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Address Unknown
Address Unknown Read online
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Introduction
Schulse-Eisenstein Galleries
Schloss Rantzenburg
Schulse-Eisenstein Galleries
Schloss Rantzenburg
Schulse-Eisenstein Galleries
Deutsch-Bölkische Bank und Handelsgesellschaft
Schulse-Eisenstein Galleries
Deutsch-Bölkische Bank und Handelsgesellschaft
Eisenstein Galleries
Eisenstein Galleries
Eisenstein Galleries
Deutsch-Bölkische Bank und Handelsgesellschaft
Cablegram
Eisenstein Galleries
Eisenstein Galleries
Eisenstein Galleries
Schloss Rantzenburg
Eisenstein Galleries
Eisenstein Galleries
Afterword
About the Author
Also by Kathrine Kressmann Taylor
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
When I was growing up in Scotland, World War II still cast a long shadow. Sugar rationing did not end until 1953, meat rationing until 1954. The comic I read every week carried a story about Biggles, the intrepid pilot, flying lone missions, while Remembrance Day, when we had two minutes of silence at school and everyone wore poppies, was a deeply solemn occasion. After hearing about the prisoners of Colditz, I tried with two friends to dig an escape tunnel in the woods. I no longer remember what we were escaping from – only that we gave up after a few feet. Did we know about anti-Semitism? Very vaguely. My adoptive mother, who grew up in London during the 1930s, told me that everyone knew about the anti-Semitism in Germany – after Kristallnacht the Kindertransport brought nearly 10,000 Jewish children to London – but she didn’t learn about the concentration camps until after the war ended. Her impression was that the adults around her knew nothing about them either.
Despite many subsequent wars, World War II still has a strong hold on our collective memories and imaginations; it is not only a part of history but also a part of our communal mythology, as the many books, fiction and nonfiction, published every year testify. Novelists can count on readers to know, in some detail, the main facts of the war and can shine a light on some new aspect of the struggle, as happens in Mamta Chaudhry’s Haunting Paris, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, Walter Kempowski’s All for Nothing, Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Jim Shepard’s The Book of Aron, to name a few. These novelists are looking back, fully aware of the dramatic ironies. But Kathrine Kressmann Taylor’s Address Unknown is not a historical novel. She was born in 1903 in Portland, Oregon, and she was writing about the present, about what she observed and understood in the world around her. The rapturous reception the novel received when it was published in 1938, under the name Kressmann Taylor, suggests that she was not alone in her awareness of what was happening in Europe, but few, if any, American novelists were writing about Hitler’s rise to power. I read Address Unknown in November 2020, and I have been thinking about it ever since.
There are certain novels that have the remarkable quality of being both timely and prophetic. Think of Kafka’s The Trial, Orwell’s 1984, Ellison’s Invisible Man and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Each creates a very particular world that simultaneously holds up a mirror to the present and suggests possibilities for the future. Address Unknown has this Janus-like quality. The novel consists entirely of letters (and one cablegram) written between two German friends, Max Eisenstein and Martin Schulse, who own a successful art gallery in San Francisco. Their correspondence begins in the autumn of 1932, when Martin moves back to Munich, and ends in the spring of 1934. What makes the novel still feel so timely are the confounding questions at the heart of the narrative: How do we know what we know, and when do we know it? Why does a good person become a bad person? What power does a citizen have against the state?
These questions felt urgent to Kressmann Taylor eighty-three years ago, and they feel urgent now. In 2015, in Iowa City, I taught Ellison’s Invisible Man, which was published in 1952. I remember beginning the class by writing on the board statistics for Black and white Americans: the mortality rates, the incarceration rates, the levels of education and income. The inequities Ellison had addressed were still, sadly, very much with us. After class I went out to dinner with my students, Black, Asian, Hispanic and white, all of us sitting around the table. Despite what I’d written on the board, I found myself thinking how fortunate we were to live in a time and place where we could work and talk as equals. Only later did I learn that afterward, walking home, my Black students carefully crossed the road to avoid the crowds of white people spilling out of the bars. As it did for many others, it took eight minutes and forty-six seconds on May 25, 2020, to make me realize how painfully limited my understanding was of the lives of Black Americans. The evidence was all around me, yet I had managed to have no idea of the ways in which racism, fear, authorized brutality and prejudice affected, to varying degrees, everyone in the Black community. When I went to investigate my mother’s claim that the adults around her were ignorant of the camps, I discovered that on June 25, 1942, the Daily Telegraph in London published a story with the headline ‘Germans murder 700,000 Jews in Poland: Travelling Gas Chambers’. The article lists the numbers killed in various towns and cities, and describes the murder of children, pensioners and hospital patients. It was published on page five of a six-page issue of the paper and disappeared without a trace. No other newspapers took up the story.
Key to the success of the prophetic novel is that it is not a sermon. The reader wants to be informed but she longs to be entertained. Kressmann Taylor fulfills this longing by her gripping, fast-moving plot and her brilliant choice of the epistolary form. She may have come to the latter, as we learn in the afterword, almost accidentally, but she could scarcely have chosen a better way to explore her moral questions. The novel in letters has a long and lustrous history. There were already a number of notable examples when Aphra Behn, the first Englishwoman to earn her living by writing, published Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister in 1682, and many more were to follow. One of the signal advantages of the form is that it banishes the narrator’s voice and moral stance; the letters represent only the point of view of the characters. It also allows for a useful compression. Readers have a sense of eavesdropping; they don’t expect to understand everything, or to learn every detail. Their assumption is that the letter writer has something important to communicate, and too much explaining can make a letter seem contrived. Kressmann Taylor makes excellent use of these attributes, particularly in the deft introduction of her third main character, Max’s sister, Griselle, an actress who still lives in Europe and who, after years of struggle, is having great success on the stage in Vienna.
The voices of the two friends are pleasingly distinct – Max in San Francisco a little more colloquial, Martin in Munich a little more formal – but at the beginning of the novel they seem united in their attitudes. Max describes himself as selling the paintings Martin is sending over from Germany ‘at an appalling profit’ and delights in getting an indecent price for an ugly Madonna from old Mrs Fleshman. ‘You speak of the poverty there’, he writes. ‘Conditions have been bad here this winter, but of course we have known nothing of the privations you see in Germany.’ From the thirty-room house he’s been able to buy so cheaply, Martin responds, ‘The old despair has been thrown aside like a forgotten coat. No longer do the people wrap themselves in shame; they hope again.’ The bad Jew-baiting, he writes, is only ‘the little surface scum when a big movement boils up.’ For many of Kressmann Taylor’s contemporary readers, these words would have held no irony.
While Address Unknown has remained timely over more than eighty years, there is one respect in which the world has definitively changed since its first publication. The novel is now being published under the author’s full name, unmistakably identifying her as a woman. Whether this would have mattered to Kathrine Kressmann Taylor, I cannot say, but it matters to many of us who read her now.
Good novels, as the name promises, keep bringing us the news, and we read them with both our outer and our inner eyes. We bring to them the swirling chaos of the world around us and the seemingly endless negotiations between the forces of good and evil, and we bring to them our deep-seated, long-lasting preoccupations. Address Unknown satisfies both kinds of reading and offers the additional delights of a piercingly good story.
Margot Livesey
Schulse-Eisenstein Galleries
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, U.S.A.
NOVEMBER 12, 1932
Herrn Martin Schulse
Schloss Rantzenburg
Munich, Germany
My Dear Martin,
Back in Germany! How I envy you! Although I have not seen it since my school days, the spell of Unter den Linden is still strong upon me – the breadth of intellectual freedom, the discussions, the music, the light-hearted comradeship. And now the old Junker spirit, the Prussian arrogance and militarism are gone. You go to a democratic Germany, a land with a deep culture and the beginnings of a fine political freedom. It will be a good life. Your new address is impressive and I rejoice that the crossing was so pleasant for Elsa and the young sprouts.
As for me, I am not so happy. Sunday morning finds me a lonely bachelor without aim. My Sunday home is now transported over the wide seas. The big old house on the hill – your welcome that said the day was not complete until we were together again! And our dear jolly Elsa, coming out beaming, grasping my hand and shouting ‘Max, Max!’ and hurrying indoors to open my favorite Schnapps. The fine boys, too, especially your handsome young Heinrich; he will be a grown man before I set eyes upon him again.
And dinner – shall I evermore hope to eat as I have eaten? Now I go to a restaurant and over my lonely roast beef come visions of gebackener Schinken steaming in its Burgundy sauce, of Spaetzle, ah! of Spaetzle and Spargel! No, I shall never again become reconciled to my American diet. And the wines, so carefully slipped ashore from the German boats, and the pledges we made as the glasses brimmed for the fourth and fifth and sixth times.
Of course you are right to go. You have never become American despite your success here, and now that the business is so well established you must take your sturdy German boys back to the homeland to be educated. Elsa too has missed her family through the long years and they will be glad to see you as well. The impecunious young artist has now become the family benefactor, and that too will give you a quiet little triumph.
The business continues to go well. Mrs Levine has bought the small Picasso at our price, for which I congratulate myself, and I have old Mrs Fleshman playing with the notion of the hideous Madonna. No one ever bothers to tell her that any particular piece of hers is bad, because they are all so bad. However I lack your fine touch in selling to the old Jewish matrons. I can persuade them of the excellence of the investment, but you alone had the fine spiritual approach to a piece of art that unarmed them. Besides they probably never entirely trust another Jew.
A delightful letter came yesterday from Griselle. She writes that she is about to make me proud of my little sister. She has the lead in a new play in Vienna and the notices are excellent – her discouraging years with the small companies are beginning to bear fruit. Poor child, it has not been easy for her, but she has never complained. She has a fine spirit, as well as beauty, and I hope the talent as well. She asked about you, Martin, in a very friendly way. There is no bitterness left there, for that passes quickly when one is young as she is. A few years and there is only a memory of the hurt, and of course neither of you was to be blamed. Those things are like quick storms, for a moment you are drenched and blasted, and you are so wholly helpless before them. But then the sun comes, and although you have neither quite forgotten, there remains only gentleness and no sorrow. You would not have had it otherwise, nor would I. I have not written Griselle that you are in Europe but perhaps I shall if you think it wise, for she does not make friends easily and I know she would be glad to feel that friends are not far away.
Fourteen years since the war! Did you mark the date? What a long way we have traveled, as peoples, from that bitterness! Again, my dear Martin, let me embrace you in spirit, and with the most affectionate remembrances to Elsa and the boys, believe me,
Your ever most faithful,
Max
Schloss Rantzenburg
MUNICH, GERMANY
DECEMBER 10, 1932
Mr Max Eisenstein
Schulse-Eisenstein Galleries
San Francisco, California, U.S.A.
Max, Dear Old Fellow,
The check and accounts came through promptly, for which my thanks. You need not send me such details of the business. You know how I am in accord with your methods, and here at Munich I am in a rush of new activities. We are established, but what a turmoil! The house, as you know, I had long in mind. And I got it at an amazing bargain. Thirty rooms and about ten acres of park; you would never believe it. But then, you could not appreciate how poor is now this sad land of mine. The servants’ quarters, stables and outbuildings are most extensive, and would you believe it, we employ now ten servants for the same wages of our two in the San Francisco home.
The tapestries and pieces we shipped make a rich show and some other fine furnishings I have been able to secure, so that we are much admired, I was almost to say envied. Four full services in the finest china I have bought and much crystal, as well as a full service of silver for which Elsa is in ecstasies.
And for Elsa – such a joke! You will, I know, laugh with me. I have purchased for her a huge bed. Such a size as never was before, twice the bigness of a double bed, and with great posters in carved wood. The sheets I must have made to order, for there are no sheets made that could fit it. And they are of linen, the finest linen sheets. Elsa laughs and laughs, and her old Grossmutter stands shaking her head and grumbles, ‘Nein, Martin, nein. You have made it so and now you must take care or she will grow to match it.’
‘Ja,’ says Elsa, ‘five more boys and I will fit it just nice and snug.’ And she will, Max.
For the boys there are three ponies (little Karl and Wolfgang are not big enough to ride yet) and a tutor. Their German is very bad, being too much mixed with English.
Elsa’s family do not find things so easy now. The brothers are in the professions and, while much respected, must live together in one house. To the family we seem American millionaires and while we are far from that yet our American income places us among the wealthy here. The better foods are high in price and there is much political unrest even now under the presidency of Hindenburg, a fine liberal whom I much admire.
Already old acquaintances urge me that I interest myself in administrative matters in the town. This I take under consideration. It may be somewhat to our benefit locally if I become an official.
As for you, my good Max, we have left you alone, but you must not become a misanthrope. Get yourself at once a nice fat little wife who will busy herself with all your cares and
feed you into a good humor. That is my advice and it is good, although I smile as I write it.
You write of Griselle. So she wins her success, the lovely one! I rejoice with you, although even now I resent it that she must struggle to win her way, a girl alone. She was made, as any man can see, for luxury and for devotion and the charming and beautiful life where ease allows much play of the sensibilities. A gentle, brave soul is in her dark eyes, but there is something strong as iron and very daring too. She is a woman who does nothing and gives nothing lightly. Alas, dear Max, as always, I betray myself. But although you were silent during our stormy affair, you know that the decision was not easy for me. You never reproached me, your friend, while the little sister suffered, and I have always felt you knew that I suffered too, most gravely. What could I do? There was Elsa and my little sons. No other decision was possible to make. Yet for Griselle I keep a tenderness that will last long after she has taken a much younger man for husband or lover. The old wound has healed but the scar throbs at times, my friend.
I wish that you will give her our address. We are such a short distance from Vienna that she can feel there is for her a home close at hand. Elsa, too, knows nothing of the old feeling between us and you know with what warmth she would welcome your sister, as she would welcome you. Yes, you must tell her that we are here and urge her to soon make a contact with us. Give her our most warm congratulations for the fine success that she is making.
Elsa asks that I send to you her love, and Heinrich would also say ‘hello’ to Uncle Max. We do not forget you, Maxel.
My heartiest greetings to you,