My dearest Lilly, he wrote in 1931. Yes, the lindens are in flower and the man on the street corner is still singing Wagner, badly. In some ways Berlin has changed. But in others it will always be your city. I start shooting my film early next year; the financing is in place and I have begun assembling my crew. The actress I have cast, however, is a dull electric bloom compared to your flickering flame. Yes, I am still considering the move to America, but not until I have sorted out my affairs in Berlin.
It was on the way to the central post office on Spandauer Strasse, one cool bright day in March 1932, that Ilya came face-to-face with Katya Nadezhda. It wasn’t surprising that he didn’t recognize her: he hadn’t seen her for years.That morning he had already passed dozens of old women who had come out to enjoy the weather, to sit in the parks and turn their faces to the cool spring sun. And so when he found himself staring into the face of a tired woman heading in the other direction, Ilya simply bowed and moved aside. But instead of passing by with a nod of thanks as the other women had done, she stared up at him with an expression he couldn’t interpret.
“Excuse me, madam,” he asked. “Is there something the matter?”
“You don’t know me, do you?” she replied in a whisper.
There was indeed something familiar about her face. Straight white hair fell to her shoulders beneath a cloche hat. She wore a patched black coat and carried a battered clutch bag in one hand and a newspaper in the other. She glanced down, shook her head, and started once more on her way.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said in Russian.
He knew that voice, he knew that accent, he knew her after all. And his heart seemed to momentarily stop beating.
“Katya,” he said. “Is it you?”
The woman paused. And as all the shopgirls out for a breath of fresh air and businessmen on their way to important meetings rushed past, she turned around slowly.
“Ilya,” she said. “It’s been so long.”
And then her eyes filled with tears.
As Katya Nadezhda dabbed her face with a darned cotton handkerchief, Ilya was filled with so many conflicting emotions that he was momentarily mute. But Katya barely noticed. In a series of rapid assertions and corrections, recollections and half-remembered anecdotes, she began to talk as if words alone could dam the flood that threatened to overwhelm her. She had been living in Berlin for ten years. She worked in a private kindergarten run by the Siemens factory. Other than that, she led a quiet life, she said. She read, she went to the park, she liked the cinema.
“I saw your name a few times,” she said. “It made me feel proud to think that you’d become such a success.Tell me, are you married?”
Katya looked up at him at last. Her eyes had dried. She had found her equilibrium. Ilya took one deep breath and then another and finally managed to articulate the question that had been threatening to choke him.
“Why,” he said. “Why didn’t you contact me, Katya? Ever since I got your letter from the Crimea, I’ve been waiting . . . just as you asked me to. . . . I wanted so much to . . . but I waited . . . because . . . I made a promise . . . and you were here all the time. . . . No, I never married.”
Katya sighed and glanced away.
“The letter,” she said. “I didn’t know you got my letter. Those were awful years. . . . I don’t think about them anymore. But surely, Ilya, you realized that it was a letter from another lifetime . . . didn’t you?”
Ilya’s hands, his mouth, his knees were all about to betray him; they were all on the brink of mutiny.
“No,” he eventually replied. “I didn’t.”
“My poor boy,” Katya whispered under her breath. “My poor, poor boy.”
A newspaper seller passed by on his bike and threw the latest edition into a doorway to their left, a baby pushed by in a pram started to bawl, a group of children washed around them as they hurried to catch an approaching tram. Only Ilya remained static, only he remained inert. Katya reached out, covered his hand with hers, and gave it the smallest of squeezes. And then she readjusted her hat. She was going to be late for work, she said. But they should meet up sometime, for a coffee, for a glass of wine. She didn’t, however, offer any way that he could contact her. And then, with an incline of her head, she stepped aside, moved off, and was immediately swallowed up by lunchtime crowds.
My dearest Lilly, Ilya wrote later that day. I have been trying to write this letter for many hours. I met Katya in the street today. It is finally over. I am finally released. Part of me is filled with relief while another part weeps for my younger self, for my misplaced valor, for what I did to you and for all the time we have lost.
The next letter was dated a week later and included these lines:
Your letter filled me with hope, Ilya wrote. But I wish I could take back the last ten years and live them all over again. I wish I could do something to atone.You deserved so much more. And for that I can never forgive myself. . . . The production has been delayed. But as soon as I have finished this film, and as soon as I have the finances in place, I will come to you, Lillushka. I would come sooner but so many friends and colleagues are depending on the project: as you know it has been tough for the last few years. We must keep busy, we must keep working, and time will pass like oil.With all my love, Ilya.
It was E. A. Dupont who spotted Lidi, the former German movie star, later that same month. While driving through the parking lot of Studio B at Universal, he glanced out of his window and looked straight into the eyes of his favorite actress of all time. Dupont had just arrived in Hollywood from Britain, where his films Moulin Rouge and Piccadilly had been box-office hits. He was casting his first American film, Ladies Must Love. Although it was a well-known fact, vouched for by several other witnesses, that upon recognizing her he immediately stopped his car and invited her into his office, he later claimed it was she who had approached him, looking for work as an extra.
The studio bosses were skeptical. Could she read lines? Yes. Didn’t she have an accent? As soft as Garbo’s. Only one German actress had ever made a successful transition across the Atlantic, and besides, they added, wasn’t Lidi a supporter of Hitler? Dupont, whose moods oscillated between love of the Land of the Free and downright animosity to its half-witted population, responded indignantly: “She’s a true icon, a huge talent. Just imagine the poignancy: a beautiful, destitute exile, saved by the love of an American man. And anyway, if she’s a supporter of Hitler, then what the hell is she still doing here?”
And so Lidi was “rediscovered,” with a double-page spread in the Hollywood Reporter, in which she was sympathetically interviewed and photographed. “America saved me,” she was quoted as saying. “It is my home now.” “Indeed her melancholy beauty has never seemed brighter,” the editorial went on. “Now is the time for her star to shine again, American style.”
I always said you’d be a smash, Ilya wrote in 1933. I only wonder why it took them so long. Here, dozens of my crew have been sacked from the project. No one of Jewish extraction is allowed to work for Ufa unless under exceptional circumstances. I too have heard rumors about a camp near Munich for the so-called enemies of the regime.Yesterday they were burning books in the street. Can you imagine? Books!
From June of that year: No, it is not possible. Money isn’t enough.You could pay the immigration tax but the paperwork is too complex and the quota has been tightened up to only around 160,000 immigrants a year from all nations, including Germany. Since Hitler was elected in March, it has become much harder to leave. Stay where you are. Please, don’t even think of coming back.There is nothing you could do here.
And there is another letter tied up in the bundle. But the writing is not Ilya Yurasov’s. Written by hand on heavy white paper embossed with Ufa’s letterhead is an invitation from Goebbels via Hugenberg’s office. He had watched her films in Hugenberg’s house in the mountains many times over. Anyone could tell by looking at her, he went on, that she was a true Aryan of aristocratic stock. She could
be the future, he wrote, of the German film industry. As Kinetic was also a favorite of the Führer’s, he would like to invite her to star in a German film.
I implore you to accept, he wrote. For too long has the light behind your name been dimmed. Germany is your home and we are your people. I await your reply in earnest, Joseph.
Ladies Must Love (1933) starred the vivacious and hitherto unknown blond June Knight. Although it was launched with a lavish party, it made a loss at the box office. E. A. Dupont worked for four American studios before he was eventually fired from Hell’s Kitchen in 1939. Lidi’s picture appeared in the Hollywood Reporter once more.The same word was printed beneath it as before. But this time there was no question mark. Nazi, it read. Nazi.
In Berlin
At first there is nothing to see, the film is black, the film is blank. But then it all comes into focus: a dark shape against the dark night, the Reichstag. Suddenly birds fly, stones fall, the ground seems to shiver. The main doors of the government building blow open to reveal an almost menopausal flush of heat. The cupola lights up, as if by a devilish filament, throwing into black relief the statue of Germania on horseback above. And as the flames break through the curves of the gilded copper and glass roof, they send shards of light up into the Berlin sky and down, in great sheets or arrows, onto the cobblestones below.
The Nazis immediately claim the arson is a Communist plot. President Hindenburg, a man so old his eyes rarely focus, agrees to the demands made by his chancellor, Herr Hitler, and signs Article 48 of the Weimar Republic. Germany is placed in a state of emergency. All civil liberties are suspended.
Forty thousand members of the opposition will be rounded up and imprisoned. Forty thousand Communists and liberals and journalists and writers and artists. The film, shot by an amateur who just happened to be passing, is taken out that night into a back court and set alight. It catches easily, burns almost as brightly as the Reichstag, cracks twice like gunshot, then turns to ash, and breath by breath blows away.
The train sped toward Berlin through cool green forests where the bright summer sun collected in pools. Bareheaded girls and brown-backed men rode bicycles along dusty lanes, with children stowed in wicker baskets or pulled alongside in little tin wagons. Some stopped and watched the train rattle past and waved, or bit into an apple or drained a bottle of beer. Others kept cycling, their knapsacks heavy with damp swimming trunks and a splaying novel, their heads giddy with too much sun or the wine they’d drunk at lunch.
The tracks drew alongside a highway, and for a minute or two a rider on a shiny black motorcycle matched the train’s speed until his engine sputtered and with a shake of his head he fell back as the road curved away. And then there was just forest, forest hushed and heady, its eyes closed, its arms open, its dark mouth seemingly holding its breath.
All day the sun had streamed through the mottled glass of the first-class compartment window, kept closed, the conductor claimed, to keep out the heat. Now he had opened it with a key and gasps of air rustled the morning newspaper and the familiar smell of pinesap and acacia blossom replaced the fug of cigarette smoke and spilled coffee. It was June; it would be a beautiful summer.
As they approached the city, nothing looked too different: a few new buildings, a plot overgrown, a billboard advertising shampoo where once a church had stood. The suburbs flew past and occasionally Lilly strained to glimpse some graffiti scrawled on a wall or a shop front. And then the train was slowing down and the conductor was striding back and forth along the corridor shouting, “Nächster Bahnhof, Potsdam! Nächster Bahnhof, Potsdam!” A car was waiting for her at the station, but no one else: she had made sure of that. She tipped the porter and climbed into the car as the driver loaded her cases into the trunk. And then he started the engine, put the car into gear, and they were off.
Like anyone who has left one country behind for another, when Lilly first arrived in America, she couldn’t help seeing the old in the new. Main Street looked just like the Unter den Linden.Venice Beach reminded her of Wannsee. Now that she was actually driving through Berlin again, it was almost as if the Berlin she remembered had been replaced by another, meaner version.The avenues and public squares seemed narrower, darker, more oppressive than she remembered; the light sifted.
She had read about the boycott of Jewish businesses, but it was still a shock to see so many shops boarded up, their windows defaced with paint. And the graffiti, she could read it now, was always a single word: Juden. Then her eye was drawn upward; Nazi banners were hung from lampposts and balconies and flagpoles and draped across windows, the red background and the white circle emblazoned with a crooked cross, the swastika.
The cinemas of the Kurfürstendamm still looked the same: the strings of bright lights, the worn red velvet carpeting leading to the box offices, the names in lights three meters high. And yet although they could have been in Paris, London, or New York, there were no Charlie Chaplin films or Marx Brothers comedies. The Jewish boycott had censored any film that failed to meet the standards of “pure Aryan elevation.”
Since the National Socialists had taken over the running of Ufa, dozens of actors, producers, directors, and technicians had either left of their own volition or had their contracts canceled. Elisabeth Bergner and Peter Lorre, both Jewish, had emigrated after being labeled “undesirable,” and many more were about to follow. Some were accused of having Jewish blood and others of having a Jewish partner. But anyone could also be blacklisted for having so-called un-German views.
To stop the drain of talent, Goebbels had already tried to engage Asta Nielsen and Greta Garbo, but neither would return his phone calls or requests by letter. He courted Fritz Lang for a day or two, until the director secretly caught the night train out of Berlin to France, leaving his wife, the scriptwriter Thea von Harbou, behind. Her relationship with Goebbels was more fruitful. Lang and von Harbou divorced a few years later.
Despite the weather, there were fewer people strolling in the streets or trying to catch the last of the sunshine than Lilly would have expected. Instead they huddled in groups, talking. At every street corner was a clutch of policemen. An army truck driven by a soldier in a green uniform passed by. And then another. She was suddenly apprehensive. Although the streets looked familiar, she didn’t know where she was anymore.
“Where are you going?” she asked the driver.
He glanced at her in the rearview mirror, and in that fraction of a second that their eyes met, she could see that he was scared too.
“To the Esplanade,” he said. “The Esplanade Hotel.”
He swung right and she recognized the raised platforms of Zoo Station. In heavy traffic, the car inched across the busy junction and accelerated into the Tiergarten. She sat back and made herself relax; she knew where she was again. It would be fine.
“That’s right,” she said. “The Esplanade.”
As they approached the burned-out Reichstag building, the number of military personnel grew larger.There was the smell of cordite in the air.
“Who are those soldiers?” Lidi asked the driver. He hesitated and glanced back at her over his shoulder before he spoke.
“The ones in green?” he replied. “Göring’s men.”
Whole streets were cordoned off and soon there were no civilians on the street at all, just soldiers and policemen.
“Von Schleicher and his wife have been shot,” he explained.
“The politician?”
The driver nodded.
“In the back of the head,” he added briefly.
And then he was silent, as if he had said too much and immediately regretted it.
“But you mustn’t ask so many questions,” he suddenly said, without looking back at her. “This isn’t America.”
The hotel suite was full of flowers, orchids and lilies in vivid orange and pale lemon yellow. One basket was from Goebbels, another from Mr. Leyer. The porter placed her bags beside the bed but wouldn’t accept a tip. And then, just after he had
closed the door, came the unmistakable sound of gunfire. She jumped, despite herself.
It was the last day in June 1934. Hindenburg, the elderly president of Germany, was confined to a wheelchair at his country estate. He would be dead in a matter of months. At Nazi headquarters, there were rumors of a left-wing plot to overthrow Hitler by the party’s own army, the SA, or the Brownshirts. And so Kolibri, or Humming-bird, the code word had been given. Hundreds of men and women would be shot that night, half of whom had sworn allegiance to the Führer. Ernst Röhm, the chief of the storm troopers, was dragged from the bed he was sharing with a young boy, imprisoned for two days, and then shot in the chest at point-blank range after he refused to commit suicide. In Berlin, one hundred fifty of his deputies were rounded up and murdered by Hitler’s personal bodyguards, the SS, at the cadet school in Lichterfelde.
And there were more. Kolibri. The names on a list were to be eliminated one by one: Gustav von Kahr, who had opposed Hitler during the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923; Father Bernhard Stempfle, who had taken some of the dictation for Hitler’s book Mein Kampf; Gregor Strasser, one of the original members of the Nazi Party and formerly next in importance to Hitler; Berlin SA leader Karl Ernst, who was involved in torching the Reichstag building in February; Catholic leader Dr. Erich Klausener; and Dr.Willi Schmidt, a music critic who had no political allegiances with anyone but who unfortunately shared the name with someone who had.
But in the softly lit suite on the third floor of the Esplanade Hotel with its huge bed, marble-topped tables, and brocade-lined walls, as the day faded outside and the streetlights came on, humming with deep pink, Lilly picked up a card written in a familiar hand and opened it. And then nothing could have convinced her that she was not in the right place at the right time.
I will come at ten, wrote Ilya Yurasov. Wait up for me.
The deal had taken months to map out. She had employed an agent, and a lawyer recommended by Mr. Leyer. Finally, after screeds of correspondence by proxy with Ufa and the Ministry of Propaganda, she had requested a modest fee and a series of nonnegotiable clauses for one film with the option to make more.
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