Free The Question of Bruno by Aleksandar Hemon Page A

weeks in different (apart from German roaches) apartments, Sorge finally settled in the Lux Hotel, Room 101. The Lux was the place where all foreign comrades working for the Comintern lived. Indeed, a day after he took off his socks, poured down his throat a gigantic glass (with misty fingerprints all over) of vodka and unpacked his two suitcases (one of which was full of books:
Das Kapital, Doctor Faustus, Seven Sweet Little Girls
, etc.), he was visited by comrades Pyatnitski, Kuusinen, Klopstock. The three Comintern activists were infamous for never leaving the proximity of each other (“They were called the ‘Three Kings,’ but then Klopstock disappeared in the late thirties, I think”). They talked to him all night long, becoming friends along the way, and effortlessly recruited him for the Comintern Intelligence Division.
    PYATNITSKI : “The Comintern is not a party but a world organization of national Communist parties. It toils for world Communism, for the incorporation of the whole world into a single Communist society.”
    KUUSINEN : “That is, it seeks to do away with private ownership of the means of production, with class exploitation and oppression, with racial tyranny, and to unite nations in accordance with a single master plan.”
    KLOPSTOCK : “In form and theory, the Comintern is the brains directing activities of the sections as they endeavor to achieve a goal for this stage in the development of world Communism.”
    ALL : “Welcome!”
    In the thirties the Lux Hotel became a virtual detention camp, for foreign comrades were more liable to become foreign spies. The hotel tenants’ revolutionary activities were palsied, as they were perennially waiting for the NKVD footsteps to stop before their doors. A car stopping noisily in the middle of the night, in front of the hotel, would have a suicide or two as a consequence. No tenant would let the cleaning personnel into his or her apartment, and after a while cleaning was abandoned altogether. Hence already uncontrollable roaches multiplied exponentially. By 1941, none of the residents from the thirties were left in the hotel, apart from now gigantic cockroaches and a comrade from Yugoslavia, mad and dying, preserved only due to a careless bureaucratic error.
    16 Beside
German Imperialism
(1927), a study of the political will that led to the slaughter of WWI, and
The Accumulation of Capital and Rosa Luxemburg
(1922), a study of the life and theories of the great German revolutionary, Sorge’s most important work was
Marxism and Love
(1921), a work about human relationships in the context of merciless exploitation. In the Introduction, Sorge writes: “Thus love is not possible in a class society, for every human relationship is a relationship of property, exploitation, and ideological subjugation. Love as a concept can be achieved only in a classless society, where a man is a man and a woman is a woman. Just as the decisive intensification of class struggle, exposing the cruelty of capitalism, leads towards the revolution, the intensification of purely sexual relations would expose the inhumanity of individual human relations. The consequent objectified vacuum of inhumanity would simply require a revolutionary action. Love, to sum up, is not what we need now—what we need now is sex!” Scholars claim that
Marxism and Love
is more a product of the unfulfilled desire for Christiane, the wife of Kurt Gerlach, his teacher at the Kiel University, than a product of studious research. Some, however, tried to show that
Marxism and Love
(and some articles like “Anal Sex and Revolution” from 1923) influenced Wilhelm Reich. Sorge himself was not too proud of his early theoretical work: “I am convinced that my handling of these difficult theoretical questions was cumbersome and immature, and I hope that the Nazis burned every last copy.”
    17 Sorge’s house was what the Japanese in those days called a
bunka jutaku
, or “an up-to-date residence,”