shellfish flown in from Berlin.” 1 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.” 2
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. 3
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.” 4
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. 5 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. 6 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 universitytown 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.” 7 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.” 8
A few months later Mildred wrote that economic conditions had worsened:
The situation is hardest on many children of the middle and lower classes, who don't get enough to eat and are in economic fear… The trouble was that the war wasn't only against the Kaiser. The people of Germany were half bled to death, and their hard times are not over. There is no pity or love between
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. 3
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.” 4
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. 5 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. 6 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 universitytown 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.” 7 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.” 8
A few months later Mildred wrote that economic conditions had worsened:
The situation is hardest on many children of the middle and lower classes, who don't get enough to eat and are in economic fear… The trouble was that the war wasn't only against the Kaiser. The people of Germany were half bled to death, and their hard times are not over. There is no pity or love between
Similar Books
