If the consequences of going into Jewish stores, of dallying about flying a Nazi flag, and of resisting attendance at Nazi meetings were not precisely known (although still feared), there was no mystery about what happened to people caught listening to verboten foreign radio broadcasts. One person who was caught listening was Marion Beyme's religion teacher. Unbeknownst to Frau Beyme, the teacher was Jewish and had converted to Christianity. (My initial confusion as to which way the conversion went prompted Frau Beyme to explain, "Jewish race. Christian belief.") The teacher, "a highly intelligent woman," not only taught religion at the high school, but also lectured at Giessen University about Christianity. "She probably hardly thought of herself as a Jew. For many, it was a surprise to return to the consciousness, 'I am a Jew.' She lived, I later learned, with a non-Jewish girlfriend in an apartment. The apartment being relatively large, I never saw it, they rented rooms to two or three women students. These students heard that the two ladies listened to foreign radio broadcasts and told their professor [. . .]. This professor was a super-Nazi. And he made sure that the two, the Jew and the non-Jew, were sent to a prison nearby. The one who was not Jewish died there. She couldn't take the punishment.
"[Later], to my great surprise, I suddenly saw my old teacher again, on the street. I went to her, spoke her name, and wanted to ask how she was, and she said ..."—Frau Beyme lowered her voice to a whisper—" 'Get away fast, get away fast.' Then I learned she had only a short time, a day or two, to get some papers before being taken to a concentration camp." She paused. "To Theresienstadt." A longer pause. "I found it so decent of her, that she didn't want to put me in danger. Nothing worse could happen to her, but she didn't want something to happen to anyone else. Ja, if someone had seen us together, I probably would have gone with her to the camp."
"Probably" is debatable, but the danger certainly was there. And so was the other danger. Still, Frau Beck continued to tune in to the enemy. "Always, even during the war, she listened to foreign broadcasts, which was strictly forbidden. And she was always afraid someone could hear at the wall of the house that we were listening. My mother and I were completely unschooled technically and racked our brains trying to figure if someone could install a device on the house to hear from outside that inside we heard foreign broadcasts. We never knew if it were a danger or not. But nothing happened." And through the broadcasts, "we learned that a lot they had told us here wasn't true."
Frau Beck also may have expressed her anti-Nazi feelings in other ways. "Certainly if an SS man had sat next to her on the bus or the trolley, she'd have stood up and walked away. That I am sure of." Frau Beyme said she worried that her mother spoke her mind more freely than was prudent. But, again, nothing ever happened. They continued living at the crossroads of bravery, timidity, luck, and fear.
Frau Beyme had a vantage point other than that of Marburg. She had Berlin. Although she often returned to Marburg to visit, she moved to Berlin in the late spring of 1933 and lived there for five years. She had gone to pursue her career as a librarian. I had assumed it was what she wanted, but much later she indicated that she had lowered her sights to being a librarian, rather than raised them.
As for Berlin itself, true to its reputation, it was "unbelievably stimulating and lively," Nazis or no. Marion, then about twenty-three, got a job in a branch of the central Berlin library. Among her first sights was one especially distressing to a young librarian. It was the Nazis' book burning.
"I suddenly heard that books were being burned. And I went there with some acquaintances to see it, if it were really true. I saw that gigantic fire." Volume after volume by Marxist and Jewish and other disapproved authors, such as Thomas Mann (who had a Jewish wife), were destroyed. "They kept throwing in the books with great enthusiasm. Most were enthusiastic. Those who found it horrible, naturally didn't go."
The Nazis' heavy-handed clamp on German culture prompted one of her cousins, a young woman sculpture student, to flee Germany. Asked if she herself considered doing so, Frau Beyme said, "No. If I must be honest, no. I did not have that much courage, nor that much independence."
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