Red Orchestra Read Online Free PDF

time, and Greta enjoyed her air of exclusivity. Thus she was less than pleased one day when another student addressed her in flawless German. This, she learned, was the other German on campus, Arvid Harnack.
    Arvid did not wear his learning lightly. His lean, bespectacled face radiated intensity, and some thought him cold. He was only a year and a half older than Greta, yet in 1924, when she was just beginning her undergraduate work in Berlin, he had already completed his law degree and was about to move on to a stint at the London School of Economics. Whereas Greta was a striver from a blue-collar family, Arvid was born into one of Germany's most prestigious clans of lawyers, scholars, and clergymen. Aspiring intellectuals competed for a place at the family table, just to hear them talk. Arvid's uncle, Adolf von Harnack, was one of Germany's leading liberal theologians.
    Arvid's younger cousin and childhood neighbor, Dietrich Bonhoef-fer, followed in their uncle's footsteps as a theologian, and came to study in the United States a few years after Arvid. The Harnacks and their close relations the Bonhoeffers, the Delbrücks, and the Dohnanyis belongedto a society that attached prestige to intellectual accomplishment. They even looked alike: a tribe of sturdy, bookish people with fine features and keen eyes, most of them framed by wire-rimmed spectacles.
    Greta found Arvid's credentials more impressive than endearing. She had had to labor for every pfennig to finance her trip to America, while Arvid had arrived in Madison on the wings of a much-coveted fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, one of only four in the whole country. Greta acknowledged Arvid's brilliance, and noticed how even Professor Commons deferred to his views. But at the same time, she bristled at his air of superiority, especially in regard to their fellow Germans. Greta quoted him mockingly: “They're deeper thinkers. They do this and that better. They even have more cultivated tastes in food and drink.” In short, Greta found Arvid to be a classic German intellectual snob. Greta tried to avoid him after that, but a second meeting changed her mind.
    The meeting took place at an ice-sailing and skating party she attended with a group of students. Greta cozied up to the bonfire beside the lake, inhaling the aroma of pork chops crackling over the flames. Suddenly she looked up and saw two figures skating toward her, their bodies swaying in unison over the ice. As they approached, she could see it was Arvid, accompanied by a pale, willowy young woman with a gentle smile. Arvid was much improved, Greta thought, by his wife's company: “more relaxed, more serene, altogether more pleasant.”
    Arvid Harnack had met Mildred Fish shortly after his arrival in Wisconsin in 1926. One day (or so the story went) he wandered into the wrong hall looking for John Commons's class. Instead, he found a young teaching assistant beginning her lecture on literature. She was slim and fair, radiating a serene and intelligent beauty. Entranced, he stayed to listen and introduced himself after class. The two agreed to swap English and German lessons, and within a few months they were married by a Methodist minister, on her brother's farm.
    Mildred Fish Harnack was only three months older than Greta. She was born in Milwaukee, a German-American enclave, but her forebears were New England Yankees. (They included such gloriously named Puritans as Preserved Fish and Grizzle Strange.) Like Greta, Mildred had been obliged to earn her education, and counted on the moral support of a devoted mother. She developed an ardent interest in literature and languages.She memorized long passages of poetry in German and ancient Greek, and planned to make her mark as a writer and critic. Together, she and Arvid made a golden couple, tall, blond, and austere.
    For all of his family's prestigious connections, Arvid also survived a troubled youth. His father, a melancholy scholar, had drowned