excellent German men with qualifications equal or surpassing your own are out of work. I cannot justify appointing a woman, and an American, instead of someone more deserving.”
“I’m an American, teaching American literature,” she said, stunned. “I have a unique perspective that not even the best of my German male colleagues can provide.”
“Tell me, Frau Harnack,” Schönemann said, leafing through some papers on his desktop. “Do you still encourage your students to study Marxism as ‘a practical solution to the evils of the present,’ as you wrote a few months ago?”
Mildred hesitated. “I do.”
“How unfortunate. Perhaps the department tolerated such deviant pedagogy under previous directors, but no longer.” Abruptly he rose, but although she understood the interview was over, she remained seated, numb. “Keep that in mind as you continue your studies. Although you are dismissed from the faculty, you have not been expelled from the university.”
“Herr Schönemann, I would ask you to reconsider. Please look over my file. You’ll find that my teaching evaluations have been excellent and I’ve received several commendations—”
“Then I trust you will continue to fill your days with productive work.” He gestured to the door. “Since it would be difficult to find a replacement instructor so close to the end of the school year, you may finish out the term. Good day, Frau Harnack.”
She nodded and left before he changed his mind and expelled her from the graduate school too.
Later, when she told her Modern American Literature class she would not be teaching in the fall, the students’ voices rose so loudly in outrage and indignation that she feared professors from nearby classrooms would complain. In the days that followed, her student Sara Weitz circulated a petition demanding that she be reinstated. Sara and her friends collected more than one hundred signatures, but although the students’ loyalty heartened Mildred, their efforts failed.
On the last day of the term, after she proctored her last final exam, a group of students appeared at her office as she was cleaning out her desk. “We all wish you the very best,” Sara said as she presented Mildred with a beautiful bouquet of flowers.
“Schönemann is making a terrible mistake,” declared another student, Paul Thomas, an army veteran who had lost an arm in the Great War.
“I agree,” said Mildred lightly, forcing a smile, “but please don’t take out your anger on your new teacher.”
Sara, Paul, and a dozen other students insisted upon escorting her home all the way to Zehlendorf, carrying her boxes of books and files. Frau Schmidt glared suspiciously from her front window as Mildred ushered the boisterous group of young people into her flat, but Mildred merely smiled, tugged on the brim of her hat in a chipper salute, and shut the door.
Inside, she set out bread, cheese, and slices of smoked sausages, and she passed around a bottle of schnapps. Later Arvid arrived with groceries, interrupting a heated debate about the relative merits of socialism versus communism. He eagerly joined in the conversation while Mildred set out more food for their guests until it felt like a proper party.
They stayed up until midnight discussing politics and literature, and some of the more imaginative students wove elaborate schemes for how they might get Mildred her job back. It was not until the last half hour that the mood turned melancholy.
“You’ll still see me on campus,” Mildred reminded them as they said their goodbyes. “We can form our own study group. Herr Schönemann can dismiss me from the faculty, but no one can prevent us from gathering on our own to discuss whatever we like.”
“Not yet, anyway,” muttered Paul.
“Not ever,” said Mildred firmly, but although her students nodded, their expressions were clouded over with anger and doubt.
The loss of Mildred’s income meant that she and Arvid could no longer afford their home in the Papageiensiedlung. As much as Mildred regretted leaving the woodland retreat where she and Arvid had been so happy, she would not miss the suspicious glares of their National Socialist neighbors. After a brief search and a recommendation from a friend in ARPLAN, they sublet three rooms in a flat on the fifth floor of Hasenheide 61, about a kilometer north of the Tempelhof airfield near St. Johannes-Basilica and the Volkspark Hasenheide. Their building was on the northwest edge of Neukölln, a working-class neighborhood popular with Communists.
“If I have to choose between living among Browns or Reds, I’ll choose Reds every time,” said Arvid after they signed the lease.