Metahistorical texts and cross-genre hybrids are now familiar literary forms, but when the German writer, critic and poet Magnus Enzensberger drafted his experimental novel Der Kurze Sommer der Anarchie in the late 1960s, the boundaries between genres were still largely regarded as fixed. The overt subject of his text is the militant Buenaventura Durruti (1896-1936), an anarchist who became a notorious figure during the Spanish Civil War. The implied subject is the retrospective retrieval of the past. His novel, cobbled together with eyewitness accounts, documented information, and a narrator’s musings, query the making of history. But source documents don’t synthesize, historians are fabulists, and their histories are more related to anarchy than they know. Or so Enzensberger tempts us to speculate.
Anarchy’s Brief Summer was first published in 1972. The post-World War II generation was starting to relive earlier debates between Left and Right. Once again, there emerged a radicalized Left, allied philosophically, if not financially, with Moscow. These Communists saw neo-liberal Western institutions as the heirs to the reactionaries of Germany’s past, from Bismarck to Hitler. Formed in 1970, the Baader-Meinhof Group was a throwback to Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries. Although not anarchists, they adopted many of their tactics, using propaganda of the deed. The group planted bombs, committed arson, robbed banks, and kidnapped and assassinated politicians throughout West Germany. Thus, in addressing the extreme politics of 1930s Spain, Enzensberger placed this contentious era next to then current headlines.
Before its Civil War, Spanish citizens experienced gaping inequalities of wealth. Over three quarters of its population worked as tenant farmers or day laborers. Anarchism became the leading voice of the masses. By 1918, 80 percent of Catalonian workers already belonged to an anarchist organization. These groups were organized horizontally, with autonomous local cells led by the workers themselves. Buenaventura Durruti was the epitome of the anarchist worker-leader.
Anarchy’s Brief Summer focuses on Durruti but allows the Spanish masses to speak for themselves. Enzensberger organized the chapters as a stream of citations collected from those who fought in and were witness to the struggle. He states, “It is unknown, nameless people who are speaking here … That is the way history has been transmitted since time immemorial: as a saga, an epic, a collective novel.” He describes history not as a series of objective events but as a story. History comprises perceptions, faulty recollections, and narrative from various perspectives. Enzensberger states explicitly, “The dubious nature of the sources is fundamental to them.”
The aims of syndicalist-anarchism were universal and revolutionary. The ambition of anarchism was not political reform, but the negation of the entire State apparatus, including property and capital. Its aim was to give voice to those with no political input, not by bringing them into the process, but by removing all levers of State power. In that sense only did it hope to level the playing field for all political minorities. Peter Kropotkin, the 19th century Russian revolutionary, stated, “The enemy on whom we declare war is capital, and it is against capital that we will direct all our efforts, taking care not to become distracted from our goal by the phony campaigns and arguments of the political parties.” Anarchists realized that their moral ends did not have to be realized through political means or by compromise with the State.
Durruti was a man of action, not a philosopher. His particular strength lay in propaganda of the deed. Journalist Luis Romero said of Durruti, “He doesn’t rely on his eloquence but on the pistol in his holster and the rifle between his knees.” Durruti was implicated in the assassinations of Prime Minister Dato and Cardinal Soldevila, the attempted assassination of King Alfonso XIII, as well as countless bank robberies and munitions thefts throughout Spain and as far afield as France, Cuba, and Argentina. Spanish anarchists were cavalier about death — both their own, and, particularly, for enemies of the revolution. As an anarchist pamphlet stated, “Every day a worker died, the following day a bourgeois or a policeman.”
Syndicalist-anarchism, like all nineteenth century utopian philosophies, attracted ardent followers who tried to will their ideas into existence. Unlike the Communists, the Spanish anarchists lionized Bakunin, not Marx. They did not believe in a vanguard of the proletariat. Augustin Souchy, a member of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo [CNT, the anarchist federation of trade unions], stated, “Durruti always insisted that the revolution should not end up with the dictatorship of one party, that the new society should be built from the bottom up, not decreed from above. That was the reason why the anarchists could never accept the result of the Russian revolution.”
Enzensberger’s collection of personal testimonies creates a vivid portrait of Durruti as a revolutionary who asked much from his comrades but practiced what he preached. It was this sincerity that endeared him to the masses. CNT compatriot, Alejandro Gilabert, related, “Durruti kept telling the workers that the republicans and the socialists had betrayed the revolution … He told the miners that bourgeois democracy was bankrupt and the time was ripe for revolution. The bourgeoisie had to be expropriated, the state abolished.”
However, in the Spanish Civil War, impeccable personal character was no match for the systemic incentives that rewarded shrewdness. There was another civil war within the Civil War. Amongst the anti-fascists, there was a Republican wing that combined the moderate Social Democrats, ousted from power in Franco’s putsch, with more ardent Communists, supported by the Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union. The Syndicalist-Anarchist wing viewed these men as almost as evil as Franco’s fascists and, certainly, anti-revolutionary in nature. The anarchists could not forget that, when in control of Spain’s government, these same Republican officials had imprisoned, tortured, and executed their comrades.
Imagining that politically naive and philosophically idealistic anarchists could navigate their way into the halls of power seems fanciful in retrospect – a point that Enzensberger surely if silently exploits. They were out-maneuvered at every turn by the Communists, the Republican generals, and the professional politicians. CNT leader, Ferica Montseny, had rightly worried, “The Communists had gained an immense amount of influence through the Soviet Union’s arms deliveries. We were constantly afraid that the Spanish anarchists would suffer the same fate as the anarchists had in Russia.” A CNTpamphlet later remembered, “True, there are people who mock us and call us political failures; there are even some who call themselves anarchists who say that. In reality, the undertaking was nothing more than a defeat. We have suffered many defeats. That is no reason to sully the memory of the fallen.”
Spain, in the summer of 1936, turned out to be the high-water mark of international syndicalist-anarchism. It was the closest any anarchist movement would reach to leading a European government. A Social Democrat politician, Jaume Miravitlles, quipped as he saw Durruti’s column marching off to the Aragon front, “There was almost something hippie-like about them, but they were hippies with hand grenades and MGs [machine guns] and they were determined to fight to the death.” Even when faced with political reality and the temptations of power, the anarchists pursued their ideals to the bitter end.
But Enzensberger loves nuances and difficulty, which may be why he includes statements by Simone Weil who began by regarding the Durruti’s anarchist movement as “the last [group] of which I had great hopes … Everyone was welcome and could join, with the inevitable result that incompatible opposites came together at close quarters: on the one hand cynicism, moral degeneracy, fanaticism and cruelty, on the other fraternity, love of mankind, and a basic desire for dignity, such as you find in simple people.” Ultimately, she perceived the CNT behaving as if it were an end in itself and that “hungry peasants no longer confronted the landowners and their accomplices, the priests, as I had originally thought.”
Anarchists persisted in Enzensberger’s Germany – and they exist today as members of the Free Workers’ Union, a small anarcho-syndicalist union which, along with Spain’s Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, are parts of the International Workers Association. Among America’s political Left today, socialist ideas circulate while anarchism seems like an historical anachronism. It recalls the bomb-tossing terrorists of Haymarket Square or the assassination of President William McKinley. But Anarchy’s Brief Summer suggests that the presence of multiple factions and a disenfranchised populace, packed with the potential for violent action, is itself an anarchic environment. France has inhaled more than a whiff of it since Gilets Jaunes began blocking traffic intersections last November. Where else might anarchy turn up?
[Published February 15, 2019 by Seagull Books, distributed by the University of Chicago Press. 264 pages, $30.00 hardcover]