Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power (30 page)

Martha Dodd claimed that a variety of factors—everything from the crudeness of German propaganda to her exposure to a widening circle of friends—transformed her from an apologist for the Nazis into a fervent opponent in the spring of 1934. Not coincidentally, this was also the period when Martha began what was probably her most passionate affair. Her new lover was Boris Vinogradov. In her 1939 memoir
Through Embassy Eyes
, she never mentioned him by name, but he was “the young secretary in a foreign embassy” who took her to the lakeside beach on June 30.
He was a tall, blond
, handsome first secretary in the Soviet Embassy, and, because he had served earlier as the press secretary, was well known to American correspondents in Berlin. They found him to be good
company when Martha would bring him by Die Taverne, the Italian restaurant where they gathered in the evenings.

The other important new person in Martha’s life was Mildred Harnack, a fellow midwesterner who found herself in Germany. She had met Arvid Harnack, a German exchange student, at the University of Wisconsin and soon married into his distinguished, scholarly Prussian family. In 1929, the couple moved to Germany, and Mildred at first taught classes on American and British literature at the University of Berlin and later at a night school for adults. Watching the impact of the Depression on her students, she noted their sense of weariness since they knew “
they had no future
.” Like her German husband, she was troubled by the rise of the Nazis, but she was confident that they would fail to seize power. “
It is said by
people who are capable of estimating the present situation that no such dictatorship as is in Italy can be erected in Germany,” she wrote on July 24, 1932.

Mildred’s confidence flowed from her faith that there was already an alternative model that would serve as the solution to the crisis of the capitalist system. She and Arvid had visited Russia, where she was awed by the atmosphere of “
hopefulness and achievement
.” She enthusiastically explained in a letter to her mother that the country was “
the scene of
an enormously important experiment in loving your neighbor as yourself.” Back in Berlin, the Harnacks became regular guests at Soviet Embassy receptions.

Once the Nazis came to power, the Harnacks had to be careful to hide their political views, and Mildred avoided any more pro-Russian commentaries in her letters home. But when she met Martha, the two instantly hit it off. Mildred and Martha, with her new political outlook and Soviet lover, felt free to share their private thoughts with each other. And they were both quick to pass judgment on those who they felt hadn’t seen the light the way they had. Martha professed herself “
amazed at
the naïveté” of any Americans who still could have profascist leanings, seemingly oblivious to the irony that she would make such a statement so soon after her own conversion.

On May 27, 1934
, Mildred, Martha and Boris—along with Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt, the son of the publisher Ernst Rowohlt—drove
to the farm of writer Hans Fallada, whose 1932 novel
Little Man, What Now?
was a huge bestseller in Germany and a major hit abroad. While the Nazis liked his grim portrayal of life in Weimar Germany, they were highly suspicious of him. Fallada tried to skirt current politics and even sought to ingratiate himself with the Nazis on occasion. Nonetheless, as numerous press attacks on him indicated, the lack of ideology in his books was enough to make the authorities discern an undercurrent of dangerously independent thinking.

But Martha was irritated by Fallada’s decision to concentrate on his life on the farm with his wife and children, and his ostensibly apolitical writing. “
He was isolated
from life and happy in his isolation,” she wrote reproachfully. From their conversation, she continued, “though I got the impression that he was not and could not be a Nazi—what artist is?—I felt a certain resignation in his attitude.” Mildred was less judgmental, telling her companions that Fallada was a man with a conscience. “
He is not happy
, he is not a Nazi, he is not hopeless,” she said. In fact, Fallada’s last novel,
Every Man Dies Alone
, which he wrote right after World War II, would prove to be one of the most powerful fictional portrayals of the horrors of life in Germany under Hitler—and of the terrifying price that anyone paid who dared to resist the Nazis.

That summer, with Vinogradov’s help, Martha made her first pilgrimage to her new ideal state: Russia. “
I had had enough
of blood and terror to last me for the rest of my life,” she declared by way of explaining why she was eager to take a break from Germany. And, of course, what other country was freer of blood and terror than the Soviet Union? From the moment she set foot in Moscow, and probably even before she made her trip, her blind admiration of Stalin’s Russia knew no bounds, even exceeding her earlier zeal for Hitler’s Germany. There was a complete lack of militarism, arrogance, insolent behavior and regimentation, she giddily reported. The Bolshevik Revolution had been a triumph for humanity. “One felt in Moscow that the struggle was over, that the fruits of victory were being cherished and enjoyed by everyone.”

While she confessed that there was still some startling poverty, everything was being done to eliminate it, she insisted. Stalin was setting an example by living modestly, the workers were living happily in their
workers’ state, and “the conscience and idealism that lie latent in most mankind were being stimulated and awakened in me,” she wrote. That didn’t prevent her from boasting that she was served caviar three times a day on a Volga cruise ship, along with “marvelous nourishing Russian soups, excellent meats, butter, ice cream, fish . . .” Or from “marveling over the fact that everything good in life was being supplied for the vast majority of the population.” Unlike Germany, she added, Russia was “almost like a democratic country,” and threatened no one.

Despite her new anti-Nazi, pro-Soviet orientation, Martha was still the same woman when it came to matters of the heart. When she returned to Germany, she was, as always, more than eager to associate with any man who looked glamorous to her, no matter what his views. This was certainly the case with Thomas Wolfe, whose novel
Look Homeward, Angel
was a smash hit in Germany as elsewhere. When he visited Berlin in 1935, the young but already widely known writer was treated like a conquering hero. Arriving in Berlin, he was greeted at the American Express office by a huge number of letters, telegrams and phone messages from journalists, diplomats and admirers, all seeking to see him. Describing all this in a letter to his editor Max Perkins, Wolfe marveled that “
for the last two weeks
at least I have been famous in Berlin.”

As Martha put it, “
Tom, a huge man
of six foot six, with the face of a great poet, strode the streets, oblivious of the sensation he created . . . To the desolateness of the intellectual life in Germany, Thomas Wolfe was like a symbol of the past, when great writers were great men.” Wolfe had visited Germany in the mid-1920s, and his fond memories of that era combined with his recent literary successes there prompted him to feel that Berlin was still a magical place. In his letter to Perkins from Berlin, he declared: “
I feel myself
welling up with energy and life again . . .” He had finally finished a new novel,
Of Time and the River
, and he was reveling in the adulation he found in Germany, going from party to party, where he was always the center of attention.

“
Part of Tom’s
uncritical attitude towards Nazism can be explained by his own state of delirium,” Martha wrote. Her own forgiving attitude was just as easy to explain: she loved escorting a celebrity like Wolfe around town and adding him to her list of conquests. It was a
tempestuous affair, with Martha often reprimanding him for his heavy drinking. Decades later, Ledig-Rowohlt, the son of his German publisher, revealed to an interviewer a conversation that he and Wolfe had about Martha. Wolfe told him that Martha was “
like a butterfly
hovering around my penis.”

Wolfe indicated that he did notice some “
disturbing things
” during his 1935 visit to Germany, but it wasn’t until he returned in the summer of the following year that his intoxication with his reception there wore off and he began to recognize what Nazi rule meant in practice. In an interview that Ledig-Rowohlt arranged for him with the
Berliner Tageblatt
, he still waxed poetic about Germany’s virtues. “
If there were
no Germany, it would be necessary to invent one,” he declared. “It is a magical country. I know Hildesheim, Nuremberg, Munich, the architecture of Germany, the soul of the place, the glory of her history and art.” But, as Martha explained, Wolfe returned to Germany “
a much soberer person
, this time eager to learn what lay beneath the surface of Nazi success and effectiveness.”

After that visit, Wolfe wrote
I Have a Thing to Tell You
, a novella that was spread over three issues of the
New Republic
in March 1937; he later expanded his story and made it part of
You Can’t Go Home Again,
one of two novels that were published after his death from a brain disease in 1938, before he reached his thirty-eighth birthday. The novella is unabashedly autobiographical in terms of Wolfe’s feelings about Germany. It is the story of an American writer as he leaves Germany, “that great land whose image had been engraved upon my spirit in my childhood and my youth, before I had ever seen it . . . I had been at home in it and it in me.”

But this Germany is one that the narrator realizes he must leave for the last time. A German friend frets about losing his job, his mistress and possibly even his life because “these stupid people”—the Nazis—are capable of anything. At the same time, he warns the American that he must not write too truthfully about what he observed, since the authorities would then ban his books and destroy his exalted reputation. “A man must write what he must write,” Wolfe’s narrator and alter ego replies. “A man must do what he must do.”

As the narrator’s train leaves Berlin behind, he muses that the people he knew there were “now remote from me as dreams, imprisoned there as in another world.”

Soon, though, the American finds himself cheered by his lively, friendly companions in his compartment. Even “a stuffy-looking little man with a long nose,” who fidgets throughout the trip and initially made the other passengers uncomfortable, gradually loosens up and joins in the convivial conversation. Reaching the frontier at Aachen, they all get out for fifteen minutes while the locomotive is changed. The little man says something about needing to pick up a ticket for the rest of the journey, and slips away. The others walk around before returning to the platform to reboard.

As the returning passengers look from the outside, they see the fidgety man—his face now “white and pasty”—sitting in their compartment facing a group of officials. The leader of his interrogators is “a Germanic type . . . His head was shaven, and there were thick creases at the base of his skull and across his fleshy neck.” Even before he learns that his fellow passenger was a Jew who was trying to escape and smuggle money out in the process, the American narrator felt “a murderous and incomprehensible anger” welling up in him. “I wanted to smash that fat neck with the creases in it,” he writes. “I wanted to pound that inflamed and blunted face into jelly.” But he admits to his sense of helplessness, which is shared by everyone around him. Feeling nauseated, he watches as the officials escort the man off the train.

As the train pulls out of the station, the narrator and the others look at him for the last time. He looks back. “And in that glance there was all the silence of man’s mortal anguish,” Wolfe writes. “And we were all somehow naked and ashamed, and somehow guilty. We all felt somehow that we were saying farewell, not to a man, but to humanity.”

The American’s sense of remorse and anger is only heightened by the advice of an attractive blond woman in the compartment, whom he had found seductively appealing, with “an almost shameless physical attraction.” She tries to talk the others in the compartment out of their glum mood. “Those Jews!” she says. “These things would never happen if it were not for them! They make all the trouble. Germany has to protect herself.”

As the German friend in his novella had predicted, the publication of
I Have a Thing to Tell You
led to the banning of Wolfe’s books in Germany, and he never returned to that country. In an interview in the
Asheville Daily News,
his North Carolina hometown paper, Wolfe talked about his last trip to Germany. “
I came away
with the profoundest respect and admiration for the German people, but I feel that they are betrayed by false leadership,” he declared. Reflecting more broadly on his European experiences, he added: “I saw a certain perfection and finish in European life that we do not have here. However, there is a poisonous atmosphere of hatred. I finally wanted to come back home.”

Despite the title of his posthumous novel, Wolfe did make it home.

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