In 1949, a Czech-German communist named Louis Fürnberg, fearful of being expelled from the Party, wrote a song dedicated to his comrades. Hugely admired when it was performed at the Congress of the Communist Party of East Germany, Fürnberg's "Song of the Party" not only lengthened its author's political life, it was adopted as the German communist party anthem. It was duly sung, with fervor, right through the 1980s. The refrain went like this:
The Party, the Party, she is always right!
And Comrades, so it will always remain...
Since he who fights for the right, is always right...
He who defends mankind is always right....
As raised to life by Lenin's spirit, as welded by Stalin
The Party, the Party, the Party!
Now, to our modern (or should I say post-modern) ears, those words sound absurd, much in the way that old films of Hitler seem absurd. If you poke around on the internet, you can now find Mickey Mouse singing that song in someone's home-made video, as well as spiky-haired teenagers pretending to dance to it. Without an intact ideology to support them, the art forms of Soviet-style totalitarianism are not merely outdated, they are laughable.
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Nevertheless, if you had attended an official assembly or a party conference in the eastern half of Europe round about 1950, such as the East German Communist Party youth rally in the photo above, everyone around you would have been singing. Some would have done so because they truly believed that the Party was always right. In this period, just after the devastation of World War II -- a cataclysmic crisis which caused many in both Eastern and Western Europe to doubt everything they'd ever been taught -- communism seemed to some people like the only viable alternative to the fascism which had just been defeated, and to the democratic capitalism which had failed so spectacularly in the 1930s. The world had been shattered. Communism offered a better way to rebuild it.
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Others would have been singing because they were afraid. The Soviet invasion of Eastern Europe, then in recent memory, had been accompanied by an extraordinary wave of violence. After the war's end this was not indiscriminate violence, but was rather carefully targeted at intellectuals, priests, merchants, political figures -- including anti-fascist political figures -- and anyone who might be capable of organizing a group, club, or society of any kind. Potential leaders were harassed, arrested, sometimes tortured, sometimes deported, or murdered. The communist regimes' intention was clear: Eliminate not only dissent, but even the possibility of future dissent. Most people knew or would have heard of a victim, and thus most people came to fear similar retribution.
Yet at the same time, many others would have been singing because they were, for the lack of a better word, reluctant collaborators. These were the people who did not necessarily believe the slogans they read in the newspaper, but neither did they feel compelled to denounce those who were writing them. They did not necessarily believe that Stalin was an infallible leader, but nor did they tear down his portraits. They did not necessarily believe that idea that the party, the party, the party is always right, but nor did they stop singing the song.
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