Red Orchestra Read Online Free PDF Page B

himself when Arvid was twelve, and his mother lost her modest pension in the economic crisis. Toward the end of World War I, Arvid ran away from home to join the army. He was sent back home for being underage, but joined the right-wing Freikorps immediately after the war, intent on battling the Communist insurrection. 8 Once he settled down to his studies, he excelled at them. But Arvid had little use for academic theory unless he could find a way to apply it to the social realities around him.
    Greta and Mildred quickly became friends. Greta found Mildred a little dreamy, especially in her notion of Germany, which, dappled with castles and enchanted forests, seemed straight out of a Grimms' fairy tale. But she was good-hearted and earnest, and Greta admired her passion for American literature, a subject that was just beginning to be taken seriously in Germany. Mildred was the kind of woman men admire and other women envy, as she floated lightly above the fray. Still, her penniless New England pedigree led some students to whisper that Arvid was out of her league.
    Greta made friends with Arvid, but she never completely warmed to him. He was fierce in a debate and enjoyed scoring points with his relentless logic. Still, he was a good person to know, especially since he received a steady supply of German newspapers from home. Arriving by ship, the papers were a few weeks out of date, and the news they brought only went from bad to worse. Unemployment back home was climbing steadily, and the coalition government in Weimar never established firm control.
    In his irritatingly pedantic fashion, Arvid would tell Greta that the real problem lay in the economy, and that the solution lay in giving more power to the workers. The big factory owners had made huge sums of money manufacturing armaments during the war, and multiplied their profits through speculation during the troubled peace. As long as profiteers could turn disasters like hyperinflation and unemployment to their own ends, Germany could never achieve peace and stability. Germany'sonly lifeline, Arvid told her, was the United States and its offer of loans to see the country through.
    Life in Madison was not all grim political debates. Arvid and Mildred liked to host Shakespeare readings in the evenings, and Greta was a frequent participant. She was amused by the way Arvid always claimed the most difficult leading roles—Lear, Coriolanus, Henry IV—soldiering through them with a sophisticated grasp of the content but hobbled by his thick German accent.
    Greta was also fascinated by movies of every description. Over its first decade, the Soviet Union produced a bounty of widely acclaimed avant-garde work. Greta was gripped by Sergei Eisenstein's film
The General Line,
an arresting look at the new phenomenon of collectivized farms. But she was also enthralled by
Hallelujah,
an early American film with a black cast, and delighted by Walt Disney's first Mickey Mouse talkie in July 1928.
    Greta and her friends were passionate about fiction, and avidly read the newest works by Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, William Faulkner, and other writers who were forging a golden age of American literature. As Germany grew more pinched and chaotic, America felt increasingly like the land of infinite possibility.
    By 1929, Greta's student visa was running out and she was in the final stage of her doctoral examinations. She was not eager to return and go job hunting in Germany's conservative university environment. She had found it cramped and misogynistic when she left Germany, and she doubted it had changed. But she did miss home. She wrote her parents:
    I'm coming back. I'll find a real job, and I'm tired from studying for so long. I'm afraid that I'll lose my foothold in reality if I remain immersed in my books, and I don't think I'll ever make it to professor anyway… I still have my old desire to wake up someday with the sure sense that I can write a convincing book.