My transfer from the Paris office to the Berlin house was due to an article I wrote on the occasion of the award of the Nobel Prize for Physics to the Prince de Broglie. My bosses decided that I had a knack for popularizing science (I had been a student of science in Vienna) and offered me the job of Science Editor of the Vossische and adviser o matters scientific to the rest of the Ullstein publications. I arrived in Berlin on the fateful day of September 14, 1930—the day of the Reichstag Election in which the National Socialist Part, in one mighty leap, increased the number of its deputies from 4 to 107. The Communists had also registered important gains; the democratic parties of the Center were crushed. It was the beginning of the end of Weimar; the situation was epitomized in the title of Knickerbocker�s best-seller: Germany,—Fascist or Soviet? Obviously there was no �third alternative.�
( page 22 )
�In 1931, CP and Nazis had joined hands in the referendum against the Socialist Prussian Government; in the autumn of 1932 they joined hands again in the Berlin Transport Workers� Strike . . .�
( page 35 )
. . . Among other members of our cell I remember Dr. Wilhelm Reich, Founder and Director of the Sex-Pol. (Institute for Sexual Politics). He was a Freudian Marxist; inspired by Malinowski, he had just published a book called The Function of the Orgasm, in which he expounded the theory that the sexual frustration of the Proletariat caused a thwarting of its political consciousness; only through a full, uninhibited release of the sexual urge could the working-class realize its revolutionary potentialities and historic mission; the whole thing was less cock-eyed than it sounds. After the victory of Hitler, Reich published a brilliant psychological study of the Nazi mentality, which the Party condemned; he broke with Communism and is now director of a scientific research institute in the U. S. A. . . .
( page 43 )
While I was in Russia, Hitler had come to power in Germany; so, in the autumn of 1933 I joined my Party friends in the Paris exile. The whole Red Block, with the exception of those caught by the Gestapo was no reassembled here, in the little hotels of the Left Bank. The next five years were for me years of near-starvation compensated by hectic political activity. Its center and motor was Willi Münzenberg, head of the Agitprop for Western Europe and Germany. . . .
( page 63 )