Stephan Hermlin

Behind the gently symbolic title of this 1979 publication are hidden Stephan Hermlin's memories, worked out in detail through the narrative - the serene retrospective view of an author who also saw himself in historical terms from a very tender age. As a 16-year old, who had read the Communist Manifesto by chance three years earlier, he decided to leave the secure territory of his family's upper middle-class milieu and set out for the new pastures of the promised classless society. He joined the Communist Youth Association. The reception of the Marxist message of salvation as described by Hermlin displays the characteristic manner in which political horizons and poetic visions combine and intermingle in his later works. It was the grand poetic style - more importantly than the conclusiveness of what was said - which gripped him and held on to him for years. Still more revealing about this intellectual's relationship to Marxism, however, is Hermlin's admission that he had misread a key sentence time and time again, and how deeply distressing this was for the 50-year old. This subconscious error had suggested to him that the free development of all was stated in the Manifesto as the condition for the free development of the individual, and now that he could see clearly that the free development of the individual is the condition for the free development of all, he could breathe more easily: his bad conscience, which was occasionally caused by the 'middle-class reminiscences' he had never quite overcome, proved in retrospect to be groundless - a true absolution!

However decisively this misunderstood doctrinal sentence may have conditioned the author's imagination and behaviour, he did not need to rewrite his biography after it was clarified. On the contrary, a correct reading of the sentence made it easy for him to stand by the history of the State he had helped to build according to the Marxist model, since neither the Stalinist excesses nor other deformities, bad habits or irksome things could even begin to approach the importance of that one sentence.