Epistolary Novel on Nazi Germany

Kathrine Kressmann Taylor. Address Unknown. London: Serpent’s Tail/Prolific Books, 2019. Originally published in New York: Simon Schuster, 1939. 86 pp.

Reviewed by Norman Simms

It is good to see this new edition of a short book published in 1939, with the virtual facsimile of typewritten letters from America and Germany that are cut short with the outbreak of World War Two. The cover, too, lends an air of authenticity to the epistolary novel, as though it were a true account, instead of a brilliant imaginary insight into how two ordinary people, one in California and the other who has just returned to Germany in 1932, were thinking before the whole world blew apart.

To begin with, this is a very short book only 70 pages of which are the actual letters exchanged between Martin Schulse and Maxwell Eisenstein and the rest an Afterword by Charles Douglas Taylor, son of the author, as well as ten completely blank pages at the end. Those final words on the history of the writing and publication of Address Unknown add another dimension to this brief novel, asking what gave the book its special interest when it first came out on the eve of the European war and justifies its republication now eighty years later.

Read slowly and carefully, the text of the letters between two friends who drift apart when the elder of the two, Martin, takes his family back from San Francisco to southern Germany just at the time when Adolf Hitler comes to power, reveals differences between them that at first seem insignificant but come to the fore quickly over the next two years from 1932 to 1934 and cause the rift in their relationship. Martin and Max begin as partners in Schulse-Eisenstein Galleries, art dealers, the removal to Germany a way of expanding their business, of procuring European paintings to be sent back to San Francisco for sale to their clients. In the first letter dated 12 November 1932, Martin expresses envy at his young friend’s life in America where things are much easier, despite the onset of the Depression. After the defeat of Germany, the revolutionary collapse of the Wilhemine Empire, and the imposition of onerous reparations by the Treaty of Versailles, there is poverty, anarchy and loss of national pride. For his part, Max says he is jealous of his friend’s return to the highly cultured civilization of the Old World. The first little fly in the ointment appears in the reference to an affair the older man had with the younger’s sister, despite Martin being married and having two children. Despite the two men seeming to agree that the matter was settled properly without rancour between Griselle and Max and the hope that she will be welcomed and aided when she comes to Austria and Germany on an acting tour, there is a sense of a deficiency in the married partner’s character.

Nevertheless, the friendship and loyalty of the business partners and friends seems secure. They even joke in their opening epistles about how they can lead a silly old Jewish woman with more money than taste to purchase expensive paintings. Again, the little in-joke between them about Mrs. Levine purchasing an “ugly” work for more than its really worth, hides a difference in the two men’s attitude towards Jews. As the time passes and Germany becomes more obsessed with Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitic rants and the increasing street violence against Jews and opponents of the new regime, Martin’s letters display his own leaning towards National Socialist ideas, not least of which is anti-Semitism. Max is alarmed by this shifting attitude and increasing distance in the tone of Martin’s letter, especially his rejection of Griselle when she comes to his house seeking refuge from the Gestapo.

The personal tensions between the two climax when Max has to remove Martin’s name from the company letterhead and the German partner cuts off virtually all connections with his former Jewish friend and partner. Yet even in the last letter dated 3 March 1934 and addressed to “Martin Our Brother, “although signed coldly as “Eisenstein”, Max behaves loyally in carrying out company business. There are no letters more out of Germany.

What happened to Martin to make him cease writing is explained in the few last words to come out. Then silence. Max writes desperately for his old friend to try to find and give aid to his sister who has been arrested by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp, and these letters—despite Martin’s pleas for his American friend to stop them—is that the Gestapo is going after his old friend. As much as he claims to be a German patriot and an admirer of Adolf Hitler, the fact that he has an American Jewish correspondent and business relationship with a Jew is enough for him and his whole family to be under threat. He loses his business, his status in the community, and his sense of safety for the whole family.

When Max complained earlier that he could not really believe his good old friend Martin had become a Nazi sympathizer and that he wished to believe that the letters were carefully credited with the knowledge that each of them would be scrutinized by a German censor, Max may not have been far off the mark, if not spot on. With this mind, if we re-read the text of the epistles from Munich, especially those inserted into official documents posted from the bank where Martin works, the whole complexion of the exchange begins to take on a different coloration. But we can never be sure. The shriller Martin’s professions of allegiance to the National Socialist regime and his barking reiteration of anti-Semitic garbage, the more he may be pitied for not being able to express his own deep liberal self. Max’s letters, meanwhile, as they argue with his old friend and beg him to help his sister in her desperate straits, may be seen as ironic: these letters would make Martin culpable of both treason and intimate relations with a Jewess under the Nazi laws.

Charles Douglas Taylor writes that when his mother’s epistolary novel Address Unknown appeared as a long short story in a magazine in late 1938 it created a sensation, exposing “the poison of Nazism” to the American public.  It was then published separately, receiving both high praise from the popular critics of the day and selling well, but then faded from view once World War Two began. We know from what Maxwell Eisenstein writes in his letters that he knows what is going on in Germany through newspaper and magazine reports, information that was generally available to the American public, so why the book should have caused a sensation seems to raise questions on how much the general opinion in America was actually informed or interested. Other novels and short stories, too, in the 1930s exposed the poison about the Nazis, as well as other Fascist regimes in Italy and Spain.

The answer, as is widely known, is that Americans by and large did not want to know about what was going on in Europe and did not have sympathy for the Jews either there or at home.  American Jews did care and held rallies, intellectuals and ordinary working people wrote letters to the editor, and rabbis and their congregations marched on Washington, DC and in New York City, among other places, to call for their government to stand up and denounce the regime in Berlin. But as the rallies of the Bund, the screaming anti-Jewishness of radio preachers and the meetings held by isolationist organizations show, there was no room in the United States for any serious opposition to the rise of international Fascism. Despite the little photo of Franklin D. Roosevelt my grandmother—and probably hundreds of thousands of other Jewish women—put up on her kitchen wall to show her great love of the man she thought of as the liberal beacon of light in the darkness of the 1930s and the saviour of the Jews, there was nothing more than an occasional platitude during a Fireside Chat. Later evidence shows that FDR, though probably not his wife Eleanor, was never a friend of the Jews.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

If Address Unknown sold a startling 50,000 copies when it was first published, and granting two or three readers per copy in private hand and about ten in the library copies available, so let us say 200 thousand people read the story, this is a pitiful percentage of the total population of about 122 million. The Know-Nothings and the Isolationists then, as now, are the overwhelming majority, and only a tiny minority of educated readers could do more than follow the most superficial movement in what passes for a plot (two good friends separate geographically and are brought to break off their relationship by political circumstances). Whether the author, Kathrine Kressmann Taylor, was aware or intended these undercurrents to be at work in her fiction, she certainly would not have expected a generally hostile American public to understand how powerful the text really is. Today, in the light of all that happened in the world, especially the Holocaust, we might tend to see Kressmann Taylor’s story as somewhat naïve; if we factor in the present rise in slander and violence against Jews (and Zionists), it is hard not to squirm at the self-willed ignorance she was writing against.