Red Orchestra (4 page)

Arvid did not wear his learning lightly. His lean, bespectacled face radiated intensity, and some thought him cold. He was only a year and a half older than Greta, yet in 1924, when she was just beginning her undergraduate work in Berlin, he had already completed his law degree and was about to move on to a stint at the London School of Economics. Whereas Greta was a striver from a blue-collar family, Arvid was born into one of Germany's most prestigious clans of lawyers, scholars, and clergymen. Aspiring intellectuals competed for a place at the family table, just to hear them talk. Arvid's uncle, Adolf von Harnack, was one of Germany's leading liberal theologians.

Arvid's younger cousin and childhood neighbor, Dietrich Bonhoef-fer, followed in their uncle's footsteps as a theologian, and came to study in the United States a few years after Arvid. The Harnacks and their close relations the Bonhoeffers, the Delbrücks, and the Dohnanyis belonged
to a society that attached prestige to intellectual accomplishment. They even looked alike: a tribe of sturdy, bookish people with fine features and keen eyes, most of them framed by wire-rimmed spectacles.

Greta found Arvid's credentials more impressive than endearing. She had had to labor for every pfennig to finance her trip to America, while Arvid had arrived in Madison on the wings of a much-coveted fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, one of only four in the whole country. Greta acknowledged Arvid's brilliance, and noticed how even Professor Commons deferred to his views. But at the same time, she bristled at his air of superiority, especially in regard to their fellow Germans. Greta quoted him mockingly: “They're deeper thinkers. They do this and that better. They even have more cultivated tastes in food and drink.” In short, Greta found Arvid to be a classic German intellectual snob. Greta tried to avoid him after that, but a second meeting changed her mind.

The meeting took place at an ice-sailing and skating party she attended with a group of students. Greta cozied up to the bonfire beside the lake, inhaling the aroma of pork chops crackling over the flames. Suddenly she looked up and saw two figures skating toward her, their bodies swaying in unison over the ice. As they approached, she could see it was Arvid, accompanied by a pale, willowy young woman with a gentle smile. Arvid was much improved, Greta thought, by his wife's company: “more relaxed, more serene, altogether more pleasant.”

Arvid Harnack had met Mildred Fish shortly after his arrival in Wisconsin in 1926. One day (or so the story went) he wandered into the wrong hall looking for John Commons's class. Instead, he found a young teaching assistant beginning her lecture on literature. She was slim and fair, radiating a serene and intelligent beauty. Entranced, he stayed to listen and introduced himself after class. The two agreed to swap English and German lessons, and within a few months they were married by a Methodist minister, on her brother's farm.

Mildred Fish Harnack was only three months older than Greta. She was born in Milwaukee, a German-American enclave, but her forebears were New England Yankees. (They included such gloriously named Puritans as Preserved Fish and Grizzle Strange.) Like Greta, Mildred had been obliged to earn her education, and counted on the moral support of a devoted mother. She developed an ardent interest in literature and languages.
She memorized long passages of poetry in German and ancient Greek, and planned to make her mark as a writer and critic. Together, she and Arvid made a golden couple, tall, blond, and austere.

For all of his family's prestigious connections, Arvid also survived a troubled youth. His father, a melancholy scholar, had drowned himself when Arvid was twelve, and his mother lost her modest pension in the economic crisis. Toward the end of World War I, Arvid ran away from home to join the army. He was sent back home for being underage, but joined the right-wing Freikorps immediately after the war, intent on battling the Communist insurrection.
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Once he settled down to his studies, he excelled at them. But Arvid had little use for academic theory unless he could find a way to apply it to the social realities around him.

Greta and Mildred quickly became friends. Greta found Mildred a little dreamy, especially in her notion of Germany, which, dappled with castles and enchanted forests, seemed straight out of a Grimms' fairy tale. But she was good-hearted and earnest, and Greta admired her passion for American literature, a subject that was just beginning to be taken seriously in Germany. Mildred was the kind of woman men admire and other women envy, as she floated lightly above the fray. Still, her penniless New England pedigree led some students to whisper that Arvid was out of her league.

Greta made friends with Arvid, but she never completely warmed to him. He was fierce in a debate and enjoyed scoring points with his relentless logic. Still, he was a good person to know, especially since he received a steady supply of German newspapers from home. Arriving by ship, the papers were a few weeks out of date, and the news they brought only went from bad to worse. Unemployment back home was climbing steadily, and the coalition government in Weimar never established firm control.

In his irritatingly pedantic fashion, Arvid would tell Greta that the real problem lay in the economy, and that the solution lay in giving more power to the workers. The big factory owners had made huge sums of money manufacturing armaments during the war, and multiplied their profits through speculation during the troubled peace. As long as profiteers could turn disasters like hyperinflation and unemployment to their own ends, Germany could never achieve peace and stability. Germany's
only lifeline, Arvid told her, was the United States and its offer of loans to see the country through.

Life in Madison was not all grim political debates. Arvid and Mildred liked to host Shakespeare readings in the evenings, and Greta was a frequent participant. She was amused by the way Arvid always claimed the most difficult leading roles—Lear, Coriolanus, Henry IV—soldiering through them with a sophisticated grasp of the content but hobbled by his thick German accent.

Greta was also fascinated by movies of every description. Over its first decade, the Soviet Union produced a bounty of widely acclaimed avant-garde work. Greta was gripped by Sergei Eisenstein's film
The General Line,
an arresting look at the new phenomenon of collectivized farms. But she was also enthralled by
Hallelujah,
an early American film with a black cast, and delighted by Walt Disney's first Mickey Mouse talkie in July 1928.

Greta and her friends were passionate about fiction, and avidly read the newest works by Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, William Faulkner, and other writers who were forging a golden age of American literature. As Germany grew more pinched and chaotic, America felt increasingly like the land of infinite possibility.

By 1929, Greta's student visa was running out and she was in the final stage of her doctoral examinations. She was not eager to return and go job hunting in Germany's conservative university environment. She had found it cramped and misogynistic when she left Germany, and she doubted it had changed. But she did miss home. She wrote her parents:

Greta packed her bags reluctantly. Her last stop in America was Brooklyn, where a student friend from Madison named Saul invited her to stay with his family on her way back. The two roamed the Hudson
waterfront to find the best view of the bridge, and finished the night with a bagful of fresh hot doughnuts. Saul took her to his favorite little Jewish restaurant. Greta thought about how safe and familiar it seemed, all the while mournfully aware that her time in America was running out. When she boarded the ship, a tender telegram from Saul was waiting for her. “I will build a bridge over the ocean,” he promised. But the romance had no future.
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Greta's two years in America had been provocative, irritating, and exhilarating all at once, giving her a superb command of the English language and sealing a relationship with the country that would last her whole life. In October 1929, Greta said good-bye not only to a student adventure, but to an entire era. Around the time she returned to Germany, she posed for a photograph on a bridge. America had made a new woman of her. She is now sleek and severe, even stylish in her dark coat and fitted hat. But her expression is troubled. The figure in the photograph is a woman on the edge.
¹¹

G
RETA RETURNED FROM AMERICA WITH A NEW PERSPECTIVE.
At the University of Wisconsin she had been treated with respect, and it was far easier to pay her own way in Madison than it had been in the slums of Berlin.

“I was a little smarter when I landed back in Hamburg,” she wrote. She was able to pursue her studies without worrying about her room and board, and reflected, “These two years in America not only freed me from the pressures of these old problems, they also put international issues in a new perspective.”
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Part of that perspective was her appreciation for a more egalitarian society, where tenured professors listened to her ideas, and where even the daughter of a metalworker could aspire to high office.

On her voyage home she had renewed her assault on leftist literature, taking the analyses of class conflict personally. “I never forgot that I was the daughter of a blue-collar worker,” she wrote.
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Gazing out at the Atlantic, she reflected on how her father's unemployment had blighted his life and hampered her ambitions.

Germany had changed in Greta's absence—in many ways, for the better. The country's grueling efforts at recovery were paying off, and Berliners enjoyed a brief period of prosperity known as “the Golden Twenties.” To optimists, it looked like the road to progress. Unfortunately, 1928 was to be its peak.

Much of the credit went to an influx of American loans, which allowed
the German government to pay its reparations to the French without crippling the country's productive capacity.
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The new prosperity brought a flowering of artistic expression and political freedom. It seemed that finally Germany could tolerate, and even celebrate, a free marketplace of ideas. Germans were not used to such liberties, and would not know them again for a generation to come. By 1928 the government felt secure enough to lift its ban on extremist parties and allow them to present candidates for the Reichstag.

Basking in the national prosperity, the moderate Social Democratic coalition triumphed in the September elections; the Social Democrats won almost twice as many seats as their nearest rivals. The newly legalized Nazi Party, on the other hand, made a dismal showing, winning only 12 out of 491 seats (just over two percent). Adolf Hitler and his colleagues had disgraced themselves with a failed coup attempt in Bavaria five years earlier, and most Germans found it hard to take them seriously. But there were signs of a rebound. Right-wing student groups multiplied in regional universities. In rural villages, traditional sports clubs and music societies were hijacked by tough-talking nationalists. This was of little concern to Berlin's intellectual and cultural elite, who disregarded developments in the provinces.

Like many of her friends, Greta preferred political theory to messy party politics. Many Germans saw their democracy as a caricature, with a Reichstag filled with fat middle-aged men shouting ineffectually at one another before they staged yet another petulant walkout or revolving-door election. Industrial workers and provincial farmers often cast their votes under instructions from their trade unions or religious leaders, while many artists and intellectuals took a whimsical approach, changing parties as casually as their clothes. Their serious allegiances were reserved for artistic movements.

Intellectual advances were the good news in Germany. Berlin was the cradle of major developments in every conceivable field, from Albert Einstein's mathematical breakthroughs at the university, to Arnold Schönberg's adventures in atonality at the Prussian Academy of Arts. Newspapers and periodicals were thriving, with pages stoked by debate and coffers swollen by advertising. Anyone who aspired to be a player, including Greta, wanted to be in Berlin.

Berlin had more than doubled in size in the new century, from a population of 1.8 million in 1900 to more than 4 million in the 1920s.
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New theaters, music halls, and galleries sprang up across the city. Old-fashioned operettas and classical paintings existed side by side with raw new works, many of them generated by angry young artists, scarred by the Great War in body and soul. The fruit of Berlin's artistic labors could be spotty, but it was abundant.

Then came Black Friday. Wall Street crashed on October 25, 1929, only days after Greta arrived back home. Initially, the Europeans heard it only as a distant echo from New York, but within months the American crisis became a worldwide phenomenon. No country was hit harder than Germany. American loans (called the “German life insurance”) evaporated as Americans tended their own disaster. The foreign investments that had flowed into Germany now flowed out, and the few Germans with money to invest sent their own capital out with it. Factories closed and construction ground to a halt, casting hundreds of thousands of workers into the street, angry, confused, and desperate. Unemployment rose from 1.5 million to 2.5 million in the month of January 1930 alone.