From Berlin to Hollywood - and beyond
Marianne Farrin
Copyright 2018 by Marianne Farrin
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Table of Contents
To the three most important men in my life:
my father, Helmut
my friend, Ray Marsh
my husband, Jim
Prologue
Medieval church bells chime across the French village when suddenly startled geese lift their clumsy bodies into the air. The time has come for an annual winged migration north.
One graylag, however, finds itself entangled in a fishermans rope and starts to panic. Frantically, the goose tugs with yellow beak at the twisted hemp. A village boy discovers the terrified bird, cuts the rope, and sets it free. With fluttering wings the graylag strains to catch up with the rest of the flock, rapidly disappearing on the horizon.
With autumn the geese return to the familiar pond in the same village, and again, church bells welcome them home. One graylag, however, still drags a piece of frayed rope in its leg.
As I watch the Winged Migration in the dark movie theater, I find myself cheering the little survivor for, like the graylag, I still drag painful memories from World War II. And as I leave a darkened interior, I hear a small voice.
Come into the light, and let your story be known even as you are known.
Winged Migration . Film by Jacques Perrin
A Wedding Portrait
A black-and-white wedding portrait of a young couple adorned my mothers dresser for sixty-seven years. It showed a picture of my parents, Dagny Albertsen and Helmut Magers, on their wedding day, December 1, 1934, in Berlin, Germany.
My mother wore no jewelry. Only four white satin roses graced her neckline, and a gentle veil of white lace draped her curly blond hair. She held a bridal bouquet of dark roses that appeared as if they had just been picked from the garden. My father stood next to her, tall and handsome with dark hair, a widows peak, and deep-set eyes; and the couple radiated hope and innocence like the golden aura encircling a religious icon.
Whether my mother lived in Germany, Denmark, California, or Florida, the wedding picture became a lodestar for my personal dreamsa fixture as permanent as a crucifix.
Dagny and Helmut
Years before I was born, Dagny, a young woman of twenty-four, was vacationing with her mother and sister on Fanoe, an island off the North Sea coast of Denmark. It was the summer of 1933.
While at Fanoe, Dagny met Inger, a young woman from Berlin who was also vacationing with her parents, and the two became friends. They stayed in touch by letter after both returned home, and the following spring, Dagny received an invitation to visit Inger in Berlin. So for the first time Dagny ventured south of the Danish border to Germany.
While Dagny was visiting Berlin, Ingers former university classmate and friend Helmut Magers was scheduled to be a panelist in a political discussion at Berlins Humboldt University. Helmut Magers, who had spent a post-doctoral year, 193031, in America at the University of Wisconsin, had recently seen his book, Roosevelt, a Revolutionary with Common Sense published; and Inger wanted to hear him speak. She invited Dagny to come along.
Both girlfriends were young, attractive, and single; and they shared a passion for the latest in fashionable clothes. Eager to appear chic at the evening event, they chose to wear colorful figure-hugging dresses with long sleeves, ankle-length skirts, and white starched collars. Berets, matching each dress, were angled on their coiffured hair.
Helmut was already seated on stage with fellow panelists when Inger arrived at the auditorium with her new friend, and she quickly found seats for the two of them in a row near the front. Helmut recognized his former classmate and acknowledged her with a smile. But who was the blonde woman sitting next to Inger? She seemed to be smiling at himeven flirtatiously perhaps.
Once the debate was over and the panelists readied themselves to leave, Inger signaled for Helmut to come over. She wanted to introduce him to her Danish friend and to invite him for dinner at her apartment during Dagnys visit. Having observed the two smiling at each other throughout the debate led Inger to recognize that it might be love at first sight.
And when Dagny returned to Denmark at the end of the week, the two seemed clearly smitten. Helmut arranged to spend the upcoming Pentecost holidays with her and bought train tickets from Berlin to Odense. He also planned to spend his summer vacation with Dagny, and both visits to Denmark were full of adventure and joy. After a third rendezvous, Helmut declared, Dagny, this traveling is simply too hard. Lets get marriedas soon as possible!
And so the wedding took place at the Danish Lutheran Church in Berlin on December 1, 1934, and a handsome wedding portrait captured the event.
After a brief honeymoon to Vienna, the newlyweds moved in with Gertrude, Helmuts widowed mother who lived in a spacious elegant apartment. Helmut, the youngest of three sons, had been living with his mother since coming back from the post-doctoral year in America and appeared to be her closest companion. Helmuts father, who was a doctor, had died in 1923 of gangrene contracted during WW I. Dr. Magers had been treating German soldiers in the trenches when Kaiser Wilhelm II himself made an official visit to the German armies. The pain of injured soldiers and the darkness of battle had caused the Kaiser to become ill, and Helmuts father was the doctor called upon to treat him in the trenches and restore him to health.
Hans, the oldest son, obeyed a strict father and had earned a doctors degree; but the day he graduated from medical school, he chose an independent path and never practiced medicine. He left Berlin in 1933 for a safer home in Rio de Janeiro when Hitlers discrimination against German youth with homosexual tendencies became official. Perhaps Hans might have been gay, but it was never spoken about in the family, and he never returned to Germany. Horst, the middle son with a PhD in agriculture, married Titika, a Greek, and lived in Greece where he was the manager of a large country estate.
Before the national election of November 1932, Helmut had been chosen by the students of the Berlin Humboldt University to represent them in a meeting with the president of Germany, General Paul von Hindenburg. The students wanted Helmut to plead with the general not to succumb to the pressures of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party who demanded that professors and students become Nazis. The November 1932 election was the last free and fair all-German vote before the Nazi takeover on January 30, 1933, followed by Hitlers election in March of that year.
At the time Helmut was the coeditor of the Berlin daily, the Tagliche Rundshau . In April 1934, Helmut had reviewed a speech in the newspaper by his former professor and mentor at Humboldt University, Dr. Eduard Spranger. The professor encouraged university students to resist nazification of the German universities, but as a result of Helmuts favorable review and further attempts by the Tagliche Rundshau to serve as the free press, Goebbels ordered the newspaper to cease publication in July 1934.
