The Music of Resistance: Berlin’s Red Orchestra

Marcel Krueger on Berlin’s remarkably brave anti-Nazi resistance group… 

In Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1980 movie Lili Marleen, the director has a cameo: during a cloak and dagger scene in which the main protagonist Willie Bunterberg is recruited for the Germany resistance set in a limousine parked in a deserted car park, he plays a man in black hat and coat sitting silently and brooding on the backseat. When Hanna Schygulla, who plays Willie, turns around and asks him who he is, he responds: “Günter Weisenborn.”

Günther Weisenborn was born in the west German city of Velbert in 1902, grew up in nearby Opladen and started working as a freelancer for his local newspaper after school. After completing his German and medical studies in Cologne and Bonn, Günther proved himself a gifted writer and playwright and worked as an actor across Germany; in 1928, he moved to the capital. After starting work as a dramaturge at the Volksbühne, his anti-war play U-Boot S4 premiered there in October 1928. He immersed himself in the city’s artistic circles, working with Bertolt Brecht, Heinrich George (who played the lead in U-Boot) and Valeska Gert, while sampling the bohemian delights of the bars and clubs at night. His novel, Barbarians, was thrown onto the Nazis’ literary bonfire in 1933, but Günther continued to write under pseudonyms.

Increasingly frustrated with the Nazi regime he emigrated first to Argentina in 1936, and then the U.S., where he tried—unsuccessfully—to make it as journalist, returning to Germany in 1937. In that same year, he met with a young Luftwaffe officer on the Ku’Damm whom he already knew through his bohemian circles. The officer was Harro Schulze-Boysen, and Günther had unwittingly been recruited for Harro’s resistance circle, comprised largely of artists, scholars and free spirits.

The group was led by Harro and his wife Libertas, with whom Günther had written a play called Die guten Feinde (The Good Enemies), and had ties to Marxist economist and jurist Arvid Harnack (whose brother, Falk, was a member of Munich resistance group White Rose) and his American-German wife Mildred, a literary scholar and philologist. Continuing their bohemian lifestyle well into the early 1940s, the group met regularly for parties, readings and performances in the Schulze-Boysen apartment on Altenburger Allee 19 in the Westend, and ventured to the Berlin lakes for sailing, swimming and picnics. It was in the Altenburger Allee apartment that Günther met teacher, actress and resistance fighter Margarete Schnabel, called “Joy”, a friend of Libertas; Günther and Joy married in 1941.

Harro Schulze-Boysen (right) with Marta Husemann and Günther Weisenborn, (c) Deutsches Bundesarchiv

What likely appeared to the authorities as shallow hedonism hid a deeper program of resistance, especially as the group grew and recruited more likeminded people from all walks of life: artist couple Kurt and Elisabeth Schumacher, the writer Walter Küchenmeister, translator Greta Kuckhoff with her writer husband Adam Kuckhoff, the journalists John Graudenz and Gisela von Poellnitz, the doctors John Rittmeister and Elfriede Paul, the dancer Oda Schottmüller and the actress Marta Husemann with her husband Walter Husemann, were just some of the names involved. Notably, the group also included members of Jewish descent.

Over a couple of years Harro and Arvid united more than 150 Berlin opponents of National Socialism from different social origins and ideological backgrounds—40 percent of them women—and also made contact with other groups across occupied Europe. Their activities were equally diverse, from Libertas flirting with soldiers (and even top Nazi brass like Göring) to gain access to photos of Nazi atrocities, and Arvid Harnack and Adam Kuckhoff collecting intelligence from their official positions deep in the Third Reich’s Economic Ministry and Propaganda Units respectively, to helping concentration camp prisoners and persecuted Jews escape, writing, distributing and mailing pamphlets, and even producing an underground magazine for foreign workers. On May 22, 1942, just four days after an arson attack on the same exhibition by the (unrelated) Jewish resistance group of Herbert Baum, the group plastered the center of Berlin with hundreds of self-designed and self-printed leaflets protesting against the Nazi propaganda exhibition

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