In the icy cold, several cars drive to the train station in Löwenberg, not far from Liebenberg. In one of them sits Libertas, and next to her, her uncle Wend, who is fifty-one, a man with a grin like a stripe across his face and what little hair he has on his head slicked back. Libs knows how much this day means to him: the Nazis are taking over in Berlin. Wend is smitten with this Hitler fellow. Two years prior he’d had an audience with him, and the man from Braunau was reassuring: “I’ll lead the battle against Marxism . . . until the total and definitive annihilation and eradication of this plague . . . I’ll fight to that goal ruthlessly, with no mercy.” That suited the estate owner, because in Liebenberg, too, people had demanded the breakup of the manorial land held by the one great local landholder, namely the Fürst.
In order to support the Nazi Party, Wend had sent a Hitler-approved circular to his friends among the landed gentry and large landholders, urgently recommending they all read Mein Kampf, which he said contained “an abundance of brilliant ideas.” Wend had set aside his initial misgivings about Hitler’s possible socialist tendencies: “If we don’t want Bolshevism, we have no other choice than to join the party that despite a few socialist ideas is the polar opposite of Marxism and Bolshevism.” Not only does he believe that the NSDAP can best solve the country’s problems, but he’s also convinced that “without Hitler, no form of government is possible in the long run.” And weren’t the Nazis predestined to rehabilitate his father, Fürst Philipp, since Maximilian Harden, the writer who triggered the Eulenburg scandal, was a Jew?
But what does Libertas think of the powerful new movement? Is she as enthusiastic as her uncle? On that day, after a one-hour train ride, they take part in the torchlight procession, and Libertas enjoys it. On the other hand, she knows little of Hitler’s goals, and isn’t terribly interested in them, as she lives from the heart and the gut. These are the places from which she hopes to write her poetry. Of course, Nazi propaganda is meant to appeal to exactly these same places, places beyond the level of rationality. When the Liebenberg group disembarks the train at Lehrter Bahnhof and heads toward the Brandenburg Gate along with the excited masses, Libertas is for that reason also moved.
Though politics may not be her cup of tea, Libertas, too, seeks to follow the suddenly powerful movement, and in March 1933 joins the local Liebenberg chapter of the Party with the member number 1 551 344.