“I’m beyond happy! I’m overjoyed.”
“Only one more wish remains to be granted.”
She smiled wistfully. “We’ve been trying.”
“Yes, and enjoying every attempt.”
She laughed lightly to conceal a pang of worry. “I’ll be twenty-nine next month. I can’t help feeling that we’re running out of time.”
“You mustn’t worry, darling.” Arvid brushed a long strand of golden hair out of her eyes. “We’re still young. Once we’re together for good, it will happen. You’ll see.”
Mildred nodded, hoping he was right. She had seen her doctor, who confirmed that she was in excellent health. Every morning she did twenty minutes of stomach exercises meant to make conception and childbirth easier. And yet every month her period came, their dream of a baby eluding them yet again.
“Perhaps I should see another doctor,” Mildred said. “A specialist.”
Arvid agreed that it could do no harm. “I should see a specialist too,” he added, “but I truly believe if we were together more, these things would sort themselves out.”
Inge recommended her own gynecologist to Mildred, but before she could arrange an appointment, she learned that a well-known authority on women’s reproductive health would be giving a public lecture in Marburg in the middle of August. Dr. Else Kienle, an outspoken opponent of laws banning abortion and discouraging birth control, had been jailed earlier that year for performing abortions, but she had won her release after a hunger strike. Mildred expected the lecture to be fascinating even if Dr. Kienle did not address her own specific concerns. If no question-and-answer session followed, she could try to speak with the doctor privately afterward.
Arvid had a prior engagement with Egmont Zechlin and a few other men with whom he hoped to form a new economic study group, so Mildred attended the lecture alone. Although she arrived early, the hall was already quite full, but she found a seat near the back and prepared to take notes. She had expected the audience to be mostly women, so she was surprised to discover many men scattered throughout the rows in groups of three or four. Most of them were clad in Nazi brown.
Her heart sank. Why else would they be there except to make trouble?
She checked her watch; the lecture was scheduled to begin at any moment. She glanced over her shoulder at the door, where a few women waiting to enter looked askance at several Brownshirts who sauntered past the queue and looked about imperiously for empty seats. Mildred turned back to face the empty stage and checked her watch again. Surely someone had informed Dr. Kienle that she would face a hostile audience; perhaps she would decline to take the stage. But just as she was wondering if she ought to leave, a white-bearded, stoop-shouldered professor approached the podium and introduced Dr. Kienle.
The doctor took the stage to resounding applause, but when she shook the professor’s hand and approached the podium, a chorus of piercing whistles went up from the Brownshirts. She regarded them steadily over the rims of her glasses as she arranged her papers, as if she thought they might settle down if she showed no fear. The professor raised his hands for silence, and briefly the unruliness subsided, but as soon as Dr. Kienle began to speak, the men shouted her down, hurling profanities, demanding the closure of birth control clinics, and chanting, “Kinder, Kirche, Küche!” Children, church, kitchen—the alliterative phrase Nazis employed to describe a woman’s proper priorities.
Dr. Kienle grasped the podium with both hands and spoke in a loud, clear, energetic voice, though nearly every sentence was punctuated with catcalls and jeers from the audience. Mildred listened attentively, determined to learn as much as she could. The doctor persisted, but when she finished her lecture and boldly offered to take questions, the professor shook his head and replaced her at the podium. His concluding remarks were drowned out by another blast of shrill whistles and profane jeers as a younger man swiftly escorted the doctor offstage. Mildred joined in when the rest of the audience applauded thunderously, hoping that Dr. Kienle could hear it and would know she had supporters there. Meanwhile, the Brownshirts strode from the room with military crispness, smug and smiling, well satisfied with having put the doctor in her place.
Mildred knew then that outspoken, independent women made up one more class of undesirables that must be suppressed if the Nazis were to remake Germany in their own image.
Chapter Five
September 1931–January 1932
Greta
For months after their furious parting, Adam sent Greta pained, apologetic letters begging forgiveness for not immediately revealing the truth about his complicated relationship with the sisters Marie and Gertrud Viehmeyer, his first wife and second. “I swear I would have told you before we became lovers if our relationship had proceeded at a normal pace,” he wrote, “but our passion overwhelmed us both. I fell for you so quickly, and afterward, I was desperate not to lose you.”
His letters provoked arousing memories of their passionate months together, but she forcibly pushed them aside. “There’s no point in explaining your domestic entanglements now,” she wrote back. “I have no interest in joining your ménage à trois.”
It occurred to her after she posted her letter that she might have made her point more emphatically by not responding at all, but she was angry and wanted to rebuke him.
“It isn’t a ménage à trois,” he protested in his reply. “Marie and I are divorced. I married Gertrud later. Marie is my former wife, the mother of my only child, and my sister-in-law, but we are absolutely not romantically involved. We’ve remained friends because it’s in our professional interest to do so, but more importantly, because it’s in our son’s best interest.”
Greta fired back, “None of this makes you any less married to Gertrud.”
His reply confounded her. “Darling, you’re right to say that my marriage, albeit unconventional, is indeed a marriage.” Then, as if that would resolve everything to any reasonable person’s satisfaction, he changed the subject, describing at length a new project he hoped to begin soon with Günther Weisenborn, the brilliant author of the antiwar playU-Boot S4, which the National Socialists had denounced as pacifist propaganda when it premiered in 1928.
Adam concluded on a regretful note: “Unfortunately, I think our collaboration will be deferred until Weisenborn finishes adapting Gorky’sDie Mutterfor Piscator. Brecht is set to direct and Helene Weigel to star. If you forgive me by then, I would love to escort you to the premiere. If you’re still angry, come anyway, and take pleasure in my suffering as I burn with jealousy that I had no part in the production.”
Very much annoyed, Greta wanted to fling the letter aside, but she could not resist devouring every word. Weisenborn was one of the most promising playwrights in Germany, Erwin Piscator one of the most skilled, radical, and influential producers and directors. Bertolt Brecht—playwright, dramaturge, winner of the prestigious Kleist Prize for drama, and the man Adam considered his chief rival—had been lauded by critics for transforming German literature, giving their postwar era “a new tone, a new melody, a new vision.” Helene Weigel was his astonishingly talented Austrian Jewish wife, a rising star and unapologetic Communist.
How could Greta not be enthralled by a letter that tossed their names about with such casual familiarity? Adam knew everyone Greta longed to meet, thrived in the world she yearned to make her own. She imagined him holding the stage door open and beckoning her across the threshold. She could join him there, but at what price?
She tried to lose herself in her own work instead of dwelling starry-eyed upon his, but curiosity won out every time her landlady slipped a new envelope beneath her door. Finally, after months of sending deliberately abrupt replies to his increasingly detailed and compelling letters, Greta agreed to meet him for coffee.
More than a year had passed since their two-month affair, and she hoped that the intense attraction she had once felt for him would have faded with time. But the moment she entered the café and spotted him seated at a table near the window, all the old feelings surged through her anew. She had to pause to compose herself before she could cross the room to join him. She wondered how long he had been waiting for her. Then she wondered whether he had kissed his wife goodbye that morning and told her whom he was meeting later, and her heart hardened.
