Red Orchestra (8 page)

As the 1920s drew to a close, Germany was poised on the brink of a new economic crisis. It would pit desperate urban workers, with their smashed hopes of industrial prosperity, against country people who feared abandonment to poverty and isolation. Many longed for the authoritarian days of the kaiser; others listened to the fairy tale of the Soviet workers' paradise. Democratic Socialism increasingly looked like a failed ten-year experiment.

Most Berliners forgot to worry about the Nazis, who were still regarded as a joke. But they were also unaware of the menace of Stalin, who played his hand behind the scenes. Stalin was secretly antagonistic toward non-Russian Communist parties, and had murderous designs on ethnic Germans and other minorities under his rule. German Communists were doubly vulnerable.

But such critical insights were unavailable to political dilettantes like Adam Kuckhoff and party foot soldiers like John Sieg.

G
RETA SAW NO REASON TO LINGER IN GERMANY. THANKS TO THE
crash, jobs were scarce, and her new love interest, Adam Kuckhoff, was a married man. Germany was changing, and clearly not for the better. Public discourse had become impossibly shrill, the press was sharply polarized, and passersby had to dodge brawls in the street.

Greta was rescued by an invitation from a lawyer friend who wanted her to accompany his family to Switzerland. He asked only that she put his large private library in order and teach his children some English. Zurich was an island of luxury and calm. Greta was paid generously on top of her free room and board, and the family included her in their activities as an equal.

It was a taste of the good life, she recalled. “I can't deny that I liked it too… There were Perigord truffles, and shellfish flown in from Berlin.”
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In the springtime, the view from her room was transformed into a carpet of violets. Greta was able to send money home to her parents, assuaging her guilt for abandoning them to their working-class poverty. “Occasionally I would dream about my father. I would see him lifting his newspapers into the luggage compartment of the train twice a day, without a word of complaint.”
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Greta enjoyed a romance on the rebound with a Swiss artist named Leo Leuppi. One of his untitled portraits from this period shows a young woman with a long face like Greta's, posed against a field of blue and graced by a single rose.
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It took her mind off her problems. “Adam Kuckhoff's face slowly blurred,” Greta wrote later. “His letters came seldom, and I wrote to him even less.”
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Once she finished the job in Switzerland, Greta reluctantly accepted a position in Frankfurt, this time as a girl Friday for a sociology professor. Karl Mannheim was a brilliant theorist, but the job was less lucrative and less satisfying than the one in Zurich. She worked long hours putting yet another massive library in order, yearning for time to finish her doctorate. After hours she would retreat to a neighborhood coffee shop, where students passionately debated the dismal state of the nation, agreeing only that the ruling Social Democratic government was a disaster. Here, too, Greta ran into Communist students, who pressed her to join the party. But she wasn't comfortable with the idea.
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She didn't understand their debates and she didn't share their vocabulary. She maintained her own different perspective and kept her distance.

But Greta's friends Arvid and Mildred Harnack found it increasingly difficult to skirt ideological debates. Arvid's initial shock at the Nazis' momentum spurred him to join a Social Democratic campus organization in Giessen. But as the German economy went into a tailspin, the Social Democrats became more vulnerable to criticism from the left as well as the right.
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Arvid Harnack joined the leftward drift. He gradually came to think of himself philosophically as a Communist (though no evidence has been found that he ever joined the Communist Party). The KPD had many unattractive attributes for a man like Arvid. Its public street brawls were matched by internal divisions, and the party underwent frequent splintering and purging.

Arvid Harnack, deeply immersed in his research, had no taste for infighting. He was set on advancing his career. He had already produced a thesis on the U.S. labor movement, and planned to publish an analysis of Soviet economic planning. Mildred was far more interested in American Transcendentalists than Soviet Bolsheviks. But once she settled in Germany, she found that politics were unavoidable.

Mildred, a newlywed abroad for the first time, was eager, observant, and more than a little homesick. Her frequent letters home offered a detailed and intimate account of her new country's rapid decline.

In October 1929, Mildred described their modest life in the university
town of Giessen, where Arvid was completing his studies. Dinner, she noted, consisted of cabbage, potato, and sausage soup, costing fifteen cents. One could eat for thirty-five cents a day “if you eat simply as we do … I think it is the best policy not to call attention to oneself in any blatant way, for among the poor Germans it is not kind to look rich.”
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Three days after Christmas she asks for her mother's help in cashing a coupon on a bond. Like others all over the country, she says, “We're in money difficulties.”
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A few months later Mildred wrote that economic conditions had worsened:

Arvid proudly introduced his bride to his family, including his uncle Adolf von Harnack, an eminent theologian who had led campaigns against anti-Semitism in the Lutheran Church. The meeting took place in Berlin in early 1930, only a few months before his death, and the elderly sage made a deep impression. A few months later the young couple visited Adolf's son Ernst von Harnack, a prominent Social Democratic official. Mildred wrote home about his impressive residence. The same letter, with an eerie foreshadowing, described her experience with a decapitated specter.

Germany was growing more unstable by the day, and even a political novice like Mildred could see a new crisis in the works. She assigned some of the blame to a vicious new faction:

Mildred shared her husband's view of the conflict, and hoped that Germany could maintain peace through the cooperation of the Social Democrats and the Communists. She retained the Harnack family's Social Democratic perspective, and feared the KPD's threat to public order:

Sophisticated Berliners were used to regarding the Nazis' boorish brownshirts as a bad joke.
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Now, suddenly, they had good reason to worry. In September 1930, from one election to the next, the Nazis went from last place (in a field of nine), to second place after the Social Democrats. They multiplied their parliamentary seats nine times over, benefiting from Stalin's secret decision to fracture the left.

Berlin's intellectuals were shocked. The city's most prestigious liberal daily,
Berliner Tageblatt,
railed against the “monstrous fact … [that] six million and four hundred thousand voters in this highly civilized country had given their vote to the commonest, hollowest, and crudest charlatanism.”
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The Nazi victory seemed to come out of nowhere, but only because the
Tageblatt
editorialists and other urban intellectuals had been inattentive, more absorbed in avant-garde and ideological hairsplitting than in the slums and farms of their own backyard.

The Nazis' strategy was simple: to exploit the fissures of Weimar political culture. Germany was rife with opportunity. The countryside, the mass media, and the streets were the three main targets.

Traditional parties were vulnerable on all three fronts. The Social Democratic government had an unfortunate history of cronyism, favoring its own affiliated trade unions and civic organizations. The leftist parties cultivated urban areas at the expense of rural constituencies. The Nazis exploited the vacuum by attacking civil society from the grass roots. Mildred Harnack had watched them move in on her college town. Between 1924 and 1928 the Nazis infiltrated local singing societies, sports clubs, and even church groups. Some towns resisted the onslaught. Others rancorously divided into two biking clubs, two drama societies, and, in one Hessian community, two competing volunteer fire companies.
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In one small town, the forty-six local members of the Nazi Party belonged to no fewer than seventy-three religious and civic organizations.
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The party grew rapidly, with a unique organizational structure. As of 1928 there were 100,000 Nazi Party members organized into tightly knit
cadres throughout the country. Over the next two years, the party quadrupled its membership, with over 3,400 branches, and 2,000 trained speakers for its national recruitment efforts. It continued to expand quickly over 1931 and 1932.
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The Nazis' success was fueled by sheer panic. Between 1928 and 1932 suicide rates rose fourteen percent among German men, and nineteen percent among women.
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The Nazis offered a reassuring message: if Germany was failing, it was because the country had been weakened by internal divisions and victimized by foreign enemies. That condition could be reversed if Germans could unite under a banner of strength and self-discipline.

The Nazis were ready to take the lead, participating in the electoral process only in order to destroy it. This philosophy was spelled out in April 1928, in an essay by Joseph Goebbels, a candidate for the Reichstag.

The Nazis needed someone who could market their message to the underdogs of German society, and Joseph Goebbels was their man. Under slightly different circumstances, he might have been another of Adam Kuckhoff's protégés. The two men had much in common.

Like Kuckhoff, Goebbels was born a Catholic Rhinelander, a small, frail man left crippled by a childhood infection. He studied at a succession of German universities in search of a vocation, and finally earned his doctorate in German literature and drama in 1922 from Heidelberg. Goebbels, too, aspired to be a writer, and had high hopes for his autobiographical novel, written just after he received his degree. His melodramatic
work was called
Michael: ein Deutsches Schicksal in Tagebuchblät-tern
(“Michael: A German Destiny in Journal Pages”). It told the story of a young student who is inspired by German folk ideals but driven to suicide by his despair over Germany's decline.
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