Liliputin- 5197

Hotel "Lux" was way too close for comfort ... "
Herbert Wehner

Liliputins. What, the heck, is this?
http://stihi.ru/2021/11/24/7101

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Lux = Luxus
luxus
noun
SUPERFLUITY
Etymology
Latin, luxury, excess

luxury
noun
noun: luxury
the state of great comfort and extravagant living.
"he lived a life of luxury"
Similar:
opulence
luxuriousness
sumptuousness
richness
costliness
grandeur
grandness
splendor
magnificence
lavishness
lap of luxury
bed of roses
milk and honey
comfort
security
affluence
wealth
prosperity
prosperousness
plenty
the life of Riley
Opposite:
austerity
poverty
an inessential, desirable item which is expensive or difficult to obtain.
plural noun: luxuries
"luxuries like raspberry vinegar and state-of-the-art CD players"
Similar:
indulgence
extravagance
self-indulgence
treat
extra
nonessential
frill
refinement
Opposite:
necessity
adjective
adjective: luxury
luxurious or of the nature of a luxury.
"a luxury yacht"

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too close for comfort

Usage examples
Similar and opposite words
: close enough to make a person feel nervous, worried, or upset. That bus came a little too close for comfort! When we went out for drinks together, I realized we were getting too close for comfort


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Hotel Lux

Hotel Lux (Люксъ) was a hotel in Moscow during the Soviet Union, housing many leading exiled and visiting Communists. During the Nazi era, exiles from all over Europe went there, particularly from Germany. A number of them became leading figures in German politics in the postwar era. Initial reports of the hotel were good, although its problem with rats was mentioned as early as 1921. Communists from more than 50 countries came for congresses, for training or to work. By the 1930s, Joseph Stalin had come to regard the international character of the hotel with suspicion and its occupants as potential spies. His purges created an atmosphere of fear among the occupants, who were faced with mistrust, denunciations, and nightly arrests. The purges at the hotel peaked between 1936 and 1938. Germans who had fled Nazi Germany, seeking safety in the Soviet Union, were interrogated, arrested, tortured, and sent to forced labor camps. Most of the 178 leading German communists who were killed in Stalin's purges were residents of Hotel Lux.

Stalin's purges
In 1934, after the murder of Sergei Kirov, Joseph Stalin began a campaign of political repression and persecution to cleanse the Party of "enemies of the people".[11] Stalin viewed the foreign occupants of Hotel Lux as potential spies,[9] or as a Moscow newspaper assumed of Germans (and Japanese) in 1937, they were working actively on behalf of their own country.[12] By 1936, his Great Purge began to include the hotel's residents.[9] The hotel then gained a second name, that of "the golden cage of the Comintern" because many would like to have left, but could not while being investigated.[1][9] Between 1936 and 1938, many residents of the hotel were arrested and interrogated by the NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs).[1] Suspicion and betrayal created an atmosphere of fear. Arrests came in the middle of the night,[13] so that some residents slept in their clothes, others paced the floor, or played games of concentration to mask the stress.[citation needed]

An investigation or arrest was prompted more by the atmosphere of terror than by charges of wrongdoing, which were often baseless. Walter Laqueur later wrote of the period, "There was no rhyme or reason as to who was arrested and who was not, the security organs were given a plan to fulfill, a certain number of people were to be arrested in a certain region, and from this stage on it was more or less a matter of accident at whose door the NKVD (the secret police) emissaries would knock in the early hours of the morning."[14] The procedure was for the NKVD to knock, the accused was told to pack a small suitcase with a few things, get dressed and wait outside the door to be picked up and taken away. Then the NKVD returned to collect the accused and seal the door. One night, the NKVD knocked on the Langs' door and Franz Lang was told to get ready. Dutifully waiting outside his door to be picked up, the security police returned. "What are you doing standing around out here?", asked the NKVD. Lang replied that he'd been ordered to do so. "What's your room number?", asked the security officer. "Number 13." "We're only taking away the even numbers tonight!" Astonished, Lang went back to bed. Nor did the NKVD ever knock on his door again.[15]

In the morning, the doors of those arrested were sealed;[16][note 1] the wives and children had to move to other quarters and were ostracized as "enemies of the state".[9][note 2] The children of parents under investigation were placed in orphanages, where some died from illness and others rejected both their parents and their own German identity.[18] Some of the adults arrested were sent to a gulag or were executed. Those who came back were regarded with suspicion, as was the case with Herbert Wehner, who was taken away and returned twice. Such people were assumed to have betrayed others[1] under torture[11] or to save themselves. In Wehner's case, that was what happened.[9]

By 1938, in order to get upstairs in the hotel, a propusk was needed, a document that said one was authorized to get past the armed guard, standing in front of the elegant Art Nouveau elevator.[19] Even high-level members of the Comintern could not get past the guard without a propusk.[19]

The atmosphere affected the children. Rolf Schaelike, who was a child at Hotel Lux, later wrote, "I grew up in Moscow, in the center of power, and state and non-state criminality, Gorky Street, Hotel Lux. It was the years 1938–1946. Around us too, there was juvenile violence. We played 'partisan and German fascists' in our Hotel Lux, and one kid in our group was hanged—for fun. He couldn't be revived again. There were frequent battles with iron bands with the kids from the neighboring building."[1]

Of the 1400 leading German communists, a total of 178 were killed in Stalin's purges, nearly all of them residents of Hotel Lux.[6] By comparison, the Nazis killed 222 of those 1400 leading German communists. Within the top leadership itself, there were 59 Politburo members between 1918 and 1945, six of whom were killed by Nazis and seven by the Stalinist purges.[6] The saying among the German communists was, "What the Gestapo left of the Communist Party of Germany, the NKVD picked up."[3] When Leon Trotsky was killed in August 1940, the purges at Hotel Lux stopped, bringing a brief respite to the exiles.

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Herbert Wehner


Herbert Richard Wehner (11 July 1906 – 19 January 1990) was a German politician. A former member of the Communist Party, he joined the Social Democrats (SPD) after World War II. He served as Federal Minister of Intra-German Relations from 1966 to 1969 and thereafter as chairman of the SPD parliamentary group in the Bundestag until 1983.

During his tenure in the Bundestag from 1949 to 1983, Wehner became (in-)famous for his caustic rhetoric and heckling style, often hurling personal insults at MPs with whom he disagreed. He holds the record for official censures (77 by one count, 78 or 79 by others) handed down by the presiding officer.

Life
Herbert Wehner was born in Dresden, the son of a shoemaker. His father was active in his trade union and a member of the Social Democratic Party. More radical than his father, Wehner engaged in anarcho-syndicalist circles around Erich M;hsam, driven by the 1923 invasion of Reichswehr troops into the Free State of Saxony at the behest of the DVP–SPD Reich government of Chancellor Gustav Stresemann. He also fell out with M;hsam, whose pacifist manners he rejected and was accused of stealing money by him, which Wehner never denied. [1] He finally joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in 1927, becoming an official of the party's Rote Hilfe organisation the same year.

Wehner rose quickly and was elected to the Landtag state legislature of Saxony in 1930. Nevertheless, he resigned one year later to work at the KPD politburo in Berlin with Walter Ulbricht. After Hitler's seizure of power in January 1933, he participated in the communist resistance against the Nazi regime from the Saar Protectorate. When the Saar was re-incorporated in 1935, Wehner went into exile, first to Paris, then in 1937 to Moscow, where he lived at Hotel Lux, wrote for the Deutsche Zentral-Zeitung and had to face Joseph Stalin's Great Purge of 1937–38.[2] After Wehner's death, German news magazine Der Spiegel documented accusations that he informed the NKVD on several party fellows like Hugo Eberlein, presumably to save his own life.[3] After being sent to neutral Sweden in 1941 in order to re-enter Germany, he was arrested at Stockholm and interned for espionage in 1942. Whether he deliberately went into custody has not been conclusively established; at least he was excluded from the Communist Party by politburo chief Wilhelm Pieck.