Otto Katz
A review of The Nine Lives of Otto Katz by Jonathan Miles
Many readers who may not have heard of Otto Katz will have strong feelings about the fictional character based on him. Millions of women have probably swooned over him; men have envied his courage, his courtliness – and the fact that in the last reel he gets the girl, who happens to be Ingrid Bergman. Katz was the model for the heroic Czech freedom fighter Victor Lazlo in the classic film Casablanca.
In the movie, Lazlo flies off amid the fog to continue the struggle against the Nazis. There is also a shroud of fog surrounding Katz. Playboy, charmer, intellectual, spy, Stalinist, sophisticated conman, fabulist, a man of at least a dozen aliases – in an age of tragic drama, Katz, by any standards, lived a life of extraordinary excitements, intrigue and adventure. He was at the centre of so many decisive moments of the last century, and as a propagandist he helped to form public opinion about events such as the rise of Hitler, the Spanish Civil War and the Holocaust.
Katz was a quintessential central European of the last century, at home in many capitals, several languages, and numerous bedrooms. He was born in the 1890s in Bohemia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As a German-speaking Czech Jew, he was used to living with multiple identities. He grew up in bourgeois ease and comfort, but became a fervent socialist early on, radicalised by the First World War and particularly the rise of anti-Semitism after the defeat of the Central Powers. He joined the Communist Party, which became the cause he lived for throughout the rest of his life – and eventually died for.
He moved in avant-garde intellectual circles and relocated to Berlin, where he worked for the leftist theatre producer Erwin Piscator, an impresario who launched the career of Bertolt Brecht. Katz was almost as committed to glamour and sexual conquest as he was to MarxismLeninism. Among his lovers in 1920s Berlin was Marlene Dietrich.
Katz was recruited into the Russian intelligence service, the NKVD, and over the next few years he was a propagandist of flair and near genius, using popular journalism to further the interests of the organisation Communist International (Comintern). This was when he began to adopt the myriad aliases and noms de plume under which he would write, broadcast on radio and speak at public meetings. For two years he lived in Moscow, training in the tradecraft of espionage.
He returned to Europe as one of the Soviet Union’s chief exponents of agitprop. In France he organised a highly effective pro-Communist news agency. In Spain he uncovered atrocities committed by Franco’s forces. In England he hobnobbed among potential leftist supporters and spying for the NKVD on the British Establishment. He moved to America and took Hollywood by storm, raising huge amounts of money for anti-fascist causes, most of them fronts for the Communists. After the war Katz returned to Czechoslovakia, but at the moment of triumph for his cause his own story turned tragic. Stalin and his stooges in Prague distrusted a cosmopolitan who had slept with film stars in Hollywood.
Miles has a good story to tell, but his problem is that he claims too much for it. Of course Katz was an ‘agent’ in the sense that he worked for the Comintern and Soviet interests. But Miles cannot entirely substantiate the more dramatic cloak-and-dagger, James Bond-type material in the book. It is full of suppositions and speculations. Was Katz a ‘super-spy’, as Miles claims? Mostly, by this account, he was a super-spin doctor working for the Soviets, a master of the black arts of propaganda. As Katz’s great friend Arthur Koestler said, ‘everybody knew Katz was a Communist agent’. So hardly very secret. There are also some very strange judgements, those of a conspiracy theorist rather than a serious biographer. The well-known writer Ben Macintyre has spawned an industry – the real-life spy story. All publishers want a success along the lines of his acknowledged book Agent Zigzag. If, like Macintyre, you can spot a good tale, research it meticulously and write beautifully, all well and good. Not everyone can.
Victor Sebestyen, Literary Review