nations, yet nations are composed of people and the people must suffer… You can see why we are careful with our money 9
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.
Dearest Heart: Enclosed is a picture of the beautiful castle in which I was the guest of Arvid's cousin Ernst von Harnack and his wife Aenne on my way to Berlin this week. Ernst is the
Regierungspräsident
[regional governor] of a portion of Germany and lives in a magnificent, if simple manner in the great stately rooms of the castle of Merseburg, a suburb of Halle. I slept in a room at the left behind the trees.…
When we came home Ernst told me a story of the headless ghost of a page who haunted the castle and especially, he said, my room. The result of his story was that I dreamt all night about the unfortunate fellow.
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:
The leaders of the group are paid by the big industrialists who wish to use the movement as their weapon against organized workers, against the insurance of the working-man, etc., and finally against Communism, which wants by working in a temporarily violent way, to pull the rich man down and to pull the poor man up until both are on the same level, until all have enough, and no one has too much or too little.
The group names itself the National-Socialists, although it has nothing to do with socialism and the name itself is a lie. It thinks itself highly moral and like the Ku Klux Klan, makes a campaign of hatred against the Jews.
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:
The existence of [the Nazis], as well as the smaller one of the Communists, whose aims are finer, endangers the government in Germany. Neither group wishes to work through the Reich stag (the German Parliament) although both sit in it. If the “ Nationalist Socialists” succeed in erecting a dictatorship, there may be much agitation, because the party of [Democratic] Socialists together with that of the Communists makes a strong left wing in the Reichstag and will oppose the efforts of the right-wing (conservatives to lower wages, reduce the amount of unemployment insurance etc.).
Just now a big strike of the Metal-Workers has begun, because there is an attempt to reduce their wages (none too high to live on now) 8%.… 10
Sophisticated Berliners were used to regarding the Nazis' boorish brownshirts as a bad joke. 11 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.” 12 The Nazi victory seemed to come out of nowhere, but only because the
Tageblatt
editorialists and other urban
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.
Dearest Heart: Enclosed is a picture of the beautiful castle in which I was the guest of Arvid's cousin Ernst von Harnack and his wife Aenne on my way to Berlin this week. Ernst is the
Regierungspräsident
[regional governor] of a portion of Germany and lives in a magnificent, if simple manner in the great stately rooms of the castle of Merseburg, a suburb of Halle. I slept in a room at the left behind the trees.…
When we came home Ernst told me a story of the headless ghost of a page who haunted the castle and especially, he said, my room. The result of his story was that I dreamt all night about the unfortunate fellow.
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:
The leaders of the group are paid by the big industrialists who wish to use the movement as their weapon against organized workers, against the insurance of the working-man, etc., and finally against Communism, which wants by working in a temporarily violent way, to pull the rich man down and to pull the poor man up until both are on the same level, until all have enough, and no one has too much or too little.
The group names itself the National-Socialists, although it has nothing to do with socialism and the name itself is a lie. It thinks itself highly moral and like the Ku Klux Klan, makes a campaign of hatred against the Jews.
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:
The existence of [the Nazis], as well as the smaller one of the Communists, whose aims are finer, endangers the government in Germany. Neither group wishes to work through the Reich stag (the German Parliament) although both sit in it. If the “ Nationalist Socialists” succeed in erecting a dictatorship, there may be much agitation, because the party of [Democratic] Socialists together with that of the Communists makes a strong left wing in the Reichstag and will oppose the efforts of the right-wing (conservatives to lower wages, reduce the amount of unemployment insurance etc.).
Just now a big strike of the Metal-Workers has begun, because there is an attempt to reduce their wages (none too high to live on now) 8%.… 10
Sophisticated Berliners were used to regarding the Nazis' boorish brownshirts as a bad joke. 11 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.” 12 The Nazi victory seemed to come out of nowhere, but only because the
Tageblatt
editorialists and other urban
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