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Meetings in Madison
The little group huddled together, clapped their gloved hands, and pulled their winter hats down over their ears. Smoke rose from the fire where the pork chops sizzled. There was an argument about cooking them slowly, not allowing them to burn; then more laughter, which echoed along the frozen shore of Lake Mendota.
Some of the boys vied for the attention of the newcomer, a twenty-five-year-old with wispy blond hair and keen gray-green eyes. A little shy, she was exceptionally bright, dreamed of being a writer, and could argue long and hard her strong feminist ideals. Her name was Greta Lorke, and they were all a little fascinated with her; and having worked so hard to get to the United States, she was intrigued by them, too.
The daughter of a metalworker and a seamstress, Lorke had grown up in a tenement house in the eastern German industrial town of Frankfurt an der Oder, where her parents, Georg and Martha, rented out rooms to make ends meet. The couple made many sacrifices to ensure she had the best education, and she thanked them for the work ethic, Catholic conscience, and sense of justice that they had gifted her. An American friend had suggested she come to the United States, discover life in America, and extend her theories of economics. She had saved hard, and when she arrived in America, she was bowled over by it: Whereas German universities were staffed by stuffy, old-fashioned men, in Madison many of the academics were young and eager to treat students as equals. For Lorke, seeing a professor sit on the floor of their student house, sipping coffee and asking them their opinions on economic theory, was a dizzying revelation.
It was no surprise that, despite memories of the Great War, she had found a warm welcome in Madison, Wisconsin. Many students were from nearby Milwaukee, where three out of four people were of German descent, and there was a fascination with Europe, an interest in how it was healing after the battles of the previous decade. Lorke told her new friends that she had lived in Berlin and seen up close the horrors of poverty. While studying economics at the University of Berlin, she had worked in an orphanage in the working-class area of Neukšlln. The children she worked with were disfigured by rickets, disease, and hunger. Seeing such poverty had a massive effect on Lorke. Lorke felt that the "old order" of not just Germany but most of Europe-the monarchs, aristocrats, and church leaders-had failed the people. That system did not work, and she looked for something that might replace it. It was 1927, and the world had readjusted after the war. It was time for the people to have their say.
The group stopped chatting to greet two new friends, who were skating on the frozen lake. Both were tall, and even though they wore bulky winter clothing, Lorke could see that they made a handsome couple. She recognized immediately the man's strong German accent, but it was the woman who interested her the most, and they quickly began to talk.
Born in 1902, three months before Lorke, Mildred Fish-Harnack had grown up close to a district of Milwaukee that housed the cityÕs large German community. Although not of German extraction herself, she had always felt close to German culture. The youngest daughter of William and Georgina Fish, she did not have a particularly happy home life. Her parents were hopelessly mismatched. William tried and failed in business, preferred his horses and dog to his children, and was devoted to Wild West stories. Georgina was the family rock. A convert to Christian Science, she told her children never to be afraid and instilled in them a strong sense of confidence and a commitment to the truth. After the Fishes separated, William struggled to cope alone, and in 1918, he was found dead in a barn where he had been sleeping during a blizzard.
Georgina moved her family to Washington, where she took a job as a stenographer. Mildred spent her teenage years immersed in poetry and playing sports, at which she excelled. She dreamed of being a journalist and in 1921 enrolled at the university in Madison, where as well as studying she worked as a drama and film critic for the Wisconsin State Journal and joined a group of poets and radicals on the Wisconsin Literary Magazine. The magazine was satirical, liberal, and highbrow, and it sold on newsstands as far away as New York. Working for it made Mildred feel like a writer. After her graduation in 1925 she stayed on at the university to work as an English teacher. One day, a German student walked into her classroom by mistake and was bowled over by her poise and appearance. He felt an instant kinship. "I felt as if Mildred was a member of my family," he later recalled.
The visitor's name was Arvid Harnack. A year older than Mildred, he was the eldest child of a family of theologians and history professors in Darmstadt, the capital of the Grand Duchy of Hesse. Like Mildred, Harnack was blond, blue-eyed, and tall. He was also hardworking, self-confident, and arrogant. Already a doctor of law with a fiercely bright brain for economic theory, he had arrived in Madison as a student paid for by the Rockefeller Foundation-a scholarship given to only four students in the whole of the United States.
Standing in Mildred's classroom, he apologized for his poor English and she for her German: They agreed to meet and practice each other's languages. Romance blossomed over canoe rides and picnics during which they talked about their love of poetry and literature, of Goethe and Whitman. In reflective moments they talked of their fathers. Like Mildred, Harnack had lost his father when he was a teenager. Otto Harnack, who suffered severe depression, had drowned himself in a river.
The couple's courtship was brief and intense, with Mildred aware that one day Harnack planned to return to Germany and work for the Ministry of Labor. Georgina Fish approved of Mildred's German boyfriend, and in August 1926, Mildred and Harnack were married. A free spirit, ahead of her time, she hyphenated her surname to Fish-Harnack.
Greta Lorke had none of the self-confidence that HarnackÕs privileged background had instilled in him, and she was acutely conscious of their differences in Òclass,Ó but she felt no such inhibition toward Mildred Fish-Harnack and a strong friendship quickly developed.
Energized by both women's interest in economics and progressive politics, Harnack introduced them to John R. Commons, a distinguished professor and renowned labor historian whose proposals became a rallying call for trade union leaders. Commons invited them all to be regulars at his exclusive weekly party at the campus, known as the "Friday Niters Club," where discussions took place on liberal ideas about social and economic policy. His invitation was an acknowledgment of the three students' intellectual standing. Commons and his students debated liberal and progressive ideas around state unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, and income tax, and many would go on to be key personnel in Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal administration. Harnack said in the meetings that those who owned the means of production continued to make money during war, depression, or hyperinflation. Working people needed more power.
During Harnack's two and a half years in the United States, Commons became a mentor to the German, who wrote a study of the pre-Marxist working class in North America, which was later published in Germany. Inspired by Commons, Harnack met and interviewed workers who had been imprisoned after a coal strike in Colorado.
The open atmosphere at Commons's meetings was such that Lorke, the daughter of a metalworker, felt empowered to share her thoughts. She praised America but, noting the way white students separated themselves from black students, said that the United States also needed reform.
After the meetings, the three students would sit and read the German newspapers, which Harnack's family could afford to send to the United States, and they would discuss the future for Germany. They had not yet seen the Nazis coming, but the seeds of the Harnacks' and Lorke's opposition to Hitler were sown during those dreamy nights in Wisconsin.
In September 1928, when Arvid HarnackÕs fellowship in economics ended and he had to return home to Germany, his wife stayed on in the United States and taught at a womenÕs college in Baltimore. But her intention was always to follow her husband, and the following summer she was able to take up an academic fellowship in Germany to study for a doctorate in American literature in Jena, a liberal-minded city in the hilly landscape of eastern Germany that had become a center for education and research. For Fish-Harnack, with her love of German literature and philosophy, it was the place where Schiller and Hegel had taught.
She had chosen Jena because it was where Harnack's family lived, and on arrival, Fish-Harnack was introduced to his mother, Clara, and his five siblings, including the youngest, Falk, who was then just sixteen. They all got on immediately, with Clara charmed by Fish-Harnack's knowledge of Greek and Goethe, and her always-improving German.
Mildred Fish-Harnack had married into German academic royalty. Harnack's paternal grandfather had been a professor and university rector, while his mother's father had been so distinguished in the field of agricultural chemistry that he had a university named after him. Clara Harnack, who was fluent in several languages, worked as an art teacher and had turned one of the four rooms in the family's apartment into a studio. She was a committed socialist and pacifist who cared little for what other people in her social class said about her. Otto-her late husband-had been a professor of literary history and aesthetics, who had written books on Goethe and Schiller. Arvid Harnack had been brought up in an environment that Greta Lorke later described as "kulturdurchtrŠnkt"-saturated with culture-and that had only intensified after his father's death. Otto had been the youngest of four professorial brothers, and on his death, his oldest brother, Adolf, had taken on the role of mentoring Arvid and his siblings. They had moved to Berlin to be with him and found him to be a major and dominating influence. This influence would extend to many others in his sphere who would eventually oppose the Nazis.
Although soft-spoken and witty, Adolf von Harnack was a disciplined, exacting, and intellectually towering figure. He was also exceptionally well connected socially, being a regular guest at state dinners and court functions. He had been raised to nobility-symbolized by the "von" in his name-by Kaiser Wilhelm and was a pillar of the Bildungselite, that class of academics and civil servants which drew deep respect from the German people. A preeminent theologian-the Harnacks were Lutherans-and church historian, he was a professor and subsequently rector of the University of Berlin. He inspired Harnack and would do the same for his wife. When they met, he took her to his study and they discussed her career and her upcoming doctorate. When she confessed that she was a little anxious about the lectures in philosophy and economics she would be attending alongside her major studies in North American literature, he told her that difficulties are in the world so one might "overcome them." Within a few days Professor Harnack was introducing her to his powerful friends at the Kaiser Wilhelm Society and at an official dinner between the ministers for state and culture.
Although he was a pillar of the German establishment, Adolf von Harnack's influence would not necessarily be a conservative one, or one that inspired conformity or blind nationalism. He was very much his own man. He had been a key figure in the German pacifist movement during the Great War and had warned against an aggressive expansionist foreign policy. Despite being a prewar member of the Kaiser's inner circle, he had eventually turned against the monarch in favor of supporting the Weimar Republic. He had even helped draft the elements of the republic's constitution that dealt with the church and education. He believed scholars should intervene in politics, offering a guiding hand, and this philosophy permeated throughout his extended family, which included the Bonhoeffers and DelbrŸcks, who were also destined to become involved in the resistance to Hitler.
Adolf von Harnack's home on Kunz-Buntschuh-Strasse in the affluent western Berlin suburb of Grunewald, which includes the forest that gives it its name, was a place where Karl Bonhoeffer, the University of Berlin's leading psychiatrist and neurologist, and Hans DelbrŸck, Adolf's brother-in-law and a leading military historian, met and debated. They were free-thinking men, opposed to Germany's anti-Semitism, with a circle of friends that included Adolf Grimme, the Social Democratic minister of culture. Their children, including Arvid and Falk, Klaus and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Justus DelbrŸck, were all in awe of this older generation, and would be deeply influenced by it. It was influence of a kind that, during the coming years of fascism in Germany, would profoundly affect all of their lives.
Greta Lorke arrived back in Germany in October 1929, a few days before the Wall Street Crash sent its shock waves across the world and the German economy collapsed. Germany had relied heavily on American capital for its growth during the 1920s, and that money was now being withdrawn. Rampant inflation and mass unemployment led to poverty and hardship for millions. The German mark was destroyed and with it peopleÕs savings.
Taking a series of jobs in order to get by, Lorke set her heart on returning to a first love, the theater, which was thriving in Berlin as political and social ideals were explored by ambitious and radical dramatists such as Bertolt Brecht and Adam Kuckhoff at the Staatstheater. During the summer of 1930 she went to a drama festival in Hamburg and met Kuckhoff. A moody but attractive figure fifteen years Lorke's senior, Kuckhoff immediately pursued the younger, independent-minded woman. She, in turn, was attracted by his confidence and the sense of danger he emitted: Kuckhoff had only recently been sacked as editor of an influential political and cultural magazine, Die Tat, having been accused by the owner of taking it too far to the political left.
Kuckhoff and Lorke took a romantic boat trip around the harbor at Hamburg, from where she had caught the boat for America. He listened to her stories from Madison, took her to dinner and then to his bed in his hotel room. Only when she returned to Berlin did she discover he was married.
Even before the Nazis had come to power, their influence among the student population was growing. In 1931, at Giessen, one of the places Mildred Fish-Harnack went to work for a semester, a third of the student body supported the Nazis. GermanyÕs young people-raised against the ghastly backdrop of the Great War-knew they faced the darkness of unemployment and economic misery, and they were looking for somebody who could offer them hope. Foreshadowing what was to come, some students sought to oppose and attack members of the faculty who espoused leftist views.
