After a few years of scraping by in Boston, living in dilapidated apartments, Elinor suggested they move to Germany to live with Frederick’s family. By then, Karl had a new engineering company that was doing well. And there was nothing keeping Elinor in Boston anymore—after her mother’s death, she and her sisters sold the house on Emerson Road—and she felt like she was at a crossroads. She never wanted Frederick to resent moving to America for her, and she knew enough about his background to understand that he was sacrificing a great deal to start over with nothing just to be with her. She also knew a life of poverty in Boston was not what they had dreamed about when they mapped out their lives as young lovers at Camp Florence.8

Frederick was hesitant. He was resistant to the idea of relying on his parents for anything, and he and Elinor would be moving to Germany with nothing more than the clothes on their backs, which meant they would have no choice but to live with his parents while he worked for his father. Frederick had no idea how his parents would receive his new family, and although he had suppressed his longing for his father’s approval, he knew that if he returned to Germany he risked falling back into a trap of rejection.

After much back-and-forth, Frederick finally agreed to the move with one caveat: he would give it one year. If they weren’t happy in Germany after that, they would return to the United States immediately. He decided to be cautiously optimistic about working for his father’s company because he would finally be able to provide for his family of three. He also knew that, as the only son, he was the natural choice for taking over his father’s business one day, which would help his parents warm to the idea of his move back to Germany to live with them. He would be groomed to be the next CEO, which would mean a significant upgrade to his current lifestyle. If his parents knew he and his family had been living in a shabby attic apartment, they would have been ashamed.

It wasn’t just Frederick’s anxiety about working for Karl that gave him pause. He knew his parents still believed in the German empire. With the fall of the Third Reich and for survival reasons in occupied territory, no one in Germany still openly supported Nazism after the war. However, his parents were German nationalists, and that strong national pride came with feelings of racial superiority. Frederick couldn’t guarantee Karl and Margarete would accept his new black family.