Agent Sonya

by Ben MacIntyre

  In April 1927, Ursula quit Prager’s and the hated Onion, and took a job as archives assistant at the Jewish-owned Ullstein publishers, one of Germany’s largest newspaper and book publishers. One of her first acts on taking up the job was to write an article for Die Rote Fahne about inadequate working conditions in her new workplace. “One thousand two hundred free copies were distributed at the entrance here and made quite an impression.” It certainly made an impression on the management.

  After less than a year at Ullstein’s, Ursula was fired. She was a troublemaker, and at a time of political upheaval and intensifying anti-Semitism the publishers wanted no trouble.

  “You have to quit,” Hermann Ullstein told her.

  “Why?” asked Ursula, although she knew the answer.

  “A democratic enterprise can offer no prospects to a communist.”

  With a patchy job record, little experience, and unemployment still rising, Ursula found she was unable to get another job. She refused to accept handouts from her parents. She wanted a challenge, somewhere unfamiliar, and some space to think and write. She needed an adventure, on a different stage. She chose America.

  The great Lenin had written: “First we will take Eastern Europe, then the masses of Asia. We will encircle the last bastion of capitalism, the United States of America. We will not need to fight. It will fall as a ripe fruit into our hands.” America was ready for revolution. Besides, Jürgen was still living there, and she wanted to see him. Her mind was made up: she would go to the United States and return when Rudi completed his architecture studies. Or possibly not. It was a quixotic decision and, for an unmarried woman of twenty-one who had never been abroad, a remarkably bold one. Ignoring her mother’s entreaties and rejecting her father’s offers of financial support, in September 1928 she boarded an ocean liner bound for Philadelphia. Rudi waved goodbye, wondering if he would ever see her again.

  America on the eve of the Great Depression was a place of roaring vitality and grinding poverty, opportunity and decay, bright hope and impending economic calamity. Ursula was independent for the first time in her life. She found a job teaching German to the children of a Quaker family, and then as a maid at the Hotel Pennsylvania. Her English, already good, improved rapidly. After a month, she took the train to New York and headed to Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

  The Henry Street Settlement, founded by the progressive reformer and nurse Lillian Wald, provided medical care, education, and culture to the city’s immigrant poor. Immigrants could stay there rent-free, in return for a few hours of social work every week. Wald was the animating spirit of the settlement, a campaigner for women’s and minority rights, suffrage and racial integration, a feminist ahead of her time, and to the latest arrival at Henry Street Settlement a revelation and an inspiration. Ursula left her first and only meeting with Wald deeply impressed by the American woman’s personality and philosophy: “The task of organizing human happiness needs the active cooperation of man and woman; it cannot be relegated to one half of the world,” Wald declared. Ursula moved in and got a job at Prosnit Bookshop in upper Manhattan.

  Ursula would stay in the United States for almost a year. The experience shaped her profoundly, beginning a love-hate relationship with the capitalist West that would endure for the rest of her life. The political and economic extremes of America at the end of the Roaring Twenties were comparable to those in Weimar Germany. New York had surpassed London as the most populous city on earth, with more than ten million inhabitants, and the city was exploding with energy, creativity, and wealth, an obsession with new technology, cars, telephones, radio, and jazz. Yet, beneath the glittering surface, disaster was brewing, as investors, large and small, poured money into an overheating stock market in the belief that the boom would never bust.

  Unlike the Onion, Prosnit was happy to have a bookworm as an employee. Ursula already knew her Marxist-Leninist literature; she could quote chunks of it from memory, and rather too frequently did. Many of Prosnit’s customers were American communists, and the shelves offered new left-wing horizons in the form of the proletarian literature movement: books written by working-class writers for a class-conscious readership. Ursula was swept up by the intellectual vigor of the American left. One new book in particular spoke directly to her heart. April 1929 saw the publication of Daughter of Earth by the radical American writer Agnes Smedley. Thinly disguised autobiography, the novel tells the story of Marie Rogers, a young woman from an impoverished background who struggles with relationships, and takes up the causes of international socialism and Indian independence. “I have no country,” declares Smedley’s protagonist. “My countrymen are the men and women who work against oppression….I belong to those who die for other causes— exhausted by poverty, victims of wealth and power, fighters in a great cause.” Daughter of Earth was an instant bestseller, and Smedley was hailed as “the mother of women’s literary radicalism.” For Ursula, the book was a call to arms: a woman fiercely defending the oppressed, demanding radical change, and prepared to die for a cause that sounded romantic, glamorous, and risky.

  A few weeks after arriving in New York, Ursula joined the American Communist Party. That spring she attended a socialist holiday camp on the Hudson River, where she met Michael Gold, an acquaintance of her parents and at that time America’s most famous radical voice. Gold was the pen name of Itzok Isaac Granich. The son of immigrant Romanian Jews brought up in poverty on the Lower East Side, he was a committed communist, founding editor of the Marxist journal The New Masses, and a ferocious polemicist. Gold liked to pick fights. When he described Ernest Hemingway as a “renegade,” Hemingway sent back a curt reply: “Go tell Mike Gold, Ernest Hemingway says he should go fuck himself.” Ursula declared Gold’s novel Jews without Money “one of my favourite books.”

  Both entranced and repelled by New York, Ursula missed her home, her comrades, and her family. Above all, she missed Rudi.

  In the autumn of 1929, Ursula sailed for Germany. A few weeks later, the American stock market crashed, hurling millions into poverty and ushering in the Great Depression.

  It was only when she saw Rudi waiting at the dockside that Ursula realized how much she loved him. Her doubts about Rudi’s politics had eased during her American sojourn. He would see the light eventually. Ursula Kuczynski and Rudolf Hamburger married in October, in a simple ceremony attended by family and close friends.

  The newly married couple were happy, jobless, broke, and, in Ursula’s case, extremely busy fomenting rebellion. As a point of principle they refused to accept money from their parents, and moved into a tiny, one-room apartment without heating and hot water. She whirled around Berlin, writing articles for Die Rote Fahne, staging agitprop theatrical productions, and arranging radical book exhibitions. The party leadership instructed her to set up a Marxist Workers’ Lending Library, where members could borrow improving left-wing literature. With the help of Erich Henschke, an Orthodox Jew from Danzig working as a gravedigger, she wheeled a handcart around Berlin, collecting communist books from radical publishers and sympathetic comrades. When a newspaper published a photograph of Ursula with her book barrow, her parents were appalled. “I was allowed to pull the cart through town, I just wasn’t allowed to be photographed doing it.” Henschke was a communist bruiser, who would rather have been beating up brownshirts than collecting books he had no desire to read. Finally they amassed a stock of two thousand volumes and arranged them on makeshift shelving in a former pigeon cellar in the Jewish working-class district. Rudi painted a sign in large red letters: “Marxist Workers’ Lending Library. Loans 10 Pfennigs per book.” The first customer was an elderly factory worker: “Do you have something very straightforward about socialism for my wife, without foreign words in it?” Business was slow, not helped by the faint but persistent odor of pigeon droppings.

  Ursula was manning a stall at Berlin’s Revolutionary Book Fair when an elegant dark-skinned foreig
ner began browsing the titles. She recommended he read Daughter of Earth. A little mournfully, the man explained he had already read it, since Agnes Smedley was his estranged wife. Ursula was stunned: this was the Indian revolutionary Virendranath Chattopadhyaya.

  Promoting Marxist literature was enjoyable and ideologically laudable, and wholly unprofitable. Rudi was now qualified, but frustrated at the paucity of architectural work. A friend of Ursula’s employed him to decorate (entirely in red) the interior of the communist Red Bookshop near Görlitz railway station. He planned an extension to his father-in-law’s library and worked on the designs for a new hotel. But as the worldwide Depression worsened, the commissions dried up.

  Help came from far away. Helmuth Woidt, a childhood friend of Rudi’s, was working in Shanghai as an employee of Siemens, the German manufacturer. Early in 1930, Woidt sent a telegram alerting Rudi to a job advertisement in the Shanghai newspaper: the British-run Shanghai Municipal Council was seeking an architect to build government buildings in the Chinese city. Rudi applied and received an immediate reply: if he paid for his own passage to China, the job was his. Woidt offered them free accommodation in the apartment at the top of his house in Shanghai.

  Ursula was initially uncertain. Would she be deserting her comrades by leaving Germany again? Then again, the revolution was worldwide, and China sounded impossibly romantic. Ursula informed KPD headquarters she was going to Shanghai and intended to join the Chinese Communist Party, as she had previously joined the American party. “Communism is international, I can also work in China,” she naïvely told the comrades.

  Ursula had no notion of the political firestorm she was marching into. There was indeed a Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai, but it was outlawed, persecuted, and facing annihilation.

  URSULA DEPARTED BERLIN FIRM IN the conviction that the communist revolution in Germany was only a matter of time, and a short time at that. She was sorry to be missing it. The Nazi Party had been trounced in the presidential elections, and Hitler’s fascist thugs already seemed a grotesque irrelevance, a nasty little historical anomaly. She could not have been more certain about the shape of the future, or more wrong. Within three months the Nazis would be the second-largest party in Germany, the rise of Hitler unstoppable, and the destruction of German communism under way.

  On a warm July evening in 1930, Ursula and Rudi boarded the train for Moscow with one-way tickets. They had sufficient money to get to Shanghai, but not enough to get back. Their worldly possessions consisted of two suitcases of clothes, some hard sausage, bread, soup cubes, a small spirit stove, and a chessboard. In Moscow, they boarded the Trans-Siberian Express and continued the slow journey east. Ursula lay on her bunk and watched the vastness of Russia slip past the window, an undulating ocean of birch forest stretching to the horizon. The train made an unscheduled stop between stations and the passengers alighted, grateful to stretch their limbs. “An accordion sounded and people began to dance. Soon hands grasped ours and we danced too.” In a meadow, somewhere in Soviet Siberia, Ursula and Rudi whirled to the music of a Russian accordion.

  In Manchuria, they boarded the Chinese Eastern Railway to Changchun, and then switched to the Southern Manchuria line for the long train ride south to Dalian, where they boarded a steamer to complete the final, six-hundred-mile leg of the trip, across the Yellow Sea to Shanghai.

  The first thing that struck Ursula was the smell, the pure, hot stink of poverty that wafted up from Shanghai harbor, a miasma of sweat, sewage, and garlic. She had witnessed plenty of human suffering during the economic crisis of the Weimar Republic, but nothing on this scale. “Encircling the ship in floating tubs were beggars, moaning cripples with stumps for arms and legs, children with festering wounds, some blind, some with hairless scab-encrusted heads.” Straining, emaciated porters formed a “human conveyor belt” from ship to shore.

  Waiting on the dockside was Helmuth Woidt, clad in a dazzling white drill suit and pith helmet, his wife, Marianne, alongside him clutching a huge bunch of flowers. A short rickshaw ride whisked them to a spacious villa on a tree-lined avenue in the French Concession, where most of Shanghai’s business community chose to reside, far from the stench and hubbub of the port. A Chinese butler in white gloves poured chilled drinks. Bowing servants served trays of food. Their dusty suitcases were removed, and Ursula and Rudi found themselves wearing crisp kimonos and sipping cocktails on a wide verandah overlooking a neatly tended garden. In a matter of moments, she had moved from one world into another.

  Shanghai in 1930 had a good claim to be the most socioeconomically divided city on earth, a place where the distance between rich and poor was not so much a gap as a yawning gulf. Part colony, part Chinese city, it was home to fifty thousand foreigners surrounded by almost three million Chinese, most living in abject squalor. The international community included British, Americans, French, Germans, Portuguese, Indians, White Russians, Japanese, and others, some of them penniless refugees, others new-minted plutocrats of staggering wealth. Political upheaval and famine in the Chinese interior combined with the impact of the Depression to force fresh waves of humanity into the city, desperate for work and food. Rickshaw pullers could be found hanging dead between the shafts, while shiny new American cars cruised the streets driven by uniformed chauffeurs. Shanghai was the largest city in China, the commercial center of East Asia. Businesses and banks competed to build ever larger buildings along the Bund, the stylish waterfront. But behind the flashy commercial district and the foreigners’ enclaves lay another Shanghai, a place of sweatshops, textile mills, and tenements, rife with disease and despair, and pullulating with political resentment. Shanghai was home to China’s only industrial proletariat and the birthplace of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). America, as Ursula discovered, had not been ripe for revolution, but China was.

  In the wake of the nineteenth-century Opium Wars, the Chinese empire had granted extraterritorial “concessions” along the Yangtze to foreign powers—British, French, and American—self-ruling districts with their own laws and administrations. Only seven of the city’s twenty square miles were under direct Chinese rule. The largest enclave, the International Settlement, a merger of the British and American concessions, contained roughly half the city’s population, and as additional foreign powers entered into treaties with China, their nationals joined in its administration. Germany had surrendered its extraterritorial rights after the First World War, rendering the fifteen hundred German residents of Shanghai subject to Chinese law. The International Settlement was governed by the Shanghai Municipal Council, a body elected by foreign residents but dominated by the British, who chaired every department except the municipal orchestra, which was run, naturally, by an Italian. Driving from one side of the city to the other required three different driving licenses. Three police forces—French, Chinese, and the British-run Shanghai Municipal Police—competed, overlapped, and struggled to contain a burgeoning crime wave.

  The “Paris of the East,” Shanghai was also the “Whore of the Orient,” where fashionable boutiques rubbed shoulders with opium dens, cabarets, ancient temples, movie houses, and brothels. The Shanghai-born British author J. G. Ballard recalled a city where “anything was possible, and everything could be bought and sold.” Simultaneously glamorous and seedy, shiny and grotty, Shanghai was home to a teeming international throng of beggars, millionaires, prostitutes, fortune-tellers, gamblers, journalists, gangsters, aristocrats, warlords, artists, pimps, bankers, smugglers, and spies.

  The expatriate German community in Shanghai had its own church, school, hospital, and club, the Concordia, a hideous, turreted Bavarian-style Schloss on the Bund, complete with ballroom and bowling alley. Here the Germans of Shanghai gathered to play cards, drink, sing patriotic songs, gossip, wax nostalgic for the Fatherland, and complain about their Chinese servants. Presiding as a mini-potentate over this small corner of Germany was the consul general, Heinrich Freiherr Rüdt von
Collenberg-Bödigheim, a veteran diplomat and enthusiastic Nazi who would end up as Hitler’s ambassador to Mexico.

  The Hamburgers’ first evening in Shanghai was spent in the club. A slew of social invitations followed: tea with Constantin Robert Eginhard Maximilian von Ungern-Sternberg, a Baltic nobleman, descended from Genghis Khan, who had narrowly escaped the Bolshevik Revolution (his older brother, Roman, a ferocious White Russian warlord known as the “Mad Baron,” had invaded Siberia before being captured and executed by a Red Army firing squad); dinner with Hans Stübel, a professor of ethnology and an expert in Chinese tattooing; a swimming pool party at the home of a businessman, Max Kattwinkel; cocktails with Karl Seebohm, representative of the chemicals firm I. G. Farben, who had a glass eye, a large private income, and three hundred gramophone records. A club stalwart was Johann Plaut, the most important, and most self-important, journalist in the German community.

  Two exotic birds to be found fluttering around the Concordia were Rosie Goldschmidt and Bernardine Szold-Fritz. The daughter of a German Jewish banker, Goldschmidt had already gained some celebrity through her travel writing, and a great deal more on account of her vagina. Rosie had been married to Ernst Gräfenberg, a Berlin gynecologist who made his name studying the female orgasm: the “G-spot,” the erogenous point in the vagina, was named after him. In spite of this discovery, Rosie divorced Gräfenberg after five years to marry the sixty-three-year-old Franz Ullstein (scion of the publishing house where Ursula had worked), a liaison considered so unacceptable by his family that they falsely accused her of being a French spy. Rosie would become a war correspondent for Newsweek, a successful novelist, and a countess through her marriage to a Hungarian aristocrat. Bernardine Szold-Fritz was Rosie’s close friend and bitter social rival: part of the New York circle that included Dorothy Parker and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bernardine was married (pro tem) to Chester Fritz, a wealthy American metals trader nicknamed “Mr. Silver.” Bernardine threw parties of legendary excess, wearing enormous hooped earrings, a breastplate of Balinese silver, and a turban. “She spent her afternoons pacing her red and black painted apartment using a telephone with an absurdly long cord to arrange buffet suppers, teas, and meetings of her amateur dramatics company.” She told absolutely no one that she was really from Peoria, Illinois.