All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler

by Rebecca Donner

She didn’t dare tell her family, who were scattered across the towns and dairy farms of the Midwest. They remained bewildered that she, at twenty-six, had jumped aboard a steamer ship and crossed the Atlantic, leaving behind everyone she loved.

When it was her turn, she approached the stand. She was emaciated, her lungs ravaged by tuberculosis she’d contracted in prison. How long she stood there remains unknown; surviving documents don’t note the time the prosecutor began questioning her or the time he stopped. What is known is this: the answers she gave him were lies, real whoppers.

“Germany is going through such very dark hours,” she wrote in a recent letter to her mother. “All feel the menace but many hide their heads in the sand.”

There is a large group of people here which, feeling the wrongness of the situation—their own poverty or danger of poverty—leaps to the conclusion that, since things were better before, it would be a good idea to have a more absolute government again.

Next year, students in a Nazi fraternity will burn twenty-five thousand books here, throwing them into a massive bonfire at the center of the square. The fraternity will stage similar bonfires in universities across Germany, circulating a list of authors deemed deviant, impure, “un-German.” The list will include Nobel Prize winners and obscure writers, philosophers and playwrights, novelists and physicists. Books by Jews and Christians and atheists will be condemned alongside books by Communists, socialists, and anarchists. Nearly every book Mildred assigned in the two years she taught at the University of Berlin will be burned.

On July 31, 1932—two days after Mildred is ousted from the University of Berlin—there will be another election. Walking around Berlin, Mildred sees Nazi propaganda wherever the poor and unemployed congregate: parks, plazas, train stations, public urinals. Posters stamped with swastikas promise “Work! Freedom! Bread!”

Every imaginable point of view is represented. They have names like “Radical Middle Party” and “Reich Party of the German Middle Class” and “National Middle Party Against Fascism and Socialism” and “German Farmers Party” and “Christian Social People’s Service Party” and “Justice Movement Against All Parties and Wage Cuts and for Provision for Unemployment” and “Highest Salary for Civil Servants, 5,000 Marks for the Unemployed and Victims of the War, Hitherto Trodden Underfoot.”

Mildred worries that Americans don’t understand how dangerous Hitler is. Germans don’t understand either. Too many are dismissive.

When the doctor was done, Hitler leaped onto a long table positioned smack in the middle of the crowd. His oratorical style was provocative, his language colloquial and at times coarse. He hollered insults at politicians, capitalists, and Jews. He castigated the Reich finance minister for supporting the Treaty of Versailles, a humiliating concession to the victors of the war that would bring Germans to their knees, he warned, unless they fought back. “Our motto is only struggle!” Hitler cried. The beer-hall crowd, a fizzy mix of working-class and middle-class men, erupted—some cheering, some jeering.

From 1921 through 1932, Hitler appeared in the magazine as a harmless imbecile. A cartoon in 1930 lampooned Hitler as a doltish schoolboy copying passages from Das Kapital while the ghost of Karl Marx scolds him (“Adolf, Adolf! Give my theories back to the Socialists!”).

As Hitler’s popularity increased, the Münchener Post sounded an alarm about his murderous agenda. Under the headline THE JEWS IN THE THIRD REICH, a 1931 article reported a “secret plan” for “the solution of the Jewish question.” An unnamed Nazi source had leaked a detailed list of restrictions that would be imposed on Jews if the Nazi Party got its way; there was also a plan “to use the Jews in Germany for slave labor.”

While walking to the U-Bahn, she spots a German woman who looks about the same age as her own mother standing on the street-corner in the bitter wind. She had no coat on, and her clothes were thin and threadbare, and she was trying pitifully to sell papers. Whenever I see such a sight, and there are many such to be seen, I think We must change this situation as soon as possible.

While they were apart, they wrote long letters. They described the books they were reading, their plans for the future. They would both become professors and teach in German universities, and perhaps American universities too. Mildred ended her letters with a drawing of a sun. Arvid ended his letters with the same sun.

Germany is in crisis. Something must be done. By studying what appears to be a novel economic solution to the Soviet Union’s woes, Arvid hopes to discover a remedy for the crisis in his own country. Arvid is secretary of ARPLAN. He receives no pay for this work, but his compassion for the poor in Germany and his desire to devise a new economic model to address this problem drive him to his desk day and night.

Though today isn’t significant in the grand stretch of history, to Mildred it’s an important milestone.

“Life seemed more free, more modern, more exciting than in any place I had ever seen.… The old oppressive Prussian spirit seemed to be dead and buried,” wrote the American journalist William Shirer, remembering the days when he was a young foreign correspondent in Berlin.

“In the streets of Berlin,” a young German writer noted, “one is often struck by the momentary insight that someday all this will suddenly burst apart.”

“You never heard her coming,” one of them would reminisce years later. “Suddenly, there she was in the middle of the room. Her walk like all her motions was light and deliberate.”

Again and again, Mildred returns to her core themes: the plight of the poor, the urgent need for political change.

On the last day of November, she begins class by asking a question. Usually she speaks to her class in English, but today she wants to make sure her students understand perfectly. “Hitler soll Kanzler werden?” Should Hitler be chancellor? The question is provocative. One of her students, a thirty-one-year-old man named Samson Knoll, is so struck by her question and the discussion it prompts that he notes it in his diary that night.

Mildred introduces Messersmith, who sits at the head of the table. In six months, he will mince no words in describing Hitler to a colleague at the White House: With few exceptions, the men who are running the government are of a mentality that you and I cannot understand. Some of them are psychopathic cases and would ordinarily be receiving treatment somewhere.

She stands at the lectern. She clears her throat, takes a breath, and sings “Clementine”: In a cavern, in a canyon, Excavating for a mine Dwelt a miner forty-niner, And his daughter Clementine and “John Brown”: John Brown died that the slaves might be free, John Brown died that the slaves might be free, John Brown died that the slaves might be free, His soul goes marching on.

The first song, she tells her students, is about the death of an American laborer during the 1849 California gold rush—a “miner forty-niner”—and his daughter. The second song is also about the death of a working-class American, an abolitionist.

Mildred sings “Clementine” and “John Brown” many times during the winter of 1932. Each time, she stands at the lectern and looks out at a roomful of Germans weary from work or demoralized by unemployment. She is entirely unselfconscious, singing so “freely” and “naturally,” a student would recall years later, that their embarrassment gives way to relief and, eventually, “to tender respect.”

Mildred knew her father had been nothing like Otto Harnack. Still, the horse trader and the professor had something in common. Both had felt a deep sadness run through them like a cold fluid. The blues was how William Fish would have put it.

And Otto? He was Mutterseelenallein. The literal translation is “mother-soul-alone.” A man suffering from this type of sadness is so lonely he feels as if his mother’s soul has been ripped out of his own. When Mildred speaks the German word, it is so much richer and more wretched than any English word for “sad.”

On January 29, 1933, Mildred sits down at Grossvater Reichau’s great slab of a desk to write a letter to her mother. There’s so much to work for in the world nowadays. Never have there been more glorious prospects…

The next evening, Mildred strides into the classroom at the BAG clutching her leather satchel. Tonight the class will not be singing songs or discussing literature, she tells them. Instead, they will discuss a historic event. It is January 30, 1933. Hitler has just been appointed chancellor of Germany.

For years, Hitler has been dismissed as an amateur, a crackpot, a buffoon, a semiliterate fool with a Charlie Chaplin mustache. He’s a high-school dropout who was twice rejected from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna; who in his twenties suffered a series of humiliations, living as a struggling artist and sleeping in a homeless shelter; who in his thirties became the leader of the Nazi Party after discovering he could mesmerize first a room, then a hall, then a stadium with his populist rhetoric; and who, at forty-three, has just been appointed by President Hindenburg to serve as chancellor of Germany.

It can happen again. We must prevent it.

“An ominous night,” the German journalist Bella Fromm writes in her diary. “A night of deadly menace. A nightmare.” “Germany has awakened!” Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels writes in his diary. “The German revolution has begun.”

He is Arvid’s cousin Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a rebellious twenty-six-year-old Lutheran pastor in Berlin. Today, he speaks into the microphone with the grave authority of a man twice his age. Historians will come to recognize his speech as one of the first public acts of defiance against Hitler. Midway through the speech, his voice gathers force. It is critical, Dietrich Bonhoeffer says, to distinguish between a “leader” and a “misleader”— Abruptly, his microphone is cut off. Across Germany, all people hear from their radios is a thick band of static.

Hugenberg is backed by aristocrats and wealthy businessmen who cringe at the Nazi Party’s populist rhetoric. Hugenberg thinks he can control Hitler. So do Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen and President Hindenburg.

But DNVP leader Hugenberg smells a rat. He has already tried several times to form a coalition with Hitler, first in 1929 and again in 1931—fragile alliances that fractured under the pressure of relentless power struggles. He listens as Hitler nimbly steers them toward another idea that also seems, to many ministers in the room, reasonable: they could call off tomorrow’s meeting of the Reichstag and hold a new election. Hugenberg objects. Hitler presses his case.

The election will surely give their right-wing coalition a parliamentary majority, enabling them to pass a law that will effectively crush their left-wing opponents.

If Hugenberg lets Hitler have his way in the cabinet meeting, just this once, he can handily manipulate the lowborn Nazi leader and position himself for his own power grab. Hugenberg withdraws his objection. Later, he will remark, “I’ve just committed the greatest stupidity of my life.”

“The cabinet is really Alfred Hugenberg’s,” remarks a prominent Social Democrat in the Reichstag. A member of the DNVP writes in his diary, “If Hitler sits in the saddle, Hugenberg gets the whip.”

The French newspaper Le Temps points out that President Hindenburg “has never concealed his feelings about Hitler, which amount to veritable aversion,” and predicts that Hitler “will be quickly exhausted.” The New York Times reminds readers that Hitler was “twice rejected last year” for the position he now occupies. “The composition of the cabinet leaves Herr Hitler no scope for gratification of any dictatorial ambition.”

The New York Times reminds readers that Hitler was “twice rejected last year” for the position he now occupies. “The composition of the cabinet leaves Herr Hitler no scope for gratification of any dictatorial ambition.”

Hitler aims to destroy the parliamentary democracy, abolish the Reichstag, and grant himself dictatorial powers, but he doesn’t tell the ministers this. He says that their right-wing coalition will strengthen Germany and restore their great country to its former glory.

Hitler identifies Communists as the cause of chaos and violence in the streets and declares that Germany will remain in shambles if left-wing renegades take control of the government.

He praises President Hindenburg’s valor as a field marshal in the Great War of 1914–1918 and asks the men and women of Germany to grant them four years to rebuild the country. Within four years, the German peasant must be saved from impoverishment. Within four years unemployment must be finally overcome.… Now German people, give us four years, and then pass judgment on us!

Meanwhile, Chancellor Hitler will invalidate the Weimar Constitution, destroy Germany’s parliamentary democracy, and engineer its complete and total transformation into a dictatorship. All this, in just six months.

In 1933 the Germans who are opposed to the principles that constitute the black, beating heart of the Third Reich are dispersed among the membership rolls of trade unions and rivalrous left-wing political parties.

They meet in cafés. They stroll through the Tiergarten. They come to the apartment and distribute themselves on the sofa and the chairs and, when there are no seats left, across the wood-planked floor. Their discussions last hours, carrying them deep into the night. What is happening? they ask. What can we do?

A week later, Greta shows up at the BAG. Grudgingly, she looks. What she sees are not snobs or Nazis but people in ragged clothes with thin limbs, wan faces. “Ashamedly, I told Mildred she was right, completely correct,” Greta wrote in her memoir.

She’s following Mildred’s lead, taking a circuitous path as she talks to the students, asking them innocuous questions that give way to more pointed ones, guiding the conversation nimbly toward the threat of fascism. Recruitment disguised as a history lesson.

Greta came to learn about Mildred gradually after spotting her from afar. At first she knew her only by sight: a serious student getting a master’s degree who dressed modestly, favoring long skirts and long sleeves, and kept her hair off her face.

She was equally put off by Mildred’s literary bent, which struck Greta as irritatingly sentimental. Sometimes, out of the blue, Mildred quoted Homer or Shakespeare, in a voice so soft it seemed as if she were speaking to herself. No matter. Loud or soft, poetry-reciting meant one thing. “To me,” Greta wrote, “it was deadly.”

Mildred, so graceful on ice skates, was, to Greta’s mind, a walking disaster,

awkward in all practical things of life. She couldn’t iron a blouse without it ending up more wrinkled than before, or it had singe marks. She invited guests to dinner in order to try out a new, wonderful recipe, but forgot the most important seasonings. The rice pot boiled over, the cake didn’t rise, the vegetables weren’t cooked.