“So do I.” Mildred frowned, pensive. “They rushed him through a disgrace of a trial and sentenced him to eighteen months. The family hopes he’ll be permitted to serve it out at Oranienburg where they can easily visit him, but they’re powerless to prevent him from being moved to Dachau or another camp even farther away.”
Martha nodded, suddenly apprehensive. Was that Rudolf’s doing? Surely he could have freed Natan Weitz if he had chosen to do so. Was he sending Martha a message, a reminder that he could do so much more for Sara’s brother if only Martha were willing to do more for him?
The weeks passed, and as autumn deepened into winter, Martha saw Boris often and Rudolf not at all, wary of him as she had never been before, thankful for the many kilometers that separated them. She and Boris had begun to discuss marriage more earnestly, and as their intimacy grew, they had become careless about concealing their affection in public. After each slip they vowed to be more discreet, well aware that their affection irritated Boris’s superiors, who wanted him to think of Martha as an asset, not a lover. Seduction was a tool with which Boris was meant to control her. He was not supposed to fall under its spell himself.
In early December, at a luncheon at the Soviet embassy where the vodka flowed freely and lively music and boisterous laughter filled the halls, Boris rose unsteadily to his feet and raised a toast to her, calling her “Martha, my wife.” More than a little tipsy herself, Martha nevertheless noticed the disapproving looks his superiors exchanged, and she quietly warned him to behave himself, hoping he was sober enough to heed her advice.
A week later, as Martha and her mother were decorating the embassy for Christmas, Boris came to Tiergartenstrasse 27a and asked to speak to her alone. For a heartstopping moment she thought he was about to go down on one knee and propose, but instead he told her, pale with anguish, that he had been transferred to Moscow.
“They cannot keep us apart,” he vowed, seizing her hands, kissing her again and again. “No distance can diminish our love.”
She wanted to believe him, and they parted with promises to arrange rendezvous in France or Switzerland as often as possible. But almost as soon as Boris left Berlin, Martha sensed that their last embraces had been infused with a desperate sorrow, a defiant refusal to accept the inevitable.
Chapter Twenty-eight
January 1935
Mildred
Mildred and Arvid welcomed the New Year in a new flat on the third floor of Woyrschstrasse 16, two blocks south of the Tiergarten and about five kilometers northwest of their old place. For more than two years they had enjoyed living in Neukölln, but the neighborhood had come under increased scrutiny by the Gestapo due to its long-standing hospitality to workers, immigrants, and Communists. When forced to choose between ending their study groups and salons or moving to a more discreet neighborhood, they had bidden a sad farewell to Neukölln.
Their new flat was small but modern, with a spacious front room, a galley kitchen, an en suite bath, and a balcony with just enough room for a table and two chairs. There were two bedrooms, but when Mildred and Arvid set up the smaller one as an office, they made none of the usual optimistic predictions that it would make a fine nursery someday. After more than eight years of marriage, countless attempts, and fleeting hopes and crushing disappointment, Mildred could no longer bear to arrange her home or her life around a dream that seemed unlikely to be fulfilled.
There were days she found some consolation in reflecting that perhaps it was better not to bring an innocent child into a world that had turned so ugly, so full of fear and hatred.
Even without a child, their lives and hearts were full. She and Arvid had each other. They had many dear friends, although their once vibrant salons had diminished with the emigration of so many gifted writers, editors, and scholars. They had fulfilling work. Arvid was busy practicing law and studying for the arduous exams that would qualify him to work in the civil service. Mildred continued to write by day and teach at the Abendgymnasium at night, avoiding as best she could the ubiquitous scrutiny of the National Socialist German Students’ Association.
In recent months she had struggled to publish anything of significant academic value, a problem that had plagued her colleagues and writer friends for more than a year, ever since Joseph Goebbels’s Reich Chamber of Culture had issued a multitude of regulations intended to impose Aryan uniformity on all publishing in Germany. Mildred had managed to slip a few subversive pieces of literary criticism past the censors, including an essay in theBerliner Tageblattthat deftly ignored the Nazi reverence forBlut und Bodenby offering a sympathetic analysis of racial issues in Faulkner’s fiction, but for the most part she had been restricted to picturesque reminiscences of her Wisconsin girlhood. Her most promising long-term project was a translation ofLust for Life, Irving Stone’s biographical novel of Vincent van Gogh. Since Universitas Publishers had already accepted the manuscript, she had reasonable expectations that the book would see print, but she knew an overzealous censor could quash the project at any time.
Once Mildred had hoped that this sort of quiet resistance would be enough. Enlightening her students, inoculating them against Nazi propaganda, writing essays that inspired a better vision of humanity—these dangerous activities would earn her the outrage of the Nazis if she were exposed. She could lose her job, or face arrest or even deportation. Yet the severity of the punishments she faced seemed wildly out of proportion to the damage she was inflicting upon the Nazi regime. She felt as if she were stubbornly flinging pebbles against a vast stone fortress—a nuisance, nothing more. Only when she helped Jewish friends escape the Reich did she feel that she was accomplishing any real good.
Arvid shared her frustration, that infuriating sense of powerlessness before the Nazi juggernaut. Quietly, obliquely, he spoke with friends who shared their antifascist beliefs, hoping to build a discreet opposition network, sharing ideas and information. “There is strength in numbers,” he often said, “and power in knowledge.”
One evening, Arvid returned home from work with an unusual lightness in his step, the carefully benign mask he wore on the streets falling away to reveal cautious anticipation. “Rudolf Heberle came to see me today,” he said. “I invited him to join us for supper, but he couldn’t come.”
“Oh, I wish he had,” said Mildred as she set the table. “We haven’t visited with him and Franziska in ages. It would be so lovely to talk over old times in Madison.”
Like Arvid, Rudolf had come to the University of Wisconsin as a Rockefeller Fellow to study with Professor John R. Commons, and the two couples had become friends through the Friday Niters. Rudolf was aPrivatdozentin sociology at the University of Kiel, but also like Arvid, he had been denied a professorship because of his political beliefs. His most recent book, a study of the rise of National Socialism amid the rural population of Schleswig-Holstein, was unlikely ever to be published in Germany while the Nazis remained in power.
“Rudolf agrees that opposition to the Reich is too weak, too scattered and directionless,” Arvid said.
“Yes, but how do we unite when anyone we approach might be a Gestapo agent?”
“We begin with friends we trust, and then friends of friends. Franziska has a second cousin in the intelligence office of the Air Ministry.”
“And we should start withhim?”
“I know it sounds unlikely, but apparently he despises the Nazis as much as we do. Rudolf suggests we collaborate.”
Arvid explained that he had agreed to meet with Franziska’s cousin, Harro Schulze-Boysen, at their flat the following evening. “He and I shouldn’t be seen together in public, in case we need to deny knowing each other later,” Arvid explained. “I want you to meet him too,Liebling. If your intuition tells you we can’t trust him, I won’t.”
Mildred’s intuition told her she could trust Franziska and Rudolf, but Arvid’s matter-of-fact acknowledgment of the new risks he was prepared to accept sent a shiver up her spine. She consented, but throughout the next day, as she cleaned the flat and baked anApfelkuchenfrom Mutti Harnack’s recipe, her hopes warred with apprehension, and she was tempted to phone Arvid and beg him to call off the meeting. Instead she busied herself with work, translating paragraphs of Stone’sLust for Lifeuntil Van Gogh’s world seemed more vivid than her own.
The sound of Arvid’s key turning in the lock broke the spell. She set aside her books and papers and hurried to meet him, but they had only a few minutes to confer before a knock sounded on the door, precisely at the appointed hour. When Mildred answered, Rudolf quickly led a tall man in his midtwenties into the foyer. Although he wore black slacks and a black sweater beneath his black wool topcoat rather than a uniform, Harro Schulze-Boysen otherwise could have stepped right out of a Luftwaffe recruiting poster. He had broad shoulders and a military bearing that seemed to add inches to his height; handsome, patrician features; a strong chin and a confident smile; dark blond hair, a bit thin but not a strand out of place; and a keen blue-eyed gaze that, Mildred suspected, missed nothing. When he removed his hat, she quickly hid her surprise—part of his right ear was missing.
Rudolf waited until she had locked the door behind them to greet her fondly, but it was a brief, insufficient reunion, with little time to spare for family news. Mildred showed them into the sitting room where Arvid waited. Rudolf made introductions, Arvid and Harro shook hands heartily, and as they seated themselves, Mildred returned to the kitchen forKaffee und Kuchen. By the time she returned, the men were so engrossed in their conversation that they scarcely glanced her way when she poured a cup of coffee for herself and took a seat. Arvid had asked her to observe and evaluate the Luftwaffe officer and she intended to do so.
She soon concluded that Harro despised the Nazis with such palpable antipathy that it could not possibly be a ruse. Although he was an avowed Communist, his patriotism sprang from an illustrious family military tradition; his great-uncle was the renowned Grand Admiral von Tirpitz, and in the Great War, his father, Commander Edgar Schulze, had served in Belgium as chief of staff to the German naval commander. Harro explained that he had joined Göring’s intelligence office not to serve the Reich but to hasten its demise, preserving Germany as a sovereign nation, governed by Germans. He was deeply concerned that Hitler’s overreaching ambitions could provoke another world war, and if the Reich fell, the nations of Europe would install their own puppet government in its place.
