Agent Sonya Page 2

  The tumultuous fourteen-year period between the fall of the kaiser and the rise of Hitler is seen as a time of mounting menace, the backdrop to the horror that followed. But to be young and idealistic in those years was intoxicating, edgy, and exciting, as the world went mad. War debts, reparations, and financial mismanagement triggered hyperinflation. Cash was barely worth the paper it was printed on. Some people starved, while others went on lunatic spending sprees, since there was no point keeping money that would soon be valueless. There were surreal scenes: prices rose so fast that waiters in restaurants climbed on tables to announce the new menu prices every half hour; a loaf of bread costing 160 marks in 1922 cost 200,000,000 marks by the end of 1923. Ursula wrote: “The women are standing at the factory gate waiting to collect their husbands’ pay packets. Every week, they are handed whole bundles of billion-mark notes. With the money in their hands, they run to the shops, because two hours later the margarine might cost twice as much.” One afternoon, in the park, she found a man lying under a bench, a war veteran with a stump, a pitiful bag of possessions clutched to his breast. He was dead. “Why do such awful things happen in the world?” she wondered.

  Though life at Schlachtensee continued much as before, with its cultured conversation and fine furniture, millions were politically radicalized. In 1922, the foreign minister, Walther Rathenau, was assassinated by ultranationalists after signing a treaty with the Soviet Union. Every day Ursula witnessed the grotesque disparity between the urban poor and the wealthy bourgeoisie, of which she was a part. She devoured the works of Lenin and Luxemburg, the radical novels of Jack London and Maxim Gorky. She wanted to go to university, like her brother.

  Jürgen was already a rising star of the academic left. After studying philosophy, political economy, and statistics at the universities of Berlin, Erlangen, and Heidelberg, he gained a doctorate in economics before embarking for the United States in 1926 to take a postgraduate degree at the Brookings Institution in Washington. There he would meet Marguerite Steinfeld, a fellow researcher in economics, whom he married two years later.

  Berta put her foot down: her wayward daughter did not need more education; she needed some womanly skills, and then a husband. In 1923, at the age of sixteen, Ursula was enrolled in a trade school to study typing and shorthand.

  At night, she wrote: poems, short stories, tales of adventure and romance. Denied an academic education, she poured her energies into her imagined world. Her childish writings reflected a craving for excitement, a sense of theater, a love of the absurd. Ursula was always the central character in her own stories, and she wrote of herself in the third person, a young woman achieving great feats through determination and a willingness to take risks. Of one character she wrote: “She had overcome the physical weakness of her childhood, she had toughened up and was strong.” Her little sisters called her “Fairy Tale Whirl.” Her diary reflected the usual sulky teenage preoccupations, but also an irrepressible optimism. “I am in a bad mood,” she wrote. “Grumpy and growling, I am a hot-head, a cross-breed with a black mane of hair, a Jew’s nose, and clumsy limbs, bitching and brooding…but then there is blue sky, a sun that warms, drops of dew on the firs and a stirring in the air, and I want to stride out, jump, run, and love every human being.”

  The year Ursula’s formal education ended, Hitler launched the Munich beer hall putsch, a failed coup d’état that turned the future führer into a household name and landed him in prison, where he dictated Mein Kampf, the Nazi bible of bigotry.

  Absorbing her father’s political instincts, shocked by the human degradation she had witnessed, appalled by fascism, and entranced by these swirling new ideas of social equality, class war, and revolution, Ursula was drawn inexorably to communism. “Germany’s own Socialist revolution is just around the corner,” she declared. “Communism will make people happier and better.” The Bolshevik Revolution had proven that the old order was rotten and doomed. Fascism must be defeated. In 1924, she joined the Kommunistischer Jugendverband Deutschlands, the Young Communist League, moving into the ideological home she would occupy for the rest of her life. She was sixteen years old. Like other communists from affluent families, Ursula played down her privileged background. “We lived much more modestly than one might have supposed,” she insisted. “One great-grandfather sold shoelaces from a barrow in Galicia.”

  Ursula’s fellow young communists came from all corners, classes, and communities of Berlin, united in a determination to overthrow capitalist oppression and usher in a new society. In that heady atmosphere, friendships bloomed swiftly. Gabriel “Gabo” Lewin was a middle-class boy from the suburbs. Heinz Altmann was a handsome apprentice, whose urging had given Ursula the “final impetus” to join the party. These were the young foot soldiers of German communism, and Ursula was thrilled to be one of them. The May Day demonstration of 1924 left her with a lifelong appetite for risk. The bruising from the policeman’s truncheon eventually faded; her outrage never did.

  On weekends, the Young Communist League ventured into the countryside to explain Marxism-Leninism to the German peasantry, who frequently responded by setting their dogs on the youthful evangelists. One evening, in Löwenberg, north of Berlin, a sympathetic farmer allowed the group to sleep in his hayloft. “That evening we were particularly cheerful,” Ursula wrote. “As soon as we lay down, someone began to imagine the place twenty years later. Löwenberg in 1944: it has long since become communist. For a long time we argued over whether money would already have been abolished. We would then unfortunately be very old—in our mid-thirties!” They fell asleep, dreaming of revolution.

  Ursula was one of nature’s missionaries. She was never preachy, but she loved to convert, and tended to chip away at unbelievers until they saw the world as she saw it. She set to work on the family nanny. “I tried to explain things to her. She found what I said made sense,” Ursula claimed. Olga Muth was not remotely interested, but allowed the girl to believe she was listening.

  The Kuczynskis did not approve of their daughter being beaten up by policemen and spending her nights in haylofts with a bunch of young communists. Observing that “reading was her only field of interest,” Robert arranged an apprenticeship in the R. L. Prager Bookshop on Mittelstrasse, specializing in law and political sciences. Berta bought her a pair of heels, a dark blue dress with a white collar, gloves, and a brown crocodile leather handbag. Mother and nanny inspected Ursula as she set off for her first day at work.

  “Nothing in front and nothing behind,” said Ollo. “You still look like a boy.”

  “But the legs are quite nicely shaped,” said Berta. “You can only see that if you take small steps.”

  Ollo agreed: “Ursel will never be a lady.”

  Like everything Olga Muth said, this was tough but true. With her long nose, thatch of hair, and forthright manner, there was nothing ladylike about Ursula. “I’ll never turn into the famous beautiful swan,” she wrote in her diary. “How could my nose, my ears and my mouth get smaller all of a sudden?” Yet even as a teenager, she gave off a powerful sexual allure that many found irresistible. She giggled when the worker mending the roof of the Dresdner Bank wolf-whistled at her as she cycled to work: “He blows a kiss, and spreads his arms wide.” With her bright eyes, slender figure, and infectious laugh, she was never at a loss for a dance partner at the teenage parties in Zehlendorf. At one of these, she wore “bright red scanty shorts and tight-fitting shirt with stiff collar,” and danced until half past six in the morning. “There are those who say I kissed twenty boys,” she told her brother. “It can’t have been more than nineteen.”

  Working at Prager’s was boring and exhausting. The manager was a chain-smoking tyrant with a large, bald, slightly tapering head, devoted to inventing fresh indignities and pointless tasks for his employees. Ursula nicknamed him “the Onion” and pronounced him a capitalist exploiter. Her time was spent “shaking out the dust cloth, standing in win
dowless niches.” She was not permitted to read on the job. “Surely there are other professions,” she reflected. “Lumberjack, for example. Could I become a female lumberjack?” Her small salary was rendered almost worthless by the raging inflation. She would remember her teenage years in the Weimar Republic through a series of politically tinted images: “The wealth of the small, privileged circles and the poverty of the many, the unemployed begging at street corners.” She resolved to change the world. For Ursula was ambitious and confident: she would transform society in more radical ways than her father, and she was determined to be a better mother than her own. These twin ambitions would not always sit comfortably together.

  Robert and Berta Kuczynski gave up trying to rein in their daughter’s politics. In 1926, Robert took a temporary position at the Brookings Institution, alongside Jürgen, researching American finance and population statistics. He and Berta would visit America periodically over the next few years, leaving Ursula and Olga Muth to run the household together, reinforcing the bond between them. “Our Ollo, who never had anyone to love. Ollo, the hysterical, grey little creature, always dissatisfied, that is besotted with each one of us, Ollo who walks through fire for us, does everything for us, lives only for us, knows nothing of the world but her six.” Ursula’s letters to her part-time parents reflected her wry resentment: “Dear Mummy, I trust your maternal feelings will sustain your keen interest in all our little trivia.” Another letter urged: “We are unanimous in our hope that Mummy will soon stop coming up with bright ideas on household matters, recommendations on how to cook cabbage, how to clean the house, and other advice.”

  While Ursula spent her days dusting books, her brother was writing them. In 1926, twenty-two-year-old Jürgen Kuczynski published Return to Marx (Zurück zu Marx), the opening rumble of an avalanche of print he would unleash over the coming decades. Jürgen loved the sound of his own voice, but even more the sound of his pen. His lifetime output was prodigious: at least four thousand published works, including acres of journalism, pamphlets, speeches, and essays, on politics, economics, statistics, and even cookery. Jürgen would have been a better writer had he been able to write less. His style became less florid with age, but he simply could not bring himself to say in a few words what might be said in many. His study of labor conditions eventually ran to forty volumes. Return to Marx was a comparatively slim work of five hundred pages. With typical grandiosity, he told his sister that he “hoped the workers would read it with pleasure.” Ursula offered some editorial suggestions: “Write easier, short phrases. You should strive for simplicity of presentation, so that everyone can understand. Sometimes the text is only complicated when, for greater persuasiveness, it is repeated in two or three places, changing only the form and structure of the phrase.” This was excellent advice, which Jürgen ignored.

  At home and at work, Ursula was a drudge; outside those places, she was a revolutionary.

  A few weeks before her nineteenth birthday, Ursula joined the KPD, the largest Communist Party in Europe. Under its new leader, Ernst Thälmann, the party was increasingly Leninist (later Stalinist) in outlook, committed to democracy but taking orders and funding directly from Moscow. The KPD had a paramilitary wing, locked in escalating conflict with the Nazi brownshirts. The communists prepared for battle. On moonlit nights in a remote corner of Grunewald forest, her earliest friends from the Young Communist League, Gabo Lewin and Heinz Altmann, taught Ursula to shoot. At first she consistently missed the target, until Gabo pointed out she was closing the wrong eye. She proved to be an excellent shot. Gabo gave her a Luger semiautomatic pistol, and demonstrated how to take the gun apart and clean it. She hid the weapon behind a beam in the attic at Schlachtensee, concealed inside a torn cushion. When the revolution came, she would be ready.

  Ursula joined the anti-fascist demonstrations. “Terribly busy,” she wrote. “Preparing for the Anniversary of the Russian Revolution.” During lunch breaks she sat in Unter den Linden, the tree-lined boulevard running through central Berlin, reading Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag), the communist newspaper. Often she sought out the working-class cabdrivers and fruit sellers, many of whom were communists, and avidly discussed politics with them. In her diary she wrote: “So many starving, so many beggars in the streets…”

  One afternoon Ursula joined a group of young leftists, members of the Social Democratic Party as well as the KPD, for an afternoon of swimming and sunbathing at a lakeside outside Berlin. Ursula later recalled the moment. “I turn around, and there is a man in his mid-twenties, well groomed, with a soft slouch, a clever, almost beautiful face. He looks at me. His eyes are wide, and dark brown, he is a Jew.” The young man asked if he could sit with her and chat. “I have no time,” she said. “I have to go to a Marxist workers’ class.” He persisted, asking if they might meet again. “I could consider it!” Ursula said, and skittered away. A few days later, the young man with the brown eyes was waiting outside the building where her Marxist class was held.

  Rudolf Hamburger was an architecture student at Berlin Technical University. Four years older than Ursula, Rudi turned out to be a distant relative—his mother and Berta Kuczynski were second cousins—and from a similar background. Hamburger was born in Landeshut in Lower Silesia, where his father, Max, owned textile mills manufacturing army uniforms. The second of three sons, Rudi was brought up in an atmosphere of liberal politics and lightly worn Jewish intellectual culture. Max Hamburger built a model housing estate for his 850 workers. The family was politically progressive, but far from revolutionary. Rudi was already a passionate advocate of architectural modernism and the Bauhaus movement. His fellow students, he wrote, included “an Austrian aristocrat, a Japanese who designed interiors in meticulously co-ordinated pastel shades, an anarchist and a Hungarian girl with a completely unjustified belief in her own genius.” Another contemporary was Albert Speer, “Hitler’s architect,” the future Nazi minister for war production and armaments.

  Ursula felt a surge of attraction, and on an impulse invited Hamburger to a communist meeting. They got on well. She invited him to another. “Finally time to be with Rudi again,” she wrote in her diary. “He helps me make the tea. He doesn’t realize I have put the gas on low so it boils slowly….My winter coat is too thin, Rudi says. He wants to try to make me a little vain.” She bought a new coat and then reproached herself for the extravagance when others were dying of starvation. “I long for Rudi,” she wrote. “Then I am angry that such a person can turn my head. And that I need him so much. And then I fall asleep, sobbing.” One night, as they walked home from a concert, Rudi paused under a streetlamp. “He stood against the light. His thick hair was still unruly in the same surprising way, his dark eyes never lost their melancholy and veiled expression, even when he laughed or was deep in thought.” That was the moment she fell in love. “Can a second, a sentence, the expression in the eyes of a person suddenly change everything previously felt into something new?” she wondered. Rudi walked her home. “That night he kissed me,” she wrote. “I was sad because my lips were so dry. Such a small thing, but I had been thinking of the kiss all afternoon, with quiet rejoicing.”

  Rudi Hamburger was almost the ideal boyfriend: kind, funny, gentle, and Jewish. Both sets of parents approved. If she became too serious, he softly teased her. And when he talked about his ambition to become a great architect, the large brown eyes danced with light. He was generous. “Rudi gave me a bar of chocolate,” she told her brother. Sweets were rare, and she was keen to stress that this was not some bourgeois self-indulgence. “He did not spend money on it. We do not do such nonsense. But if someone gives him something, he always shares with me.”

  Rudi hinted at marriage. Ursula held back.

  Because there was only one problem with Rudolf Hamburger: he was not a communist. They might share a Jewish heritage, cultural interests, and chocolate, but Ursula’s lover was not a comrade, and he showed no signs of converting.


  Hamburger’s politics were liberal and progressive, but he drew the line at communism. Their disputes followed a pattern.

  “You question socialism in general and our beliefs in particular,” she would remonstrate. “Your views on communism are determined by emotions and lack the slightest scientific foundation.”

  Rudi listed his objections to communism: “The exaggerations in the press, the primitive tone of some articles, the boring speeches filled with jargon, the arrogant dismissal of opposing views, the ham-fisted behaviour towards intellectuals, whom you isolate instead of winning over, insulting opponents instead of disarming them with logic and recruiting them.”

  Ursula dismissed this as a “typical petty bourgeois attitude.” But privately “she knew that a kernel of truth lay in what he said.” This made her even crosser.

  The fight usually ended with Rudi cracking a joke.

  “Let’s not quarrel. A world revolution is no reason to shout at each other.”

  Rudi joined Red Aid, a workers’ welfare organization linked to the communists. He read some Lenin and Engels, and declared himself a “sympathizer.” But he flatly refused to join the KPD, or participate in Ursula’s activism. Beneath his placid nature, Hamburger was remarkably stubborn, and no amount of cajoling could persuade him to join up. “There are things about the party that disturb me,” he said. “Perhaps I’ll get there slowly, if you give me time.”

  After one particularly vehement argument, Ursula wrote: “When Rudi questions the viability of socialism itself, I get upset and answer back. For him it’s as if we are having a difference of opinion about a book or a work of art, while for me it’s about the most vital problems, our whole attitude to life. At times like this he seems like a stranger to me.” But Ursula was not about to give up. She copied out a list of communist quotations and presented them to Rudi, an unlikely sort of love token. “I believe that, if we stay together, it is only a matter of time until he joins the party,” she told Jürgen. “But it could well take another two years.”