All Intensive Purposes

Like all intellectuals in a closed society, Wat had to rely on rumor, guesswork, intuition. His sense of German communism's being doomed because Stalin didn't want a Communist Germany was validated by Friedrich Wolff, a German playwright. Wat had met him in Berlin in 1928 and saw him again in Warsaw in 1934 or 1935 when Wolff was on his way to Moscow. Wat retells what Wolff divulged to him when they went out to a bar: "It was a tragic story. Wolff had been the head of a section, a communist cell. After the Reichstag fire, everything was put in place for a communist revolt, resistance. They knew where their weapons had been buried, in a woods outside Berlin. With German precision, everyone had been assigned a role. Wolff's group had assembled and they were only waiting for a messenger to bring them the word. But the messenger never came. Not just to his cell, not to any."

Richard Lourie's Introduction to Aleksander Wat, My Century xxviii (NYRB, 2003).