Red Orchestra (5 page)

That year a Berlin newspaper reported that the number of customers selling their belongings in the city's pawnshops had doubled. A quarter of them were unemployed women.
⁵
Greta might have been one of them. Her financial outlook was bleak, and she had to revise her American dreams of academic glory downward to a life of editorial piecework and tutoring to pay the bills. She spent the winter and spring of 1930 at a series of odd jobs, seeking a new sense of direction.

“My thoughts began to turn back to my old love of theater,” she wrote, recalling her high school theater days when she consumed German, French, and English dramas at the rate of four or five a day
⁶
“I swam ecstatically in that flood of plays.”

So Greta was excited to learn of the Fourth International Theater Congress, scheduled to take place in Hamburg for nine days in June 1930. The event promised many glamorous highlights, including presentations by the Comédie Française and an experimental theater company from Moscow. Impulsively, Greta scraped together the money to go.
⁷

Once in Hamburg, Greta was drawn to the French delegation. Greta
spoke enough French to fit in comfortably, and she reveled in the Gallic spirit. The Congress was all she could have hoped. The honorary president of the assembly was legendary producer Leopold Jessner, one of the three most powerful figures in Berlin theater. Jessner headed the Prus sian Staatstheater, which occupied a neoclassical building on Unter den Linden just down the block from Greta's university
⁸

Greta's eyes were fixed, however, on a less-renowned colleague of Jessner's who accompanied him to the Congress. Dr. Adam Kuckhoff was Jessner's head dramaturge, a position that offered playwrights a stipend in return for editing scripts and mediating discussions between writers, directors, and management.
⁹

Adam Kuckhoff was a square fireplug of a man, just short of forty-three, with a moody gaze, blunt features, and a full mouth. Given his august position, Greta was half-expecting him to present a formal lecture on the mechanics of theater administration. Instead, Kuckhoff gave a passionate speech on nothing less than “the nature of theater and film in the new Era.”
¹⁰

The previous year, Kuckhoff had already laid out many of his ideas in an essay entitled “
Arbeiter und film
” (“Worker and Film”). He was contemptuous of the “sentimental lies of the typical society film,” and just as critical of the “patriotic hurrah” of nationalist cinema:

Greta listened, so visibly rapt that Kuckhoff approached her after his lecture. He addressed her in French, based on her location in the French section. Did his talk correspond to her experience, he demanded? She answered him in French, continuing the little game. Kuckhoff decided they needed to discuss “the problems of dramaturgy” further, on a romantic boat tour of the Hamburg harbor. From the boat they went on to dinner, and from dinner to other diversions. It was the story of a thousand conferences, in which countless charismatic older men have ensnared
countless dreamy-eyed young women sitting starstruck in the stalls.

On her last day in Hamburg, Greta confessed to Kuckhoff that she loved him. It was only after she returned to Berlin that she learned he was a married man.

Adam Kuckhoff was rife with complications. To begin with, he was born in 1887, making him fifteen years Greta's senior. The son of a needle manufacturer, he grew up in Aachen, the ancient city on the Belgian border where Charlemagne once ruled and was buried. The region had passed back and forth between German-and French-speaking rulers for centuries, and its inhabitants tended to be intermarried and bilingual. There were rumors that the Kuckhoff family had Jewish ancestors, but Adam was raised in the tradition of the Rhineland's easygoing Catholicism.

Like many students of his time, Kuckhoff tried out half a dozen different disciplines, ranging from literature to law, in at least four universities. He finally found a subject that united his enthusiasms: the eighteenth-century German writer Friedrich Schiller. Kuckhoff identified with the playwright's mission to create poetry out of his passion for liberty and equality. One of his most famous quotations was “
Eine Grenze hat Tyrannenmacht
” (“There is a limit to the power of a tyrant”).
¹²
Kuckhoff completed his degree with a thesis on Schiller's theory of tragedy, and Schiller's influence colored the rest of his career.

At the same time Kuckhoff explored literature, he was also experimenting with more practical matters. In 1912, at the age of twenty-five, he fathered a son, Armin-Gerd, neglecting to marry the child's mother, actress Marie Viehmeyer, until the following year.
^*
In 1914, Kuckhoff, swept up in Germany's war fever, enlisted in the army. Shortly afterward he was assigned as an actor to the army's “front theater” in the French town of Laon. Less than two hundred miles from Kuckhoff's hometown, this beautiful but treacherous region of French countryside was called the Aisne after the river that meandered through it.

Kuckhoff and his company had been posted to one of the most fiercely contested theaters of the Great War—not as hellish as the
nearby battlefields of Ypres and the Somme, but brutal by any other measure. The first Battle of the Aisne, in September 1914, was an early experiment in trench warfare and machine-gun slaughter. The second, a bitter three-week engagement in the spring of 1917, was an unabated bloodbath. French casualties were listed at 96,000 but believed to be higher. The German casualties numbered over 160,000.
¹³

The front theater included both civilians and professional actors who had joined the armed forces. Many, including director and producer Erwin Piscator, would go on to become major figures in the theater after the war. Female roles were played by both imported actresses and soldiers in drag. The companies staged their productions under the most primitive conditions. One memoir described how actors drove to the front and converted a delousing station into a theater on the spot, improvising their lighting from truck headlights and still managing to “raise the curtain” within an hour of their arrival.
¹⁴

Adam Kuckhoff emerged from the army full of theatrical energy. He wrote a play,
Der Deutsche von Bayencourt (The German from Bayencourt)
describing a border dweller who is torn between his German patriotism and his cultural identification with the French. Kuckhoff's work in theater administration led to a succession of higher positions with larger theater companies. By 1923 he was the director of the touring company for a theater in Frankfurt.

Kuckhoff, drawn to both theater and a literary career, pursued both at the same time. In 1927 he was offered a tempting new opportunity. Eugen Die derichs, a prominent publisher, invited him to edit his political and cultural monthly,
Die Tat (The Deed).
Diederichs hoped that Kuckhoff could revitalize
Die Tat,
which had fallen behind the times. Known for promoting German nationalism and economic self-sufficiency from a conservative standpoint,
Die Tat
had spawned its own political circle, the Tatkreis, made up of influential figures from politics, business, and the military.

But with Kuckhoff, Diederichs got more than he'd bargained for. His new editor gave the magazine a sweeping new subtitle, “the monthly magazine for the formation of new realities,” and a new leftist profile to go with it. He brought in an eye-catching list of new contributors, including Armin Wegner, a Prussian aristocrat who had valiantly exposed
the Turkish massacres of Armenians that he had witnessed as a medic during the war.
¹⁵
Wegner's was one of the twentieth century's first voices to be raised against the crime of genocide.

Another of Kuckhoff's discoveries never achieved Wegner's fame, but he was destined to play a far larger role in Kuckhoff's future. This was a young German-American journalist named John Sieg.
¹⁶
Kuckhoff took a liking to the young man and his atmospheric essays, and the two became good friends.

Kuckhoff's editorship of
Die Tat
came to a sudden end in 1929 after he had a falling-out with Diederichs, who feared that he was taking the journal too far to the left. Kuckhoff, like many other intellectuals in Berlin, had lost patience with the hapless Social Democrats and began to regard the Communists with greater interest. There is no evidence that he ever joined the German Communist Party, but he was well-versed in the concepts of Marx and Lenin. Growing ranks of middle-class intellectuals were gravitating to the left. The question that resounded endlessly, in rehearsals, editorials, and coffeehouses, was whether theater and other art forms could be harnessed to the interests of the workingman. Kuckhoff was eager to leap into the fray, but Diederichs was not.
¹⁷
Kuckhoff was fired.

Despite the bleak economy, Kuckhoff's period of unemployment was brief. Rescue came at the hands of Adolf Grimme, the new Prussian minister of culture. Grimme, a respected educator and committed Social Democrat, had been one of Kuckhoff's closest friends since they were twenty-year-old students together in Halle. Now Grimme pulled some ministerial strings to get Kuckhoff appointed first dramaturge at Leopold Jessner's Staatstheater in Berlin. It was this post that took him to the Theater Congress in Hamburg a few months later.
¹⁸

So this was Adam Kuckhoff, the man who swept the wistful Greta Lorke off her feet. And for all his complications, Greta was loath to let him go. After the thrill of her adventure in America, Greta feared that at the age of twenty-eight, she would settle into the dreary existence of an underemployed old maid. Adam Kuckhoff may have been unprepossessing with his high-flown theories and gnomish appearance, but his thoughts on the great questions of the day were wonderfully similar to her own. Furthermore, an association with him could propel her from
her secretarial backwaters into the whirlpool where Berlin's experimental theater and leftist politics converged.

Berliners were eager to drag their high culture off its pedestal and mix it up with the life of the street. Classical theater was reworked to the rhythms of cabaret satire and barroom ballads. But there were dark reasons behind Berlin's frenetic cultural energy. Many important artists were driven by anger, nihilism, and despair. An entire generation of young Germans had watched the kaiser's hubris drag the country through an insane and devastating conflict. Now they doubted the ability of the Social Democrats to put it back together again. Furthermore, many young artists had served at the front and personally experienced the unprecedented carnage. That trauma was played out ferociously and obsessively in their work.

One of Adam Kuckhoff's rivals in the Berlin theater world was a scruffy young playwright named Bertolt Brecht. Over much of the 1920s the two writers' careers ran on parallel tracks. They worked with many of the same actors and faced similar tribulations. Both men experimented with form, reworking the same source material into drama, fiction, and screenplays. Brecht, eleven years younger than Kuckhoff, came from a comparable background, and served as a teenage medic in the final stage of the war. Afterward, both Brecht and Kuckhoff were surrounded by the maimed and shell-shocked “walking dead” on the streets of Berlin. Their generation's wartime experiences were translated into a new dramatic form called the
Heimkehrerdrama,
depicting the soldier's homecoming to “face the difficulty, or impossibility, of reintegrating into a society which rejects them as symbols of a recent past that it wishes to forget.”
¹⁹

Both Brecht and Kuckhoff wrote poetry and drama. But poetry was self-expression; theater was supposed to change the world. Their work came to life through the efforts of extraordinary producers. Leopold Jessner, Adam Kuckhoff's patron, combined innovative stagecraft with strong political engagement. Producer and director Erwin Piscator was more radical and even more influential. Piscator held that the purpose of theater was to serve as an engine of social change.

Much of Piscator's theatrical work was driven by his rage against the war. In 1928 he produced an unexpected hit in the form of a new antiwar
play.
U-Boot S-4
was the work of an unknown twenty-six-year-old graduate student named Günther Weisenborn, who would work closely with both Kuckhoff and Brecht in the future. The play, drawn from newspaper stories, depicted six American sailors trapped in a submarine off the coast of New Jersey. The production featured Heinrich George, a major star of both commercial theater and the Communist avant-garde, fresh from his appearance in the film sensation
Metropolis.

Weisenborn's
U-Boot S-4
was denounced as pacifist propaganda by the nationalist press, but this was to be expected (and may have contributed to its great success). The author, a slight, engaging young man with beetle brows and a toothy grin, promptly moved to Berlin. Piscator introduced him to Brecht, and the two writers soon became friends and collaborators.
²⁰

In early 1930, Erwin Piscator asked Weisenborn to work on a stage adaptation of Maxim Gorky's 1906 novel
The Mother
‘for his Volksbühne company. Brecht took an interest in the project and asked Weisenborn to collaborate on a further adaptation based on the Volksbühne script. The Brecht-Weisenborn version of the play opened in Berlin in 1932, directed by Brecht and starring his wife, Helene Weigel. She was joined in the cast by a blond, nineteen-year-old actress named Marta Wolter, who had just finished filming a new movie with Brecht.

Die Mutter (The Mother)
began to tour workers' halls and clubs, but the Nazis considered the play an outright provocation. They disrupted performances and the police closed it down in February. (It would be Brecht's last stage production in Germany before the Nazi takeover the following year.)
²¹
Weisenborn maintained his friendship with Brecht for decades, and also remained close to the young actress Marta Wolter, who would play a critical role in his resistance activities in the future.