new book: "Communazis"

[Doug Millison]

http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/01/28/reviews/010128.28jaylt.html

review of
"Communazis"  FBI Surveillance of German Emigre Writers
by Alexander Stephan

" 'Communazis' ''takes its title from the neologism coined after the 1939
Hitler-Stalin pact by a disgruntled faction of the emigré left and then adopted
by the F.B.I. to stigmatize those refugees whose alleged potential for
subversion matched that of America's official enemies during World War II.
Although the F.B.I. was a prime mover in surveillance of the emigrés, it was
not alone; Stephan cites dossiers from the Immigration and Naturalization
Service, the Office of Strategic Services, the Office of Censorship, 
the Central
Intelligence Agency, various military intelligence services, the House
Un-American Activities Committee and its California State Senate counterpart.
Well before McCarthyism, indeed while the United States and the Soviet Union
were allies against Hitler, the mind-set and apparatus were firmly in place for
the cold war hysteria that followed. [...] In the case of the 
refugees considered by Stephan, however, such a charge is hard to 
sustain. For most were literary figures -- like members of the family 
of Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Bertolt Brecht, Oskar Maria Graf, 
Anna Seghers -- who may have romanticized Stalin or excoriated 
capitalism, but had no access to military or diplomatic secrets. 
[...] In retrospect, there is something absurd about the whole 
enterprise -- Walt Disney ratting on Thomas Mann to the F.B.I., J. 
Edgar Hoover's agents fixated on Klaus Mann's homosexual liaisons, 
Brecht pulling the wool over HUAC's eyes before skipping the country 
-- but the costs were very real."