George F. Kennan: An American Life (25 page)

At the moment, though, the contradiction meant little. In The Hague, he found a German military band playing to a sizable audience of “placid, applauding Dutchmen,” not far from a place where German bombs had wiped out most of a city block. In Rotterdam, shops were open, trains were running, and the streets were crowded with busy people. But suddenly, “with as little transition as though someone had performed the operation with a gigantic knife, the houses stopped, and there began a wide, open field of confused bricks and rubbish.” Meanwhile, “the imperturbable Dutch rode along on their bicycles as though nothing had happened.”
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Two weeks later Kennan was off to occupied France. War damage in Belgium was greater than in Holland, but there was no evidence anywhere of much resistance. With no other way to get to Paris, he offered to hitchhike, complete with diplomatic pouch, perhaps remembering his 1924 trip. But since the only vehicles on the road were those of the German army, embassy officers frowned on this idea and instead lent him a car with enough gasoline to get there, in the company of an American ambulance driver who had been caught behind the lines by the
Blitzkrieg
.

The devastation south of the Belgian frontier was horrendous. All the towns were damaged, and several of the larger ones were “gutted, deserted, and uninhabitable.” The odor persisted, in places, of decomposing bodies. German sentries guarded the debris, as though it mattered now who stood before shattered houses and stinking corpses. French refugees were “seared with fatigue and fear and suffering.” One girl, riding atop a cart in torn dirty clothes, made a particular impression on Kennan: “Just try to tell her of liberalism and democracy, of progress, of ideals, of tradition, of romantic love.” She had seen the complete breakdown of her own people. But she could also see German soldiers, handing out food and water at crossroads, setting up first-aid stations, transporting the old and the sick. “What soil here for German propaganda, what thorough ploughing for the social revolution which national-socialism carries in its train.”

In Paris, though, the Germans seemed strangely at a loss: the city was intact but dead. Policemen stood on the corners, without traffic to direct or pedestrians to guard. At the Café de la Paix, six German officers sat at an outside table with “no one but themselves to witness their triumph.” It was as if Paris had been “too delicate and shy a thing to stand their domination and had melted away before them just as they thought to have it in their grasp.” When the Germans came, its soul disappeared, leaving only stone. “As long as they stay—and it will probably be a long time—it will remain stone.”
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After returning to Berlin early in July 1940, Kennan settled into a lonely bachelor’s existence. British air raids were hitting the city regularly now: shrapnel was ripping through the leaves of the trees in his garden, then clanking onto the street. It was more of a nuisance than anything else. Soon he was sleeping through the raids, and there was little evidence that they were having much effect. Hitler’s military successes were expanding Kennan’s embassy responsibilities as the Americans took over the “interests” of each new country the Germans had invaded, but he was growing more confident that they could not win the war.

September 11 was the Kennans’ ninth wedding anniversary, but Annelise was not in Berlin to celebrate. George spent it, instead, arranging a clandestine midnight meeting in a limousine driving around the Grunewald forest. With him was a friend, Hubert Masarik, one of the two Czech diplomats who had been present but ignored at the 1938 Munich conference. Speaking only for himself, Kennan ventured a bold set of predictions: that within a year the United States and the Soviet Union would be at war with Germany, and eventually also with Italy and Japan; that it would take them through 1944 to defeat Hitler, but that victory was certain; that the Czechs should therefore conserve their strength, so that they would never again have to rely on British protection. At Kennan’s request, Masarik passed this message on to General Alois Eliás, the Czech prime minister of the German “protectorate.” It was, Eliás commented, the best news he had yet received—he expected the Germans to execute him, however, before it could be confirmed. This they did, a year later.
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Kennan’s optimism was in part psychological warfare: he admired the Czechs, understood their fatalism, and hoped that they would not lose hope. But he had stronger reasons for saying what he did, one of which had to do with what was happening in Czechoslovakia itself. If the Germans’ occupation of that country was indeed a hint of how they would run the rest of Europe, then they were already in trouble. Back in Prague in October to close down what was left of the American diplomatic establishment, Kennan found that the Germans had stripped the region of its economic assets, setting off serious inflation: the cost of living had soared by some 50 to 60 percent. Czech universities were closed completely or open only to Germans, and all major industries were now under German control. Their authority might be physically unchallengeable, but morally it did not exist. “Whatever power the Germans may have over the persons and property of the Czechs, they have little influence over their souls.”
⁴³

A second source of optimism came from souls of a different sort: those of Germans opposed to Hitler. Kirk, the retiring
chargé d’affaires
, had been meeting quietly with Count Helmuth von Moltke, one of several Prussian aristocrats who had always viewed the Nazis with disapproval and now were convinced that Hitler was leading Germany into disaster. After Kirk’s departure, Kennan took over this contact, although because he feared leaks, he never reported his conversations to Washington. Another acquaintance with similar views was Gottfried von Bismarck, grandson of the Iron Chancellor, whom Kennan remembered refusing to rise at the opera when Nazi officials came in. Still another was Johnnie von Herwarth, who had leaked the information to Bohlen about the Nazi-Soviet Pact. These connections, however, involved only listening: Roosevelt was not about to authorize negotiations with the conservative German opposition. The conversations did, though, provide evidence of yet more friction within the Nazi machine: the fact that Hitler drew his support from the lower middle class and the nouveau riche, while the old Prussian nobility opposed him.
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Finally, it was now clear to Kennan that the Germans were losing military and diplomatic momentum. There were official acknowledgments that the war would not end that winter. The promised invasion of Britain had not materialized. Reports of German bombers raining ruin on English cities became so repetitive that newspaper readers began joking about them. And Kennan was picking up evidence of increasing tension in Soviet-German relations: “All the glowing references to this subject seem to come from Berlin; whereas the Russian expressions of opinion, as far as I see them, are marked by a very obvious dryness, and are interspersed with occasional sharp cracks of the Russian ruler over the German knuckles.” By November, there were rumors that Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov was about to pay an official visit: “That, if true, would really enliven things.” Molotov did come and the meetings were difficult, not least because the last one had to take place in an air raid shelter. The Germans assumed that they had won the war, the acerbic Russian told his German counterpart Joachim von Ribbentrop, but it was the British who seemed to be fighting to the death.
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Life in Berlin, George wrote Jeanette, had not been easy: “You will probably find me distinctly older when and if I get back.” But there had been no health crises: “Happily I still feel that I am gathering rather than losing strength as these months—some of which are like years—go by. Only I don’t know what to use my strength on, when this is all over.” He was rising high enough in the Foreign Service to expect significant future appointments but still doubted the American capacity to craft a real foreign policy. The alternative was “to stay home and do something useful.” Who, though, would want him? “For good or for bad, I
am
Europeanized.” “Thanks for the news about my children,” George added. “I just lapped it up.”
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The first months of 1941 were spent getting back to the United States to see the family, who were now renting a house in Milwaukee. This was not easy in wartime. George left Berlin on January 10, sailed from Lisbon on the seventeenth, and arrived in New York on the twenty-ninth: he then spent three weeks in Wisconsin, where early in February the
Milwaukee Journal
interviewed him as “[o]ne of the leading diplomatic representatives of the United States dealing with the German government.” Had he heard Hitler’s speeches? “No, I’ve been too busy at the embassy.... As a matter of fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen Hitler.” “Yes you have, daddy,” Grace piped up. “Remember we saw him together riding down the street in Prague.” “Grace,” George admitted, “it seems you remember things better than I do.”
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The trip back, with Annelise, took five weeks: they did not reach Berlin until April 12. “I don’t know how I can thank you enough for taking my little girls,” she wrote Jeanette from the ship. “I miss them like hell—it was terribly hard to leave.” But “George is not the kind of person who is happy alone and I think he needs me more than the children do (as long as they can stay with you).” Jeanette later admitted to having felt imposed on. “I at the time had [my] three boys and the two girls and I was running a nursery school, and there were times when I felt: ‘Oh! It’s much easier to go back to Germany with George!’ But it wasn’t that much easier for her.”
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Annelise had gone back for several reasons. Her family in Norway had survived the German invasion and was for the moment safe. George had even been allowed to visit the Sørensens briefly before traveling to America. She hoped to do the same, but the Germans refused to allow this: “It is a great disappointment.” She also worried about the “Kennan depression” she saw in the letters George had written from Berlin. “I know now that he really did have a bad time and that there were many things which I could have helped him with,” she explained to Jeanette. “What a life! It may be exciting in spots, but it almost tears one to pieces. (If I don’t stop soon I’ll sound as gloomy as George!)”
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Something else concerned her as well. Annelise had discovered, by this time, that George’s bachelor existence in Berlin had not been celibate: “Our personal life was also very difficult at that time.” He had always, he admitted when he was seventy-eight, had a roving eye: “ ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife.’ My God, I’ve coveted ten thousand of them in the course of my life, and will continue to do so on into the eighties.” Who this one was, how long the relationship lasted, and how Annelise found out about it remain unclear. Her resolve, however, was firm. When asked decades later why she had left her children to return to a war zone, she cut off further discussion with a single sentence: “To save the marriage.”
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As the summer wore on, this arrangement too began to unravel. Despite Jeanette’s willingness to provide a home for Grace and Joan when they had no other, the burdens on her were growing, but there was no way for both George and Annelise to make another long trip home. He was now the second-ranking officer in the embassy, with no one under him qualified to take over his responsibilities. So Annelise would return alone in September. “We have been so touched by what you have told about the children,” George wrote Jeanette. “Poor little things, I wonder if they are destined always to bat around from one place to another with at best half of the normal parent complement.”
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The need for roots was much on his mind that fall. Plans to purchase part of the island in Kristiansand had fallen through, probably fortunately in the light of the war. Now, though, George had another idea, even if Jeanette thought it “mad”: he wanted to buy a farm somewhere in the United States: “I have thought this over very carefully and know what I am doing.” After a series of rapid promotions, he was at last relatively well off. American farms were less expensive than Berlin houses, and after all how many other people made $8,000 a year? He had lived for too long with no home at all. He had seen too many places “where every form of existence except that of the small land-holder has been pretty thoroughly shattered.” Wisconsin looked like the best bet: it was where the Kennans had lived longer than anywhere else. So might Jeanette and Gene sound out the owner of their grandfather’s old farm near Packwaukee?
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“Dined at the Hoyos’ to meet an American couple, the George Kennans,” Marie Vassiltchikov, a young White Russian living in Berlin who kept a remarkable diary, noted on May 26, 1941. “He has highly intelligent eyes but does not speak freely, but then the situation is of course ambiguous, as the Germans are still allies of Soviet Russia.” Kennan faulted himself and his Berlin colleagues, years later, for not having foreseen the abrupt end of that alliance less than a month later. Enough indications of trouble had accumulated, however, for the embassy to warn the State Department, which in turn tried to alert the Kremlin. None of this had any effect, and on June 22 the invasion began. Two days later Kennan sent Loy Henderson, now back in Washington, his views on this major turning point in the war.

He could see the advantage of extending material aid to the Soviet Union “whenever called for by our own self-interest.” But there should be no attempts to identify politically or ideologically with the Russian war effort, because to do so would also associate the United States with