Karl Retzlaw’s book was translated into English but never published. All those who read it in English could not put the manuscript down, it is that sort of material. You read it in one go, you cancel everything in order to get to the end. Very few books have that sort of momentum. Even Ernest Mandel acknowledged that he read it all in one sitting.

But no-one helped to find a publisher. Even to this day there is an English translation floating about - but where? I knew the translator of Retzlaw’s book, Karl Rennert. I often spoke with him about the Kronstadt massacre, ordered by Lenin and Trotsky in 1921. The last time I saw Karl Rennert was around 1989; he pulled up at my place literally crashing his way through the front door as a friend went to see who was ringing the bell. I heard him shouting, ‘It is me, Karl, let me through.’ He then announced that he was an anarchist and that he had at last understood the Kronstadt massacre. He howled against the state builders Lenin and Trotsky. I asked Rennert where he lived: he said Heathrow airport. he then explained that he stayed there - like the Iranian exile in Orly airport, whose story was made into a film with Tom Hanks.

Karl spoke eight or nine languages, some better than others, and so he begged in nine languages. His ‘technique’ was simple: he would hang around arrival lounges waiting for tourists to go by, and then he would give them a spiel about being a refugee from East Germany or some other Eastern country. Once he had a tourist or a group of them snared, the only way out for them was to give him a fiver. Karl reckoned he made at least £40 a day, and sometimes more depending on the supply of visitors. He also said people were kind to him, there was plenty of food, coffee from all the outlets, and he could wash, shave etc.

The strangest thing of all, when Karl arrived at my place, he was dressed in a pair of women’s trousers, with no flies. That made me laugh. I pointed this out to him. ‘Ach, don’t worry about this!’ he replied, and then fell asleep on my kitchen table.  Then I got worried; I let him snooze for a bit, and after a while I woke him up and asked him to phone a friend, which he did. He then left but before he went I asked him what happened to his translation of Retzlaw’s book. He sort of laughed, saying that one day, when there was a strong wind, he had left the window open and gone out. Upon returning the pages of the manuscript were flying around the room, and maybe some took flight and left the room altogether.

It reminded me of a scene from John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (originally a novel by anarchist and associate of Retzlaw, B Traven) especially when all the gold dust is flying around; an allegory for all those who want or who are exploiting others; it is all in vain because in the end everything crumbles to dust, as in the present economic crisis. Many top traders and hedgefunders have lost their shirts.

Then a few years later I head that Karl Rennert had died. He esentially ‘lived’ in the old British Library for at least forty years. He had his ‘own’ books. He would give French and German lessons in exchange for Japanese ones.  the old library was much more human than the current police academy, as Charlie Windsor has rightly called it. In the old British Library in the main dome room, behind the books, someone would start singing opera. The big hard-copy of catalogues were also conducive to mental driftin’; you started looking for a book and you ended up finding something else. The computer catalogue is less drifter-friendly.

Karl Rennert and May 1968
Karl Rennert had done some good stuff in May 1968. He stayed glued to the French radio stations and noted down everything he heard. French reporters were mainly on the side of the Revolution and warned the insurgents as to the police movements. Karl wrote all this up in the Independent Labour Party newspaper: They are probably the best articles on the subject in the British left-wing press at the time. The Socialist Party of Great Britain (SPGB), for example, attacked the ten million people on strike, saying ‘it was not the right time to fight back.’  In France the FER/AJS, the equivalent of Gerry Healey’s mob, crossed police lines during the Gay-Lussac night of the barricades saying to the people they left behind: ‘Comrades, this is not the right time to fight.’ The CRS let them through their lines.

The FER/AJS left history for good.

Some went for ‘entryism’ in a big way after that. Jospin, the ex-French Prime Minister was one of them; he infiltrated some ministry and got stuck right in, like a moth in a spider’s web.

Back to Karl Rennert: this is how he became aware of Situationist/Enragés material through the radio in May 1968. He also met Lucien Goldmann, Kostas Axelos (The French translator of History and Class Consciousness). As a boy in Berlin before Hitler, Rennert he had watched the Battleship Potemkin film more than 300 times, since his dad had bought a cinema in order to screen Eisenstein’s oeuvre!

Karl once accosted me in the Hammersmith Labour Exchange - it must have been 1974. He seemed to know about me, how I do not know, but then the world is a small place. He asked me if I was a situationist. I said: Maybe.

Karl Retzlaw: European revolutionary
So lets have a look at Retzlaw’s book. As he says at the beginning: ‘I don’t say everything, but everything I say is true.’ Still, his book is damning for any Leninist, because he spills the beans on them. Retzlaw was a member of the Spartakus Bund as a boy of fifteen or sixteen, distributing leaflets against the First World War, a dangerous activity; those who were caught doing that were treated harshly.

Then Retzlaw took part in the Council Republic of Bavaria in 1923. He was put in charge of security at the age of 23. Other members included Eurgen Levine (later executed), Ret Marut (B Traven) who fled to Mexico in the aftermath, Paul Frölich, (who wrote a book about Rosa Luxemburg) the anarchist Gustav Landauer and Leo Jogiches, ex-partner of Rosa Luxemburg. Landauer and Jogiches were both murdered by the Freikorps, on the orders of Gustav Noske, the social-democrat traitor, who famously said ‘If there is need for a bloodhound, I will be the one.’

When the Freikorps surrounded Munich, Retzlaw managed to escape. H. Himmler was in the Freikorps, and in Munich at this time.

Retzlaw travelled to the Soviet Union and saw at first hand the results of the Bolshevik so-called revolution. He recalls German workers arriving in Moscow with clenched fist salutes, and as they left a year or two later they were giving different salutes, namely the national socialist one.  A real disaster. They then became the ambassadors who had seen how the USSR was really run.

Retzlaw recalls how one day he met Trotsky, who was minister for war, and he remarked to him that the generals were kicking their heels in Czarist fashion. Trotsky said: ‘Comrade Retzlaw, there is a war waged against us. We need discipline.’ Indeed!

A few years later - Retzlaw had by then become one of the first German Trotskyists under the name of Karl Grun - met Trotsky in Royan, France. Trotsky was a different person, not the man of steel anymore in his armoured train as portrayed in Doctor Zhivago. He was more human, a dissident fleeing from persecution, from Stalin’s system of state capitalist domination. (Trotsky would always refer to the USSR as a workers’ degenerated state, to the dismay of many of his followers, who would break with him over this.)

But Trotsky in fact had been the architect with Lenin and other top Bolsheviks, like Zinoviev, Bukharin and Radek, of this new society called the USSR. A hybrid form of capitalism where the law of value applied. Stalin reckoned the first chapter of Marx’s Capital was not needed, all that stuff about the commodity and fetishism was not necessary and so it was omitted.

Karl Marx would have been angry about that. In fact Stalin himself decided what the meaning of a word was. To transgress against this edict could find you sent to the gulag for re-education. Some did not survive this harsh treatment; the hard labour and the cold Siberian winters.

Retzlaw managed to get out of Paris the day before the Nazis arrived in the French capital. He managed to bury some papers and books in the garden of his landlady. After the war she told him: ‘You were wise to leave Paris Mr. Retzlaw, because the Gestapo were here the next day looking for you.’ Retzlaw had kept fit, so he cycled down to Spain. He traversed the Pyrenees, got to the coast and embarked for Britain.

The concluding chapter on the life and times of Karl Retzlaw: How Retzlaw puts Goebbels on the back-foot will follow shorty

Written by a friend of Junius, 15 June 2009

               

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 at 9:53 pm and is filed under Critical Fragments, The memoirs of a Situationist drummer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.