The Question of Bruno (8 page)

(The passage that Klausen alludes to is from
The History of King Lear
and goes as follows:

“… so we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news, and we’ll talk with them too—
Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out,
And take upon’s the mystery of things
As if we were God’s spies.”)

¹³
On the outset of Sorge’s mission to Japan, Berzin told him: “The only thing you should trust and rely upon is the omnipresence of surveillance. There’ll be eyes everywhere, and nowhere.” Sorge was all too well aware of being watched: even on the Junker flight, he felt a gaze adhered to his body (although that may have been Mary Kinzie). Once in Japan, the following things made Sorge aware of the surveillance:

a) he was being watched by Maritomi Mitsukado, a reporter for
Juji Shimpo
, who would always somehow find him in any bar or at any party and then ask a transparent question like: “Do you think this tyranny will last forever?” (Sorge: “What tyranny?”);

b) his maid and laundryman were frequently questioned and tortured by police;

c) a woman he slept with (name lost) got up in the middle of the night and went through his pockets, finding nothing;

d) in bars and restaurants, even at the Imperial Hotel, he was constantly monitored by plainclothesmen of the Thought Police (sticking out of the careless crowd by being too focused on him);

e) his house was searched and his suitcase examined, during his absences;

f) most of all, it was a sense that he developed, a sense that someone’s gaze was always at the nape of his neck, like a wart.
Sorge: “When you know you’re being watched, you assume a role and play it, even when you sleep—even when you dream. Most of my life I played Richard Sorge, and I was someone else, somewhere else. The ubiquitous surveillance makes everything look differently—you see things through someone else’s eyes. Everything is more present—more real—because you see nothing alone.”

¹⁴
Sorge’s group maintained radio contact mainly with Vladivostok (code name: “Wittenberg”) and, seldom, Moscow (code name: “Munich”).

¹⁵
In 1924, upon a decoy invitation from the Moscow Marx-Engels Research Institute, left by the illustrious scholar Chichikov, Sorge left Germany for good and went to Moscow. Having spent some 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,” which was, by contemporary European and American standards, rather small. Alphonse Kauders, who visited Sorge in 1939, described it as “scarcely more than a two-story doghouse in a small garden.” In the upstairs room that Sorge used as his study, the untidiness that surrounded him amused his friends (Kauders: “It was like a Verdun of things”) and horrified his housemaid (“German pig!”), for there was a seeming chaos of books, maps, magazines, and papers. Kauders recalls that many of the books were on economics (notably on the geisha wage system), that there were American movie magazines (obtained from Gimon), and that there was “some quite interesting Asian pornography.” There were one or two fine Japanese prints and some expensive pieces of bronze and china. There were photographs of Japanese creek dams and a photograph of Greta Garbo on the thin walls. The room also contained a gramophone, and a pet owl (fed with local mice and cockroaches) in a cage. Sorge respected Japanese customs by removing his shoes at the front door and by wearing velvet slippers on the stairs and in the tiny corridor. He slept in Japanese fashion, on a mattress laid on the
tatami
, with his head on a small round, hard pillow. Kauders, describing Sorge’s bathroom, remembers that the fanatically clean Sorge “scrubbed himself daily, as if there was no tomorrow, and then, drawing up his knees, climbed into the wooden tub, filled with scorchingly hot water.”

¹⁸
Sorge’s grandfather, Adolph Sorge, had served as the secretary for the First International during Marx’s lifetime. Grandpa Adolph told Sorge, throughout his childhood, Marx stories: about Marx reading Shakespeare (in English) and the Greek tragedies (in Greek) every July; about Marx and Engels playing tennis (Marx always losing), as the officials of the First International watched them, moving their heads “left-right, left-right, like a clock pendulum”; about Grandpa Adolph, stopping by Marx’s home and taking him to a bogus meeting, covering Marx’s secret trysts with his (recently fired) housemaid; about Marx’s pathological fear of dentists—Engels or Grandpa having to go with him and hold his hand as the blood soaked his immortal beard; about holding, piously, the manuscript of
The Communist Manifesto
, knowing that it was something that was to change the world forever, “the world that philosophers theretofore only attempted to interpret.”

¹⁹
During his stay in Shanghai, Sorge was a frequent visitor of the infamous opium houses. In 1932, in the middle of the siege of Shanghai, in Gong Li’s opium bar, Sorge had a sensation of the physically split personality: Sorge stepped out of his own body and left it to wallow in its opiatic stupor, while he walked among the defenders, with a German nostalgia for trenches, handing out grenades to poorly clad and armed Chinese, not fearing Japanese bullets, hallucinating about “the eye of the ubiquitous sniper, the infinite preciseness of the supreme sharpshooter.”

²⁰
Sorge was admitted to the Tokyo branch of the Nazi Party in October 1934. In his speech, preceding an orgiastic drinking contest, Colonel Ott said: “One cannot but feel that our cause will be only strengthened by the energy of Dr. Richard Sorge, our beloved fellow German. There’s no better occasion to use, once again, our Führer’s timeless words: ‘We have hundred of thousands of the most intelligent sons of peasants and workers. We will have them educated and are already doing so, and we wish them someday to occupy the leading positions of state and society, along the rest of our educated strata, and not the members of the alien people. We are determined to thwart and thrust aside this alien people that knew how to insinuate itself and seize all the leading positions for itself, for we want our own people for that position.’ I deeply believe that Dr. Richard Sorge’s blood will only enhance the purity of German blood. Welcome, Richard, welcome!”

²¹
The Thought Police inspectors, with the typical bureaucratic thoroughness, made an inventory of the items seized at Sorge’s house upon the arrest. Those bare objects—the physical tools of espionage—were to form the first grim and material skeleton in the body of proof to be forged against him. They included three cameras; one copying camera with accessories; three photo lenses (one telescopic); developing equipment; two rolls of film with photographed documents (the nature of the documents is unknown from the police files); one black leather wallet containing $1,782; sixteen notebooks with details of contacts with agents and notes in an unknown language; Sorge’s Nazi Party card (with membership fees paid until 1951) and a list of Party members in Japan; two volumes of the
Complete Shakespeare
(no data as to what edition); seven pages of reports and charts in English; and, lastly and fatally, two pages of a typewritten draft, also in English, of the final message of achievement, compiled to be sent to “Wittenberg” on October 15.

²²
Sorge: “In the summer of 1914, I visited Sweden on vacation, and returned to Germany by the last boat available. The Austrian Archduke had been assassinated in Sarajevo, and World War I broke out. I volunteered for service immediately, joining the army without reporting to my school or taking the final graduation examination.” This period may be described as “from the schoolhouse to the slaughterhouse.” Sorge was sent to the Eastern Front (Galicia). He was befriended by an old stonesman from Hamburg, a real leftist, whose head was shattered to smithereens before Sorge’s very eyes, a piece of skull bone cutting his face (a permanent scar remained). In July 1915, Sorge was wounded by shrapnel in his right leg. In 1916, a bullet struck him from the back, taking out his bowels. Sorge was transported to a field hospital, conscious, watching with listless amazement his viscera throbbing in his hands. Exhausted surgeons gave him no hope of survival, but patched him up and let him occupy a bed. Sorge’s next-bed neighbor, a Jewish boy, crushed his skull against the bed frame, as Sorge was helplessly writhing in his own pain. In early 1917, fully and miraculously recovered, Sorge was sent back to the Galician front, where he became one of the best sharpshooters in his division, specializing in eliminating enemy snipers.