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Indiana University Press - George Huppert

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After discovering the autobiography of the Austrian communist and writer Hugo Huppert (1902–1982), historian George Huppert became absorbed in the life and work of this man, a Jew, perhaps a relative, who was born a few months after George's father and grew up just miles away. Hugo seemed to embody a distinctly central European experience of his time, of people trapped between Hitler and Stalin. Using the unvarnished account found in Hugo's notebooks, George Huppert takes the reader on a tour of the writer's life from his provincial youth to his education and radicalization in Vienna; to Moscow where he meets Mayakovski and where he is imprisoned during Stalin's purges; through the difficult war years and return to Vienna; to his further struggles with the communist party and his blossoming as a writer in the 1950s. Through all the twists and turns of this story, George remains a faithful presence, guiding the way and placing Hugo's remarkable life in context. Comrade Huppert is a story of displacement and exile, the price of party loyalty, and the toll of war and terror on the mind of this emblematic figure.

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Personal Memoirs

Biography

Memoir

Autobiography

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Publié par	Indiana University Press
Date de parution	14 mars 2016
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780253019844
Langue	English

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COMRADE
HUPPERT

COMRADE
HUPPERT

A Poet in Stalin s World
GEORGE HUPPERT
This book is a publication of
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2016 by George Huppert
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z 39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Huppert, George, 1934- author
Title: Comrade Huppert : a poet in Stalin s world / George Huppert.
Description: Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015030953| ISBN 9780253019783 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253019844 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH : Huppert, Hugo. | Authors, Austrian-20th century-Biography. | Translators-Austria-Biography.
Classification: LCC PT 2617. U 725 Z 65 2016 | DDC 838/.91409-dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015030953
1 2 3 4 5 21 20 19 18 17 16
This book is dedicated to the memory of my parents, Dr. Edmund and Irma Huppert. Together with their own parents, their brothers and sisters, and virtually the entire Jewish communities of Teschen and Bielitz, they were murdered in Auschwitz .
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Note on Translation
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
References
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author thanks the archivists and librarians who made his research possible, especially Christina Moeller of the Akademie der K nste in Berlin and Dr. Deborah Rose-Lefmann of Northwestern University. Robert Sloan of the Indiana University Press has been an ideal editor, and Harriet Lightman remains the author s indispensable collaborator.
NOTE ON TRANSLATION
All translations are mine, unless otherwise noted. Cities in the multi-ethnic Austrian empire and its successors almost always had a German name as well as a second version, as in Lemberg/Lw w. Depending on the time and the circumstances, I have tried to use the German name or the Slavic one, following Hugo Huppert s usage, which usually favors the German name he grew up with, as in Teschen and Bielitz.
COMRADE
HUPPERT
INTRODUCTION
I NEVER KNEW HUGO HUPPERT. I WAS NOT AWARE OF HIS existence until years after his death. By chance, I found his three-volume autobiography on a shelf in the University of Cincinnati Library, which I happened to be visiting. Those books were rare items. Only one of his books was translated into English, and that was his Men of Siberia (1934). Originally published in Moscow that year, the book was made available to Communist sympathizers in New York and London, at a time when there was a good deal of sympathy for the Soviet Union in the West, just one year after Hitler s seizure of power and before the Moscow Trials revealed the brutal face of Stalin s world.
I started reading the first of the three autobiographical volumes and I was completely taken with the author s account of his growing up in Bielitz, on the eve of the First World War. Bielitz was part of the Austrian Empire, a largely German-speaking city surrounded by Polish-speaking villages. I hardly knew anything about Bielitz, but I was born in the city of Teschen, only a few miles away, another German-speaking island in a sea of Polish and Czech villages.
My interest in the author s account of his family s experiences might not have carried me much further had I not noted that Hugo was born only a few months after my own father s birth, in 1902. There were other similarities as well. Both boys left their hometowns to pursue advanced degrees, Hugo in political science, my father in chemistry. I was slightly intrigued-was the previously unknown Hugo Huppert a relative?-and found to my surprise that I could not bring myself to put the memoir down: there was something familiar in Hugo s voice, in his language, his storytelling. It was just a completely absorbing book.
My next step was to order the three volumes from an antiquarian book dealer in Berlin. He was able to add some other titles, several books of Hugo s poetry, and his Italian travel book, M nzen im Brunnen (Coins in the Fountain), among others. This hardly exhausted the huge bibliography of Hugo Huppert s works. There are other volumes of poetry, the adaptations of Mayakovsky s poetry, and the adaptation of the Georgian national epic, Shota Rustaveli s Vitiaz v tigrovoi shkure ( The Knight in the Tiger Skin ).
I started reading seriously now, especially the autobiographical books. Gradually I began to realize that it was not only the charm of Hugo s writing that had me spellbound: it was also the story of his life, a life that was an almost perfect embodiment of a twentieth-century experience-if you happened to be born in Europe, especially in eastern and central Europe, between 1900 and the 1950s, when the killings of two world wars were extended by the mass murder of innocent civilians on the orders of two half-mad backcountry politicians, Djugashvili (Stalin) and Schicklgruber (Hitler).
At this point in my reading, in my discovery of Hugo s writings, I decided to write a book about Hugo s life. Not a biography, exactly, but the story of a poet whose life is perfectly representative of those men, women, and children who had the misfortune of coming into the world at the wrong time and in the wrong place. Especially if they were Jewish, they were not likely to survive the events set in motion in the 1920s.
Before the wars, before the collapse of empires, growing up in a town like Bielitz would have been something close to an idyllic experience. Still, even here, in this prosperous place full of industry and surrounded by lush forests and mountain ranges, it was not possible to avoid entirely the first stirrings of the madness to come. In the first two chapters of this book, I draw a contrast between the apparently idyllic life of the boy Hugo, growing up in Bielitz, and the violence in Vienna and in the provinces.
Right up to his departure for Vienna, in 1920, Hugo had been exactly what you would expect from a well brought up son of middle-class parents in a provincial city. He wrote poetry, he had a serious interest in music, and he loved his parents, his younger brother, his hometown, and, of course, girls. By the time Hugo reached Vienna, things had changed radically since the collapse of the empire, two years earlier. Austria was now a small republic. The political atmosphere in Vienna had shifted-from the right-wing antisemitic parties to the Social Democrats. The brand-new Austrian Communist Party was popular among Hugo s friends and associates at the university, at least among the circle of mainly Jewish students who befriended him.
Hugo s relationship to Judaism, it would seem, was not then, and had never really been, more than an acknowledgment of his family s traditions. His father was not religious, although he belonged, as a matter of course, to a local Reform temple. Even though he had always been surrounded by other Jewish students back in Bielitz and continued to be closely linked to Jewish friends and colleagues in Vienna, my impression is that his friends, too, had grown up in Jewish families but not particularly religious ones, and once in Vienna they cultivated their art and their politics, not their religion.
In Vienna, Hugo assumed a new identity: he became a Communist. His girlfriend, Emily, was a seventeen-year-old typist, smart as a whip, dirt poor, but now employed by the Soviet Trade Mission. She was a Communist as was her father, a worker in a furniture factory. Hugo, too, joined the Party. Those student years in Vienna and a post-doctoral year in Paris are the subject of chapter 3 .
He did not mean to be a revolutionary. He was a writer. Nothing else defined him as clearly. Already as a teenager, in Bielitz, he had been in the habit of filling notebooks with his elaborate diary entries, using shorthand. He never stopped filling those notebooks, often transcribing his quick shorthand notations into full sentences in his handsome italic script. The surviving notebooks and letters are deposited in the Hugo Huppert Archive in the Berlin Akademie der K nste, where I was able to consult them.
There is no doubt that writing was his calling. He claimed that filling his notebooks was by far his favorite activity. And, I should add, those private entries, some long and detailed, can be read as authentic testimonies, unadorned, free of the compromises required of his published writings which, of course, cannot be read as always necessarily reliable accounts of the world he lived in.
Hugo Huppert s life would have been entirely different had not external circumstances channeled his path into exile. His first years in Vienna were very difficult: hyperinflation, unemployment, food shortages. Revolution was in the air. The collapse of old empires led to armed revolts, not only in Russia, but also in the ruins of the German empire and in the Habsburg lands. Suppressed in Hungary and in Bavaria, they provoked counter-revolut