Word: wolfgang
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CHILD OF THE REVOLUTION (447 pp.)-Wolfgang Leonhard-Regnery...
...often that the author of an autobiography consents to an introduction n which he is compared to a subhuman being. Such is the case of Wolfgang Leonlard, an ex-Stalinist official of East Germany, whose dismal career has apparently foundered on the dismal hope that "national Communism" would be better than the all-too-togetherness of a universal Moscow state. Soviet Expert Edward Crankshaw met Leonhard in Yugoslavia, where, says Crankshaw in his foreword, "he was rather like one of those legendary young men who . . . emerge from the jungle emitting strange sounds, having spent their childhood or adolescence...
...Degenerate Fantasies of a British Middle-Class Female Child. He was 13 when his mother, a German Communist and a refugee from Hitler in Sweden, took him to the Soviet Union. There were thousands like them in Moscow. It was 1935, the eve of the Great Purge. Little Wolfgang was lodged, with other foreign youngsters, in Children's Home No. 6, then briefly among Russians in a grim Dotheboys Hall called the Spartak Children's Home. At school, the teacher vanished after having made a slip of the tongue and garbled a current slogan of Stalin...
...Leonhard got a postcard from Mother; she had been sentenced to five years in a concentration camp for K.R.T.D., i.e., "counterrevolutionary Trotskyite activity." This did not shake the boy's faith in the system, or that of his schoolmates, many of whom had been similarly orphaned. Wolfgang worried about Mother sometimes, but not enough to prevent his getting excellent marks...
Every traditional schoolboy value-loyalty to comrades, gaiety and spontaneity-was smothered in great quilts of priggish guff. Wolfgang found that the bully was esteemed by the teachers. When one pupil from Hamburg Sunday-punched a little fellow half his size, the smaller student was denounced for having behaved in a "provocative" manner. Wolfgang was reported for having remarked that some Spanish girl students were very pretty; this kind of frivolity would not do. The result was an episode recorded like "My First Communion" in a pietistic work-"My First Self-Criticism." He duly denounced himself, but he could never...