In her last letter from Wisconsin, Greta had told her family not to meet her ship in Hamburg, but when she disembarked and took her first few unsteady paces along the pier, she felt a pang of profound loneliness and wished they had ignored her instructions. All around her, couples embraced and families greeted long-absent loved ones, while she walked alone, a suitcase in each hand.
From the station office, she telegraphed her parents to let them know when to expect her and hurried to catch the train to Frankfurt an der Oder. As the train carried her nearly four hundred kilometers south and east, she watched the scenery speeding past the window of her second-class carriage, curiously moved, marveling how her homeland had changed so little during the two years she had been studying abroad though she had changed so much.
Hours later, the train jerked to a halt at a station near the Polish border. “Frankfurt an der Oder,” the conductor announced, sending a thrill of expectation up her spine. She gathered her belongings and descended to the platform, where she was immediately swept up in a strong embrace. Startled, she dropped her suitcases. “Hans,” she exclaimed. She kissed her brother on the cheek, breathless. How well he looked, tall and sturdy, his blue eyes bright and cheerful, his hair darker and curlier than she remembered.
“Welcome home, little sister,” he said, seizing the handles of her suitcases and heading to the exit from the platform. “You’ve gotten thin. Couldn’t you find any good German food in Wisconsin? Mutti will want to fatten you up.”
Greta’s stomach rumbled in anticipation. “She’s welcome to try.”
“She’s planning a dinner party for tomorrow night,” Hans said as he led her through the crowd to the street. “Just the family and a few neighbors, and all your favorite dishes.”
“I hope she won’t go to too much expense.”
“You know Mutti. She’ll haggle with the butcher and trade mending work for bread with the baker and Papa will boast about her shrewdness until she blushes.”
Greta laughed and agreed, tears of happiness pricking her eyes. She had missed joking with her brother about the endearing quirks of the people they loved, which included their mother’s frugality. Mutti had a gift for making something nourishing and delicious from meager ingredients, a skill her family extolled as a moral virtue while tactfully overlooking that it was born of necessity.
Throughout the wretched, tumultuous years of the Great War, Greta’s parents had kept poverty at bay through relentless effort and sheer force of will. Greta’s father was a metalworker in a musical instrument factory, and her most vivid childhood memories involved watching him roll out gleaming sheets of brass, placing patterns upon them, and meticulously cutting out intricate pieces from which he shaped cornets, flügelhorns, and tubas. Her mother was a seamstress who took in piecework, mostly clothing and blankets for an upscale department store in Berlin.
As soon as Greta had been old enough, she had helped earn her keep by polishing shoes, but her parents had emphasized that education came before everything but the church. They had scrimped and sacrificed to afford their children’s tuition at theOberschule, and when Greta was older they had nearly burst with pride when she had been accepted into the University of Berlin. Determined to pay her own way, she had taken a work-study job looking after two dozen boys at an orphanage in Neukölln, a rough industrial neighborhood favored by Communists and laborers and the indigent. Her time at the orphanage had taught her that although her own family had struggled, others had suffered far greater hardships. She learned gratitude for what she had and compassion for the vast multitude of people who had far less. She acquired indignation for the suffering of the innocent and resolve to make their lot better, however she could, whenever she could.
Through it all, her parents had encouraged her and had taken great pride in her achievements. What would they think now that she had returned from her grand and glorious adventure in America with wonderful memories but no doctorate to show for all her hard work and all their sacrifice?
Greta’s apprehensions surged at the sight of her childhood home, three narrow stories of stone and plaster, modest but meticulously kept, reassuringly solid and enduring after Madison, where even the oldest buildings seemed startlingly new. But when she crossed the familiar threshold, her parents met her with warm embraces and tears of joy. She choked back sobs as she hugged them as hard as she dared, mindful of their new wrinkles, more silver in their hair, a slight stoop to her father’s back, and yet the same love and pride shining in their eyes.
At the dinner party the following evening, friends and family cheerfully proclaimed their certainty that she had represented Frankfurt an der Oder with honor and distinction. They were all so kind and proud that Greta briefly feared she had forgotten to tell them that she had not earned her degree.
The next morning, as she helped her mother tidy the kitchen after breakfast, she stoked her courage, took a deep breath, and said, “Mutti, I’m sorry I failed you and Papa.”
Her mother’s soft, round face creased in puzzlement. “What nonsense is this?”
“To travel so far and to be gone so long, when I could have been here helping the family, only to return empty-handed—”
“My dear child.” Her mother guided her into a seat at the kitchen table and sat down beside her. “You haven’t achieved your goal yet. That doesn’t mean you never will.”
“But I have no doctorate, no work—”
“So you’ll earn one and find the other.” Her mother regarded her with loving sympathy. “I know from your last letter that you’re exhausted and discouraged. Take some time off before you go back to school.”
“Mutti—” Greta chose her words carefully. “I don’t think my problems will be solved by a holiday.”
“Time off will do you good nonetheless. You couldn’t resume your studies in the middle of the term anyway.”
Her mother’s expression was so full of pride and confidence that Greta did not have the heart to confess her doubts. “I’ll have to find something to do in the meantime,” she said instead. “I thought I might look for a job in Berlin. I hate to leave you so soon after coming home—”
“Don’t worry about us. Of course you must go, unless you want to stay here and help me sew piecework.”
Greta suspected she would have more success in Berlin. After a few restful days with her family, she took the morning train to the capital, and by nightfall she had rented a furnished room in a boardinghouse, smaller and plainer than what she could have had for the same price in Madison, but clean and fairly quiet. The threadbare rug and faded curtains gave the room an air of weary futility, one she could all too well imagine steadily leaching into its occupant. She hoped it would not be long until she could afford a better place.
She had barely settled in when the devastating stock market crash in America rocked Europe. Thanks to her economics training, she understood the alarming implications for Germany even before the failing American banks desperately called in their foreign loans. The fragile German economy, already suffering from staggering inflation and unemployment, could not withstand the blow. Without foreign investment, factories closed, construction projects halted, and thousand of workers lost their jobs.
As the financial disaster unfolded, Greta struggled to secure an elusive university scholarship, to convince a professor to take her on, to find a job as a lecturer or a researcher or even a lowly assistant. There were no vacancies anywhere, of any kind. Professors clung to their tenure, postponing retirement out of fear that their pensions would disappear overnight. Students stayed enrolled, hoping that one more advanced degree would give them an edge over their peers when they were finally forced to graduate and join the wretched millions of unemployed.
Greta willingly accepted the only work she could find—tutoring, freelance editing, some copywriting. It reminded her of her mother’s piecework, but with pen and ink and words instead of needle and thread. With almost nothing to spend on entertainment, she rediscovered her lifelong love of literature and drama, disappearing into the pages of a novel or a play, scraping together enough marks for cheap seats at the Staatstheater or the Deutsches Theater. On long winter evenings, she would huddle under blankets in her room’s lone armchair and lose herself in dramas and comedies, the greatest masterpieces ever written in German, French, and English.
As winter turned to spring, she toyed with the idea of finding a new career in theater. Perhaps she could translate English and French works for the German stage. She could become a playwright or dramaturge.
“You should attend the Internationaler Theaterkongresse,” urged her friend Ursula, an actress. “Nine glorious June days in Hamburg devoted to all things theater—performances, seminars, lectures.”
