Franz
Borkenau
was
born in Germany in 1900. He joined the German
Communist Party and for a while served as an official of Comintern.
Borkenau
went to Spain in September 1936. He
visited Barcelona, Valencia, Madrid and other Republican areas during
the Spanish Civil War. He stayed for two
months but returned again in January 1937. On his second visit he
became critical of the behaviour of Soviet agents in Spain. He was
denounced as a supporter of Leon Trotsky
and was arrested by the Communist Party
(PCE).
After his release, Borkenau
wrote his highly acclaimed book, The Spanish
Cockpit (1937). Franz
Borkenau died
in 1957.
(1)
Franz
Borkenau, Spanish Cockpit: An Eyewitness Account of the Political
and Social Conflicts of the Political and Social Conflicts of the
Spanish Civil War (1937)
It must be explained, in order to make intelligible the
attitude of the communist police, that Trotskyism is an obsession
with the communists in Spain. As to real Trotskyism, as embodied in
one section of the POUM, it definitely does not deserve the attention
it gets, being quite a minor element of Spanish political life. Were
it only for the real forces of the Trotskyists, the best thing for
the communists to do would certainly be not to talk about them, as
nobody else would pay any attention to this small and congenitally
sectarian group. But the communists have to take account not only
of the Spanish situation but of what is the official view about Trotskyism
in Russia. Still, this is only one of the aspects of Trotskyism in
Spain which has been artificially worked up by the communists. The
peculiar atmosphere which today exists about Trotskyism in Spain is
created, not by the importance of the Trotskyists themselves, nor
even by the reflex of Russian events upon Spain; it derives
from the fact that the communists have got into the habit of denouncing
as a Trotskyist everybody who disagrees with them about anything.
For in communist mentality, every disagreement in political matters
is a major crime, and every political criminal is a Trotskyist. A
Trotskyist, in communist vocabulary, is synonymous with
a man who deserves to be killed. But as usually happens in such cases,
people get caught themselves by their own demagogic propaganda. The
communists, in Spain at least, are getting into the habit of believing
that people whom they decided to call Trotskyists, for the sake of
insulting them, are Trotskyists in the sense of co-operating with
the Trotskyist political party. In this respect the Spanish communists
do not differ in any way from the German Nazis. The Nazis call everybody
who dislikes their political regime a 'communist' and finish by actually
believing that all their adversaries are communists; the same happens
with the communist propaganda against the Trotskyists. It is an atmosphere
of suspicion and denunciation, whose unpleasantness it is difficult
to convey to those
who have not lived through it. Thus, in my case, I have no doubt that
all the communists who took care to make things unpleasant for me
in Spain were genuinely convinced that I actually was a Trotskyist.
(2)
Franz
Borkenau, wrote about Madrid
and Barcelona
during the
Spanish Civil War in
his book Spanish Cockpit: An Eyewitness Account of the Political
and Social Conflicts of the Political and Social Conflicts of the
Spanish Civil War (1937)
Certainly there are fewer well-dressed people than in ordinary times,
but there are still lots of them especially women,
who display their good clothes in the streets and cafes without hesitation
or fear, in complete contrast to thoroughly proletarian Barcelona.
Because of the bright colors of the better-dressed female element,
Madrid has a much less lugubrious aspect than even the Ramblas in
Barcelona. Cafes are full, in Madrid as in Barcelona, but here they
are filled
by a different type of people, journalists. State employees, all sorts
of intelligentsia; the working class element is still in a minority.
One of the most striking features is the strong militarization of
the armed forces. Workers with rifles, but in their ordinary civilian
clothes, are quite exceptional here. The streets and cafes are full
of militia, all of them dressed in their monos, the new dark blue
uniforms; most of them do not wear any party initials on their caps.
We are under the sway of the liberal Madrid government, which favors
the army system as against the militia system favored by Barcelona
and the anarchists. Churches are closed but not burned here. Most
of the requisitioned cars are being used by Government institutions,
not political parties or trade unions. Here the governmental element
is much more in evidence. There does not even exist, in Madrid, a
central political committee. Very little expropriation seems to have
taken place. Most shops carry on without even control, let alone expropriation.
To sum up, Madrid gives, much more than Barcelona, the impression
of a town in social revolution.
(3)
Franz
Borkenau, Spanish Cockpit: An Eyewitness Account of the Political
and Social Conflicts of the Political and Social Conflicts of the
Spanish Civil War (1937)
The village bar is full of peasants. The appearance of
three foreigners naturally is a big event. They immediately start
telling us proudly about their feats. Most of them are anarchists.
One man with a significant gesture of the fingers across the throat
tells us that they have killed thirty-eight 'fascists' in their village;
they evidently enjoyed it enormously. (The village has only about
a thousand inhabitants.) They had not killed any women or children,
only the priest, his most active adherents, the lawyer and his son,
the squire, and a number of richer peasants! At first I thought the
figure of thirty-eight was a boast, but next morning it was verified
from the conversation of other peasants, who, some of them, were not
at all
pleased with the massacre. From them I got details of what had happened.
Not the villagers themselves had organized the execution, but the
Durruti column when it first came through the village. They had arrested
all those suspected of reactionary activities, took them to the jail
by motor-lorry, and shot them. They told the lawyer's son to go home,
but he had chosen to die with his father.
As a result of this massacre
the rich people and the Catholics in the
next village rebelled; the alcalde mediated, a militia column entered
the village, and again shot twenty-four of its adversaries.
What had been done with
the property of those executed? The houses, of course, had been appropriated
by the committee, the stores of food and wine had been used for feeding
the militia. I omitted to ask about money. But the big problem was
the land and the rents which the landlords had previously received
from their tenants. To my intense surprise, no decision had been taken
about this matter, though it was more than two weeks since the executions.
The only certain thing was that the land of the deceased continued
to be worked as it had been previously: those parts
which had been let were still worked by their former tenants, and
those formerly managed
as an estate and cultivated by agricultural labourers were still functioning
in the same way; only instead of the squire it was now the committee
which employed the necessary labour. As to the rest, there was only
vague talk: the committee would eventually receive 50 per cent of
the old rents, the other half being remitted, and half of the expropriated
lands would be distributed among the poorer peasants, while the other
half would be managed by the committee as collective property of the
village.
Evidently in this village
the agrarian revolution had not been the result of passionate struggle
by the peasants themselves, but an almost automatic consequence of
the executions, which were themselves but an incident in the civil
war. Now most of the peasants were bewildered by the new situation.
One of them, among many others, simply said: 'What do I know? They
will give an order about it.' I ask: 'Who will give an order?' 'Oh,
how do I know? There will be some government,' he replied. This threw
a new light upon the vague replies I had got the day before in other
villages when inquiring about land expropriation and rent abolition.
Available from Amazon Books
(order below)
