The group broke up at the street corner, but Emil was heading in the same direction as Mildred, so they walked along together, chatting about blocking and costumes and whether they ought to risk using real swords in act five. Emil was all for it, Mildred against. “If we use real swords, we may be expected to use real horses too,” she teased as they walked along Tauentzienstrasse toward the Bahnhof Zoo.
Emil’s face lit up, but before he could reply, a swarm of SS were upon them, as suddenly as if they had risen from hidden fissures in the earth. Instinctively Mildred reached for Emil’s arm, but the black-clad officers swept them and other hapless passersby along before them, a wave cresting toward the UFA Filmpalast. Frantic, Mildred tried to tear herself free, certain they had been caught up in a raid, but when they reached the sidewalk in front of the entrance to the theater, the SS suddenly halted, penning them in.
“Frau Harnack!” called Emil, struggling to make his way to her side, but just as he reached her, the enormous double doors swung open and Adolf Hitler strode out, surrounded by his usual entourage. A murmur rippled through the crowd and swelled into a roar as all around arms flung out in theHitlergrussand shouts of “Heil Hitler!” rose to the sky. As the SS shoved the crowd back to clear a path from the door to the Führer’s automobile, his flaccid face and piercing eyes turned to one side and then the other as he accepted the people’s worship, returning their salutes with a rather affected one of his own, his elbow bent at his side, his right hand flung up by his ear, palm facing forward. Almost, Mildred thought fleetingly, as if he were shooing away a persistent fly.
It was all over in a moment. Hitler climbed into his car and was swiftly driven away with several SS staff cars as escort. “What a historic moment,” an old woman cried, her thin voice rising above the excited hum of the crowd. “How thankful I am to have lived long enough to see our great leader!”
Emil muttered disparagingly under his breath, but Mildred was shocked into silence as she watched the old woman tremble in tearful ecstasy. Sickened, she turned her gaze to the faces of the people surrounding them. They looked like men and women she might see strolling through the Tiergarten on a Sunday or waiting in a queue at the market or opening a hymnal at church. But now these perfectly ordinary people turned beatific faces toward the departing cars, a feverish light in their eyes. They behaved as if a god had briefly come to earth to walk among mortals, and they, the fortunate few, had witnessed his divine majesty and would never be the same.
Mildred’s gaze found Emil’s, and she saw her own dismay reflected in his eyes. How could the resistance persuade such devout followers that the Nazis were leading them toward destruction? How could reason overcome such ardent, irrational veneration?
A week later, Dr. Stecher called an all-school assembly.
There, trembling and watery-eyed, he bravely announced that although the accusations of seditious teaching and disloyalty to the Reich had not been proven, the Gestapo had decided to close the Abendgymnasium. The students’ dismay and outrage struck the hapless principal with such force that he stepped backward. Raising his hands for silence, he shouted back empty reassurances that they would receive full credit for their incomplete courses and assistance transferring to universities and trade schools. It was only as she was clearing out her desk that Mildred learned the faculty would receive no severance pay, no help finding new jobs, nothing.
“Why would they close the school when they found no evidence of subversion?” Mildred lamented to Arvid. “The Nazis boast about creating jobs and lowering unemployment, and the Abendgymnasium helps students move on to better careers and higher education. Why shut us down when we’re accomplishing work they themselves insist is important?”
“The Abendgymnasium was founded by the Social Democrats,” said Arvid. “Anything created by the previous administration, however beneficial to the German people, must be swept away.”
“It’s stupid and wrong,” said Mildred, close to tears.
Arvid brushed her hair away from her face and kissed her, but the gesture gave her no comfort.
The Gestapo could shut down her school, but they could not prevent her from meeting elsewhere with her students. She would find another job—something, somehow—but she was a teacher, and she would never relinquish her responsibility to her students. As long as they wanted to learn, she would teach them.
Chapter Thirty-five
June–August 1936
Martha
Martha relished the thrill of athletic competition as much as anyone, but it was difficult not to regard the Berlin Olympics cynically as a massive state-sponsored public relations campaign. The new facilities included a magnificent art deco track and field stadium with room for one hundred thousand spectators, a natatorium for ten thousand, and a state-of-the-art 130-acre Olympic Village for housing the athletes. Arranged in the shape of a map of Germany, it boasted houses fitted with the latest modern conveniences, a post office, a bank, and training facilities including a 400-meter oval track and a regulation size indoor swimming pool. The director of construction, Captain Wolfgang Fürstner, had promised that these were the most excellent accommodations ever provided for Olympic athletes. From what Martha had seen, she would be hard pressed to disagree.
The ten-mile road connecting the Alexanderplatz to the Olympic complex just north of Berlin was lavishly adorned with banners and flags bearing the swastika and the Olympic rings. Whenever Martha drove along it, she had the strange sensation of participating in a caesar’s triumphal procession in ancient Rome. If only someone would assign a staff officer to follow Hitler around whispering, “Remember you are mortal.”
The Olympiastadion and the Via Triumphalis were the most impressive refurbishments Hitler had ordered in honor of the Games, but they were hardly the only ones. For months, conscripted workers had remade nearly every visible surface of Berlin, painting houses, patching roads, restoring decrepit railway stations, banishing litter, pruning and polishing as required. It seemed to Martha that even the oldest cobblestone streets gleamed as if they had been swept and scrubbed.
The economy continued to improve steadily, but more important to Hitler was theappearanceof prosperity. Pamphlets were distributed to every household encouraging citizens to grow flowers rather than vegetables in their gardens and window boxes. Vacant shops and offices on main thoroughfares were leased at significantly below-market cost, with additional subsidies available so that proprietors could spruce up their new storefronts. Unsightly Roma camps were demolished overnight, although none of Martha’s Nazi acquaintances would tell her what had become of the Roma themselves. Then, in the last few weeks before foreign tourists would descend upon Berlin, familiar tokens of the new Germany began quietly disappearing. The ubiquitous signs in store windows declaring “Juden unerwünscht” were removed. Newsstand racks reserved for the rabidly antisemitic newspaperDer Stürmerwere refilled with foreign papers. Many of the same books that the Nazis had thrown onto the pyres returned to bookstore shelves. Posters announcing the Nuremberg Laws and other regulations stripping Jews of their civil rights were torn down, every trace of paste and paper scrubbed from the brick.
“Germany primps for the tourists like a debutant for her coming out,” Martha remarked to her mother one afternoon as they were shopping on the Kurfürstendamm.
“No amount of fresh makeup can conceal such gross disfigurement,” her mother replied, an edge to her voice. “I’ll believe in the Nazis’ Olympic spirit of peace and fellowship when they close the concentration camps and send the prisoners home to their families, and not a moment before.”
It was her mother’s public vehemence rather than her beliefs that took Martha by surprise. Her mother and Bill had been skeptical of the Nazis from the very beginning, while Martha’s father was suspending judgment and Martha was enamored with their noble revolution, or whatever she had called it. Her cheeks flushed with shame when she remembered how enthralled she had been by the glamour and spectacle, how she had once cheerfully echoed every “Heil Hitler” sent her way.
Now the Germans were rehearsing their best behavior for when the world came to Berlin for the Games. Martha hardly dared hope their rehabilitation would be permanent, but at least for the moment the humiliation and abuse of the Jews had significantly diminished.
A few days before the opening ceremonies, as Martha was reading on the terrace, Fritz approached her to announce a visitor. His prim, sour expression kindled a memory, and for an electrifying moment she thought Boris had returned. Setting her book aside, she leapt up from her chair and followed Fritz into the house, quickly outpacing him on the way to the green reception room.
A large, dark-haired man stood at the window, his back to her, engrossed in the view of the Tiergarten.
“Why, Thomas Wolfe,” Martha exclaimed, swiftly crossing the room to greet him. “What a wonderful surprise. Are you here for the Olympics or for me?”
“Both.” Thomas swept her up in an embrace and kissed her soundly on both cheeks. “And also because Herr Hitler won’t let me take the royalties for my German translations out of the country. I had to come to Germany to spend them.”
“I can certainly help you with that. Germany isn’t as much fun as it used to be, but we can still find good champagne, extravagant dinners, and great music to dance to.”
“So it’s not all military marches, Wagner, and the ‘Horst Wessel Lied’?”
