberg, Editor Marion Faber, Translator A Life on the Left: Moritz Mebel’s Journey Through the Twentieth Century Marion Faber is Scheuer Family Professor of Humanities at Swarthmore College. Her previous translations include Sarah Kirsch’s The Panther Woman (1989) and Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (1998). Her translation of Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s Mozart (1982) was nominated for the American Book Award. Robert Weinberg is Professor of History at Swarthmore College. He is the author of The Revolution of 1905 in Odessa: Blood on the Steps (1993) and Stalin’s Forgotten Zion: Birobidzhan and the Making of a Soviet Jewish Homeland (1998). He is also co-editor, with Laurie Bernstein, of The Russian Revolution: A History in Documents (2007). No. 1805, April 2007 © 2007 by The Center for Russian and East European Studies, a program of the University Center for International Studies, University of Pittsburgh ISSN 0889-275X This publication is a translation of portions of Rot und Weiß: Gespråche mit Moritz Mebel published by Hans-Dieter Schütt. This translated edition is published with the permission of Karl Dietz Verlag Berlin GmbH. The Carl Beck Papers Editors: William Chase, Bob Donnorummo, Ronald H. Linden Managing Editor: Eileen O’Malley Editorial Assistant: Vera Dorosh Photograph from cover taken by Robert Weinberg. Submissions to The Carl Beck Papers are welcome. Manuscripts must be in English, double-spaced throughout, and between 40 and 90 pages in length. Acceptance is based on anonymous review. Mail submissions to: Editor, The Carl Beck Papers, Center for Russian and East European Studies, 4400 Posvar Hall, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Abstract In A Life on the Left, Moritz Mebel describes life as a Jewish refugee from Germany in 1930s Moscow, service in the Red Army during the war, and what it meant to be a Jew in Stalin’s Russia and communist East Germany. He also evaluates his life as a political activist upon his return to East Germany after Stalin’s death and offers insight into the allure of communism. 1 Contents Introduction, by Robert Weinberg 2 Prologue: A Questionnaire 6 The Early Years: From Erfurt to Moscow 8 The War Years 31 The Postwar Years: Return to Germany 45 Afterword, by Robert Weinberg 60 Notes 62 Appendix: The Life of Moritz Mebel 65 2 Introduction Robert Weinberg In 1997 and 1998 Moritz Mebel sat down with the journalist Hans-Dieter Schütt for four lengthy interviews about his youth in Erfurt, Germany, during the 1920s, his life after he moved to Moscow in the early 1930s, his stint as a soldier in the Red Army during the Second World War, and his professional and political life after 1959 when he returned to East Germany and became a prominent physi- cian and member of the Central Committee of the ruling Communist Party. At the time of his retirement in 1988, Mebel was professor of urology at the Charite, the preeminent hospital in East Berlin, and author of nearly two hundred articles and texts on urology and renal transplantation. A Life on the Left is an abridged transla- tion of these conversations, which appeared in 1999.1 Mebel’s refl ections on his life are extremely revealing about issues at the very heart of the twentieth-century experience as lived by a German Jew who came of age in the Soviet Union. To read Mebel’s recollections is to learn about war, ideology, nationality, and emigration from a fervent believer in the communist ideal. Russian Jews in the twentieth century traversed many geographical and ideo- logical paths that embodied particular forms of modernity. Many crossed the Atlantic Ocean to the New World, where they took advantage of the liberal polities of Canada and the United States to acculturate and integrate. Some chose to embrace Zionism by moving to Palestine and helping to establish a Jewish nation-state, Israel. Still others remained behind and joined with non-Jews to build a classless and internationalist utopia in the Soviet Union, successor state to the Russian Empire. Mebel’s story, like that of so many Jews in the last century, has connections to all three of these routes, but the road he chose and remains committed to is the one leading to socialism. During these conversations Mebel explains his lifelong devotion to politics and medicine. We learn about the allure and appeal of an ide- ology and state to a young German Jew who had found refuge in one of the few countries willing to take in Jews fl eeing the Nazis. Mebel literally owes his life and career to the Soviet Union, a simple but powerful fact that helps to account for his sustained commitment to the communist movement. As Mebel notes, he did not view the world through the prism of national differences. Instead, he, like so many other devoted foreign communists who lived in the Soviet Union during the 1930s, describes himself as an “internationalist,” with his Jewish and German identities occupying less signifi cance in shaping his worldview. His comments echo those made by Mary Leder, an American Jew who lived in the Soviet Union from the early 1930s to the mid-1960s. When asked by my wife and me why she thought so 3 many American Jews embraced Stalin’s Russia in the 1930s, she replied forcefully, “We didn’t consider ourselves Jews. We were internationalists!”2 Mebel remains dedicated to his ideals of social, political, and economic equality and justice. He played a role in the formation of the Party of Democratic Social- ism, which succeeded the East German Communist Party after 1989, has criticized NATO’s bombing of Serbia in 1998, and has defended the right of East Germany to build the Berlin Wall.3 He is still very active in left-wing politics and has raised his voice to protest the war in Iraq. Throughout the 1990s he forcefully expressed his criticism of the shortcomings of reunifi cation. Like many other former East Germans, he and his wife refer to the unifi cation process as “annexation” (Anschluss) and the era of the two Germanies as “peacetime.” He is particularly disappointed by what he believes to be the health care system in the reunited Germany. As he notes in the German edition: I am horrifi ed by this medical system in which I fortunately do not have to practice. The doctor entrepreneur above all else! No thanks! I can’t even listen to that! The doctor as entrepreneur? That turns disease into a commodity, and health, too. To be sure, a market economy has very effective levers to motivate people and to elicit intellectual innovations: economic pressure, competition, money. But in my eyes the kind privatized health system I’ve now had to live to witness is inhu- man. The human being is treated much too much like an abstract thinker, an insurance risk, as a market value, and not as a sufferer, as someone in need of help and attention.4 Mebel attributes the failings of the communist regimes to an erroneous un- derstanding of the dialectical process. He blames the application of the Leninist model of political organization for most of East Germany’s problems. His Marxist analysis of socioeconomic and political systems and his emphasis on the role of the dialectic in the historical process may seem quaint and out-of-date in the early twenty-fi rst century. As he told me when we met in 2004, “Stalinism was not com- munism.” Mebel’s remark underscores the power of ideology to shape and infl u- ence our views and behaviors. It also evinces Mebel’s steadfast belief that he has no reason to apologize or second-guess what he accomplished in his lifetime on behalf of communism and the East German government and society. As he puts it in Rot und Weiß, “I regret nothing that I did in my life. I see no reason to extract myself from my biography.” He adds a bit later, however, that “no new evaluation or new memory makes valueless what you thought before.” Mebel cautions us against “retrospective as- sessment” gleaned from the benefi t of historical hindsight. Yet he also acknowledges that the governments of the Soviet Union and East Germany “perverted” the teach- ing of Marx and the ideals of communism. In October 1989, at a meeting of the 4 Central Committee, Mebel asserted that “the great mass” of East Germans rejected “not socialism, but rather its deformations.”5 In short, he remained a steadfast and loyal supporter of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) until the very end and believed that reforms could save the regime.