Andrew Nagorski - Hitlerland

That summer, with Vinogradov’s help, Martha made her first pilgrimage to her new ideal state: Russia. “I had had enough of blood and terror to last me for the rest of my life,” she declared by way of explaining why she was eager to take a break from Germany. And, of course, what other country was freer of blood and terror than the Soviet Union? From the moment she set foot in Moscow, and probably even before she made her trip, her blind admiration of Stalin’s Russia knew no bounds, even exceeding her earlier zeal for Hitler’s Germany. There was a complete lack of militarism, arrogance, insolent behavior and regimentation, she giddily reported. The Bolshevik Revolution had been a triumph for humanity. “One felt in Moscow that the struggle was over, that the fruits of victory were being cherished and enjoyed by everyone.”

While she confessed that there was still some startling poverty, everything was being done to eliminate it, she insisted. Stalin was setting an example by living modestly, the workers were living happily in their workers’ state, and “the conscience and idealism that lie latent in most mankind were being stimulated and awakened in me,” she wrote. That didn’t prevent her from boasting that she was served caviar three times a day on a Volga cruise ship, along with “marvelous nourishing Russian soups, excellent meats, butter, ice cream, fish…” Or from “marveling over the fact that everything good in life was being supplied for the vast majority of the population.” Unlike Germany, she added, Russia was “almost like a democratic country,” and threatened no one.

Despite her new anti-Nazi, pro-Soviet orientation, Martha was still the same woman when it came to matters of the heart. When she returned to Germany, she was, as always, more than eager to associate with any man who looked glamorous to her, no matter what his views. This was certainly the case with Thomas Wolfe, whose novel Look Homeward, Angel was a smash hit in Germany as elsewhere. When he visited Berlin in 1935, the young but already widely known writer was treated like a conquering hero. Arriving in Berlin, he was greeted at the American Express office by a huge number of letters, telegrams and phone messages from journalists, diplomats and admirers, all seeking to see him. Describing all this in a letter to his editor Max Perkins, Wolfe marveled that “for the last two weeks at least I have been famous in Berlin.”

As Martha put it, “Tom, a huge man of six foot six, with the face of a great poet, strode the streets, oblivious of the sensation he created… To the desolateness of the intellectual life in Germany, Thomas Wolfe was like a symbol of the past, when great writers were great men.” Wolfe had visited Germany in the mid-1920s, and his fond memories of that era combined with his recent literary successes there prompted him to feel that Berlin was still a magical place. In his letter to Perkins from Berlin, he declared: “I feel myself welling up with energy and life again…” He had finally finished a new novel, Of Time and the River , and he was reveling in the adulation he found in Germany, going from party to party, where he was always the center of attention.

“Part of Tom’s uncritical attitude towards Nazism can be explained by his own state of delirium,” Martha wrote. Her own forgiving attitude was just as easy to explain: she loved escorting a celebrity like Wolfe around town and adding him to her list of conquests. It was a tempestuous affair, with Martha often reprimanding him for his heavy drinking. Decades later, Ledig-Rowohlt, the son of his German publisher, revealed to an interviewer a conversation that he and Wolfe had about Martha. Wolfe told him that Martha was “like a butterfly hovering around my penis.”

Wolfe indicated that he did notice some “disturbing things” during his 1935 visit to Germany, but it wasn’t until he returned in the summer of the following year that his intoxication with his reception there wore off and he began to recognize what Nazi rule meant in practice. In an interview that Ledig-Rowohlt arranged for him with the Berliner Tageblatt , he still waxed poetic about Germany’s virtues. “If there were no Germany, it would be necessary to invent one,” he declared. “It is a magical country. I know Hildesheim, Nuremberg, Munich, the architecture of Germany, the soul of the place, the glory of her history and art.” But, as Martha explained, Wolfe returned to Germany “a much soberer person, this time eager to learn what lay beneath the surface of Nazi success and effectiveness.”

After that visit, Wolfe wrote I Have a Thing to Tell You , a novella that was spread over three issues of the New Republic in March 1937; he later expanded his story and made it part of You Can’t Go Home Again, one of two novels that were published after his death from a brain disease in 1938, before he reached his thirty-eighth birthday. The novella is unabashedly autobiographical in terms of Wolfe’s feelings about Germany. It is the story of an American writer as he leaves Germany, “that great land whose image had been engraved upon my spirit in my childhood and my youth, before I had ever seen it… I had been at home in it and it in me.”

But this Germany is one that the narrator realizes he must leave for the last time. A German friend frets about losing his job, his mistress and possibly even his life because “these stupid people”—the Nazis—are capable of anything. At the same time, he warns the American that he must not write too truthfully about what he observed, since the authorities would then ban his books and destroy his exalted reputation. “A man must write what he must write,” Wolfe’s narrator and alter ego replies. “A man must do what he must do.”

As the narrator’s train leaves Berlin behind, he muses that the people he knew there were “now remote from me as dreams, imprisoned there as in another world.”

Soon, though, the American finds himself cheered by his lively, friendly companions in his compartment. Even “a stuffy-looking little man with a long nose,” who fidgets throughout the trip and initially made the other passengers uncomfortable, gradually loosens up and joins in the convivial conversation. Reaching the frontier at Aachen, they all get out for fifteen minutes while the locomotive is changed. The little man says something about needing to pick up a ticket for the rest of the journey, and slips away. The others walk around before returning to the platform to reboard.

As the returning passengers look from the outside, they see the fidgety man—his face now “white and pasty”—sitting in their compartment facing a group of officials. The leader of his interrogators is “a Germanic type… His head was shaven, and there were thick creases at the base of his skull and across his fleshy neck.” Even before he learns that his fellow passenger was a Jew who was trying to escape and smuggle money out in the process, the American narrator felt “a murderous and incomprehensible anger” welling up in him. “I wanted to smash that fat neck with the creases in it,” he writes. “I wanted to pound that inflamed and blunted face into jelly.” But he admits to his sense of helplessness, which is shared by everyone around him. Feeling nauseated, he watches as the officials escort the man off the train.

As the train pulls out of the station, the narrator and the others look at him for the last time. He looks back. “And in that glance there was all the silence of man’s mortal anguish,” Wolfe writes. “And we were all somehow naked and ashamed, and somehow guilty. We all felt somehow that we were saying farewell, not to a man, but to humanity.”

The American’s sense of remorse and anger is only heightened by the advice of an attractive blond woman in the compartment, whom he had found seductively appealing, with “an almost shameless physical attraction.” She tries to talk the others in the compartment out of their glum mood. “Those Jews!” she says. “These things would never happen if it were not for them! They make all the trouble. Germany has to protect herself.”