sempozyum_bildiri_kitabi

capital gain. Anne introduced Linke to her books and Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit [Poetry and
Truth].
With all this she was the first human being I ever met. I lived in such abnormal times
that I had seen death before I had ever seen life. […] (In fact, all my learning never
happened in a one‐and‐one‐is‐two‐way, but only in connection with a personal influence.)
She helped me to discover that sentiments need not be sentimental, that a restless heart
and spirit have to be checked by form and knowledge, and—most important of all—that
respect, logic, and justice are the qualities which alone are able to regulate the anarchy of
man in a humane and livable way. Certainly all this was not quite so clear to me at that
time, and it did not change my confused and selfish character from one day to the next.
But somehow in the future I knew about the existence of this truth, it directed my outlook,
and I could never completely forget it. 6
After graduating from Gymnasium in 1923 at seventeen, Linke worked as an apprentice in a
bookshop, sarcastically calling it a “business career.” Class struggle and rivaling bourgeois parties
continued to fracture German society—in parallel—as mass consumerism blossomed amidst
Inflation. Linke and fellow workers cheated the book shop, buying books in advance to resell them at
a more expensive price on the black market, to earn money for a lipstick, skirt or stockings. In January
1919 the mark was 8.9 to USD. By 15 November 1923 it was 4,200,000,000,000 to the USD. 7
The whole population had suddenly turned into maniacs. Everyone was buying, selling,
speculating, bargaining, and dollar, dollar, dollar was the magic word which dominated
every conversation, every newspaper, every poster in Germany. Nobody understood what
was happening. There seemed to be no sense, no rules in the mad game, but one had to
take part in it if one did not want to be trampled underfoot at once. 8 [...] A growing fear
took hold of me. I could not go on with all this swindle, I was wasting myself, I had to stop
this kind of life before I was completely lost. 9
When she was approached by a co‐worker in the bookshop to join the Trade Union for Shop and
Office Workers Linke stated, “I plunged into a new but healthy adventure, and I was saved.” 10 Thanks
to this “fortunate encounter” Linke took a liking to politics. Eager to learn, a few years later she took a
typist position at the DDP Deutsche Demokratische Partei and joined the Young Democratic League
[DDP youth wing] in Berlin. Linke rallied a plebiscite for expropriation of ex‐princes (1925) fought
against rearmament and campaigned in the 1929 election despite Stahlhelm threat. Unselfishly
working for Weimar democracy—like fellow youth—she felt their efforts were unacknowledged. “Not
for a moment did I consider turning Communist, but I knew that the truth must lie somewhere in that
direction” 11 Linke admitted. Multiparty democracy had failed. Nevertheless, the DDP experience
helped her gain self‐confidence and led to another “fortunate encounter” with Gustav Stolper, a
Bildungsbürgertum, political economist, co‐founder of Der Deutsche Volkswirt (economic journal) and
a member of the DDP. What did a successful man want with a poor woman from east Berlin? Twenty
years her elder, perhaps Gustav sought to capitalize from Linke’s involvement in politics in working
class east Berlin to help lure voters to the DDP. Was Gustav charmed by an attractive and enthusiastic
Lilo or might he have had a higher aim to save a fellow citizen from extremism? Twelve years later
Stolper wrote in This Age of Fable (1942) a letter addressing her: “For L. the American friend
searching and fighting for truth.”
You are bewildered. You are not an historian or an economist or a sociologist, but
simply an honest person who takes life seriously and wants to understand the political and
economic world we live in. 12
An erudite man of intellectual persuasion, with connections to academics, politicians, journalists
and writers across Europe, Stolper hired Linke as a typist in January 1929. Their fructuous relationship