A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [71]
Werner Handler had become the Bonn correspondent for Berliner Rundfunk, and he covered the Globke affair. He also covered the organized extreme right, which reached a level in 1950s West Germany that it would not reach again until the reunification of Germany decades later. In 1954 there were almost fifty extreme right-wing organizations in the new West Germany, with an estimated 78,000 members. Expelled Nazis from the East, former targets of denazification in the western zones, and some who had been quiet for a time were now regrouping. Handler thought the West Germans were at best soft on Nazis. While he was in East Berlin in 1948, someone painted a swastika on the Berliner Rundfunk building, and when Handler and others protested, the station director called a meeting and said, “There is one thing you should know. We don't have discussions with Nazis. If we catch one, we beat it out of him. We don't discuss it.”
THE FIRST TIME Irene Runge saw Europe, in 1949, she was a seven-year-old New Yorker, her ship had just pulled into Gdansk, and she wanted to jump and swim back all the way to Washington Heights. Her father was a German Jew who might have been destined for the family's business in Mannheim. But when Hitler came to power, he went to Paris with his non-Jewish girlfriend and lived the leftist intellectual life of the days of the Popular Front, changing his name from Alexander Kupermann to Georges Alexan, which he deemed a fashionable nom de plume. He wrote articles and pondered larger works that he was never to write, but he did manage to use his base in Paris to get his entire family out of Germany.
When the Germans invaded France, he fled to Palestine, where he convinced his girlfriend to convert to Judaism before they married. Then they moved to the United States, settling in the Washington Heights area of upper Manhattan, west of the Broadway trolley. It was a Jewish neighborhood with a concentration of Austrian and German refugees. He opened a shop in the vast, dark labyrinth of the Times Square subway station, where he sold books and art. The shop became a hangout for German refugees, who drifted in and out all day, were served coffee, and passed hours arguing and debating in German.
Their only child, Irene, was born in 1942. After the war, the family did not go back to Germany. Irene's father still enjoyed his shop and his German intellectual life in Manhattan, and her mother liked living in the boom town that was postwar New York. But then came the cold war, and some of their friends—the crowd that passed through his shop—were called for questioning by the U.S. Congress on their leftist activities. In 1949, with the same quick instincts that had saved him from Nazi Germany, Irene's father told his wife and daughter to pack because they were moving to the newly formed German Democratic Republic. Over the protests of his wife and the whining of his daughter, they were soon living in Pankow, an East Berlin neighborhood just north of Prenz-lauer Berg. Pankow had not been bombed, and so many of the East German ruling elite lived there that Westerners often sneeringly referred to the East German government as “the Pankow government.”
Back in Washington Heights, little Irene's only notion of a place called Germany had been that she would see her parents and neighbors putting together packages, and she was always told it was to help the poor people in Germany. They would joke about putting her in the box and shipping her off. And now here they were, off to that miserable place where the poor people waited for packages. But she was told that her friend Johnny, with whom she played in Washington Heights, would be there too. He was. In fact,