German-American Discourse on Politics and Culture

October 25, 2016

Mascha Kaléko came into her own as a poet in late Weimar Berlin. Her short, whimsical-satirical poems, tinged with melancholy, perfectly reflected the modern urban sensibility - along with the sense of dread - of Berlin in the early 1930s. Her poems were admired by many of the Weimar luminaries such as Kurt Tucholsky, Thomas Mann and Eric Kästner. When not sitting in the Romanische Café with other artists and writers, she would be at home in her apartment on Bleibtreustraße - just off the Kurfürstendamm. Here she was in her element, but after 1933 it was no longer a safe haven for any Jew. Somehow, Mascha Kaléko, along with her husband and one-year-old child, managed to flee Germany just before the November Pogrom of 1938. She lived the rest of her life in exile, but never found her footing again as a poet - cut off from the oxygen of the Berlin she loved.

In 1974 Mascha Kaléko returned to Berlin and visited her old street. She wrote about the mixed feelings in one of her late poems.

(I lived here nearly forty years ago. …Something tugs at my sleeve / when I head down the Kurfürstendamm/ I’m strolling – that’s the word / And not looking for anything, that was my point. / And something keeps tugging/ Don’t be silly, I say to her./ Forty years! I’m no longer that person. / Forty years. How many times have my cells renewed in the meantime / Away fro home, in exile. New York, Ninety-Sixth Street and Central Park/ Minetta Street in Greenwich Village./ And Zurich and Hollywood. And after that Jerusalem. / What do you want of me, Bleibtreu? / Yes, I know. No, I’ve forgotten nothing. / Here was my happy home. And my distress. / Here my child was born. And had to leave./ Here is where my friends came to visit, and the Gestapo./ At night we heard the streetcars / And the Horst-Wessel song from the pub next door./ What was left?/ The pink petunias on the balcony./ The little stationary shop./ And a wound that never healed.)

October 22, 2016

The author and so-called historian Werner Rügemer describes himself as an "expert" on the United States and its history, but it is highly likely that he's never visited the US, and any understanding of American history comes from the Leninist dialectics he learned as a long-time member of the DKP (the West German communist party that staunchly supported the East German Stasi). For Rügemer the United States - indeed the entire world - is controlled by a (Jewish) Wall Street elite. Rügemer's "lectures" on the evils of the United States are easily found online.

Of course, there are many crackpot theories on the Internet. But Werner Rügemer was allowed to present them as an adjunct faculty member of the University of Cologne.

Among his favorite conspiracy theories featuring the US:

World War One was started by the United States and financed by "Wall Street Bankers";

The United States dictated the terms of the Treaty of Versailles;

US oil companies prolonged World War II by supplying oil to Hitler's Luftwaffe;

The US government colluded with German car manufacturers to build assembly plants in the US in order to weaken German trade unions.

Last week, in an interview, Werner Rügemer talked about the latest conspiracy he had uncovered regarding the sudden deadly collapse of the City Archives in Cologne in 2009. Of course if something bad happened it had to be fault of the United States and Wall Street bankers:

So, the fact that a few American-based firms managed funds that held shares in the global construction group Bilfinger "proves" that they were involved in the building collapse (btw, last I checked, Allianz is a German financial institution). This treachery of the Americans was covered up by the (CIA-controlled) German media. Of course, Blackrock is a favorite target of Werner Rügemer, since it is run by the "prominent New York Jew" Larry Fink. Blackrock manages index funds that track the DAX exchange and holds shares from a number of German companies, just as the German Asset Management Group DWS holds shares in American companies. So far, I haven't heard complaints about the threat of German influence on American companies - even after Bayer AG announced its plans to acquire Monsanto, at $64 billion the largest takeover so far in 2016.

September 20, 2016

Forget "House of Cards" the best show now available on Netflix is the three-part series NSU German History X, the German network ARD production Mitten in Deutschland. Most Americans have likely never heard about the the NSU - National Socialist Underground - a terror group that went on a ten year rampage killing Turkish and Greek immigrants, as well as a police woman and carrying out bombings. The series is comprised of three feature-length episodes. The first deals with the formation of the terror cell; the second with the aftermath of the first murder for the victim's family, and the third with the botched investigation.

The screenwriters were smart in just focusing on one murder - the first murder of the ethnic Turk and florist Enver Simsek in 2000 - which serves to represent the rest. The murder frames the first episode, but what comes between is fascinating and frightening. The central figure is Beate Zschäpe - we follow her development from typical confused teenage girl to a full-fledged Nazi-Braut who encourages the boys to commit ever more gruesome acts of violence. I think Americans will be shocked to see scenes of young people giving the Nazi salute to images of Adolf Hitler and singing about gassing Jews - this is a reality in certain parts of Germany. The adults in the first episode - which takes place in the eastern state of Saxony - are powerless to influence - much less control - their children. Their sons and daughters see their elders as losers - or worse, former Stasi informants. Unfortunately they find meaning and direction in a retrograde Nazi ideology, the cornerstone of which is hatred of foreigners. The charismatic ring-leader Uwe Mundlos talks incessantly about Der Tag X - the day when all foreigners are expelled (or killed) and the German Volk will have its Fatherland restored. Interestingly, his inspiration is not Mein Kampf, but rather the right-wing American manifesto The Turner Diaries - which also inspired Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber.

The second episode - which follows Enver Şimşek's family after his murder - is just heartbreaking. The family dynamics are the polar opposite from what we experience in Saxony. Here the family is close-knit, and every family member is focused on playing their part and working towards a common goal. Enver was an entrepreneur who was building a brighter future for his children. His daughter Semiya was even attending a boarding school and planning on a university study. Enver's murder throws everything into turmoil, and the law enforcement officials make everything worse. Rather than searching for Enver's murderer, they accuse the family of dealing drugs, or assume that the murder was the result of some clan-related revenge. The racism of the police is palpable. Semiya keeps the family together- we follow her from a 14-year-old teenager at the time of her father's murder to a confident young woman who never gives up finding the real murderers. The two female leads in "NSU Germany History X" - Almila Bagriacik who plays Semiya and Anna Maria Mühe who plays Beate Zschäpe - deliver outstanding performances.

The third episode, which follows the 10-year botched investigation, may be too much "inside baseball" for Americans. A couple of detectives began to connect the seemingly random murders of ethnic Turks (and one Greek) but are stymied at every juncture by the Verfassungsschutz (domestic intelligence - equivalent of our FBI).

What is frightening is that NSU German History X is not just history; it has relevance for current events in Germany. We now see the leader of Germany's third most powerful party - AfD - Alternative for Germany - seeking to rehabilitate the Nazi concept of "völkisch" - meaning ethnically pure. Are we getting closer to Uwe Mundlos' "Der Tag X"?

August 18, 2016

The "Zero Hour" - Die Stunde Null - , the years immediately following the 1945 collapse of the Third Reich, is for me a fascinating period of German history. The great cities of Germany had been reduced to rubble, the people were forced to endure incredible deprivation and starvation conditions, yet there was also a promise of new beginning. This combination of misery and optimism has always intrigued me, which is why I keep coming back to the novels and stories of Heinrich Böll and Wolfgang Koeppen, the poetry of Günter Eich, Gottfried Benn (late phase) and Paul Celan (early phase).

Lara Feigel, a lecturer at Kings College London, has approached the Zero Hour in Germany from a different angle: the outsider perspective. The Allied governments were interested in "changing hearts and minds" of the defeated nation, and saw the arts as playing a critical role in that process. The United States and Great Britain - and later, the Soviet Union - recruited some its most renown artists, filmmakers, journalists and writers to travel to the devastated country and establish new cultural institutions, while also reporting back to their home countries on what they saw and learned. Some of these emissaries of "the American Way of Life" were famous native born American writers, such as Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos. Others were German exile writers who during the war had become American citizens, such as Thomas Mann, Carl Zuckmayer and Alfred Döblin. Their mission - To remake Germany:

"Germany was to be reborn; its citizens as well as its cities were to be reconstructed. This was a campaign for the minds of the Germans - 're-education' in the ideas of peace and civilization. So, suddenly, a generation of British and American writers, film-makers, artists, musicians and actors found themselves in the vanguard of the campaign to remake a country. The immediate postwar period was a time when culture mattered, when writers and artists were seen as fundamental in securing a peaceful postwar settlement not just in Germany bun in Europe as a whole. When UNESCO - the United Nations Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization - was founded in November 1945 to prevent war, it guided itself by the credo that 'since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed. Often the cultural figures entering Germany in 1945 were hoping to forge not just a new denazified Germany but a new pacifist Europe."

The cultural envoys had very different reactions to what they found in Germany and to the question of "Collective Guilt". Peter de Mendelssohn had come to see the Germans as a 'band of thieves and murderers and abject criminals." Film director Billy Wilder also had little sympathy: "They burned most of my family in their damned ovens... I hope they burn in hell." Photographer Lee Miller perceived the Germans she in encountered in bombed-out Cologne as "repugnant in their servility, hypocrisy and amiability." Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway's wife, never recovered from the trauma of what she saw at the Belsen death camp. Others were far more sympathetic with the plight of the German people. The poets Stephen Spender and W.H.Auden recalled their glory days in Weimar Berlin and were hopeful for a united, peaceful Europe.

At the center of The Bitter Taste of Victory is Thomas Mann and two of this children - Erika and Klaus, bound together in an almost incestuous relationship. Thomas Mann was reluctant to return to Germany but felt is was his duty. He had actively condemned the Third Reich from his villa in California, but always felt bound to the fate of the German nation (see his essay Bruder Hitler). Erika had zero sympathy with this view and is seen as a fierce anti-fascist:

"Having retained her uncompromising stance throughout twelve years of exile, Erika was certainly not prepared to mellow now. She was exhausted by her year of press camp cots and army rations; aware that her thirty-eight-year-old body was taking the same battering as the car given to her by her dead friend. She missed her parents (at home in the plush comfort of Los Angeles) and her brother Klaus (stationed in Italy reporting for the US army). But she was propelled by hatred of the Germans who had driven her family from their homes and killed many of her friends. The people who confronted her daily exhorting sympathy for the destruction of their cities or demanding additions to their stamp collections were the same Germans who had thrown chairs at her in Munich and burned thousands of the books she loved. She was determined to play whatever part she could in witnessing their humiliation and convincing them of their guilt."

All the more surprising then is her later return to Pacific Palisades where she transformed into the dutiful "Daddy's Girl."

There is much extraneous gossip in Lara Feigel's book : she spends an entire chapter on the love triangle between General James M. Gavin, Martha Gellhorn and Marlene Dietrich. And then on the extra-marital fling of Rebecca West with Francis Biddle, the primary American judge at the Nuremberg trials. Still, her description of Brecht's production of Mutter Courage in the frozen Berlin during the Soviet Blockade of 1949 is highly rewarding. Also, her bibliography is a real treasure trove.

In the end, the whole endeavor of Western artists and intellectuals transforming postwar German culture and changing "hearts and minds" was a failure. This was in part the fault of the emissaries themselves who were unable to overcome their own prejudices, but also the advent of the Cold War which pitted intellectual camps against one another and destroyed the dream of a peaceful, united Europe.

The one exception was Carl Zuckmayer, who really did engage young Germans in dialogue and changed "hearts and minds" with the tremendous success of his play Des Teufels General. Zuckmayer - more than his fellow German exiles - was better equipped to convey the advantages of liberal democracy and "The American Way" having escaped the hothouse of Hollywood to raise goats in Vermont (see my review of Zuckmayer's Vermonter Roman ). Zuckmayer's contribution to postwar reconciliation deserves a separate book.

July 24, 2016

Nikolaus Wachsmann, Professor of History at the University of London, takes the reader on a 12-year journey into innermost circle of Hell in his monumental work KL (abbreviation for Konzentrationslager - concentration camp). This 800-page work includes over 150 pages of footnotes: Wachsmann spent years researching original sources, including 45 camp archives that were preserved. How he could read and systematically sort through the statistics and the stories of torture, slave labor,selections, death marches, horrific "medical" experiments on children, mass murder, etc. without going mad is beyond me. There is a danger that the reader grows numb from the sheer numbers of prisoners murdered in the camps - beginning with hundreds in the days following the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, to thousands following the 1938 November Pogrom, to tens of thousands Hitler launches his war, to, finally, hundreds of thousands as the Nazis carry out the Final Solution against Europe's Jews. Of an estimated 2.3 million prisoners who entered the hell of the Nazi concentration camps, over 1.7 million were killed, whether gassed or perished through the Nazi program of Vernichtung durch Arbeit ("annihilation through labor"). Wachsmann does manage to bring the nightmare down to a human scale by recounting the stories of individual prisoners that he obtained from personal memoirs, letters or eyewitness testimony. But nearly a million men, women and children entered the death camp at Auschwitz and were gassed within two hours of the their arrival without registration. They are what the writer and camp survivor Primo Levi called "the Drowned" - we will never know their identities.

Still, as Wachsmann points out, it is mistake to just associate the Nazi concentration camps with Auschwitz. For there were 27 main camps and over 1000 satellite camps. Professor Wachsmann goes into great detail about the camp network, its function and administration. True, we know more about Auschwitz because it was the largest camp which doubled as mass killing center and a vast slave labor facility for IG Farben and other German companies. But we cannot lose sight of the "lesser" camps: Sobibor, for example, murdered about a quarter of a million people, a quarter as many as Auschwitz-Birkenau in one three-hundredth of the space and half the time. Precisely because of this efficiency, we know virtually nothing about the dead.

The camps served different purposes throughout the 12-year Reich. Here is Wachsmann writing about the liberation of Dachau on April 29, 1945. Dachau - the only camp I've personally visited - was the first camp established by the Nazis in 1933 and one of the last to be liberated:

"It was more than twelve years since the SS had set up its first makeshift camp on the site. Since then, Dachau had changed its appearance many times over and gained multiple functions: bulwark of the Nazi revolution, model camp, SS training ground, slave labor reservoir, human experimentation site, mass extermination ground, and center of a satellite camp network. Dachau was nto the most deadly KL, but it was the most notorious at the time, inside Germany and abroad."

I learned many things from this book, including extensive information about the hierarchy of prisoners in the camp - as denoted by the colored triangles. At the bottom were the black (criminal), yellow (Jews) and green ("Asozial" - social outsiders). Beginning in 1937 the Nazis began rounding up these "social outsiders" - pimps, prostitutes, beggars, homeless people - often just poor people down on their luck. They were subjected to the worst abuse as "human scum" - very few survived for long in the camps and little is known about this group,

One question has always intrigued me: how much did the German population at large know about the concentration camps? The early camps were often in residential areas of German cities and the prisoners were often paraded down the street in broad daylight. Later, slave laborers - often Poles or Russian POW's would work along side German workers int he munition plants. And in the end, the emaciated inmates from the camps in the east were brought "home" to the Reich in Death Marches that passed though towns and villages throughout Germany. Wachsmann writes that a small portion of the population tried to help some of the prisoners when they could by giving food and water. Likewise a small portion believed the Nazi propaganda that these were "subhumans" who deserved their fate - they joined in with the SS in tormenting the prisoners, or hunting down and killing those who tried to escape. The vast majority looked away or reacted in silence - whether out of indifference or out of fear of reprisals from the Nazi terror apparatus.

The one individual who makes frequent appearances throughout KL - and who was responsible the management and expansion of the camp network from the early days to the end - is Heinrich Himmler. I strongly recommend reading Peter Longerich's definitive biography Heinrich Himmler (see my review) along side KL.

KL is not an easy book to read - the facts are too horrific to comprehend. Nikolaus Wachsmann makes it readable, and any student of the Third Reich or of the Holocaust will need to add this work of immense scholarship to his/her bookshelf.

July 17, 2016

The other day I wrote about the heroic efforts of two Americans - Varian Fry and Dorothy Thompson - to save the lives of German writers from falling into the hands of the Nazis and Nazi-sympathizers during the Third Reich. The fact is that both Fry and Thompson faced two formidable opponents in obtaining safe passage to America for these writers. On the one hand, they had to bribe, cajole, threaten or deceive the Nazis and their vassals in Vichy France and elsewhere to get transit visas and other documentation to allow these artists, writers, musimcians, etc. to leave. On the other, they had to contend with often hostile, suspicious and recalcitrant American officials who wanted at all cost to prevent "Jewish riff-raff" from arriving onto American shores.

Here are three authors who tried to emigrate to America but were denied entry:

Netty Reiling, a.k.a. Mrs Netty Radvanyi, alias Anna Seghers arrived in New York harbor on June 16, 1941 seeking asylum in the United States. As a left-wing "intellectual" and a Jew she was doubly in danger of being detained, imprisoned, and most likely murdered by the Nazis. Unfortunately, Anna Seghers never made it off Ellis Island. The FBI had been alerted via an anonymous letter that Anna Seghers and her husband were "comouflaged Communist agents." This was the beginning of the anti-communist hysteria in the United States; this, despite the fact that the Soviet Union was ostensibly an ally in the war already raging in Europe. Anna Seghers and her family were forced to continue on to Mexico, where supporters of the Republic in the Spanish Civil War were welcome. Unbelievably, J. Edgar Hoover took a special interest in Anna Seghers and deployed resources in Mexico to spy on the writer and her husband. Her FBI dossier contains more than 1000 pages.

What makes the story even more absurd is that while on Ellis Island signed a contract with an American publisher for a translation of her novel Das siebte Kreuz. The Seventh Cross became a monster best-seller in the US and was made into a Hollywood feature film starring Spencer Tracy.

The FBI also closely monitored the activities of other German exiles in Mexico, including Ludwig Renn, Egon Ervin Kisch, and Bodo Uhse. (For complete information, see Alexander Stephan, "Communazis" : FBI Surveillance of German Emigre Writers)

The poet and archeologist Erwin Walter Palm and his wife Hilde - both Jews - left Germany already in 1932, sensing the rising anti-Semitism. Their first stop was Italy, where Hilde earned a doctorate at the University of Florence. After Hitler visited Mussolini in 1939 they fled to England. When war broke out the couple was desperate to find asylum in the United States. By then, immigration rules were changing — and attitudes in the United States toward immigrants from Europe were becoming increasingly suspicious. The American government was making it harder for foreigners to get into the country.By early 1939, more than 300,000 names were on the waiting list to receive an immigration visa to the United States. American consulates changed their protocol and weren't granting visas unless transportation to the United States had been booked. By June 1941, most U.S. consulates in German-occupied territories had shuttered or were closing. In July 1941, a new division within the U.S. State Department took over visa pre-screening, meaning those in the United States would need to fill out new affidavits on behalf of potential immigrants. The situation for the Palms was impossible.

While the door was shutting for Jewish refugees in the United States, the Dominican Republic became the only country that offered asylum to refugees from Nazi Germany. Rafael Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic, was ready to provide a place to escape from Nazi persecution to one hundred thousand Jewish refugees. This was a very generous offer, given that the population of the Dominican Republic was just 1.6 million. Trujillo hoped that his actions would please Roosevelt.

The Palms arrived in Santo Domingo in 1940 and stayed for 14 years. There, Hilde found her voice as a poet and took her adopted country as her new name Hilde Domin - the great poet of exile, and -later - of homecoming.

Anne Frank was just starting out as a writer when she and her family were arrested and transported to Auschwitz. Her diary has since been translated into 67 languages and over 31 million copies have been sold - more than the combined sales of the work all other German emigre writers. Recently some letters from her father - Otto Frank - were discovered which show that by 1941 he was desperately seeking asylum for his family in the United States:

By 1941, the Frank family had already relocated from Germany to the Netherlands where, just a few years earlier, Otto Frank applied for visas to the United States — applications that were eventually destroyed, Frank wrote in a letter to his old college friend in the United States, Nathan Straus Jr.

"I am forced to look out for emigration and as far as I can see U.S.A. is the only country we could go to," Frank wrote on April 30, 1941. "Perhaps you remember that we have two girls. It is for the sake of the children mainly that we have to care for. Our own fate is of less importance."

"Ultimately, powerful connections and money were not enough to enable the Franks, not to mention most other European Jews, to break through the State Department’s tightening restrictions. By the summer of 1942, the Franks were forced into hiding. They remained in the secret annex for two years before being turned in, probably by the same courier who initially may have tried to blackmail them. As schoolchildren around the world know, the story ends with the death in concentration camps of 15-year-old Anne, her sister Margot and her mother, Edith, and the publication of Anne’s diary, now a literary and historical landmark that personalizes the Holocaust’s immeasurable loss."

Anne Frank was just one of thousands of Jewish refugees who were denied asylum in America during WWII. They were kept out by a successful campaign of fear, anti-Semitism, and general xenophobia. Most of them met the same fate as Anne in the Nazi death camps. To be clear, the guilt and responsibility for their murder belongs to the Nazis and the millions of Germans who supported the policy of annihilation of all European Jews. Still, this episode is a black mark on American history for more - much more - could have been done to save these desperate people.

July 15, 2016

Anti-Americanism in Germany is reaching absurd levels; now history is being rewritten. The economist and social researcher Lutz Hausstein has an article on NachDenkSeiten where he complains that the "protective" role of the Soviet Union in postwar East Germany (DDR) has not been sufficiently appreciated:

Yes, of course, the "Schutzmacht" had to build a "Schutzmauer" ("Protective Wall" - which is what the East German regime called the Berlin Wall) to "protect" its citizens from escaping to the West and the evils of Capitalism.

The photo above is of the body of 18-year old Peter Fechter who was "protected" - i.e killed - by East German border guards in August 1962.

July 02, 2016

.Princess Marie ("Missie") Vassiltchikov was born in St. Petersburg in the waning days of the Russian Empire. She was the fourth child of a member of the Fourth Duma, PrinceHilarion Vassiltchikov (fr) and his wife, the former Princess Lidiya Leonidovna Vyazemskaya. Missie and her beautiful sister Tatiana arrived penniless in wartime Berlin from Lithuania, but - thanks to their fluency in 4 languages and family connections - were able to find employment in the Auswärtiges Amt (AA) the Information Department of the German Foreign Ministry. The AA turned out to be a refuge for aristocrats, most of whom opposed the Nazi regime. Missie was the assistant to Adam von Trott, a brilliant lawyer who was also the great-great-great grandson of John Jay, America's first Chief Justice. Missie kept a quite detailed secret diary during the war which was published only after her death in 1978.

The princess could write! In colorful, idiomatic English. And what a story she had to tell. In her breezy style she describes scenes of horror of the almost nightly (later, both day and night) bombing of Berlin juxtaposed with champagne and oyster brunches with her aristocratic friends (from across Europe and beyond - and they all seemed to be somehow related by blood.) I have yet to read any better descriptions of what it was like to live during the Allied firebombing of Germany (and later, Austria). Here is a typical diary entry - from November 1943 following a bombing raid:

"I decided to go out and try and reach my office, in the hope - wildly optimistic, as it turned out - of jumping into a hot bath as soon as I got there. Clad in slacks, my head muffled in the scarf and wearing a pair of Heinz's fur-line military goggles, I started off. The instant I left the house I was enveloped in smoke and ashes rained down on my head. I could breathe only by holding a handkerchief to my mouth and blessed Heinz for lending me those googles.

At first our Woyrschstrasse did not look too bad; but one block away, at the corner of Luetzowstrasse, all the houses were burnt out. As I continued down Luetzowstrasse the devastation grew worse; many buildings were still burning and I had to keep to the middle of street, which was difficult on account of the numerous wrecked trams. ...At the end of Luetzowstrasse, about four blocks away from the office, the houses on both sides of the street had collapsed and i had to climb over mounds of smoking rubble, leaking water pipes and other wreckage to get to the other side. Until then I had seen very few firemen around, but here some were busily trying to extricate people trapped in the cellars. ...Many cars were weaving their way cautiously through the ruins, blowing their horns wildly. A woman seized my arm and yelled that one of the walls was tottering and we both started to run. ... Then I saw my food shop Krause, or rather what remained of it. Maria had begged me to buy some provisions on the way home, as the one in which her coupons were registered had been destroyed. But poor Krause would be of no help either now."

But something else was going on in and around the Auswärtiges Amt , and we first catch wind of it in Missie's diary entry of August 2, 1943:

"Later I dragged a suitcase over the Potsdam and went to be early...Unfortunately sleep was postponed by the arrival Gottfried Bismarck, Loremarie Schönburger and Count Helldorf...It is all very hush-hush, but Loremarie, who has also moved out to Potsdam, keeps me informed about what I call 'the Conspiracy'. She is feverishly active, trying to bring various opposition elements together, and acts often in a head-strong and imprudent way. Gottfried, however never breathes a word."

This is Missie's first reference to the July 20 plot. Missie's boss, Adam von Trott, and others in the Foreign Ministry were very much involved in the plot. Missie says little about the details in her diary, but she must have been more involved than she lets on - for she reveals the exact date it was to happen. After Operation Valkyrie fails, the diary takes on a somber tone as one by one Missie's friends are arrested. Most of them - including Adam von Trott - are horribly tortured and executed by the Nazis.

It was something of a miracle that Missie herself wasn't arrested. To avoid the fate of her friends she left Berlin for Vienna where she worked as a nurse in the Luftwaffe hospital. Conditions there were awful as rations run low. As the war winds down we see the princess -half-starved - stumbling over dead bodies in the streets of Vienna following yet another bombing raid. The elegant champagne brunches in Berlin are a distant memory.

Footnote: The Berlin Diaries has been translated into Russian (Берлинский дневник 1940—1945) and French - but, as far as I can tell, not German. This is unfortunate, since it is a great read, not to mention an important historical document. I first encountered MarieVassiltchikov's diary through excerpts (in German) in Oliver Lubrich's interesting Berichte aus der Abwurfzone:Ausländer erleben den Bombenkrieg in Deutschland 1939 bis 1945 (2007) (See my review)

June 26, 2016

From 1933 - 1945 thousands of European intellectuals, scientists, musicians, etc. found refuge in the United States; so many of them would have undoubtedly perished if they had remained in Nazi-occupied Europe. I just want to highlight the efforts of two Americans whose heroism and persistence helped to preserve the continuity of German literature.

Varian Fry (1907 - 1967) is sometimes referred to as the American Schindler, except unlike Oscar Schindler, Fry is virtually unknown - even though he saved many more lives. As a foreign correspondent in 1935 the young Harvard (yes!) graduate witnessed Nazi thugs assaulting Jews on the streets of Berlin; other people passing by on the street pretended not to notice. Disturbed by what he had seen, Varian Fry began raising money to support victims of Nazism. His efforts caught the attention of Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika, who presented Fry with a list of 200 prominent artists and intellectuals who were stranded in Europe and whose lives were endangered. Following the Nazi occupation of France in 1940, Fry went to Marseilles with no support other than $3,000 in his pocket to secure the release of a short list of refugees - mostly Jews (Fry was a Protestant) - to whom the Vichy regime refused to issue exit visas. The plan was to stay for two weeks, but immediately he was deluged with desperate requests for help from hundreds. Two weeks stretched to 13 months. In that period of time Varian Fry managed to bribe and cajole local authorities as well as forge documents or otherwise arrange for the escape of more than two thousand people - writers, musicians, academics, Jews and non-Jews, Germans, French, Austrians. Most secured passage to America. Among those rescued were Alfred Döblin, Heinrich and Golo Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Franz Werfel,Alma Mahler, Walter Mehring, Hannah Arendt as well as Marc Chagall , Max Ernst and André Breton. The list goes on and on.

Looking back on what he had done, Varian Fry recounted:"I remembered what I had seen in Germany. I knew what would happen to the refugees if the Gestapo got hold of them ... It was my duty to help them ... Friends warned me of the danger. They said I was a fool to go. I, too, could be walking into the trap. I might never come back alive."

After leaving Europe, Fry lived mostly in obscurity as a school teacher. His heroic efforts were recognized only long after he died. In 1994 Fry became the first United States citizen to be listed in the Righteous among the Nations at Israel's national Holocaust Memorial , award by Yad Vashem. .

Dorothy Thompson (1893-1961) was the first American journalist to be kicked out of Germany by Goebbels. Dorothy made her way as a freelance journalist to Germany in the 1920s; by 1925 she was heading up the Berlin bureau of the New York Post, writing biting commentary which made her so famous that she attracted the attention of Sinclair Lewis, who married her. Thompson became completely fluent in German. In 1931 she was invited to sit down for an interview with Hitler, whom she found comically preposterous. After this "Little Man" (Thompson) seized power in 1933, she wrote about her impressions in a book, I saw Hitler, introducing Hitler to American audiences for the first time. It was this book which so infuriated Goebbels and resulted in her expulsion.

Back in the States, Dorothy Thompson went on the lecture circuit warning a skeptical American audience about the dangers of Nazi Germany; she reached an even wider audience through her regular radio broadcasts. But because she knew the true nature of the Nazi regime, she understood the perils for anti-fascist Germans - particularly writers. It is not an exaggeration to say that Dorothy Thompson is a savior of 20th century German letters. She used her celebrity, her considerable organizational talents, and even her own money to bring as many writers to America as possible.

It was extremely difficult for any European to get into isolationist America in the 1930's: for one thing, emigrants needed an affidavit from an American "sponsor". These were extremely hard to come by, and not a few refugees from the Nazi terror perished in Europe for lack of a sponsor. Dorothy Thompson personally knew many of the key writers in Berlin and Vienna; she sponsored the expressionist playwright Ernst Toller and the Austrian literary salonist Eugenie Schwarzwald (who never made it). In one of the ironies of history, the lifelong Republican Thompson sponsored the Marxist Bertolt Brecht. In the case of Carl Zuckmayer, Thompson flew to Washington DC and stormed into the Oval Office unannounced (impossible today) to have President Roosevelt personally sign an affidavit. Zuckmayer and his family spent their first weeks in New York at Thompson's apartment on Central Park. When she couldn't help personally, she enlisted the aid of others. Peter Kurth, Thompson's biographer, wrote me this: " What she did was make sure that every damn person she knew in the United States sponsored at least one or two people while there was still time, her efforts to bring in hordes of refugees solely on the grounds of "racial persecution" having failed before Congress."

Those writers she couldn't help, such as the great Austrian writers Joseph Roth and Robert Musil, she introduced to American readers with her own translations. Thompson translated and secured American publication of Roth's The Radetzky March (on my list of the Ten Greatest German Novels) and Musil's notoriously difficult The Man without Qualities.

Dorothy Thompson's efforts on behalf of all refugees likely saved many lesser-known writers and intellectuals, such as the poet Mascha Kaléko.

The literary landscape of postwar Germany would have looked very bleak indeed had it not been for the intervention of these two brave Americans.

June 06, 2016

We spent last week in New Orleans for both work and pleasure - okay, more for pleasure, enjoying the best music and food any US city has to offer. This great city is still - ten years on - traumatized by Hurricane Katrina. Every New Orleanian will tell you that this was a MAN-MADE disaster, and there are visible scars scattered throughout the city. Besides the outstanding restaurant and incomparable jazz, there are plenty of other attractions and activities for any taste. I had a couple of free hours and visited the National World War II Museum which is located just in the Central Business District.

This is how the City of New Orleans describes the museum:

Since its opening day on D-Day – June 6, 2000 – nearly two million visitors have toured the National WWII Museum. A must-see for history lovers and all patriots, it has been designated by the U.S. Congress as America’s official WWII Museum. Powerful images and extraordinary artifacts bring to life the American Spirit, the courage, teamwork and sacrifice of the young men and women who won the war and changed the world. From the 1930s prelude to war, to the Normandy Invasion and the battles of the Pacific Islands, visitors trace America's role in the war and on the Home Front.

Visitors to the museum can choose between following a Pacific Theater track - "The Road to Tokyo" - or a European/North Africa track - "The Road to Berlin". I chose the Road to Berlin, which took me through a series of interactive exhibits from the preparations for war, the Pearl Harbor attack and Hitler's declaration of war, the setbacks in North Africa and invasion of Italy, Normandy Invasion and the aerial bombing of Germany. Visitors are presented with a magnetic card a "dog tag" - which is attached to an actual soldier, sailor or pilot which one can "follow" throughout the course of the war.

Each exhibit is devoted to a particular battle or phase of the war and contains amazing footage, sound effects, artifacts, and oral histories. I found the exhibits on the Merchant Marines, Normandy Invasion and Battle of the Bulge particularly effective. The exhibits showed American troops in victory, but also defeats, retreats, friendly fire incidents, etc. I get it that this is the "National" - i.e. American - war museum, so the emphasis is on the American experience. But I still think there could be more information on America's allies - especially the role of the Soviet Union - in defeating the Nazis. Also, the exhibit on the the firebombing of Germany emphasized the targeting of military-industrial targets rather than the civilian population. The section on the bombing of Dresden features Kurt Vonnegut (who was a POW in the city at the time of the bombing) and little about the firestorm that killed over 25,000 citizens in a city that had zero military-strategic value.

Still, the National World War II Museum is an impressive effort and a must-see for any visitor to New Orleans.

There was one other - much happier - connection to Berlin during my stay in New Orleans: we were able to listen to the amazing jazz pianist David Torkanowsky perform one evening. "Tork" is a true New Orleans treasure and is the son of the Flamenco dancer Teresa Romera and the Berlin-born conductor and violinist Werner Torkanowsky. Only in America could the son of a German Jew carry on the rich tradition of New Orleans jazz.