Free Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman by Jeremy Adelman Page B

the party to resist the legislation, hoping they could spoil the gambit. On March 23, the parliament met in the Kroll Opera House. Outside, storm troopers surrounded the building, taunting and threatening Socialist Deputies who dared enter. The police intercepted and even arrested some of the deputies, one was pummeled, and others started packing their bags in preparation to flee. That night, 448 approved of Hitler’s request; only 94 Socialists were able to stand up and have their negative votes counted as storm troopers patrolled the aisles barking at them. 30
    In a matter of weeks, fear replaced confusion. Bristling with their laws, the Nazis ravaged the opposition. Arrest campaigns followed. There were so many detained that the government opened its first concentration camp at Oranienburg, 35 kilometers north of Berlin. Nazis seizedBertolt Brecht’s personal address book and used it as a guide to expand their net. Otto Albert’s rowing partner, schoolmate, and brother to his first amour, Peter Franck, found himself arrested and also had his address book confiscated. One by one, Peter’s friends and associates were rounded up. Everything had now changed for OA.
    Meanwhile, Carl had a sense that matters were getting much worse, but he kept his worries to himself. Some of his friends were feeling the pressure. Among them was René Kuczynski—a demographer and avid pacifist—whose name appeared on the SA’s list, which led the troopers to Kuczynski’s house. In the end they withdrew because the police and the storm troopers got embroiled in a dispute over who had claims to seized properties and detainees. But Kuczynski was rightly petrified. In early March, Carl clandestinely arranged for him to hide in his clinic (located in an asylum for the insane where, presumably, no one worth worrying about would live) and set about making arrangements for his friend to escape, eventually to England, where he would teach demographics at the London School of Economics. 31 It took five decades for OA to learn of his father’s private heroism. Only then did he learn from Kuczynski’s son, Jürgen, of Carl’s sanctuary. Jürgen produced the original full-sized Gertrude Simon portrait, which the family had been safeguarding, as a gesture of gratitude; for half a century, the photograph of Carl had hung on the wall as a tribute to the family’s secret savior. 32
    Carl was concealing another secret: he knew he was about to die of cancer. In January, he grew visibly unwell. The children were told he had ulcers. Then one day he returned home from the clinic with X-rays of his stomach and clinically pointed out the growths to his confused, and then upset, children. Some time around March 20, shortly after Kuczynski’s hiding, an operation removed the cancerous tissue; but it was too late, the disease had metastasized. Carl lived only another ten days. The children were not encouraged to see him—the decay was so swift and awful that Hedwig did not want them to remember their father in this condition. Instead, she paced the Hohenzollernstrasse apartment repeating to herself, “I must remember him, I must remember him.” 33 His friends and associates, mostly doctors, ministered to him and were at his bedsideconstantly. Carl was pronounced dead in a hospital in Charlottenburg on March 31, 1933. The next day, the first wave of government-sanctioned violence swept Berlin, with assaults and boycotts on Jewish shops and businesses.
    The funeral brought out a crowd of doctors, friends, and family. There were memorial speeches. Ulrich Friedemann, Carl’s closest friend, gave the longest of the tributes. Thirteen-year-old Eva was inconsolable as the wreath was laid before his coffin. Carl’s body was laid to rest at the Heerstrasse Cemetery, a handsome interconfessional burial site, which the Nazis, knowing Jews were buried there, later slated to raze for the Berlin Olympics of 1936. After the funeral, the family retreated to the apartment