Resistance Women Page 2

  Mildred wondered how much of this Arvid had revealed to his family. Although they had been unfailingly warm and gracious to her in their letters, Greta had warned that the Harnacks and their extended clan of Bonhoeffers and Dohnányis might receive her with cold disdain.

  It was early evening by the time their borrowed Mercedes crossed the Harz Mountains and descended into the hills of eastern Thuringia. When they reached Jena, Arvid pointed out the university, the city square, and other significant landmarks they passed on the way to his childhood home. Eventually he pulled up to a tall white half-timbered residence with black shutters, balconies on the first and second floors connecting the two perpendicular wings. Arvid’s mother had moved with her children into this house when Arvid was fourteen, after his father’s suicide. Mildred took a deep, steadying breath as Arvid parked the car and turned off the ignition. “They’re going to love you,” he said, taking her hand and raising it to his lips. She managed a smile.

  As he escorted her up the cobblestone path to the front door, her heart thumped as several men and women and two eager young boys hurried outside to welcome them. Her nervousness faded as they embraced her, smiling, greeting her warmly in German and English. As Arvid proudly made introductions, Mildred felt a curious sense of recognition when she learned that the handsome young man with Arvid’s warm smile was his seventeen-year-old brother Falk. The two lovely women with familiar blue eyes and bobbed blond hair were his sisters, Inge and Angela, and the two cheerful boys were Inge’s sons, Wulf and Claus. Mildred also met several cousins, including one Arvid had often mentioned when reminiscing about home—Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran minister, a round-cheeked, bespectacled fellow with a strong chin.

  Next Arvid escorted Mildred inside to meet his mother. “My dear child,” Mutti Clara said warmly in flawless English, clasping Mildred’s hands and kissing her on both cheeks. She had strong features and a keen, intelligent gaze, and she wore her graying light brown hair in a soft chignon. “You are even more beautiful than Arvid described. Welcome to Germany. Welcome home.”

  She summoned the family to gather around the supper table, where Dietrich led them in prayer. The meal of bratwurst in a vinegar and caper sauce, potato dumplings, and cabbage rolls, with poppyseed cake for dessert, was delicious and satisfying after a long day of travel. Everything was seasoned with warm smiles and laughter as the family teased and praised one another, joking in Greek and Latin, quoting Goethe, quizzing Falk and the younger boys on their schoolwork. Mildred marveled at how delightful it was, and how very different from the family dinners of her childhood, marked by tension between her parents, worries about money, and her father’s frequent absences.

  At the end of a perfect evening, Arvid took her home—at long last, a home they would share, a suite of rented rooms in a house on the Landgrafenstieg, small but cleverly arranged to make the most of the limited space. The front windows offered wonderful views of the mountains, and plenty of room remained on the bookshelves for the new volumes they hoped to acquire in the years to come. After a few days in Jena, Mildred and Arvid embarked on a second honeymoon to the Black Forest, where the loneliness of their long separation soon faded to a distant memory.

  In autumn, Mildred began her doctoral studies at the University of Jena. Once again her life was satisfyingly full, her days devoted to study, her nights to her beloved Arvid. She missed her family in America, but the Harnacks made her feel so welcome that she could not complain of homesickness.

  Then, on a beautifully clear, vividly hued autumn day at the end of October, Arvid found her in the garden studying in the afternoon sunshine. “I’m sorry, Liebling,” he said grimly, handing her a newspaper. “Bad news from America.”

  As she scanned the headlines, her heart plummeted. The stock market had crashed, losing more than three billion dollars over the span of two days.

  She steeled herself. “Arvid?” With his academic training and expertise, he would know as well as anyone on Wall Street what this meant for her country.

  He held her gaze and shook his head. She knew then that much worse was yet to come.

  Chapter Two

  October 1929–July 1930

  Greta

  In her last letter from Wisconsin, Greta had told her family not to meet her ship in Hamburg, but when she disembarked and took her first few unsteady paces along the pier, she felt a pang of profound loneliness and wished they had ignored her instructions. All around her, couples embraced and families greeted long-absent loved ones, while she walked alone, a suitcase in each hand.

  From the station office, she telegraphed her parents to let them know when to expect her and hurried to catch the train to Frankfurt an der Oder. As the train carried her nearly four hundred kilometers south and east, she watched the scenery speeding past the window of her second-class carriage, curiously moved, marveling how her homeland had changed so little during the two years she had been studying abroad though she had changed so much.

  Hours later, the train jerked to a halt at a station near the Polish border. “Frankfurt an der Oder,” the conductor announced, sending a thrill of expectation up her spine. She gathered her belongings and descended to the platform, where she was immediately swept up in a strong embrace. Startled, she dropped her suitcases. “Hans,” she exclaimed. She kissed her brother on the cheek, breathless. How well he looked, tall and sturdy, his blue eyes bright and cheerful, his hair darker and curlier than she remembered.

  “Welcome home, little sister,” he said, seizing the handles of her suitcases and heading to the exit from the platform. “You’ve gotten thin. Couldn’t you find any good German food in Wisconsin? Mutti will want to fatten you up.”

  Greta’s stomach rumbled in anticipation. “She’s welcome to try.”

  “She’s planning a dinner party for tomorrow night,” Hans said as he led her through the crowd to the street. “Just the family and a few neighbors, and all your favorite dishes.”

  “I hope she won’t go to too much expense.”

  “You know Mutti. She’ll haggle with the butcher and trade mending work for bread with the baker and Papa will boast about her shrewdness until she blushes.”

  Greta laughed and agreed, tears of happiness pricking her eyes. She had missed joking with her brother about the endearing quirks of the people they loved, which included their mother’s frugality. Mutti had a gift for making something nourishing and delicious from meager ingredients, a skill her family extolled as a moral virtue while tactfully overlooking that it was born of necessity.

  Throughout the wretched, tumultuous years of the Great War, Greta’s parents had kept poverty at bay through relentless effort and sheer force of will. Greta’s father was a metalworker in a musical instrument factory, and her most vivid childhood memories involved watching him roll out gleaming sheets of brass, placing patterns upon them, and meticulously cutting out intricate pieces from which he shaped cornets, flügelhorns, and tubas. Her mother was a seamstress who took in piecework, mostly clothing and blankets for an upscale department store in Berlin.

  As soon as Greta had been old enough, she had helped earn her keep by polishing shoes, but her parents had emphasized that education came before everything but the church. They had scrimped and sacrificed to afford their children’s tuition at the Oberschule, and when Greta was older they had nearly burst with pride when she had been accepted into the University of Berlin. Determined to pay her own way, she had taken a work-study job looking after two dozen boys at an orphanage in Neukölln, a rough industrial neighborhood favored by Communists and laborers and the indigent. Her time at the orphanage had taught her that although her own family had struggled, others had suffered far greater hardships. She learned gratitude for what she had and compassion for the vast multitude of people who had far less. She acquired indignation for the suffering of the innocent and resolve to make their lot better, however she could, whenever she could.

  Through it all, her parents had encouraged her and had taken grea
t pride in her achievements. What would they think now that she had returned from her grand and glorious adventure in America with wonderful memories but no doctorate to show for all her hard work and all their sacrifice?

  Greta’s apprehensions surged at the sight of her childhood home, three narrow stories of stone and plaster, modest but meticulously kept, reassuringly solid and enduring after Madison, where even the oldest buildings seemed startlingly new. But when she crossed the familiar threshold, her parents met her with warm embraces and tears of joy. She choked back sobs as she hugged them as hard as she dared, mindful of their new wrinkles, more silver in their hair, a slight stoop to her father’s back, and yet the same love and pride shining in their eyes.

  At the dinner party the following evening, friends and family cheerfully proclaimed their certainty that she had represented Frankfurt an der Oder with honor and distinction. They were all so kind and proud that Greta briefly feared she had forgotten to tell them that she had not earned her degree.

  The next morning, as she helped her mother tidy the kitchen after breakfast, she stoked her courage, took a deep breath, and said, “Mutti, I’m sorry I failed you and Papa.”

  Her mother’s soft, round face creased in puzzlement. “What nonsense is this?”

  “To travel so far and to be gone so long, when I could have been here helping the family, only to return empty-handed—”

  “My dear child.” Her mother guided her into a seat at the kitchen table and sat down beside her. “You haven’t achieved your goal yet. That doesn’t mean you never will.”

  “But I have no doctorate, no work—”

  “So you’ll earn one and find the other.” Her mother regarded her with loving sympathy. “I know from your last letter that you’re exhausted and discouraged. Take some time off before you go back to school.”

  “Mutti—” Greta chose her words carefully. “I don’t think my problems will be solved by a holiday.”

  “Time off will do you good nonetheless. You couldn’t resume your studies in the middle of the term anyway.”

  Her mother’s expression was so full of pride and confidence that Greta did not have the heart to confess her doubts. “I’ll have to find something to do in the meantime,” she said instead. “I thought I might look for a job in Berlin. I hate to leave you so soon after coming home—”

  “Don’t worry about us. Of course you must go, unless you want to stay here and help me sew piecework.”

  Greta suspected she would have more success in Berlin. After a few restful days with her family, she took the morning train to the capital, and by nightfall she had rented a furnished room in a boardinghouse, smaller and plainer than what she could have had for the same price in Madison, but clean and fairly quiet. The threadbare rug and faded curtains gave the room an air of weary futility, one she could all too well imagine steadily leaching into its occupant. She hoped it would not be long until she could afford a better place.

  She had barely settled in when the devastating stock market crash in America rocked Europe. Thanks to her economics training, she understood the alarming implications for Germany even before the failing American banks desperately called in their foreign loans. The fragile German economy, already suffering from staggering inflation and unemployment, could not withstand the blow. Without foreign investment, factories closed, construction projects halted, and thousand of workers lost their jobs.

  As the financial disaster unfolded, Greta struggled to secure an elusive university scholarship, to convince a professor to take her on, to find a job as a lecturer or a researcher or even a lowly assistant. There were no vacancies anywhere, of any kind. Professors clung to their tenure, postponing retirement out of fear that their pensions would disappear overnight. Students stayed enrolled, hoping that one more advanced degree would give them an edge over their peers when they were finally forced to graduate and join the wretched millions of unemployed.

  Greta willingly accepted the only work she could find—tutoring, freelance editing, some copywriting. It reminded her of her mother’s piecework, but with pen and ink and words instead of needle and thread. With almost nothing to spend on entertainment, she rediscovered her lifelong love of literature and drama, disappearing into the pages of a novel or a play, scraping together enough marks for cheap seats at the Staatstheater or the Deutsches Theater. On long winter evenings, she would huddle under blankets in her room’s lone armchair and lose herself in dramas and comedies, the greatest masterpieces ever written in German, French, and English.

  As winter turned to spring, she toyed with the idea of finding a new career in theater. Perhaps she could translate English and French works for the German stage. She could become a playwright or dramaturge.

  “You should attend the Internationaler Theaterkongresse,” urged her friend Ursula, an actress. “Nine glorious June days in Hamburg devoted to all things theater—performances, seminars, lectures.”

  “It sounds wonderful,” said Greta. “Wonderful, and very expensive.”

  “Yes, but theater companies and professionals from around the world attend. What better occasion to make contacts that might lead to a job?”

  Greta could not dispute that, so she quickly pulled together the necessary funds, skipping meals and forgoing sleep to finish two lengthy editing projects ahead of schedule. She took on three new English language students and requested a month’s payment in advance. Just in time she saved enough to cover her registration fees, train fare, and lodgings, but as she packed her suitcase, she felt a pang of worry. She could be squandering her money on nine days of revelry that would ultimately leave her significantly poorer but no closer to finding a job.

  On her first full day in Hamburg, she fell in with a jovial group of French authors and performers staying at her hotel. Her French was fluent enough to win their approval, their conversation clever enough to win hers. When they invited her to consider herself one of the company, she gladly did.

  On the third day, Greta and her new friends attended a special lecture by Leopold Jessner, renowned producer and director of German Expressionist theater, honorary president of the Theaterkongresse, head of the Preussisches Staatstheater at Gendarmenmarkt, and one of the most important figures in Berlin theater. In the lecture hall, a delegation of artists from the Staatstheater accompanied Jessner onto the stage. When Jessner introduced Dr. Adam Kuckhoff, his head dramaturge, a square, solid man in his early forties with a full mouth and a brooding look strode to the podium.

  Greta settled back in her seat, resigned to a dry lecture about the logistics of theater administration, but instead Kuckhoff delivered a fiery, passionate speech about the nature of theater and film in the modern era. Riveted, Greta absorbed every word in wonder, never taking her eyes from his face. Suddenly she realized that he was the author of a powerful essay she had read earlier that winter, “Arbeiter und Film,” a denunciation of the “sentimental lies of the typical society film” and the “outmoded spirit and patriotic hurrah of nationalist cinema.” She listened, enthralled, as he developed those concepts into a bold, astonishing vision for the future of German theater.

  Her fervent attention did not escape Kuckhoff’s notice. From time to time as his gaze swept over the crowd, it rested upon hers, curious and searching.

  After the program, Greta and her companions were debating which session to attend next when Kuckhoff approached her. “You seemed very intent upon my remarks,” he said in French. “Was that a sign of agreement or dissent?”

  She regarded him for a moment, bewildered—but of course he assumed she was French, given her companions. She decided to play along. “Agreement, for whatever that’s worth. I’m rather new to the theater,” she said in French, extending her hand. “Greta Lorke, a mere aspiring playwright, or dramaturge, or whatever role might find me.”

  His gaze held hers as he shook her hand. “I doubt the word ‘mere’ ever suits you, mademoiselle.” When he invited her to discuss his lecture in more detail on a boat
tour of the Hamburg harbor, she hesitated only a moment before agreeing.

  The Theaterkongresse was forgotten as the hours passed swiftly and wonderfully in sightseeing and engrossing conversation. The excursion led to a romantic dinner at one of the city’s finest hotels, at a table overlooking the Elbe. After the most delicious meal Greta had ever tasted and a magnificent bottle of wine, their talk drifted pleasurably into lingering glances and subtle touches, his hand resting upon hers on the table, her leg pressed against his beneath it.

  When, with almost formal politeness, he invited her upstairs to his room, she nodded and gave him her hand.

  In the morning she woke in Adam’s arms and knew from the sunlight streaming through the windows that the morning conference sessions were already well under way. She had not intended to stay the night, or to make love with him, but Adam’s touch and his words had evoked desires she had not known she possessed. At the last moment, when prudence had shouted warnings that she must tear herself from his arms or risk losing everything—her future, her reputation—all for a moment of passion, Adam had produced a small packet that she needed a moment to recognize as a condom. Of course she was not his first, as he was hers; of course a worldly man would have come prepared. And she had been profoundly glad for it.

  When Adam stirred, she snuggled closer and rested her head on his shoulder. Drowsily he kissed her forehead, inhaled deeply, and sighed. “Ah, ma chère mam’selle,” he lamented, smiling. “You are too young and lovely for an old man like me.”

  “How old are you?”

  “I confess that I’m forty-three.”

  “How ancient,” she teased, but then she hesitated. “I have a confession of my own. I’m not French. I was born in Frankfurt an der Oder and I live in Berlin.”