At the Hamburg local group, the sailor [Hermann] Knüfken had reported that the steamer "Senator Schröder" from the Cuxhaven fishing fleet would be setting out for the White Sea, the first fishing trip in those waters, which had been regularly fished by German ships in previous years. The captain would meet a Russian commission there, and with them, we could be put ashore in one of the ports in the Murman Bay.
We immediately sought out this Knüfken.
We were supposed to find him in the apartment of his brother-in-law, who was a carpenter in one of the East Frisian coastal villages and also worked as a boatswain on the "Senator Schröder." The man had no knowledge of what Knüfken had told in Hamburg but assured us that it would not be difficult for him to accommodate us aboard as stowaways.
Before we had the chance to discuss this fundamentally unexpected turn of events — we hadn’t anticipated the need to travel as stowaways — Knüfken appeared: He had just seen the captain, and the trip had not yet been definitively decided, but everything seemed fine so far. He had spoken with the crew, and we would initially board as stowaways, simply to avoid causing any difficulties for the captain, who would need to protect us due to his responsibility to the shipping company. Additionally — we would need to board that very night, as the boat would surely depart the following morning.
Knüfken seemed to have already discussed everything with the local group. We didn’t have time to ask any further questions, other than handing him the small amount of money we had received from the party... Knüfken would take care of the extra provisions and also buy drinks to keep the crew in a good mood during the journey.
We boarded the ship that same night.
This trip was reported extensively in the press with large headlines and fantastic embellishments regarding my person. All I can say today is: there was nothing particularly exciting about it; everything went quite simply and without any special heroic deeds. Of course, there were some unforeseen difficulties to overcome; that is, after all, nothing unusual on a journey.
We were accommodated in one of the wardrobe trunks in the crew's cabin, which served as seating and benches around the long table in the center. None of the cabin’s occupants had the slightest knowledge of our presence. These trunks were used by the boatswain to store various materials, so they were relatively safe from accidental discovery. The air inside was thick and very scarce. It took a while for the breathing technique to adjust. I suspect that these trunks, if any of the crew were to die during the trip, are used as coffins in which the body is hoisted overboard; the width, depth, and length would have been suitable.
The next morning, we heard occasional remarks from the sailors, which reached us only in muffled sounds, that the departure was not scheduled until the following day. The boatswain came by from time to time during the day to check on us when the crew was busy on deck or had gone back to the city. He carefully lifted the lid and encouraged us: breathe calmly! It won’t take long...
By the end of the first night, we were already too weak to take any food, too weak even to make a decision, like: to give up the whole thing now. We had neither heard nor seen Knüfken all day.
To insert this right away: Knüfken was a type often found among sailors — immediately enthusiastic about anything. He would then fully commit to it. In our case, it was service to an action for the revolutionary movement; what kind of action it would be and for what particular goal didn’t matter as much. The greater the difficulty, the more tempting the task. However, it would be wrong to see it only as pure adventure. It had to be something he could fully dedicate himself to once he was in the middle of it, something he believed in with burning fanaticism. He had picked up a few buzzwords of the movement; that was more than enough for him. He would get carried away in what he promised, no matter how impossible the execution seemed. Above all, he believed in his promise; he probably never knew real doubts; and very often, I would say most of the time, he succeeded with it. That reality sometimes turned out differently than he had imagined in his fantasy was, after all, not his fault… Then he would try to reshape reality according to his vision.
In the following years, he worked in the courier service of the Comintern. He enjoyed unusual trust there. Many years later, I met him again in Berlin. He was passing through on his way to Java to deliver financial support for an uprising against the Dutch. However, the uprising had already collapsed, and the leaders hoping for Moscow were on their way to the jungles of New Guinea to the prisoner camps before Knüfken had left Munich, where he had gone initially to celebrate the upcoming action in grand style and with cheerful company. He had since left the courier service.
A few years earlier, a rumor spread in circles close to him that he had financed the Pat and Patachon film series through a Danish relative. [I could not find any information about this being true — so it probably is not. Knüfken does not mention it in his autobiography either, which would be understandable. P&P was series of Danish films produced inbetween 1921-1920. -K.V.] The money had originally been intended for the preparation of a general strike in the Copenhagen harbor, the publication of a newspaper, and the purchase of a printing press. The printing press had indeed been bought, but on credit, and the promised operating funds had not arrived. The press went bankrupt after a few weeks; the general strike had already been called off beforehand.
Knüfken returned to the ship at night with the others.
I was already too weak to move in the trunk. I could hardly hear what was being said in the cabin anymore. From cautious hints that Knüfken dropped into the general conversation at the table, it was clear that he had not spoken to a single member of the crew. I could deduce from fragments that Knüfken was not at all sure of his people. He now talked about what would happen if the captain refused to sail to the White Sea instead of the Icelandic fishing banks, as he, Knüfken, had been promised, because he, Knüfken, had the order to disembark at one of the Russian ports. The crew took this as a great joke and laughed loudly.
No one had the slightest doubt that this time, unlike on previous trips, they would not be sailing for three to four weeks with the "Senator Schröder" to Iceland for cod fishing. Moreover, as emerged from the conversations, the wages and the fishing percentages for this trip had already been pledged on land and were partly already spent as an advance; a financial difficulty had also arisen.
I drifted in and out, struggling to suppress the groaning from the shortness of breath. In the final hours before departure, I must have been completely unconscious.
My companion, Jan Appel, probably had a similar experience. Jan was the type of worker who is little noticed in normal political times, an outwardly inconspicuous average, who doesn’t stand out and from whom no one would expect anything. Such types are swept to the forefront in a more acute development of political unrest. Previously regarded as loners and eccentrics, they now become the center of a circle of similarly disposed individuals. They suddenly lay claim to leadership with the inner revolt of someone who has been silent for too long, who has felt neglected and oppressed for decades. This doesn’t necessarily have to be the case, because they have mostly not dared to emerge from the shadows, but this will be overlooked when the individual unexpectedly demonstrates above-average intelligence — and this will not be uncommon: unfortunately, often not for the inner stability and benefit of the movement.
The same was true for Jan Appel. Such a type is completely unsuitable for grasping certain developments. He knows better than everyone else, a constant complainer, sarcastic and hurtful in personal dealings, and no matter how much one tries to accommodate him, he remains perpetually disgruntled, probably filled with distrust at the core of his being.
Jan Appel also exhibited a particular character trait of the German worker: he only saw the mistakes, the shortcomings of others. He would have done everything differently — the Russian Revolution, the education of the Russian masses, Soviet Russia’s adaptation to international political conditions, the discipline in the Red Army — everything the Russians did in one area or another was wrong; he would have done it better.
Originally a welder at a shipyard by profession, he now developed into a railway specialist. The decay of the Russian railway system, the rotting ties along the tracks — as if it didn’t exist elsewhere too, even in homely Germany — was all evidence of Russian incapacity; he tortured me with this for days from morning till night. He rejected any deeper economic reasons for the backwardness of the Russian production economy. Even a slow defense of certain grievances, he treated as a betrayal of the movement, especially of Jan Appel... It was very hard to get along with him at all.
A type of proletarian puritan — despite his above-average intelligence, he succeeded in ensuring that soon no one cared about him. He saw himself neglected and sidelined once again. This made him blind to any development — out of hatred, out of scorn. He became a burden to the delegation, and this did not change even when he became aware of various attempts to win him over and loosen him up, even from the Moscow elite.
The Russian communists in the Comintern, including Lenin, were very interested in him in the first few weeks — for this type, I assume. Then, they dropped him very quickly.
He returned as a sworn enemy of Soviet Russia, as an over-communist and over-marxist [Jung says Über-Kommunist and Über-Marxist here, referencing Nietzsche’s overman. -K.V.]. Later, he took a job at a shipyard in Holland. Over the years, he published a series of magazines and bulletins, financed by his meager wages, meant for the dozen or so of his followers, and always developed new theories to help socialism break through — a not uncommon worker’s fate of those years.
In Moscow, he did not speak at any of the meetings called for us. He sat next to me at the Comintern congress when we were attacked and slandered, and he didn’t open his mouth. [Knüfken in his memoirs attests that Appel definitely spoke at the II Congress too. Knüfken is also very sympathetic towards both Jung and Appel. Appel himself mentions speaking there too, however he is uncertain of what he had said. This passage was probably another result of Jung’s distaste for Appel. -K.V.]. He left the task of defending the party, which had sent him, Jan Appel, to Moscow for this purpose, to me alone.
About at the height of the Elbe I lightship [Feuerschiff Elbe 1 — these ships serve a role similar to the one of lighthouses. -K.V.], I was pulled out of the trunk. I can still sometimes see the astonished faces of the sailors in front of me, who could not have been more baffled if I had fallen straight from the moon.
Knüfken was speaking excitedly, gesturing to the crew. The boatswain had positioned himself at the door, which led to the stairs up to the deck.
I was still too dazed to understand anything. Next door, Jan Appel was pulled up onto the bench.
And then everything happened very quickly. Knüfken had taken me up to the deck. The fresh air made me feel a bit better, and then further up to the bridge, where we met the captain. I don’t remember it too clearly anymore, but the conversation with Knüfken probably went something like this:
"Who is this?!" "A representative of the Russian government who asks you to steer the ship to Murmansk and set him ashore there." "How can I do that? You know yourself, our course is Iceland." "It is of utmost importance for the Russian government. Your expenses will of course be reimbursed. There will also be a reward..." The captain, very irritated, interrupting: "I can’t decide that. I don’t have the right to change the course. This should have been negotiated with the shipping company in Cuxhaven." Knüfken now took a different tone: "You will decide immediately. Otherwise, we will use force. The crew is fully behind us." The captain, very cool and almost contemptuous: "How do you imagine that... by the way, do what you want. I will not command the ship. I resign."
Knüfken had drawn a weapon that looked like a revolver, a so-called "bullcracker," [Bullenknaller -K.V.] which the East Frisian farmers use to shoot at the communal bull if it tries to break out of the herd. He demanded that the captain leave the bridge, and both of them went down, leaving me in the chart room still in quite a miserable state.
I did not interfere in this conversation and did not speak a single word, nor did I change my expression — it wouldn't have been possible for me. The captain, to mention here, had served as a U-boat commander during the war, highly decorated, one of the aces of the imperial navy.
The rest unfolded without difficulty.
Downstairs, the brother-in-law received the captain and brought him into the sail room. Knüfken fetched the first mate from his cabin, and the boatswain got the chief engineer. Both were told that the ship was heading for Russia, and that the captain had resigned his command, whereupon they immediately expressed solidarity with the captain; they too were locked in the sail room.
Meanwhile, Jan Appel had come to life in the crew's quarters. He gave the sailors a speech about international solidarity, class struggle, and the education of proletarian consciousness. They listened to him in full awe, at first thinking he was a member of the Russian government. Knüfken had also just promised them large monetary rewards and positions in the Russian navy, from the harbor captain in Murmansk upwards. The cook, who wanted to bring his wife and child, was particularly interested in this post; Knüfken had already made promises. The brother-in-law brought out a bottle of cognac, and the cook fried nearly a hundred fried eggs, and everything seemed to be dissolving into contentment. Now, they could be allowed out on deck.
Here, things did not go so smoothly.
Knüfken had taken me off the bridge to speak with the two remaining officers, the second mate and the second engineer, both of whom had retreated to the engine room.
I followed the line that Knüfken had already outlined for me earlier: conciliatory and calming — we primarily needed the helmsman, as no one from the crew was able to steer the ship. Additionally — completely unforeseen by us — we now had to navigate through the extended minefield, which stretched from the German Bight to the southern tip of Norway, a particularly feared and avoided route by shipping at that time. The helmsman had so far firmly refused. There were no maps, except for an old sailing logbook from before the war; the Danish coastal lights couldn’t be spotted.
We were suddenly in the middle of a crisis.
At that moment, I was close to making a big mistake. The excited and agitated sailors were now standing around us, we were with the two officers on deck, in front of the sail room, where the others were already locked up... not to bargain too long in such a situation... I burst out: "Just throw them overboard!" ... when the helmsman started to speak to the crew, explaining the dangers of the course.
My outburst was exactly the wrong tone in the 'fun' atmosphere.
It suddenly became completely quiet. Had I engaged in arguments, discussions — I knew it, could already feel it — the mood would have turned... I would probably have been thrown into the water.
The boatswain saved the situation by directing both officers into the sail room: "To confer with the captain." The boatswain had also, somehow, now pulled out a revolver.
But it was an old, earnest seafarer [Seebär -K.V.], the captain of a fishing trawler off Iceland, whom the "Senator Schröder" was supposed to drop off at his ship there and who really fixed the situation; Knüfken had completely forgotten about this passenger.
The man had come up from his cabin to inquire about the noise on deck. When some sailors called to him, "We’re heading to Russia!" he didn’t take it very seriously. I briefly explained the situation to him, which only made him laugh even louder. They locked him up with the others.
This old captain did us a great service. He was the one who, with his indestructible sense of humor, which took everything lightly, managed to broker a compromise with the boatswain, without us having to pull the crew into the negotiations. We would relocate the officers to the crew's quarters; they could move freely there and come up to the deck at certain hours; the cook would provide them with meals. The second engineer would occasionally look after the engines, and the helmsman would be available to help with the course calculation. But the other officers, in their own interest, also advised Knüfken during the roughly twenty-hour journey through the minefield. The crew had taken possession of the officers' quarters. The festive mood aboard had returned. The cook served double and triple portions. Everyone now had plenty of time to think about what role they would be assigned in great Soviet Russia. Knüfken, as the formally established authority aboard, assigned the shifts.
The next day, I received an inquiry from the captain, asking me to calculate the costs for the detour to Murmansk and whether the ship could refuel at a Russian port... I told him to wait until we arrived in Murmansk.
I had set myself up on the bridge in the chart room and stared from above at the wildly moving water mountains rolling against the bow; the "Senator Schröder" had been sailing for the longest time in wind force eight to nine.
Nothing else significant happened during this trip. We passed through the minefield without incident. During the journey along the Norwegian coast, for which no maps were available, the helmsman loyally helped by identifying the lights. The rocky coast of Norway, seen from afar, looked extraordinarily depressing. We had already been underway for eight days before we could roughly identify the northern tip of Norway. Boring and monotonous, the routine of shifts and changes had returned aboard.
With the North Cape behind us, we sailed for the second day in storm and fog, the coast out of sight. Doubts arose as to whether we were even steering the right course — another eight days, and we were running low on coal and provisions in case a return journey became necessary. The officers had no idea where we were anymore. Enthusiasm had long since given way to a sluggish mood among the crew. Someone had found a red rag, which we now hoisted on the foremast.
With this flag, we were sighted by a Norwegian fishing trawler that crossed our path and called out for whisky. From the Norwegians, we learned that we were already in the Bay of Murmansk. News of our venture spread from Vardø, the trawler's home port. Shortly thereafter, the Russians sent patrol ships from the war port of Alexandrovsk to search for our ship.
Three days later, we were found, the "Senator Schröder" still drifting in the fog, without sight and no set course.
I don’t think today that we would have found the entrance to Murmansk on our own, without getting into a new minefield that the Russians had kept intact against new English invasion plans.
We were escorted to Alexandrovsk first, with a Russian pilot aboard. There we were given a Russian watch crew, and with this, the "Senator Schröder" headed for Murmansk.
The day we arrived at the quay in Murmansk was May 1st, 1920. A snowstorm swept across the barren and completely deserted harbor area.
We had to stay on the ship for several more hours until the local authorities had contacted Petrograd or Moscow. Apparently, the order then arrived to put us on the next train of the Murman Railway, destination Petrozavodsk; from there, we would catch a connecting train to Petrograd. This was communicated to us in a military manner, with standing at attention and caps off. But this order only applied to the delegation, for which we had obtained a temporary pass for Knüfken. The others had to be left behind.
The ship was handed over to the Russian harbor authorities.
Later, an agreement was reached that the "Senator Schröder" would set sail again under the Russian flag for fishing, once refueled.
Our passengers had initially been thrown into jail. At the request of some crew members — who had visited the officers in jail, perhaps they were called — it must have been a dreadful hole, the prison was hastily set up in a half-collapsed shed... at the urgent request of our sailors... "They haven’t done anything wrong, they can’t help it, they are people too…" how often is this heard in a revolution... we were able to persuade our Russian companions, who didn’t understand anything about the whole situation, to take the passengers on the same train to Petrograd. They were given their own compartment, and no guard was necessary; whether they were given food, I do not know.
After a brief stay in a Petrograd prison, they were then deported via Reval to Germany; a note exchange between Moscow and Berlin is said to have preceded this. In the trial against the sailors, which took place a few months later in Cuxhaven, these people acted very boldly.
The crew, as I later heard upon my return, had mutinied again, this time against the Russian ship management. The Russian officers came into the sail room; again, the boatswain, who felt sidelined, claimed the success of the venture for himself; however, the cook no longer had any fried eggs to serve. The fishing trawler arrived in Tromsø. There, the Russian crew was released, but the ship was placed under Norwegian guard. There was no more opportunity to sell the nets and fishing equipment, which had originally been the plan. With a Norwegian guard crew aboard, the "Senator Schröder" was brought to Bergen, where a new German crew, including officers, took over the ship. The old crew, eighteen men in total, was imprisoned in Cuxhaven; understandably, I no longer cared about that.
We — I mean Appel, Knüfken, and I — spent the evening of 1st May in a Russian club, sailors and dock workers, farmers, lumberjacks, and people from the street, a crowd numbering in the hundreds, packed tightly in a long shed, Russian people.
Murmansk had only been freed a few weeks earlier by an invasion army, which, with the active participation of regular English military units, had advanced far south along the Murman Railway. The harbor was still littered with the debris of material depots from this army. In the following days, from the train, we saw dozens of railway cars that had tipped down into the swamp along the embankment, many railway bridges that could only be crossed by one car at a time, causing long delays, the connecting arches of the bridges hanging down into the water. There were also clusters of earth huts along the railway line, prisoner camps, whose inmates were waiting for transport. Many of them must have starved. There was nothing to eat, neither for the Reds nor for the Whites, neither for the militia nor the commissars, nor for the government’s guests — the English had thoroughly destroyed the supply and provisioning depots before their withdrawal. And it was bitterly cold.
I see this Murmansk before me: a heap of miserable huts, with a few larger solid block houses in between. Over the street, electric light bulbs hung on wires, tiny and very modest compared to the grand brilliance of the stars on the night horizon. And I see groups of Russians in the storage shed in front of me, opposite one of the larger block houses, which was the administrative building of the local Soviet.
There was no one to communicate with us, none of us knew a single word of Russian. The air in the shed was heavy. The breath hovered above the mass, a gray mist cloud. The lighting was so dim that you could just see your neighbor.
This crowd then began to sing. They sang "The Internationale," the song of the Red Flag, and many other songs. In between, individual commissars gave brief speeches, transitioning to the next song. Hours must have passed like this.
It has become the great experience of my life. This was what I had been seeking, what I had set out for since childhood: home, the homeland of people. Whenever, in the years that followed, I found myself confronted by the baseness of people, the profound malice, treachery, and betrayal in the character of man, even of the Russian people, I only needed to recall this 1st of May in Murmansk to regain my inner balance.
The next night, we were on the Murman railway heading to Petrograd. For six days, we traveled through the Karelian forests to Petrosawodsk, the Karelian administrative center. The Leatherstocking Tales and The Last of the Mohicans [Two novels by James Fenimore Cooper. -K.V.] came to life again—the lakes stretching far into the land, the rapids in the wide rivers, the fisherman's hut in the middle of a green meadow, covered with nets, with the pier for the rowing boat down by the lake. We never saw a soul in this seemingly untouched wilderness. Complete solitude... but not empty, rather filled with ideas, exploding in anticipation of a new future.
In Petrograd, the delegation was received very warmly, as is customary, and a few days later we were forwarded to Moscow. Appel and I were lodged at the Comintern headquarters, the Hotel Lux, while Knüfgen stayed at the newly established guesthouse of the trade unions. He encountered an English tour group led by the writer H. G. Wells. Wells paced the corridors night after night—unaccustomed to the many bedbugs in his room, which were particularly noticeable because, as mentioned, the rooms had just been repainted and had new wallpaper. Wells complained to the government about the bedbugs. His capitalist aversion to bedbugs was shared with the writer Wilhelm Herzog, who was also staying at the trade union guesthouse at the time, and a few years later with the painter George Grosz, who had been invited to Moscow for a Comintern meeting to sketch profiles of the participants. However, Grosz did not see the heads or the people; he only saw the bedbugs.
The bedbugs were discussed in a special session of the Executive Committee of the Comintern, alongside the matter of the Communist Workers' Party of Germany (KAPD).
Before that, the delegation had been received by Lenin and then one by one by the prominent figures of the International. All were very cordial and gave a very comradely impression. Lenin inquired about the standard of living of the German workers: What remnants of the war were still affecting them? How had the change in government impacted them? Do they read newspapers? Do they discuss things in the factories? And so on. Appel often couldn't answer precisely enough; Lenin had to repeat the question. I, on the other hand, did not answer Lenin at all. He treated me with visible irony—an opportunist [Mitläufer -K.V.]; to be honest, it didn’t bother me much.
On the memorable day when the Political Bureau was to discuss the application of the KAPD to join the International, a number of foreign correspondents working in Moscow were invited into the meeting room as listeners, as well as a number of sympathetic German writers and tourists, whose curiosity was surely satisfied.
The whole thing was set up like a grand spectacle. The delegation, placed in the center of the long side of the table in a row of three, was a focal point that could be referred to as proof of what was being presented.
As far as I remember—there’s no need to go into detail because the stenographic record of the accusations was later spread and is certainly available in every library that collects such materials—Bukharin opened the meeting in a neutral tone, which still showed some goodwill. But what followed—from the Russian bureaucrats and the foreign prominents of the International—surpassed all limits.
By these reports, the German communists, represented by the opposition of some local groups to the party, which now had to be rebuilt with the help of the International, were accused of undermining the movement, paralyzing its ability to act, aiding the imperialism of the capitalist countries, even allying with officers of the Black Reichswehr... [a paramilitary formation in direct contact to the Reichswehr, they were used to evade the Versailles Treaty -K.V.] (which, although an entirely fabricated lie, a year later the same Major Buchrucker, who could only have been the one meant and who had become politically known through the Küstrin Putsch against the Reichswehr, was invited to Moscow), and everything else that was concocted. All these accusations were from the outset presumed to be the result of an investigation and were taken as true. In the end, my task was solely to explain the principles of the party against the accusations. I could have just as easily refrained from it. It was merely protocol that we were also heard. I kept it very brief.
Essentially, I focused on describing the party's activity in the last months, especially the internal processes in defending against the Kapp Putsch, which had just been rolled out. The party apparatus, funded by Moscow, had scarcely participated in the general strike carried out by all worker parties. The Ruhr workers, who had started to raise a Red Banner in the region, had been distracted with flimsy slogans: No individual action! Berlin decides! In Berlin, no decision was made, nor was one intended. The government had fled to Saxony, and Moscow had preferred to wait. The workers in Berlin were completely left to their own devices. They held out the general strike but without any political leadership that could have shown a perspective, and practically without a clear goal. Simply letting Kapp retreat with his Baltic allies from Berlin was too little and hardly a goal.
When I began to explain the role of the communist opposition, which at the time had not yet formed as the KAPD, I was continuously interrupted by ironic remarks and laughter.
In those days, we had no paper to print newspapers or pamphlets; however, the official party apparatus had a whole warehouse full. We broke in during the day and took the paper. Wilhelm Pieck, who was in charge of the warehouse at the time, reported this to Moscow. He had previously asked us for a receipt for the number of bales taken, and we gave him one. Karl Radek interrupted my accusations against the party headquarters from time to time to read out Pieck’s report. The report was a masterpiece of perfidy. It was full of suspicions, distortions, and personal allegations. I only found out much later that this report had been commissioned by Moscow.
I would like to take this opportunity to make a special remark: During the days of the Kapp Putsch, there were occasionally small, insignificant skirmishes. There were some wounded on our side. For such cases, the Moscow apparatus had already organized a kind of mobile medical unit with doctors available to treat the wounded. The wounded could not be taken to the hospitals, which were under police and military control in those critical days of combat. There was a danger that a wounded person admitted to a hospital with fresh gunshot wounds would immediately be shot. Not a single one of the doctors or medics registered with the headquarters made themselves available to us. A complete outsider volunteered to treat the wounded: the German poet Dr. Gottfried Benn. I knew Benn only briefly through Pfemfert. I called him, and he immediately agreed, without further questions and without the usual protection and everything that professional revolutionaries have in such cases.
Given everything that was said against us at this meeting, one would have expected that the party and we as a delegation would have been utterly condemned, perhaps imprisoned, sent to Siberia, or liquidated.
The opposite was the case. The same people who, as representatives of their national parties, had practically competed with each other in denouncing our political mistakes, took us aside when the meeting was finally concluded with a final protocol and shook our hands: from suspicious elements, from the accused, from children who were only playing with fire—Lenin had called this in a brochure dedicated to the KAPD: “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder—we had suddenly, without any apparent transition, become heroes. I am too politically untrained and probably too politically uninterested to understand this turnaround even in hindsight. In the following week, which we still had to spend in Moscow, we were almost celebrated. We spoke at dozens of workers' meetings convened in our honor in the factories, and we were asked dozens of times by our accusers Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek, and others high up in the party hierarchy: "What now?" ... "What can we expect in Germany?" ... "What will you do?" ...
The meeting protocol, which had already reached Germany before our return, had the surprising result: the opposition would be admitted to the International as a sympathizing party with the rights and duties of full member parties, until the next general congress of the Comintern. We, the delegation, were probably the only ones truly surprised by this decision.
For the broader public, for the communist world press, which continued to print all the accusations from the protocol for weeks, we had suffered a complete defeat; externally branded, we were probably seen as the victors internally.
Neither I nor the members of the party in the regional districts of Germany later understood this. The offer from the International was rejected everywhere with large majorities.
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