Red Orchestra (11 page)

M
OST GERMAN ARTISTS WERE NOT NAZIS, AND THE TAKEOVER
obliged them to choose quickly among three unattractive options: run for cover, flee the country, or try to conform. A sudden chill set over the theaters, galleries, and cafes where Adam Kuckhoff and his colleagues had gathered to talk politics and art.

The golden age of Berlin theater was officially over, its presiding geniuses dispersed. Max Reinhardt, the Jewish impresario, fled to his native Austria. Adam Kuckhoff's mentor Leopold Jessner, even more at risk as a Jewish Socialist, escaped to New York. Erwin Piscator was not Jewish, but he was a member of the KPD, and elected to stay on in Moscow where he was working at the time.
¹

Some writers could make themselves less conspicuous. Adam Kuckhoff remained in Berlin, deciding to wait and see. Brecht's friend and Piscator's protégé Günther Weisenborn took a riskier approach. His new play,
Warum Lacht Frau Balsam?
(
Why Is Mrs. Balsam Laughing?
), provoked a right-wing riot in the theater when it premiered on March 16, 1933, and was immediately closed.
²
Weisenborn would not be able to produce a play under his own name for the next twelve years.

Bertolt Brecht had no intention of testing the waters. He was reportedly in the hospital on February 27, 1933, when the Reichstag fire broke out. He went straight to the train station the following day, accompanied by his wife and their eight-year-old son. (Their two-year-old daughter, Barbara, was left behind, to be brought out later.)

Once the Nazis laid the blame for the Reichstag fire on the Communists, they launched an all-out attack to annihilate them as political rivals. On the night of the fire an estimated 1,500 people were arrested in Berlin alone.
³
By April 1933 over 45,000 antifascists had been arrested, the majority of them Communists and Social Democrats.
⁴
Historian Eric Johnson writes: “One can well argue that the destruction of the left, particularly the Communist left, was nearly the sole focus of the Nazi terror in the first year and a half of Hitler's regime.”
⁵

All across Germany, but particularly in the epicenter of Berlin, leftist intellectuals were forced to evaluate their options and their odds. Anyone who had taken the trouble to listen to Hitler or to read
Mein Kampf
knew that anti-Communism and anti-Semitism were fundamental to his outlook. Nonetheless, while Jews were frequent victims of street violence, they were not yet the primary targets of official attacks—unless, of course, they had been Communists, Social Democrats, or public critics of the Nazis before they came to power.

One such figure was Jewish novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, an early patron of Brecht's and a popular member of Berlin's leftist literary circle. Feuchtwanger was on a speaking tour of the United States at the time of the Nazi takeover, and guest of honor at the German embassy in Washington. The following day the German ambassador resigned from the diplomatic corps and warned Feuchtwanger not to return to Germany. The writer moved to Los Angeles and launched a successful second career. But he remained loyal to his vision of Germany, and wrote from exile, “The [Nazis] could not kill or imprison all their adversaries, for their adversaries comprised two-thirds of the population.”
⁶

Mildred and Arvid Harnack had seen the crisis coming, and now hastened to lower their profile. The couple was safe on religious grounds, since both of them came from “Aryan” families and were active members of the American Protestant church in Berlin. Their political status, however, was questionable. The couple shared an interest in Marxist theory, but neither was a member of the Communist Party. Still, they feared the consequences of their trips to the Soviet Union the previous year and Arvid's writings on labor and the Soviet economy. His Soviet study group, ARPLAN, was disbanded in March just after the Reichstag fire; the affiliation cost its president, Professor Friedrich Lenz,
his job. Arvid's publisher canceled the contract for his book on the Soviet economy and destroyed the printing plates. Another of his manuscripts had to be smuggled out of the country.

The Harnacks left Berlin in March to lie low in a little hotel in the countryside. Once they returned to Berlin, Arvid's cousin Klaus Bon -hoeffer came to his rescue with a job as a lawyer at his employer, Lufthansa. This allowed Arvid to earn a living while he studied for another round of examinations, required for government work.
⁷
Years earlier, as a prospective bridegroom, he had written a letter to Mildred's mother about his desire to work for the German Labor Ministry on international labor issues.
⁸
Now he was about to realize his dream, though in a very different fashion than he had anticipated.

The Harnacks were settling into their new apartment near the Tem-pelhof airfield. In the beginning, Mildred was pleased with it, and wrote to her mother that the only problem was “a bit too much music from the restaurant downstairs.”
⁹

Following the Nazis' takeover, the noise took on a different character. Mildred wrote: “The traffic seems to us to have increased tenfold here in the last two years. Heavy trucks are continually going through to the barracks and places of detention not far from here.”
¹⁰
The trucks were conveying political prisoners to an airfield facility called Columbia-Haus, an obsolete military prison. At the beginning of the takeover, Communist, Social Democrat, and trade unionist victims had been hauled into
Wilde Lager
(“wild camps”), improvised in warehouses, pubs, and cellars. But these were soon filled, and Columbia-Haus was reopened to provide additional facilities for torture and interrogation. Although the Harnacks were probably not aware of it, some of the trucks that sped past their apartment carried people they knew, such as Paul Massing, an agricultural economist and member of Arvid's Soviet study group. Massing was beaten and interrogated at Columbia-Haus, then sent to the Oranienburg concentration camp for five months' solitary confinement.
¹¹
The Harnacks, distressed by the daily “traffic,” began to look for new rooms once again.

Mildred, fired from her position at the university, was now teaching literature at a night school for working-class adults. Once again, she quickly won the respect and affection of her students, although they
were sometimes taken aback by her American spontaneity. (Sometimes she livened things up by leading the class in American folk songs.) She filled the rest of her time with occasional lecturing, writing, and hosting literary teas, and began to publish reviews and essays in the Berlin daily press. There was no problem writing about most topics in American literature, as long as they didn't stray into the areas of German controversy. Arvid, for his part, did his best to disappear into the role of a colorless legal bureaucrat.

Mildred and Arvid's friend Greta followed the crisis from a distance. In March, just after the Reichstag fire, she had traveled to London. There she received a letter from her old flame, Adam Kuckhoff. She read it, her “heart pounding,” on the steps of the British Museum. Most of her friends had discouraged her from returning to Germany, she recalled, telling her that “it would be wiser to wait for at least a few months. I would be naïve to think that I could continue my study of sociology (as if I believed it!).”

But Adam's letter carried a different message. Adam had written: “Come—I'm waiting for you.”
¹²
Her friends' warnings were quickly dismissed, and she decided to return.

But Greta received another letter in April, this one from her father: “Yesterday we read in the newspaper about the professors' leaves of absence. Frankfurt-am-Main alone had six listed. Unfortunately Professor Mannheim was among them.”
¹³

This was bad news. Sociologist Karl Mannheim had retained Greta as his secretary and librarian the year before, eager to mine her knowledge of academic developments in the United States. The professor was in the process of laying the intellectual foundation for the sociology of knowledge, but he was also a Hungarian Jew, and was summarily dismissed once the Nazis took power.
¹⁴

Greta's return to Frankfurt was tense. Her academic program was closed down and her typewriter had been confiscated. Her landlady trembled when Greta told her that she was going to see the Nazis to get her typewriter back.

The new officials were expecting her. They had some questions.

“Where is your airplane?” they demanded, waving a flyer bearing Greta's signature that they had found posted in the sociology department.
The paper gave the details for a “flying group” meeting on nearby “Zeppelin Street.” Greta could only laugh, explaining that their study group met “on the fly” in different locations. Fortunately, the Nazis laughed, too. But the incident reminded Greta that in the new Germany, casual misunderstandings could have dangerous consequences.
¹⁵

There was nothing to hold her in Frankfurt, and Adam was in Berlin. Greta returned to the capital, where she would spend the rest of her life. Soon after she arrived she encountered Arvid Harnack. She was certain it was not a coincidence. Arvid was putting together a discussion circle, or
Kreis,
made up of opponents of the regime. Would she join? Greta wasn't sure she had much to offer. She had been away from Berlin a long time, and her contacts among workers and slum dwellers were out of date. But Adam Kuckhoff was also pressing her toward activism. And so, in the spring of 1933, Greta Lorke, a thirty-year-old sociology student just short of her doctorate, left Frankfurt for Berlin and abandoned academia to join her lover. Perhaps it was not clear to her at the time, but in the process, she joined the anti-Nazi movement.

Adam Kuckhoff's career was once more in flux. He worked as a freelance reader at Ullstein, wrote fiction and drama, and published the occasional review.
¹⁶
It was not a brilliant career, but for the moment, his obscurity worked in his favor, allowing him to stay in the country.

By now, many of Kuckhoff's colleagues from journalism and theater had fled, meeting hardship along the way. Most were not wealthy, and there was little demand for German writers in non-German-speaking lands. Prague was an easy destination, but the Czechs made a practice of deporting German Communists back to the Gestapo's enthusiastic welcome. Paris had its own aggressive immigration police. Other Germans headed east to Moscow, where Stalinists viewed them with distrust. Every destination had its problems, whether they were political, economic, or cultural.

But the choices were also fiendishly difficult for antifascists who stayed. Their plight was illustrated by the case of Armin Wegner, Adam Kuckhoff's author who had denounced the Armenian genocide. A few days after the Nazis' April 1933 boycott against the Jews, Wegner wrote an impassioned open letter to Hitler denouncing anti-Semitism. He knew that no newspaper would dare to print it, so he sent it directly to the Nazi headquarters
in Munich with the request that it be forwarded to Hitler. Wegner made his appeal, he wrote, “as a descendant of a Prussian family which can trace its roots back to the days of the crusaders”:

Wegner predicted that his generation would be remembered as one that “thoughtlessly gambled away our country's fortune [and] disgraced its name forever.”

A few days later Wegner was arrested by the Gestapo and thrown into a cell in Columbia-Haus, where he was gagged and beaten until he lost consciousness. He survived seven other prisons and concentration camps before he finally escaped to Italy.
¹⁷

Other authors from Adam Kuckhoff's stable fared just as badly. John Sieg, the dashing young autoworker from Detroit, was rounded up in the Nazis' initial March foray. This was not surprising, since he was a member of the KPD and on staff for the party newspaper
Rote Fahne,
and therefore high on the list of targets. Sieg was hauled into the storm trooper barracks on Hedemannstrasse.
¹⁸

His detention facilities were described that month in the British daily
The Guardian
via a letter from “a private correspondent in Berlin”:

Following his ordeal in the barracks, John Sieg was transferred to the Plötzensee prison in the northern part of the city. This was an improvement, since Plötzensee had long served as a traditional prison for common criminals, and retained its old staff and procedures. Sieg was finally released in June, after the legal proceedings against him stalled.