Word: sperber
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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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...
...BURNED BRAMBLE (405 pp.)-Manes Sperber-Doubleday...
...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...
...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...