Dream into Nightmare

THE BURNED BRAMBLE (405 pp.)--Manes Sperber--Doubleday ($3.95).

If the run of ex-Communist novelists can be believed, the only good Communists are dead Communists, and the man who destroyed them is Stalin. Most of them died because they failed to make the tricky turns on the tortuous slalom course of the party line. Some of them didn't even see the turns coming up. A few saw them but preferred destruction to further writhing and twisting.

The Burned Bramble belongs in the select company of those novels which have best explained why and how the good Communists become dead ones (others : Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, Victor Serge's The Case of Comrade Tulayev). It is the work of Manes Sperber, a slight, talkative ex-professor of psychology in German universities, who now lives in Paris. Like many a Communist intellectual, he had a blind spot for Stalin's big lie until the Moscow trials of old Communist heroes. In 1937 he broke with the party.

Author Sperber's doomed Communists are hand-picked for their roles, their fate assured in advance. Because The Burned Bramble is a rigged deal, it is no great shakes as a novel, but because Sperber is impassioned and superbly sure of what he is talking about, his book becomes a fascinating polemical exercise. In essence, it describes how the Kremlin underestimated the Nazis (counting on the Nazis and the Social Democrats to destroy each other and leave the field, in a year or two, to the Communists), and how Germany's huge Communist Party was itself destroyed. Naturally, Stalin could hardly be expected to admit that his line had been wrong. Scapegoats had to be found.

In the end, Author Sperber's little band of dedicated, wrong-headed men are broken on the Comintern's rack, discover too late that they have been pawns in a game that has nothing in common with dewy-eyed dreams of Marxist brotherhood.

What makes The Burned Bramble effective is Author Sperber's sharp, insider's awareness of the agony that gnaws at the comrade when realization comes.

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