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September 2 - September 24, 2022
Inflation skyrocketed. The economy was so volatile that prices would often soar in a single afternoon; a cup of coffee that cost 5,000 marks at 1:00 p.m. would cost 14,000 marks a few hours later. As the value of German currency plummeted, purchasing anything becam...
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When you go shopping, you have to carry your banknotes in suitcases. In order to mail a letter inside Germany, I had to pay several million marks for a stamp.
Bella Fromm
People with pensions or bank accounts lost nearly all their money. Rampant theft, homelessness, and starvation followed. Suicides escalated, reaching record levels.
By the winter of 1923, forty-two billion marks was worth one American cent. The collapse was complete.
The German artist Käthe Kollwitz roamed the garbage-strewn streets of Berlin, pasting posters on walls and billboards. Her posters were cries of anguish. Above an openmouthed figure, scrawled in large black letters, were the words Nie Wieder Krieg!—“Never Again War!” It was a sentiment shared by many.
Kollwitz’s art has been removed from Germany’s galleries. She is among the artists whose work is considered offensive, subversive, degenerate.
The middle class, the working class, and wealthy, property-owning aristocrats all experienced devastation; no one was exempt. Or nearly no one. The great German industrialists not only survived hyperinflation, they profited from it. During the 1920s, the tycoons at the helms of the massive chemical conglomerate I. G. Farben and the weapons manufacturer Friedrich Krupp knew hyperinflation made manufacturing German goods cheap and easy to export to other countries. While most of the population in Germany suffered grievously, these tycoons amassed even larger fortunes. They were also among the
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Unspeakable evil
He writes as fast as he can, as if possessed by a demon. Always in a fevered rush to put his thoughts down, he fills page after page, scribbling for days and weeks at a time, until his hand hurts and his eyes sting, and the stack of pages beside him inches upward, growing mountainous.
“I wrote and wrote and wrote,” Wolfe tells Mildred. “Every time I’d get a hundred thousand pages piled up, I’d take them to my friend Max Perkins of Scribner. And every time he’d say, ‘That’s good, that’s the real stuff. But it’s only the knee joint.’ Or, ‘It’s only an arm.’” In Wolfe’s mind, his book was a statue and he couldn’t arrange all the pieces properly. That’s what he needed Perkins for, he tells Mildred, to put it all together.
Look Homeward, Angel is as huge and overblown as Thomas Wolfe himself, and German readers can’t get enough of him.
As his German editor, Heinrich Ledig-Rowohlt, puts it, Wolfe is “the embodiment of the free world that we in Hitler’s prison were longing for.”
Wolfe pushes away from the table, rises to his full height, and lumbers amiably out. The interview has lasted an hour or so. Mildred has learned a great deal about him and he’s learned nearly nothing about her, which is how she wants it.
Mildred invites Wolfe to join her for a walk in the Tiergarten. If they were alone, it might be possible to have a more lengthy, serious talk. He’s having tremendous fun in Germany and doesn’t seem to understand how grave the situation is. She wants to tell him to open his eyes. But his mind is fixated on parties parties parties, girls girls girls.
To be an American in Berlin is to turn a blind eye to atrocity. Wolfe isn’t the only one. Most American expats Mildred meets in Berlin are largely untouched by what’s going on around them.
The American journalist William Shirer watches it all from the section of seats allotted to the press, noting the “six hundred or so sausage-necked, shaved-headed, brown-clad yes-men, who rise and shout almost every time Hitler pauses for breath.”
Hitler has hollered about peace before, but not like this. His speech stands apart for its specificity and length. His thirteen-point proposal convinces not only Germans that he’s telling the truth but also people in other countries, including those he will invade.
Dazzled, Martha didn’t realize that the guide who led her on this tour—“a pretty rosy-faced girl”—had been instructed to present a carefully crafted vision of Russia, a Potemkin village at every stop.
In Leningrad, Martha had lunch with an American diplomat and heard something shocking. He claimed that between 1932 and 1933, Stalin had engineered the murder of millions of Ukrainians.
There was nothing about a Ukrainian genocide in the newspapers. Ambassador Bullitt, she decided, was “a man to be suspicious of and one not to be trusted.”
All Russians—men and women, children and babies, even the elderly—seemed irrepressibly happy. She couldn’t help but observe that “there seemed to be a sort of ebullient vitality and love of life everywhere.” Stalin wasn’t murderous, Martha decided. The murderous one was Hitler.
Mildred “set the table festively with the old family silver,” Greta recalls in her memoir. She doesn’t elaborate, but by now we know Mildred well enough to fill in the blanks: candles flickering, a simple jar filled with flowers, and a meal that’s most likely bland or burned or both.
Hitler’s “peace” speech was a sham, a dog-and-pony show, the work of an inveterate liar. The documents Arvid has seen tell the truth, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that peace plays no role in Germany’s future. Hitler, he says, is “preparing for war.”
There’s a term for what Arvid is: a Rindersteak—beefsteak—Nazi. Nazi brown on the outside, lefty red on the inside. In such a guise, Arvid can justify becoming a member of the Deutscher Klub. But he won’t join the Nazi Party. It’s a line he will not—cannot—cross.
Trust gave way to friendship. All the while, Arvid remained unaware that Hirschfeld was taking careful notes.
In the chummy jargon of Soviet espionage, the Red Army and the NKVD are sosedi—neighbors. Because the Red Army and the NKVD have overlapping jurisdictions—military intelligence and foreign intelligence—the agencies can be as rivalrous as siblings vying for parental favor. In this case, they have cooperated. Arvid is a valuable asset, and squabbling will get them nowhere.
Martha finds Dmitri so agreeable that she sees him again and again. She tells him all about the “swinish behavior” displayed by Ambassador Bullitt, a man she believes is unfit to be U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union. She tells him all about her father, too, confiding details about a letter Ambassador Dodd wrote to the State Department in Washington, DC. She lets it be known that, as the daughter of a diplomat, she’s privy to numerous secrets of this sort. Dmitri knows this, of course. It is precisely why the NKVD has targeted her.
At the BAG, Mildred continues to serenade her students with American protest songs. “John Brown’s Body” is especially resonant now. John Brown was executed the same way some German men in the resistance will be executed: by slow strangulation, on gallows constructed with sadistic care.
Their crime? Same as John Brown’s: treason.
Centuries ago, Ernst told her, a page who had worked in the castle somehow found himself in trouble. Did he displease a monarch? Probably so. Did the punishment fit the crime? Probably not. Whatever his crime, the blade came down, slicing off his head. Now a headless ghost haunts the rooms of the castle. Especially, Ernst said, your room.
Mildred had lived in Germany long enough to develop a feel for what passed as German wit. She knew Ernst was teasing.
Mildred and Emil are so deep in conversation, Emil writes later, that they don’t notice the commotion ahead. People are thronging the entrance of a movie theater. SS officers shove them aside, shouting at them to move. The grand doors open and a man emerges. The crowd erupts, cheering as if the man were a matinee idol. It’s Hitler. The sinister smudge of his mustache. His eyes startlingly blue. A middle-aged woman swoons, crying out, “What an historic moment!” Mildred and Emil walk on in silence. They reach the S-Bahn station. They nod goodbye. We still have so much work to do. This is what
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An ordinary citizen who finds a leaflet in her mailbox can report the offense to the local police station. The Gestapo relies on citizens like this to assist in policing neighborhoods and rooting out the resistance.
No bullets are fired that day. The maneuver is a kind of performance, a powerful piece of theater. Hitler has alerted the world that Germany won’t be crippled by a punishing treaty any longer. He’s gambling that he’ll get away with it. He does.
Ernst and Harro trade a few witticisms. Then Ernst grows serious. He tells Harro that his activities in the resistance are dangerous. And more—they’re treasonous. He is committing “a crime.” Harro’s winning smile fades. His eyes harden. “Inactivity,” Harro says, is “the greatest crime of all.”
She is Mildred Harnack. Sometimes she’s Mildred Fish-Harnack. Sometimes she’s Mildred Harnack-Fish. She is a woman. She is a wife. She is an American. Sometimes she’s an American leader of a German resistance group. Sometimes she’s the American wife of a German in the resistance. Sometimes she’s the American wife of a Nazi. Once, Mildred was recognizable to herself. Now, she isn’t.
Bob remembers the day she got married here. Everyone in the family was happy for Mili then, even as they allowed that she might be making a mistake marrying Arvid. Now, Bob Fish considers the possibility that they’d been right. His sister’s strange behavior is getting stranger. She seems uncomfortable at home. She used to crack jokes. Now she doesn’t even crack a smile.
The moment Mildred arrives at 16 St. Luke’s Place, Clara senses something is off. Mildred’s jitteriness is pronounced, but it’s more than her nerves that rattle Clara. Mildred seems hardened somehow. Every day Mildred makes “a fetish,” as Clara puts it, “of morning & evening exercises.” The girl she knew in college is gone.
Tough times make
I envy her will power, almost I envy a certain ruthlessness she’s developed in pursuing her own interests & plans, no matter how rude part of the process may be.
Clara Leiser
Mildred has changed. They all try to put their fingers on how, exactly. She speaks German fluently and has made herself into some kind of scholar; this much they know. In spite of these accomplishments, Mildred doesn’t seem happy. Not even a little. The easygoing, radiant Mildred has been replaced by someone brittler. Stonier. The light in her is gone, snuffed out.
Mady Emmerling thinks Mildred seems “extremely frightened, cautious and reserved as if she felt there was someone looking over her shoulder all the time.”
Dorothy Meyer tries to engage Mildred in a friendly conversation. She has heard through the grapevine that Mildred visited Russia. She asks Mildred about the trip. ...
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Later, after Mildred kisses her goodbye, Dorothy turns to her husband and says, “I have the feeling I’ve just been kissed by a Nazi.” Dorothy isn’t alone in t...
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Marion notices a change in Aunt Mili. She’s “kind of strained, sort of roughened,” she recalled years later. She used to talk in a way that made sense. Now she’s “slightly off.” Harriette is studying her too. The odd rigidity, the severity in her facial expressions—it all adds up: Nazi.
Fred keeps telling Mili, in the stern voice he reserves for disciplining their children, Don’t go back to Germany. Stay with us. She tells him she can’t. Why? he wants to know. Mili says something mysterious then. “I hold Arvid’s head in my hands.”
The day Mildred is to depart, Harriette is happy to see her go. Almost happy, anyway. Mildred has caused too much friction in the family, and worse—Jane is thoroughly captivated by her. The entire visit, Harriette has bristled, watching her almost-twenty-one-year-old daughter hang on Mildred’s every word.
During her visit, Mildred notices that friends and even family treat her differently. It is the same wherever she goes—New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, even Wisconsin. She seems odd to everyone. Her years abroad have changed her. No one understands why she left Wisconsin in the first place and why she won’t return.
Americans can’t grasp—how could they?—what is happening in Germany now.
America is an all encompassing microcosm.
We read the papers, Harriette insists. We know what’s going on. The papers tell you nothing, Mildred informs her old...
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Why do you remain in Germany? Countless times Mildred has been asked this question. Countless times the person asking it—a shopkeeper, a stranger on the street—is unconvinced when she answers, Because my life is here.
Still, she holds on to the hope that fascism can be fought.
