Nor did she leave her Berlin library job, even though her boss, predictably, was a Nazi Party member. "I would not say he was a great supporter of Hitler, but someone who was most proud of the Nordic race." He was a disciple, she said, of a then-famous professor, Hermann Wirth, who had immersed himself in old Nordic traditions, studying everything from runic script to ancient Germanic customs.
And he was smitten with his new employee. "It was ludicrous. Everything I said was terrific and wonderful only because I was blonde. We always took books home with us, which we had to read and discuss so we could advise the readers about them. Because we couldn't read every book, it was divided, and we all sat together once a week and told the others, this kind of book is for simple people and that's a fantastic book, very complicated in style and should be recommended only to exacting readers, and so on. And when I said what I'd read and thought, his reaction was, 'Fabulous, that is really the natural and healthy sensibility.'
"And in the library, we wore white smocks. It's always so dusty when one works with books. A smock is very practical. And because I had only a furnished room in Berlin, I sent my wash home to my mother. She was fed up with these white smocks she had to keep washing and sending back. So she made a brightly striped smock which looked cleaner longer. One day, I appeared wearing it and the reaction was, 'That is again the correct sensibility. Not this sterile one, but again the healthy color.' So, it was again right.
"Whenever we wanted the afternoon off for whatever reason, I was the one to go and ask. Mostly the answer was yes. Only because of my blonde hair. But one day it came to an end."
That day was years later, in 1938. She no longer was a single librarian, but a married woman (married to her first husband, a Herr Koch) with a baby girl, named Annegret.
"I was taking a walk in Berlin with my daughter, she in her baby carriage, and I met this library director. He said, 'Ach, may I peek in?' and surely thought there would be this completely wonderful blue-eyed blonde child inside. At the beginning my daughter had very black hair and looked like she was from the Caucasus steppes or something. All he said was, 'Oh!'"
She laughed. "Horrified! 'Oh!' Since then he never spoke with me again." She laughed again. "That was the end of his enthusiasm. He probably thought I'd married some foreigner and not a racially pure German or whatever."
Incidentally, Leonard Beyme, whom she married long after the war, was having difficulties with racial stereotypes himself. The Beymes now make an unusually arresting couple as they walk along holding hands, but alone in the 1930s, he could not walk along the sidewalk with the ease she could. "I was treated as if I were a Jew. I was short, had a curved nose, I had dark hair, curls, and, whatever. Anyhow, I got it too, even though I'm not." During his undergraduate days at Marburg, he said, he was walking up the steps to a classroom building when uniformed SA men blocked the door. They yelled at him, "Out! Jews out!" To escape such treatment, he fled—to the German army. He was sent to France and Russia, and was wounded five times.
The day the war began, said Frau Beyme, she fled for home. "I was going shopping for something or another that morning and read, in huge posters everywhere, war has been declared. I was insanely terrified and thought it's all going to happen at once with the bombs, which took a good deal longer. I took my child and the most important things and came here to Marburg, where my mother lived, because I thought it can't be as bad in a small town as a big city, which also was right."
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