Character Is Destiny: The Autobiography of Alice Salomon

13. Fourteen Years of Democracy, II: My Foreign Affairs, 1920–1933

CHAPTER 13 Fourteen Years of Democracy II: My Foreign Affairs, 1920–1933 In the midst of Germany’s deepest despair, we received an expression of international solidarity, of caritas inter arma. Members of the Society of Friends, who had helped the French rebuild their homes in devastated areas while the war still raged, were again aroused by their Christian and humanitarian conscience. Immediately after the armistice, they sent cod liver oil for the starving children in Germany and Austria. Dorothy Buxton, and her sister, Eglantine Jebb, in England started the “Fight the Famine Council.”1 Herbert Hoover’s plan for an emergency committee to feed the innocent children got under way.2 Jane Addams, who had been in Switzerland for a meeting of the International League for Peace and Freedom, came to Berlin, accompanied by Carolena Wood.3 Hoover had asked her to investigate the condition of the German and Austrian children. No one could have been better quali‹ed for a mission of goodwill, kindness, and generosity . In 1915, on her mission to the statesmen of Europe, everyone had been glad of the opportunity to meet her in my home. Now, when she came into our shadow-haunted country in 1919, the Americans had become “enemies,” Germany had been excluded from the peace deliberations currently held in Paris, and German nerves were tense and raw. The wound of hurt pride would not heal, and people who believed in reestablishing bonds with foreign nations and individuals were regarded with more than suspicion—with contempt. I had to learn that the women who had been chauvinistic during the war now had a tendency to hysteria that amounted to a persecution mania. They took every attempt at conciliation on as an offense. 133 I thought I had been very careful in preparing the reception to be given in honor of Jane Addams by the league of social work. We decided to ask each person on the list whether she would like to receive an invitation, in order to save her the embarrassment of a formal refusal. One American woman, married to a German high of‹cial, wrote me a very courteous letter. She said, “I feel I cannot yet meet people from the country of my birth, that rose up against the country which is now my home.” I considered this a question of sentiment and beyond criticism. The reception, in the assembly hall of my schoolhouse, was very informal, and we served a substitute tea made of bramble leaves, which we had been drinking for years. Jane Addams was as natural and simple , full of warm sentiment without sentimentality, as I had always known her to be. She looked rather ascetic, perhaps the result of much illness in her childhood, but Carolena Wood, with her good nature and 134 Character Is Destiny Alice Salomon, 1925. (Photograph courtesy of the Alice-Salomon-Archiv Berlin.) look of well-fed, rosy contentment, seemed quite a novelty. In a short speech I explained the purpose of the meeting, and I asked their permission to welcome our two guests, who did not understand German, with a few words in their own language. Jane Addams and Carolena Wood then spoke of the goodwill that had prompted them and the “Friends,” whose emissaries they were, and about Hoover’s plans. The evening seemed quite harmonious. Of course we were all deeply moved at meeting the Americans after years of isolation, the more so since it was our national tragedy that had brought them to us. But the next day a board member, one of my former students, resigned. She had “never dreamt of hearing English words spoken by a German woman.” Apparently she thought it proper to invite Americans but not to communicate with them. Aside from this outburst, she was and has remained a ‹ne, sensible woman. She was a tower of strength and sanity when the Nazis came into power. When we again became friendly, there was no grievance left in me. But the incident left no doubt as to the dif‹culty of restoring a spirit of understanding among individuals of former enemy countries. Jane Addams did not have a much better time. Her efforts to keep the United States out of war and her paci‹st attitude later had injured her popularity at home. Her propaganda for the German children killed it, for the time being. Up to the end of the...