Few in the Albanian world may have heard of Manès Sperber. Time for a brief introduction to an author who should be read especially in the current times.
“Manès Sperber has pulled out my rotten tooth of communism.” These words are from Wolf Biermann, a poet, musician and dissident from East Germany, who was exiled to West Germany by the communists there (including the removal of his citizenship). Manès Sperber is not known in the Albanian world. A search on the websites of the national libraries in Pristina and Tirana does not result in any findings that match the name Manès Sperber, so first some biographical information.
Manès Sperber was born in 1905 in Zabllotov in today’s western Ukraine. At that time, Zabllotov, according to Sperber, was “a small Jewish town in eastern Galicia.” And part of Austria-Hungary. When World War I broke out, a young Austro-Hungarian officer of Croatian-Slovenian origin was sent there to fight against Russia, his name: Josip Broz. Almost at the same time, the Sperber family emigrated to Vienna. In the capital of the Danubian empire, Manès Sperber completed high school, studied psychology, and became friends with Alfred Adler, who had gone from being a disciple of Sigmund Freud to his fierce opponent.
Sperber describes life in his native Ukraine in the first volume of his autobiography: “There were men who fasted not only on the many fasting days, but also every Monday and Thursday, so that their children or grandchildren would have something more to eat.” But the Jews of Zablotov spared no expense for their children’s education. They were sent to school from the age of 3. Manès Sperber never saw this Jewish world again. The Jews of Zablotov were shot, thrown into the river, and exterminated in Auschwitz—like 6 million others.
After World War I, Manès Sperber became a communist, like many young people in Europe, who when looking back saw the staggering figure: 17 million dead as a result of the armed conflict, while when looking forward, they saw the strengthening of extremist parties, known as fascists or Nazis. In this situation, many people hoped that a more just, more humane world, with equal chances and opportunities was possible only through communism.
It took Manès Sperber 10 years to realize that he had been seriously (self-)deceived. He joined the Communist Party of Germany in 1927, left it in 1937. In 1933 he was arrested by Nazi troops in Berlin and after five weeks was deported as an Austrian citizen. This is where his odyssey of exile began. After a short stay in Croatia, which he knew from previous holidays, Sperber emigrated to Paris. As a collaborator of the Comintern, he witnessed the communists ruthlessly suppressing those who dared to express an opinion different from the official line. Soviet dictator Stalin's repressive campaign against critics convinced Manès Sperber that the idea of communism had already been corrupted. "I turned my back on the party when the party, that is, the Soviet Union, demanded that I look at the sky at night and admit that it is day. This happened during the staged (Stalinist) trials. Here everything turned out to be a lie."
By the late 1930s, Sperber had become a harsh, outspoken, and comprehensive critic of communism. He made a name for himself as an essayist, theorist, writer, and chronicler of the injustices of the 20th century. Sperber described the essence of his literary work as follows: “Man’s task is not to be a hero—which means to make a virtue out of misery—nor to be a saint—which means to make a misery out of virtue—but simply to become wise.” His work is, for the most part, a confrontation with one’s own mistakes. For example, in 1931, Sperber spent three months in the Soviet Union. Although he had the opportunity to see with his own eyes how communism (did not) work, Sperber remained silent at that time.
When the Nazis invaded France in 1940, Sperber took refuge in the south of France. He had a great supporter and great friend: André Malraux, writer and later French Minister of Culture. As the circle was narrowing, Sperber escaped to Switzerland in September 1942. He spent the next three years there. Regarding the three months he spent in a refugee camp near Zurich, Sperber wrote: “In these camps, where the internees were completely without rights, even the attempt to complain was strictly forbidden, as if complaining were an act of rebellion. (...) The worst was the condescending tone, the brutal contempt for the refugees, on the part of the soldiers, non-commissioned officers and most of the officers; no doubt the troops were ordered to treat us as if we were lepers.” He was alone in the camp, his wife and young son having been interned in French Switzerland. While in the camp, Sperber fell ill and found shelter with the family of a priest. This Swiss family welcomed the “atheistic Jew” as a dear friend and provided him with access to the “Museumsgesellschaft”, a renowned cultural association in Zurich founded in 1834, which still serves today as a center for reading and intellectual reflection. Here he began writing the trilogy “Like a Tear in the Ocean”, a masterpiece that the German Nobel Prize winner Heinrich Böll has compared to Tolstoy’s novel “War and Peace”. “Like a Tear in the Ocean” deals with the great conflicts of the time and the temptation that intellectuals have to become part of totalitarian systems of thought.
In 1945 Manès Sperber returned to Paris. Along with Arthur Koestler, who had also gone from being an admirer to a warner of the dangers of communism, Sperber was targeted by European leftist intellectuals who idealized the Soviet Union, among them the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. However, Manès Sperber remained a leftist - a non-communist leftist. He was committed to freedom of expression for intellectuals in the communist bloc. He criticized the students "pets of the industrial countries" who in 1968, in the name of the legitimate struggle against the absurd war in Vietnam, partially slipped into anti-Americanism and cheered the Chinese communist leader Mao and the Vietnamese one Ho Chi Minh.
Manès Sperber called himself a “skeptical optimist” or “post-purgatory optimist.” He opposed naive pacifism and called for Europe to become a superpower. This is what he said 42 years ago, when he received an important literary prize in Frankfurt, Germany. This speech and many other texts by Sperber sound very relevant in 2025.
In 1963, Manès Sperber visited Yugoslavia, which was ruled by Josip Broz, who now also bore the new name Tito. In a lecture that can be heard thanks to the digitization of the archive of German public media, Sperber tries to approach the multinational state without prejudice, even with kindness. But Sperber is not naive. He describes a dinner with wise people from the Yugoslav elite. The conversation goes well until someone mentions the national question. “Suddenly, you could feel that a dangerous fire was burning in secret,” says Sperber in his melodious German, accented by Eastern Jews. Sperber, an atheist who was not hostile to religion, died in Paris in 1984. Last year, the Vienna publishing house Sonderzahl-Verlag reprinted Manès Sperber’s main works in three volumes. Following are the titles in the original and translation: “All das Vergangene …” (All the Past, volume one), “Wie eine Träne im Ozean” (Like a Tear in the Ocean, volume two), “Zur Analyse der Tyrannis” (On the Analysis of Tyranny, volume three). (A2 Televizion)
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