Pastor in Marxland

UNWILLING JOURNEY (316 pp.)--Helmut Gollwltzer--Muhlenberg ($3.50).

At their model prison camp in Krasno-gorsk, a pleasant, hilly spot with flower gardens and Sunday band concerts, Soviet propagandists assembled a group of potential German apprentices--army generals, Nazi Party officials, and promising young intellectuals. They held especially high hopes for a wiry little Medical Corps orderly named Helmut Gollwitzer, for Gollwitzer looked like just the man to tell pious East Germans that Marxism was simply another brand of 20th century Christianity.

Gollwitzer, then 38, was an ordained Lutheran pastor who had spent two years in & out of Gestapo jails as a leading Christian anti-Nazi. He was Pastor Martin Niemoller's assistant in Niemoller's church at Berlin-Dahlem, and he took over the services there after Niemoller was arrested in 1937. Before he was drafted into the army, he had cheerfully collaborated with German Communists in the anti-Nazi resistance, and he had a European intellectual's theoretical respect for the Marxist solution. "To be leftist," he said later, "seemed a matter of honor."

The Russians were rudely disappointed in Pastor Gollwitzer, and he survived to tell how and why.

A New Vision. Gollwitzer surrendered to the Russians on Ascension Day, May 10, 1945. For a while, despite cases of Soviet brutality, he and his comrades were sanguine about their fate. A Soviet cultural officer made a speech, in fluent German, about the cultural revival of the German people, freed at last from Hitlerism. Wrote Gollwitzer: "Our hearts swelled. The vision of a new land opened before us."

More often than not, Gollwitzer found his Russian captors men of kindness and humanity. ("I am always surprised," he quotes a fellow P.W. as saying, "at what a measure of humanity . . . has been preserved in this nation under such oppression.") But the rigid work "norms" and the inflexibly planned disciplines of the Communist system acted to crush the "humanness" alike in Russian and German P.W. The Soviet system, he decided, made Hitler's Reich seem "little more than the work of a dilettante."

When Gollwitzer left the labor camp for the Krasnogorsk indoctrination center, he set out to steep himself in the Marxists' explanation for this Russian misery. The theoreticians there seemed convinced that their system, with all its temporary drawbacks, would ultimately produce a materialist heaven on earth--Theologian Gollwitzer called it a "secularized Christian eschatology." Accordingly, they reasoned themselves into a 1984-type "dream world." Russian professors argued that the prisoners must see things "dialectically." For instance, if the Kremlin planned to erect a magnificent city street on a row of squalid huts, it was as good as there already. Hence it should be reported as such to the outside world.

Gollwitzer continually tried to put himself in the Marxists' place. He took part in the discussions of the camp "antiFascist" committees, but soon admitted their hopelessness. For the Russians had gradually organized the camp into a revealing microcosm of the Soviet Union, where such forms of democracy as committees and discussion groups were skillfully sapped of their content!

An Essential Fallacy. Through the record of his observations and discussions, Gollwitzer has clearly traced out the essential fallacy that sheds its influence on every corner of the Marxist state -- the belief that man can perfect himself through economic change. His conclusion: Stalinist dictatorship is not a perversion of Marxism, as some non-Communist Marxists argue, but Marxism's only logical ending.

In the process of forming his conclusions, Pastor Gollwitzer was one of the few men courageous enough to criticize the Communist leadership at Krasnogorsk. For this, he was sent back to a labor camp, and he narrowly missed permanent imprisonment there.

On New Year's Eve, 1949, he was released, along with several hundred others, a better Christian for his experience, but glad to have left it behind. "Our long suppressed joy surged forth," he wrote. "We embraced each other, and for the first time we laughed."

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