Part 2 (1/2)

On the platform, the Dodds encountered a crowd of Americans and Germans waiting to meet them, including officials from the German foreign office and reporters armed with cameras and flash apparatus known then as ”flashlights.” An energetic-seeming man, midsized, about five feet six inches tall-”a dry, drawling, peppery man,” as historian and diplomat George Kennan later described him-stepped forward and introduced himself. This was George Messersmith, consul general, the Foreign Service officer whose lengthy dispatches Dodd had read while in Was.h.i.+ngton. Martha and her father liked him immediately, judging him to be a man of principle and candor and a likely friend, though this appraisal was destined for significant revision.

Messersmith returned this initial goodwill. ”I liked Dodd from the outset,” Messersmith wrote. ”He was a very simple man in his manner and in his approach.” He noted, however, that Dodd ”gave the impression of being rather fragile.”

In the crowd of greeters the Dodds also encountered two women who over the next several years would play important roles in the family's life, one a German, the other an American from Wisconsin who was married to a member of one of Germany's loftiest scholarly dynasties.

The German woman was Bella Fromm-”Auntie Voss,” society columnist for a highly respected newspaper, the Vossische Zeitung Vossische Zeitung, one of two hundred newspapers then still operating in Berlin and, unlike most of them, still capable of independent reportage. Fromm was full figured and handsome, with striking eyes-onyx under black gull-wing brows, her pupils partially curtained by upper lids in a manner that conveyed both intellect and skepticism. She was trusted by virtually all members of the city's diplomatic community as well as by senior members of the n.a.z.i Party, no small achievement considering that she was Jewish. She claimed to have a source high in Hitler's government who gave her advance warning of future Reich actions. She was a close friend of Messersmith's; her daughter, Gonny, called him ”uncle.”

Fromm in her diary recorded her initial observations of the Dodds. Martha, she wrote, seemed ”a perfect example of the intelligent young American female.” As for the amba.s.sador, he ”looks like a scholar. His dry humor attracted me. He is observant and precise. He learned to love Germany when he was a student in Leipzig, he said, and will dedicate his strength to build a sincere friends.h.i.+p between his country and Germany.”

She added: ”I hope he and the President of the United States will not be too disappointed in their efforts.”

The second woman, the American, was Mildred Fish Harnack, a representative of the American Women's Club in Berlin. She was Fromm's physical opposite in every way-slender, blonde, ethereal, reserved. Martha and Mildred liked each other at once. Mildred wrote later that Martha ”is clear and capable and has a real desire to understand the world. Therefore our interests touch.” She sensed that she had found a soul mate, ”a woman who is seriously interested in writing. It's a hindrance to be lonely and isolated in one's work. Ideas stimulate ideas, and the love of writing is contagious.”

Martha in turn was impressed by Mildred. ”I was drawn to her immediately,” she wrote. Mildred exhibited an appealing combination of strength and delicacy. ”She was slow to speak and express opinions; she listened quietly, her large grey blue eyes serious...weighing, evaluating, trying to understand.”

COUNSELOR GORDON PLACED MARTHA in a car with a young protocol secretary a.s.signed to accompany her to the hotel where the Dodds were to live until they could find a suitable house to lease. Her parents traveled separately with Gordon, Messersmith, and Messersmith's wife. Martha's car proceeded south over the Spree into the city. in a car with a young protocol secretary a.s.signed to accompany her to the hotel where the Dodds were to live until they could find a suitable house to lease. Her parents traveled separately with Gordon, Messersmith, and Messersmith's wife. Martha's car proceeded south over the Spree into the city.

She found long, straight boulevards that evoked the rigid grid of Chicago, but the similarity ended there. Unlike the skysc.r.a.per-forested landscape she had walked through every workday in Chicago, here most buildings were rather short, typically five stories or so, and these amplified the low, flat feel of the city. Most looked to be very old, but a few were jarringly new, with walls of gla.s.s, flat roofs, and curved facades, the offspring of Walter Gropius, Bruno Taut, and Erich Mendelsohn, all condemned by the n.a.z.is as decadent, communist, and, inevitably, Jewish. The city was full of color and energy. There were double-decked omnibuses, S-Bahn trains, and brightly colored trams whose catenaries fired off brilliant blue sparks. Low-slung automobiles thrummed past, most painted black, but others red, cream, and deep blue, many of unfamiliar design: the adorable Opel 4/16 PS, the Horch with its lethal arrow-in-bow hood ornament, and the ubiquitous Mercedes, black, low, edged with chrome. Joseph Goebbels himself was moved to capture in prose the energy of the city as exhibited in one of its most popular shopping avenues, the Kurfurstendamm, albeit in an essay meant not to praise but to condemn, calling the street ”the abscess” of the city. ”The bells on the streetcars ring, buses clatter by honking their horns, stuffed full with people and more people; taxis and fancy private automobiles hum over the gla.s.sy asphalt,” he wrote. ”The fragrance of heavy perfume floats by. Harlots smile from the artful pastels of fas.h.i.+onable women's faces; so-called men stroll to and fro, monocles glinting; fake and precious stones sparkle.” Berlin was, he wrote, a ”stone desert” filled with sin and corruption and inhabited by a populace ”borne to the grave with a smile.”

The young protocol officer pointed out various landmarks. Martha asked question after question, oblivious to the fact that she was trying the officer's patience. Early in their drive, they came to an open plaza dominated by an immense building of Silesian sandstone, with two-hundred-foot towers at each of its four corners, built in what one of Karl Baedeker's famous guidebooks described as ”florid Italian Renaissance style.” This was the Reichstagsgebaude, in which Germany's legislative body, the Reichstag, had convened until the building was set afire four months earlier. A young Dutchman-a lapsed communist named Marinus van der Lubbe-was arrested and charged with the arson, along with four other suspects named as accomplices, though a widely endorsed rumor held that the n.a.z.i regime itself had orchestrated the fire to stir fears of a Bolshevik uprising and thereby gain popular support for the suspension of civil liberties and the destruction of the Communist Party in Germany. The upcoming trial was the talk of Berlin.

But Martha was perplexed. Contrary to what news reports had led her to expect, the building seemed intact. The towers still stood and the facades appeared unmarked. ”Oh, I thought it was burned down!” she exclaimed as the car pa.s.sed the building. ”It looks all right to me. Tell me what happened.”

After this and several other outbursts that Martha conceded were imprudent, the protocol officer leaned toward her and hissed, ”Sss.h.!.+ Young lady, you must learn to be seen and not heard. You mustn't say so much and ask so many questions. This isn't America and you can't say all the things you think.”

She stayed quiet for the rest of the drive.

UPON REACHING THEIR HOTEL, the Esplanade, on the well-shaded and lovely Bellevuestra.s.se, Martha and her parents were shown the accommodations that Messersmith himself had arranged.

Dodd was appalled, Martha enchanted.

The hotel was one of Berlin's finest, with gigantic chandeliers and fireplaces and two gla.s.s-roofed courtyards, one of which-the Palm Courtyard-was famous for its tea dances and as the place where Berliners had gotten their first opportunity to dance the Charleston. Greta Garbo had once been a guest, as had Charlie Chaplin. Messersmith had booked the Imperial Suite, a collection of rooms that included a large double-bedded room with private bath, two single bedrooms also with private baths, one drawing room, and one conference room, all arrayed along the even-numbered side of a hall, from room 116 through room 124. Two reception rooms had walls covered with satin brocade. The suite was suffused with a springlike scent imparted by flowers sent by well-wishers, so many flowers, Martha recalled, ”that there was scarcely s.p.a.ce to move in-orchids and rare scented lilies, flowers of all colors and descriptions.” Upon entering the suite, she wrote, ”we gasped at its magnificence.”

But such opulence abraded every principle of the Jeffersonian ideal that Dodd had embraced throughout his life. Dodd had made it known before his arrival that he wanted ”modest quarters in a modest hotel,” Messersmith wrote. While Messersmith understood Dodd's desire to live ”most inconspicuously and modestly,” he also knew ”that the German officials and German people would not understand it.”

There was another factor. U.S. diplomats and State Department officials had always stayed at the Esplanade. To do otherwise would have const.i.tuted an egregious breach of protocol and tradition.

THE FAMILY SETTLED IN. Bill Jr. and the Chevrolet were not expected to arrive for a while yet. Dodd retired to a bedroom with a book. Martha found it all hard to grasp. Cards from well-wishers continued to arrive, accompanied by still more flowers. She and her mother sat in awe of the luxury around them, ”wondering desperately how all this was to be paid for without mortgaging our souls.”

Later that evening the family rallied and went down to the hotel restaurant for dinner, where Dodd dusted off his decades-old German and in his dry manner tried to joke with the waiters. He was, Martha wrote, ”in magnificent humor.” The waiters, more accustomed to the imperious behavior of world dignitaries and n.a.z.i officials, were unsure how to respond and adopted a level of politeness that Martha found almost obsequious. The food was good, she judged, but heavy, cla.s.sically German, and demanded an after-dinner walk.

Outside, the Dodds turned left and walked along Bellevuestra.s.se through the shadows of trees and the penumbrae of streetlamps. The dim lighting evoked for Martha the somnolence of rural American towns very late at night. She saw no soldiers, no police. The night was soft and lovely; ”everything,” she wrote, ”was peaceful, romantic, strange, nostalgic.”

They continued on to the end of the street and crossed a small square into the Tiergarten, Berlin's equivalent of Central Park. The name, in literal translation, meant ”animal garden” or ”garden of the beasts,” which harked back to its deeper past, when it was a hunting preserve for royalty. Now it was 630 acres of trees, walkways, riding paths and statuary that spread west from the Brandenburg Gate to the wealthy residential and shopping district of Charlottenburg. The Spree ran along its northern boundary; the city's famous zoo stood at its southwest corner. At night the park was especially alluring. ”In the Tiergarten,” a British diplomat wrote, ”the little lamps flicker among the little trees, and the gra.s.s is starred with the fireflies of a thousand cigarettes.”

The Dodds entered the Siegesallee-Avenue of Victory-lined with ninety-six statues and busts of past Prussian leaders, among them Frederick the Great, various lesser Fredericks, and such once-bright stars as Albert the Bear, Henry the Child, and Otho the Lazy. Berliners called them Puppen Puppen-dolls. Dodd held forth on the history of each, revealing the detailed knowledge of Germany he had acquired in Leipzig three decades earlier. Martha could tell that his sense of foreboding had dissipated. ”I am sure this was one of the happiest evenings we spent in Germany,” she wrote. ”All of us were full of joy and peace.”

Her father had loved Germany ever since his tenure in Leipzig, when each day a young woman brought fresh violets for his room. Now on this first night, as they walked along the Avenue of Victory, Martha too felt a rush of affection for the country. The city, the overall atmosphere, was nothing like what news reports back home had led her to expect. ”I felt the press had badly maligned the country and I wanted to proclaim the warmth and friendliness of the people, the soft summer night with its fragrance of trees and flowers, the serenity of the streets.”

This was July 13, 1933.

PART II.

House Hunting in the Third Reich

Amba.s.sador Dodd at his desk ( (photo credit p2.1)

CHAPTER 6.

Seduction.

In her first few days in Berlin, Martha fell ill with a cold. As she lay convalescing at the Esplanade she received a visitor, an American woman named Sigrid Schultz, who for the preceding fourteen years had been a correspondent in Berlin for Martha's former employer, the Chicago Tribune Chicago Tribune, and was now its correspondent in chief for Central Europe. Schultz was forty years old, five foot three-the same height as Martha-with blond hair and blue eyes. ”A little pudgy,” as Martha put it, with ”an abundance of golden hair.” Despite her size and cherub's gleam, Schultz was known to fellow correspondents and n.a.z.i officials alike as being tenacious, outspoken, and utterly fearless. She made every diplomat's invitation list and was a regular at parties thrown by Goebbels, Goring, and other n.a.z.i leaders. Goring took a perverse delight in calling her ”the dragon from Chicago.”

Schultz and Martha chatted at first about innocuous things, but soon the conversation turned to the rapid transformation of Berlin during the six months since Hitler had become chancellor. Schultz told stories of violence against Jews, communists, and anyone the n.a.z.is saw as unsympathetic to their revolution. In some cases the victims had been American citizens.

Martha countered that Germany was in the midst of a historic rebirth. Those incidents that did occur surely were only inadvertent expressions of the wild enthusiasm that had gripped the country. In the few days since her arrival Martha had seen nothing at all to corroborate Schultz's tales.

But Schultz pressed on with stories of beatings and capricious imprisonments in the ”wild” camps-ad hoc prisons that had sprung up throughout the country under the control of n.a.z.i paramilitary forces-and in more formal prisons, known by now as concentration camps. The German word was Konzentrationslager Konzentrationslager, or KZ. The opening of one such camp had occurred on March 22, 1933, its existence revealed at a press conference held by a thirty-two-year-old former chicken farmer turned commander of the Munich police, Heinrich Himmler. The camp occupied an old munitions factory a brief train ride from Munich, just outside the charming village of Dachau, and now housed hundreds of prisoners, possibly thousands-no one knew-most arrested not on specific charges but rather for ”protective custody.” These were not Jews, not yet, but communists and members of the liberal Social Democratic Party, all held in conditions of strict discipline.

Martha grew annoyed at Schultz's effort to tarnish her rosy view, but she liked Schultz and saw that she would make a valuable friend, given her vast range of contacts among journalists and diplomats. They parted amicably, but with Martha unshaken in her view that the revolution unfolding around her was a heroic episode that could yield a new and healthy Germany.

”I didn't believe all her stories,” Martha wrote later. ”I thought she was exaggerating and a bit hysterical.”

When Martha left her hotel she witnessed no violence, saw no one cowering in fear, felt no oppression. The city was a delight. What Goebbels condemned she adored. A short walk from the hotel, to the right, away from the cool green of the Tiergarten, took her to Potsdamer Platz, one of the busiest intersections in the world, with its famous five-way streetlight, believed to have been the first-ever stoplight installed in Europe. Berlin had only 120,000 cars, but at any given moment all of them seemed to collect here, like bees to a hive. One could watch the whirl of cars and people from an outdoor table at the Josty Cafe. Here too stood Haus Vaterland, a five-story nightclub capable of serving six thousand diners in twelve restaurant milieus, including a Wild West bar, with waiters in immense cowboy hats, and the Rhineland Wine Terrace, where each hour guests experienced a brief indoor thunderstorm complete with lightning, thunder, and, to the chagrin of women wearing true silk, a sprinkling of rain. ”What a youthful, carefree, won't-go-home-till-morning, romantic, wonderful place!” one visitor wrote: ”It is the jolliest place in Berlin.”

For a twenty-four-year-old woman unenc.u.mbered by job and financial concern and soon to be freed of a dead marriage, Berlin was endlessly compelling. Within days she found herself going on an afternoon ”tea date” with a famous American correspondent, H. R. Knickerbocker-”Knick” to his friends-who filed stories for the New York Evening Post New York Evening Post. He took her to the Eden Hotel, the notorious Eden, where communist firebrand Rosa Luxemburg had been beaten nearly to death in 1919 before being driven into the adjacent Tiergarten and killed.

Now, in the Eden's tea room, Martha and Knick danced. He was skinny and short, with red hair and brown eyes, and led her across the floor with skill and grace. Inevitably, the conversation s.h.i.+fted to Germany. Like Sigrid Schultz, Knickerbocker tried to teach Martha a bit about the politics of the country and the character of its new leaders.h.i.+p. Martha wasn't interested, and the conversation drifted elsewhere. What enthralled her were the German men and women around her. She loved ”their funny stiff dancing, listening to their incomprehensible and guttural tongue, and watching their simple gestures, natural behavior and childlike eagerness for life.”

She liked the Germans she had met thus far-more, certainly, than the French she had encountered during her studies in Paris. Unlike the French, she wrote, the Germans ”weren't thieves, they weren't selfish, they weren't impatient or cold and hard.”

MARTHA'S CHEERY VIEW of things was widely shared by outsiders visiting Germany and especially Berlin. The fact was that on most days in most neighborhoods the city looked and functioned as it always had. The cigar peddler in front of the Hotel Adlon, at Unter den Linden 1, continued to sell cigars as always (and Hitler continued to shun the hotel, preferring instead the nearby Kaiserhof). Every morning Germans crowded the Tiergarten, many on horseback, as thousands of others commuted into the city center on trains and trams from such neighborhoods as Wedding and Onkel Toms Hutte. Nicely dressed men and women sat in the Romanisches Cafe, drinking coffee and wine, and smoking cigarettes and cigars, and exercising the sharp wit for which Berliners were famed-the of things was widely shared by outsiders visiting Germany and especially Berlin. The fact was that on most days in most neighborhoods the city looked and functioned as it always had. The cigar peddler in front of the Hotel Adlon, at Unter den Linden 1, continued to sell cigars as always (and Hitler continued to shun the hotel, preferring instead the nearby Kaiserhof). Every morning Germans crowded the Tiergarten, many on horseback, as thousands of others commuted into the city center on trains and trams from such neighborhoods as Wedding and Onkel Toms Hutte. Nicely dressed men and women sat in the Romanisches Cafe, drinking coffee and wine, and smoking cigarettes and cigars, and exercising the sharp wit for which Berliners were famed-the Berliner Schnauze Berliner Schnauze, or ”Berlin snout.” At the Katakombe cabaret, Werner Finck continued poking fun at the new regime, despite the risk of arrest. During one show a member of the audience called him a ”lousy yid,” to which he responded, ”I'm not Jewish. I only look intelligent.” The audience laughed with gusto.

Nice days were still nice. ”The sun s.h.i.+nes,” wrote Christopher Isherwood in his Berlin Stories Berlin Stories, ”and Hitler is the master of this city. The sun s.h.i.+nes, and dozens of my friends...are in prison, possibly dead.” The prevailing normalcy was seductive. ”I catch sight of my face in the mirror of a shop, and am shocked to see that I am smiling,” Isherwood wrote. ”You can't help smiling, in such beautiful weather.” The trams moved as usual, as did the pedestrians pa.s.sing on the street; everything around him had ”an air of curious familiarity, of striking resemblance to something one remembers as normal and pleasant in the past-like a very good photograph.”

Beneath the surface, however, Germany had undergone a rapid and sweeping revolution that reached deep into the fabric of daily life. It had occurred quietly and largely out of easy view. At its core was a government campaign called Gleichschaltung Gleichschaltung-meaning ”Coordination”-to bring citizens, government ministries, universities, and cultural and social inst.i.tutions in line with National Socialist beliefs and att.i.tudes.

”Coordination” occurred with astonis.h.i.+ng speed, even in sectors of life not directly targeted by specific laws, as Germans willingly placed themselves under the sway of n.a.z.i rule, a phenomenon that became known as Selbstgleichschaltung Selbstgleichschaltung, or ”self-coordination.” Change came to Germany so quickly and across such a wide front that German citizens who left the country for business or travel returned to find everything around them altered, as if they were characters in a horror movie who come back to find that people who once were their friends, clients, patients, and customers have become different in ways hard to discern. Gerda Laufer, a socialist, wrote that she felt ”deeply shaken that people whom one regarded as friends, who were known for a long time, from one hour to the next transformed themselves.”

Neighbors turned surly; petty jealousies flared into denunciations made to the SA-the Storm Troopers-or to the newly founded Geheime Staatspolizei, only just becoming known by its acronym, Gestapo (GEheime STAatsPOlizei), coined by a post office clerk seeking a less c.u.mbersome way of identifying the agency. The Gestapo's reputation for omniscience and malevolence arose from a confluence of two phenomena: first, a political climate in which merely criticizing the government could get one arrested, and second, the existence of a populace eager not just to step in line and become coordinated but also to use n.a.z.i sensitivities to satisfy individual needs and salve jealousies. One study of n.a.z.i records found that of a sample of 213 denunciations, 37 percent arose not from heartfelt political belief but from private conflicts, with the trigger often breathtakingly trivial. In October 1933, for example, the clerk at a grocery store turned in a cranky customer who had stubbornly insisted on receiving three pfennigs in change. The clerk accused her of failure to pay taxes. Germans denounced one another with such gusto that senior n.a.z.i officials urged the populace to be more discriminating as to what circ.u.mstances might justify a report to the police. Hitler himself acknowledged, in a remark to his minister of justice, ”we are living at present in a sea of denunciations and human meanness.”