Red Orchestra (6 page)

Before the war, German theater was rooted in nineteenth-century conventions, decked out in literary flourishes and elaborate costumes, sets, and lights. But the front theater taught a generation of dramatists like Adam Kuckhoff and Erwin Piscator that theater could thrive under the most extreme conditions and speak to contemporary experience. Avant-garde theater moved into the basements of Berlin, with additional pockets in regional centers such as Hamburg and Munich. Over the 1920s it gathered momentum. Many artists saw a natural convergence
occurring between Marxism, political reform, and creative experimentation. Bertolt Brecht decided to abandon his middle-class background and adopt the proletarian affect of a convict haircut and black leather jacket. By 1928 he had begun to make a conscious effort to write plays with Marxist themes.
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When he opened his new musical
Threepenny Opera
that year, the production included his favorite actors from Communist theater groups, including a sloe-eyed beauty named Carola Neher, who was cast as the ingenue Polly Peachum.
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Brecht converted to Marxism the same year he became a commercial success.

Brecht's and Kuckhoff's lives intersected again in the person of an exceedingly handsome young actor from Dresden named Hans Otto. Adam Kuckhoff had met Otto in 1920 in Frankfurt am Main.

Otto made his professional acting debut at Kuckhoff's theater, playing the lead in
Kabale und Liebe (Intrigue and Love),
an early Schiller classic
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Otto, who had just turned twenty, was gorgeous in his nineteenth-century powdered wig and lace cravat, playing an aristocrat who falls tragically in love with the daughter of a humble musician.
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Kuckhoff and the company soon realized they had a star on their hands. Soon Otto was writing grandly to Kuckhoff about his contract, suggesting programming and making demands: “Regarding the clause ‘Possible accommodation in unheated quarters'—I object.”
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Otto also caught the attention of Adam's wife of ten years, Marie, who saw him as “a high-strung, strikingly pale young man, a man who, without being a wet blanket, was standoffish—a real loner.”
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(Marie, in contrast, was called “slight, stylish and clever” by Otto's sister Elspeth.)

The stylish, clever Marie and the high-strung Otto fell in love. She divorced Adam Kuckhoff and married Hans Otto in 1923, and Adam married Marie's sister Gertrud. In short order, Hans Otto simultaneously became Adam Kuckhoff's ex-wife's husband and his new brother-in-law. By all accounts, the union of Marie and Hans Otto was a happy one. Even under these most complicated of circumstances, Kuckhoff, Otto, and the Viehmeyer sisters all remained good friends.

“Dear Gertrud and Adam,” Otto wrote cheerfully in 1928. “This abundance of work makes it hard for me to write—forgive me! Maybe
I'll come to Berlin next year after all. It's so hard to decide. Should one pursue success, or one's interests?”
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Otto pursued both. He and Marie fell in with a group of Communist artists in Hamburg, and Otto joined the German Communist Party, or KPD, in 1924. Soon he was recruited to staffs of their arts publications and collectives. In 1926, Otto starred in a production of Bertolt Brecht's play
The Life of Edward II
and Otto and Brecht became fast friends.

Everyone seemed to like Hans Otto. He grew more outgoing as he matured, and people were attracted to his frank, warm gaze and dark curly hair. He approached both communism and theater with a passion for the workingman. Otto exerted a strong influence on Brecht, who mentioned him frequently in his correspondence.

By 1930, Otto, Kuckhoff, and Brecht were all working at Jessner's Staatstheater in Berlin. Otto was an extraordinary example of that Weimar phenomenon: matinee idol combined with leftist firebrand. In 1930 he drafted a flyer promoting the agitprop theater program of the KPD's German Workers' Theater Association. He called “the masses to the gigantic task” of creating a workers' cultural movement. Music clubs would sing “new revolutionary songs that the masses should learn,” gathering in workplaces and recreational facilities.
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The following year he starred in Jean Giraudoux's delightful comedy
Amphitryon 38
with leading actresses Elisabeth Bergner and Lil Dagover.

But by 1932, Otto raised the stakes with a pamphlet confronting the Social Democrats' minister of culture, Adam Kuckhoff's old friend Adolf Grimme. He accused the Social Democrats of betraying German artists by closing theaters for budgetary reasons. Their police, he complained, had closed down a theater collective's production of Bertolt Brecht's (and Günther Weisenborn's) play
The Mother.
The ministry dared to say it supported the “Theater of the People.” Otto pointed instead to the Soviets, who, he claimed, had increased the numbers of theaters and audiences over the previous two years.

Adam Kuckhoff steered a middle course between his friends, the bureaucratic Adolf Grimme and the incendiary Hans Otto. He was still trying to meld his political convictions to his dramatic art, but it was not easy. Even Piscator and Brecht, with their open allegiance to Marxism, frequently ran afoul of the Communist Party. The Russian Bolsheviks,
now under the rule of Joseph Stalin, made a fetish of their proletarian and peasant roots. They were particularly suspicious of the worldly German Marxists, who combined an air of superiority with an annoying degree of independence.
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In his usual fashion, Adam Kuckhoff was ensnared in conflicts that had nothing to do with ideology. Unable to commit himself wholeheartedly to either of his disciplines, he split his time between them. Kuckhoff continued as dramaturge at the Staatstheater, but he was also working on a novel,
Scherry,
based on the character of the celebrated Swiss clown named Grock. The book explored the overweening ego of the performer, which overpowered weaker beings in its path.
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(The theme may have been inspired by Adam's recent experience of losing his first wife to an actor.)

Greta Lorke, who had found Adam Kuckhoff so irresistible in Hamburg, had removed herself from his travails. She called the discovery of his marital status “a major blow.” Adam tried to explain away the complexities of his married life with the Viehmeyer sisters, but Greta was having none of it. Crushed, she pulled away. “I buried myself in my work,” she wrote later, “although given the conditions, I couldn't expect any satisfaction from it, beyond making enough money to support myself, with a little extra to send home to my parents.”
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G
RETA'S FRIENDS FROM WISCONSIN, ARVID AND MILDRED HARNACK
, spent 1928 and 1929 in the small university towns of Jena and Giessen. There they became aware of a disturbing new phenomenon. A radical right-wing party called the National Socialists was enjoying extraordinary success in recruiting student supporters.

Mildred understood the Germans' frustration, but she feared the direction they were taking. She wrote to her mother: “There is a large group of people here which, feeling the wrongness of the situation and their own poverty or danger of poverty, leaps to the conclusion, since things were better before the war, it would be a good idea to have a more absolute government again.”
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Arvid reacted by joining competing student groups that favored pacifism and the Social Democrats, struggling to apply his academic training to the crisis at hand. As the German economy sank deeper into chaos, he took a growing interest in the idea of a centrally planned economy. He was not alone. As the Western capitalist nations floundered in the Great Depression, Americans lost their life savings in uninsured bank accounts, British workers marched in the streets, and Germans panicked at the threat of renewed starvation. Could economic planning protect society from such hardship and disruption? In London and Washington, officials were starting to explore the radical ideas of economist John Maynard Keynes. Arvid Harnack asked similar questions, and wondered
whether the new Soviet economists could create a more rational system by starting from scratch.
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In 1930, Arvid and Mildred moved to Berlin, where she received a fellowship to study at the university. They were pleased to return to the comfort of his family, and Mildred was thrilled with the prospect of life in the big city. “Yesterday I went to Jena and bought myself material for an evening dress to wear in Berlin,” she wrote her mother. “White crepe de chine (waist close-fitted, somewhat short, skirt to feet, two yellow satin appliquéd flowers). Wore to theater.”
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Six weeks later she wrote, “My days [in Berlin] are full until midnight… Full of study, lectures, seminars, concerts, meetings with various members of the family and others.”
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But Berlin was not to everyone's liking. Adolf Hitler, for one, despised the city as a decadent sinkhole, full of Communists, audacious artists, and Jews—three groups that he tended to conflate. Hitler called Berlin a
Trümmerfeld,
a “field of rubble,” and condemned it as “cosmopolitan”: a place where German culture was corrupted by decadent foreign and avant-garde influences.
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(In the Nazi lexicon, “cosmopolitan,” “foreign,” and “ avant-garde” were often slightly veiled terms for “Jewish.”)

Berlin was proudly and undeniably cosmopolitan. Some observers were fond of comparing Berlin to Chicago, but most Berliners felt a stronger affinity to New York. By the end of the nineteenth century, both cities had helped transform their nations from agricultural economies to industrial and financial powerhouses. These dynamic conditions couldn't fail to excite intense interest in Greta as a sociologist, Mildred as a literary critic, and Arvid as an inquiring economist.

Berlin's Central Park was the Tiergarten, the old royal hunting park graced with decorative fishponds and romantic walks. Arvid and Mildred often joined their fellow Berliners in weekend strolls along its paths. The Tiergarten intersected with Berlin's spacious promenade, Unter den Linden, which featured elegant hotels and embassies, as well as the University of Berlin, where Greta, Arvid, and Mildred studied and taught.

Friedrichstrasse was Broadway and Madison Avenue combined, with bustling shops and restaurants to complement the theaters where Adam
Kuckhoff and his colleagues produced their work. There were echoes of the Lower East Side in the southeastern working-class neighborhood of Neukölln, where Eastern European immigrant families crowded into tenements and Greta had picked lice from the orphan boys' hair.

Berlin was founded in the twelfth century on a marshy patch of land (its name was said to have come from the word
bid,
or swamp). For centuries it remained a political and cultural backwater. But in the seventeenth century a canny reformist ruler, Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm, modernized the city. He promoted it as a haven for persecuted French Protestants and Viennese Jews, and both populations took root and prospered. As of 1871, when it was named capital of the new unified Germany, Berlin's population was just over 800,000, half the size of New York's. By 1880 the city had some 45,000 Jewish residents, almost ten percent of Germany's total.
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Germany's Jewish population peaked in 1910 at 615,000, roughly one percent of the country's population.

Berlin's Jews attained levels of status and influence that were undreamed of in most of Europe. Nonetheless, anti-Semitism still plagued German society. Some of it arose from a tendency to scapegoat Jewish bankers and businessmen for financial panics. Other forms of intolerance resulted from the pogroms in czarist Russia, beginning in the 1880s. These attacks drove floods of Polish-and Russian-speaking refugees into Berlin—thanks in part to international Jewish relief agencies that promoted Berlin as a welcoming destination for resettlement.
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Berlin's worldly, assimilated Jews, who had struggled for years to win full enfranchisement in German society, now expressed ambivalence about the arrival of the
Ostjuden,
whose dress, speech, and religious practices were redolent of a different century. They feared, with some justification, that the influx of aliens could prompt a backlash among the malicious and the ignorant of their fellow citizens. At the same time, many non-Jewish Berliners denounced anti-Semitism as barbaric. In 1880 a group of Berlin's leading professors, politicians, and businessmen signed the “Declaration of the Notables,” deploring anti-Semitism as a “national disgrace” and cautioning against the “ancient folly.”
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The cataclysm of World War I affected Berliners even more drastically than other Germans. Following the Bolshevik revolution, Russian refugees poured into the city. Another result of the war was the reconstitution
of Poland. The new government launched a new series of attacks against Polish Jews, and many fled west to Berlin.