Mildred Harnack
Mildred Elizabeth Harnack was an American communist, literary historian, translator, and member of the German resistance against the Nazi regime. After marrying Arvid Harnack, she moved to Germany in 1929, where she began her career as an academic. Mildred Harnack spent a year at the University of Jena and the University of Giessen working on her doctoral thesis. At Giessen, she witnessed the beginnings of Nazism. Mildred Harnack became an assistant lecturer in English and American literature at the University of Berlin in 1931.
In 1932, Mildred and her husband Arvid began to resist Nazism. Mildred nicknamed the underground resistance group they established "the Circle." Mildred and Arvid became friends with Louise and Donald Heath, who was First Secretary at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin, and to whom Mildred and Arvid passed intelligence from Arvid's position at the Reich Economics Ministry. Between 1935 and 1940, the couple's group intersected with three other anti-fascist resistance groups. The most important of these was run by Luftwaffe lieutenant Harro Schulze-Boysen. Like numerous groups in other parts of the world, the undercover political factions led by Harnack and Schulze-Boysen later developed into an espionage network that collaborated with Soviet intelligence to defeat Hitler. This Berlin anti-fascist espionage group "the Circle" was later named the Red Orchestra by the Abwehr. The couple were arrested in September 1942 and executed shortly after.
Life
Mildred Elizabeth Fish was born and raised on the west side of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her parents were William Cook Fish, who was frequently unemployed between gigs as an insurance salesman, butcher, and horse trader, and Georgina Fish, a self-taught stenographer and typist. Mildred had three siblings, Harriette, and twins Marbeau and Marion. She attended West Division High School. After the death of her father, Mildred and her mother moved to Chevy Chase, Maryland where Mildred's eldest sister lived. There she attended Western High School her senior year. She played on the basketball and baseball teams, served as editor for The Trailblazer, and played the role of Princess Angelica in William Makepeace Thackeray's The Rose and the Ring, the senior class play. She finished her last year at Western High School. In 1919, she began studying at George Washington University, then enrolled in 1921 at the University of Wisconsin. During her first year, she worked for the Wisconsin State Journal as a film and drama critic to support herself. She stayed at a rooming house popular with journalists and writers, but left after facing some mild prejudice, which caused her to change her major from journalism to humanities, then later to English literature. In 1922, she became a staff writer for the Wisconsin Literary Magazine.On June 22, 1925, she was awarded a Bachelor of Arts in Humanities. Her senior thesis was "A Comparison of Chapman's and Pope's Translations of the Iliad with the Original". She stayed for further study and was awarded a Master of Arts degree in English on August 6, 1925.
While Mildred was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, she met Arvid Harnack, a graduate student from Germany who was studying under a Rockefeller Fellowship. After a brief love affair, they were engaged on June 6, 1926, and wed on August 7, 1926 in a ceremony at her brother's farm near the village of Brooklyn, Wisconsin. On September 28, 1928, Arvid Harnack returned to Germany. Between 1928 and 1929, Mildred Fish-Harnack taught English and American literature at Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland.
A fellow student of Mildred Harnack's at the University of Wisconsin was Clara Leiser. A professor who exerted an influence over her was William Ellery Leonard, who advised her when she was writing her senior thesis. Leonard was a non-conformist who believed in the Emersonian principle that "nothing at last is sacred but the integrity of own mind". He subjected Fish-Harnack to a grueling scrutiny that shaped her intellectual outlook. For Fish-Harnack, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman were the two greatest advocates of American literature. While at Madison, the couple met Margaretha "Greta" Lorke, a German student of sociology who had been invited to study in the U.S. A lifelong friendship developed between Mildred and Greta. Lorke later married Adam Kuckhoff.
Education
On June 2, 1929, Mildred moved to Jena in Germany, where she spent her first year living with the Harnack family. In the same year, she received a grant from the German Academic Exchange Service that enabled her to start working on her doctorate in American literature at the University of Jena, but she found the University of Giessen to be most welcome. Fish-Harnack's doctoral supervisor was Walther Fischer, who judged her to be an excellent lecturer and described her in a 1936 recommendation as showing great "tact", by which he meant Fish-Harnack's tactful approach to the Nazis' increasing incursion into the university in 1931 and 1932. By the time Fish-Harnack arrived in Giessen, more than half the student population were vocal in their support of the Nazis and therefore opponents of several faculty members. Amongst those under suspicion were philosophy professor Ernst von Aster—a Marxist—and economist Friedrich Lenz. Aster's wife, Swedish novelist Hildur Dixelius, became a good friend and eventually became a house guest at Fish-Harnack's Berlin house.On February 1, 1931, Mildred Harnack began studying at the University of Berlin on a fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Harnack was invited to hold a public lecture called "Romantic and Marital Love in the Work of Nathaniel Hawthorne" at the Friedrich-Wilhelm University, which allowed her to work as an assistant lecturer and lector on English and American literature. She taught courses on Emerson, Whitman, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Thomas Hardy, and George Bernard Shaw. Mildred Harnack was popular with her students and over three semesters enrollment in the course tripled.
Harnack was an active member of the American expatriate community in Berlin. She went to dances at the American Student Association and was a member of the American Women's Club in Bellevuestraße, later serving as its president. The Harnacks socialized with American journalists and diplomats at the American Church in Nollendorfplatz, a popular meeting place for American ex-pats.
Career
During their time in Berlin, the Harnacks witnessed the Weimardämmerung, the unraveling of the German republic. They became interested in the Soviet Union and communism, seeing them as a solution to the rampant poverty and unemployment that Germany suffered during the Great Depression. They were of particular interest for Harnack, whose mother had struggled during the hyperinflation of the 1920s after the loss of her husband when he was a teenager. Their interest in capitalism waned, and they both believed that the economic system was ideologically bankrupt; they looked to the Soviet Union's new experimental five-year plans, believing the system could provide work for the masses. In 1931, Arvid established the Wissenschaftliche Arbeitsgemeinschaft zum Studium der sowjetischen Planwirtschaft, a group of writers and academics that met once a month to discuss the Soviet planned economy.In 1932, Fish-Harnack lost her position as a lecturer in American literature at the University of Berlin. At the time, the German Americanist and ardent Nazi Friedrich Schönemann had returned from leave in America to work in the English department. Fish-Harnack never hid her leftist political views during lectures. In May 1932, the funding that enabled Mildred to teach at Friedrich-Wilhelm University was canceled. The couple was forced to move to 61 Hasenheide in Neukölln due to the Nazis' presence. The couple had leased the apartment from a relative of the writer Stefan Heym; in his postwar novel Nachruf, Heym stated he found the Harnacks to be a genial academic couple with a determined outlook on the Nazis.
In the same year, Soviet economist and diplomat Sergei Bessonov, with the help of the Soviet embassy, organized a three-week study trip to the Soviet Union for 23 members of ARPLAN including Arvid. Mildred hoped to go, but due to a scheduling conflict decided to make her own way there by booking the trip using Intourist and flying back early. Fish-Harnack's career as a scholar was saved when a family friend who was also president of American Student Union, Warren Tomlinson, suggested she take over his position as lecturer at the Berlin municipal evening high school. On September 1, 1932, Fish-Harnack began lecturing at the Heil'schen Abendschule Abendgymnasium at Berlin W 50, Augsburger Straße 60 in Schöneberg, an evening high school for adults to prepare for the Abitur. Fish-Harnack was popular with her students, for many of whom her courses were their first introduction to American Literature. She socialised with her students and discussed economic and political ideas from the United States and the Soviet Union in an open and frank manner. One of her students, Karl Behrens, became friends with the Harnacks and eventually one of their most ardent recruits.
During the 1930s, the Harnacks kept in close contact with the Bonhoeffer family. Fish-Harnack, seeking additional income, launched a lecture series that was held in Klaus and Emmi Bonhoeffer's home.
On June 13, 1933, Fish-Harnack met Martha Dodd when she and other members of the American Women's Club met at the Lehrter train station to welcome Dodd's father and American ambassador, William. Dodd became Fish-Harnack's friend in Berlin, and her manuscript, In Memory, found in her Prague apartment attic in 1957, stated:
The years of our acquaintance were the most significant of my life. Our work, our experiences, in these courageous tragic years of fulfillment and disappointment are closely interwoven. Everything we thought about. What we loved. Hated. What we fought for. We shared with each other. We, all of us, my husband were in the German underground from 1933 to 1943. I'm the only one left.In a letter Fish-Harnack wrote to her mother in October 1935, she described Dodd as a talented writer of literary criticism and short stories with "a real desire to understand the wider world... Therefore, our interests combine and we will try to work something out together." Fish-Harnack and Dodd edited a book column together in the English-language newspaper Berlin Topics. The Harnacks began to host a Saturday literary salon on Hasenheide where political views among editors, publishers, and authors were freely expressed; the attendees included publishers Samuel Fischer, Ernst Rowohlt, and Rowohlt's son Heinrich Marie Ledig-Rowohlt; translator Franz Frein; physician and writer Max Mohr; authors and playwrights Adam Kuckhoff, Max Tau, Otto Zoff, and Ernst von Salomon; journalist Margret Boveri; critic Erich Franzen; and Mildred's students, such as writer Friedrich Schlösinger. In Dodd's book Through Embassy Eyes, she mentioned a report by an American publisher who had visited the Fish-Harnacks in 1934, who stated:
He was expecting a lively exchange of views and engaging conversations that evening—definitely more appealing than that to which we were used in diplomatic circles. Instead, I only saw suffering and need. People whose spirit was broken. I saw pathetic cowardice. A lying in wait and tension, which was triggered by the visits by the secret police. The last of the meager remnants of free thought.In 1934, the couple moved to the third floor apartment at 16 Schöneberger Woyrschstraße, close to the Tiergarten. The house was destroyed in the war and is now known as 14 Genthiner Straße.