Live memory: "The general’s daughter", an unpublished novel by Arkadij Maslow

Abstract

Arkadij Maslow (1891-1941), a communist politician during the Weimar Republic and since 1933 in Paris exile, finished in 1935 an eye-witness novel about Hitler’s surge to power, the underlying causes for the switch in Germany to a totalitarian regime and its immediate evil effects. The plot focuses on a real case of espionage and its sensationalist outcome which kept the international press busy for several weeks. The text is a first-hand document whose premonitory nature, 75 years later, is still astonishing in its freshness and immediacy. Apart from a close account of these occurrences which were known mainly by hearsay, Maslow offers a political and cultural view of pre-war Berlin from 1928-1933, and afterwards, of the vicissitudes which German exiles underwent in Paris, an episode we shall dwell on especially.

Keywords

• literatura testimonial
• nazismo
• espionaje
• memoria histórica
• exilio alemán.