Chapter One
Berlin, 1936
“I want to give readers all the dope there is” Sigrid Schultz
In the autumn of 1936, Sigrid Schultz was starting to feel like a stranger in her own city. Less than a decade ago, the Berlin she’d known and loved had been crackling with wit, colour, deviance and dissent. Painted boys with nipped-in waists had sauntered through the stylish crowds along Kurfürstendamm; girls in suits and monocles had drunk cocktails at the Eldorado ballroom. Satire—the city’s native genius—had flourished in cabarets and bars, and, as a very dazzled young William Shirer had noted, Weimar Berlin had felt like “a wild open city full of crazy poets and homosexuals,” a place for adventure and self-reinvention.2 It had been a city of violence, too—scarred by Germany’s recent defeat in the 1914–18 war, rocked by political battles within the newly democratic Reichstag and growling with a savage underbelly of poverty, drugs and prostitution. Yet, to an ambitious young journalist like Sigrid, it was the darkness in the glitter of Berlin that made it the most engrossing city in the world in which to make her career.
Then, in 1933, Hitler and the National Socialists had seized power, and the Nazification of Berlin began. The brown-shirted muscle of the Sturmabteilung (SA) and the black-uniformed elite of the Schutzstaffel (SS) had bullied most of the satirists into silence and forced the radical artists to skip town. Formerly emancipated women had been told to wipe off their lipstick and produce babies for the Fatherland, while the children were dragooned into the Hitler Youth or the League of German Girls. As fledgling Nazis paraded through Berlin in their crisp little shirts and neckerchiefs, it seemed to Sigrid as though the city itself was in uniform. Scarlet and black swastikas rippled from every public building and the streets were loud with Party messages, broadcast daily over public loudspeakers.
The harsh metallic tones of Adolf Hitler and the hectoring bark of his Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels had become almost as familiar to Berliners as the voices of their family and friends. And, to all those who’d become principal targets of the regime—the trade unionists, the communists, the homosexuals and, above all, the city’s Jews—these voices were also a daily reminder of the threats they faced, whether of violence or arrest.
As bureau chief of the Chicago Tribune, Sigrid had made it her mission to keep America informed about Germany’s decline into totalitarianism, to expose every stage of its draconian dismantling of democracy and the rule of law. According to Gregor Ziemer, her former assistant and fellow journalist, she was “one of the most talented foreign correspondents” of her generation, publishing more damning information about the Nazis than any of her colleagues, facing off Gestapo spies and interrogation until she was finally forced to leave.3 Hitler’s Berlin had been her personal war zone, and if it had made her as expert as any combat journalist in arming herself against danger, it had also forced her to keep very close the fact that, by Nazi reckoning, she was a Jew.
Sigrid Lilian Schultz had settled in Berlin late in 1913. She’d been a pretty, intellectually pugnacious twenty-one-year-old, with a command of several foreign languages and a headful of ambitions to sing in opera or practise law. She also considered herself a cosmopolitan, for, despite her Germanic-sounding name, her father had been born in Norway and she herself had been born in Chicago, where Herman Schultz, a society portrait painter, had moved in 1891 to advance his career. His plan had been to put down “deep roots in prairie soil” to create his version of the American dream, and, after his eighteen-year-old wife, Hedwig, had given birth to Sigrid, on 5 January 1893, he’d settled his family in a spacious house in the suburb of Summerdale, with a garden overlooking miles of open ground.4
Sigrid was a tiny blonde scrap of a child for whom Herman had high ambitions. She was to be raised in the modern American way, encouraged to run freely around the countryside with the family’s huge St. Bernard dog. But she was also to be raised as a European, to speak German and French as well as English, and, until she was eight, she lived in the centre of a charmed little world, petted by her parents, admired by the busy stream of friends who came to the house. Then, in 1901, that world broke apart as a sharp downturn in the Chicago economy coincided with a temporary decline in Herman’s own health, and the Schultz family felt they had to pack up their home and return to Europe, where a commission awaited Herman in the royal court of Stuttgart.
The two years Sigrid spent in Germany were, for her, a period of angry exile. While her father was painting in Stuttgart, she and her mother were sent to Hedwig’s family in Wiesbaden, where, for the first time in her life, Sigrid encountered disapproval. Her Jaskewitz relatives might have descended from a vivid ancestral mix of Spanish, Polish, Balkan, Russian, Central European and Jewish stock, but they’d adopted the mindset of snobbish, provincial Germans. They’d never cared for Herman and they greatly disliked the “fresh” American ways which he’d allowed his daughter to develop. Sigrid was thus sent away to Munich, “to a school for little princesses,” and, missing her parents, mocked for her “Yankee” accent, she turned from petted child to aggressive little waif.5
Years later, she recalled that she’d never hated that school more deeply than when news filtered through of her father’s favoured position at court, and “suddenly the teacher became so nice and all the little girls wanted to carry my books home.”6 But, once Herman had fulfilled his commission, he was able to move his family to Paris, and there Sigrid flourished. She attended an excellent lycée, she had teachers to develop the sweetly melodious voice that she’d inherited from her great-grandfather Joseph Jaskewitz, a former director of the Wiesbaden Opera, and she finally got to meet her father’s Norwegian family. They were ebullient, “crazy”—and she adored them, just as she adored Herman himself. But the most charmed hours of her life were the weekly lunches with her father, when he introduced her to Parisian restaurants, taught her about good food and wine, and recounted the stories of when he’d been a nineteen-year-old dreamer and had bicycled all the way from Norway to Paris to become an artist.
To Sigrid, Herman seemed marvellous; he was funny, flamboyant, gallant, and he could light up a room with his anecdotes. “He never lost the faith that life was thrilling,” she wrote, “and always knew how to make others share his joy.” It was only as she reached puberty that she realized how promiscuously Herman was spreading that joy; and while she would loyally excuse his philandering—“Poor man, he couldn’t help it the way women were running after him”7—she could see the pain it caused her mother. Later, she would admit how badly she was affected by these dark sexual ructions—“I was really scared of marriage”—and in her troubled, confused state, the teenage Sigrid was also starting to worry about her parents’ finances.8
Herman’s career had remained volatile, boomeranging between celebrity and penury, and it had become apparent to Sigrid that neither of her parents had any talent for managing money. Hedwig, girlishly pretty and guileless, had never mastered the art of the household budget, while Herman, a man always hoping for better times, could squander lavish sums in a restaurant, even when there were only scraps in the larder at home. At one point, they were living in a studio on the Place Pigalle, a “ramshackle, terrible and colourful district,” and, noting the squalor of other failed artistic careers, Sigrid studied to become the watchful adult of the family, teaching herself to cook and attempting to practise small domestic economies.9
“I probably missed out on a lot of fun,” she acknowledged. But she had no intention of sacrificing her own ambitions and, having graduated from the lycée with high honours, she not only began professional singing lessons, but was enrolled at the Sorbonne for courses in history and international law. Already, she was displaying the stubborn application that would drive her reporting career, and, even though she’d inherited Herman’s weak chest and had to be admitted to a Lucerne sanatorium with possible TB, she remained open to new horizons. When her parents wrote with news that they were temporarily setting up a home and studio in Berlin for Herman’s work, she was eager to join them as soon as she was well.
Berlin seemed full of possibilities when Sigrid arrived: it had a fine university and “it was the place” to study singing, if she could only scrape together the funds.10 Yet it didn’t take her long to become aware of an unsettling edge to the city. The newspapers she read were strident with xenophobic editorials, calling for the Kaiser to defend Germany against the expansionist greed of its European rivals; meanwhile, her parents’ Jewish friends spoke of an alarming surge of anti-Semitic feeling in the city, their businesses boycotted and hate mail sent to their homes. Even though the Schultzes themselves had made little of Hedwig’s ancestry (it’s not even clear when Sigrid was told that she herself was half-Jewish), the family could not ignore these signs and could not but feel that Berlin in early 1914 was a potentially hostile city.
Sigrid’s own response to these uncertain times was typically self-denying and typically practical. It was obvious that she and her parents needed a reliable source of income, so, abandoning her own studies, she gained a rudimentary teaching certificate and advertised for work as a private language tutor. Herman, who’d had such fine plans for his daughter, was grandly and unreasonably disappointed in her, yet, by 3 August, he had to acknowledge Sigrid’s prescience. The Serbian bullet that assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand had sparked a dramatic unravelling of the already fragile European peace, and the Central Powers of Germany, Austro-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire were now at war with Russia, France and Britain.
Initially, the war made little impact on the Schultzes. They trusted that their dual American and Norwegian citizenship would keep them safe (both countries were still neutral at this point); Herman was earning unexpectedly good money from high-ranking Germans who wanted to be painted in their uniforms; and Sigrid was particularly buoyant because a Norwegian-American naval officer, whom she’d known for several years, had proposed to her while on leave in Berlin. Guarded as she later was about the details of her private life, she didn’t identify her fiancé by name, but she did imply that he’d been the love of her young life, that he’d helped to overcome her fears of marriage and that she’d hoped to become his wife as soon as the war was over.
Two and a half years and several million casualties later, however, the war showed no signs of ending, and, in April 1917, when America joined forces with Allied powers, Sigrid’s own situation became extremely grave.
Like all American citizens, she and her parents had been encouraged to leave Germany, yet their departure had been delayed because Herman had been offered a last-minute and very lucrative commission in Hamburg. His decision to accept would then prove fateful for the whole family because, once there, he was diagnosed with TB and placed under strict quarantine, which left Sigrid and Hedwig stranded in Berlin, not only scared about Herman’s health, but, even more frighteningly, re-categorized as enemy aliens, required to report twice a day to the police and to remain confined to their immediate neighbourhood.
Life for Sigrid now shrank to a series of small survival strategies, as she dodged the military police to teach her few remaining pupils and bred rabbits on the apartment balcony, bartering them for flour at a local bakery. Then, in the summer of 1917, she heard that her fiancé had been lost at sea, his ship almost certainly torpedoed by German U-boats. At that moment, she all but buckled under the weight of despair. “I thought [it] was the end of my emotional life,” she recalled.11 Yet her parents still needed her support, and, in the autumn of 1917, when she learned that the mayor of Baghdad was in Berlin and was looking for an interpreter who was fluent in English, German and French, Sigrid forced herself to rise above her misery and apply for the post.
Her new job was to have a transformative effect on her world. Réouf Bey Chadirchi was rich, aristocratic and clever, and while he’d come to Berlin on diplomatic business, he was planning to supplement his own private law studies at the city’s university, and was expecting Sigrid to assist him in lectures as well as in meetings. After three years of anxious, menial work, it was thrilling to feel her brain re-engaged: “Can you imagine,” she wrote, “the joy of continuing studies that seemed all important to me, and being paid for that privilege.” But so intimately did Réouf come to depend on Sigrid, for her intelligence as well as her interpreting skills, that he began to entrust her with some of his more politically tricky affairs.12
If there was a moment when Sigrid first got her taste for investigative journalism, it may have been the confrontation she engineered with Réouf’s most formidable adversary, the right-wing nationalist and anti-Semite, General Ludendorff. Ludendorff had come up with a plan to scapegoat the nation’s Jewish community for Germany’s failing performance in the war and he was pressuring Réouf to drum up support for his scheme among the Arab states. Réouf had been repelled by the idea, but his position in Berlin was delicate and he was ready to accept Sigrid’s proposal that she interrogate Ludendorff further, on his behalf.
Later she would admit that her strategy for questioning the general was intrepid, but naive; for, while she’d provided herself with cigarettes and canned sardines to bribe her way up to Ludendorff’s hotel suite, she had no way of compelling him to listen and, as she recalled, “an onlooker would have been amused to see me firing questions at the stony faced general while he tried to walk away as fast as possible without actually breaking into a trot.”13 Yet, even though Sigrid failed to assist Réouf in his dilemma, he was captivated by the courage she’d shown, and in November 1918, when the war ended and he was recalled to Baghdad, he asked her to accompany him as his wife.
“Our relations, which were indifferent at the beginning, became more and more intimate, you supported and advised me in every way,” Réouf fondly reminded Sigrid when he wrote to her fourteen years later.14 But, while she cared for Réouf, she had no interest in marrying him, not least because she was still in mourning for her fiancé and would continue to be so for “years and years.”15 Nevertheless, Réouf’s departure would leave an emotional as well as a financial void in Sigrid’s life, and she would feel his absence even more keenly when Germany’s defeat in the war was followed by months of revolutionary chaos.
Copyright © 2021 by Judith Mackrell. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
