George F. Kennan : an American life

In the midst of a conversation, one evening in Riga, someone mentioned Berlin. “In a flash,” George recorded in his diary, “I see the Leipzigerstrasse, every detail of it, as clearly as though I were standing in the traffic tower on Potsdamer Place.” There were the cold, hard buildings, the boulevards swept shiny by the automobiles and the streetlamps, the shop windows spilling confused light onto jostling pedestrians, the huge buses with blinking signal-arms roaring through intersections, the yellow streetcars with ventilators spinning on their roofs, grinding to a halt before the corners. The vision was tactile in its intensity: “I feel the whole vibration and excitement of the city . . . and all the cruelty and fascination and adventure with which it throbs.”⁴⁴

Kennan’s assignment was to enroll in Russian-language courses at the Seminar fur Orientalische Sprachen at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin, and to take advantage of other opportunities in that city, as might be practicable, to study the geography, history, and institutions of Eastern Europe. The State Department would pay for tuition, textbooks, and living expenses. The seminar’s two-year curriculum, designed chiefly to train Russian translators and interpreters for the German courts, was of limited use. Having taught himself conversational Russian while in Tallinn and Riga, Kennan was able to pass the required examination at the end of his first year, “barely skimming through.” The rest of his time was spent more profitably, studying Russian history at the University of Berlin, as well as Russian language and literature with private tutors. Kelley had instructed his young proteges to equip themselves with an education similar to that which an educated Russian of the prerevolutionary era would have received. Exposure to Soviet affairs could come later.⁴⁵

Just as important for Kennan, however, was the experience of living in Berlin at a remarkable moment in its history. The city had “surprised both itself and the rest of the world by becoming the centre of a cultural explosion,” one of its historians has written. Suddenly it “threw off the Prussian imperial mantle, emerging as the capital of modernism and the undisputed centre of the ‘Golden Twenties.’ ” It became, for Kennan, “the nearest thing I had known to an adult home.”⁴⁶

Soon after he arrived, George sought to rekindle his relationship with Charlotte Bohm, but she was seeing another man and probably understood “that I was too young for her, really.” Disturbed nonetheless, he consulted a psychiatrist, who recommended a breakup: “My dear fellow, you’re just a Pantoffelheld. You’re a slipper-hero; you’re under the domination of this woman. You’d better get out of it.” And so, as George wrote Jeanette early in 1930, “I must put the idea out of my mind.”⁴⁷

There were other women: “Hello. Miss L——? This is the American you talked to the other night at the Russian opera.... I’d sort of like to go out and paint the town red, and I wondered if you’d come along.” “Very red?” “Well, pretty red. Besides, I haven’t been out with an American girl for pretty nearly two years.” “All right, I’d be glad to.” So they tried the Femina, famous for its table telephones and pneumatic tubes, but found it full. Then the Kakadoo, where the orchestra played far too fast. “I drink my whiskey-soda, she her cocktail, and we leave the bottle of Rheinwein standing on the table.” And then home, alone, where “I drink another whiskey-soda, ... at the same time wondering what it is that forces me to act like a gentleman, when I am with an American woman.”

The next diary entry is titled “Fantasia.” A man in a fur coat walking along the Kurfurstendamm at five o’clock on a Sunday morning meets a polite prostitute and goes to bed with her between bare blankets. The woman’s legs are cold, as though she were dead. Afterward he is back on the street where, if listening closely, one might hear “a sudden, unexpected, half-suppressed sob, above the whining of the wind.” What the man demanded of life was unbearably greater than what he had received, all of which might move one to pity someone “so utterly lost, in the cold winter dawn, in the forest of stone and steel which is called the city.” But sympathy is a dangerous thing, so he should be allowed “to turn into a side-street and to seek his rest where he can.... (wicked, degenerate man, he must be, coming brazenly home at this hour, from the whores).”⁴⁸

All diaries entangle fiction with truth, so there’s little point in seeking to sort out here which was which. George did admit to Jeanette shortly thereafter, though, that “I had a very bad bringing up . . . (you needn’t tell Father).” He had learned “to look for all sorts of things in the world, which aren’t in it at all, and the few good things which the world has to offer, are things which I have never learned to see.” As was often the case, the mood did not last: two weeks later George was back from nine days on the French Riviera, feeling “like a new man. I hope to work hard at Russian and play a lot of tennis . . . and forget that life is supposed to have other, more significant experiences.”⁴⁹ And he had, by then, a new family.

“January 19, 1930. . . . Young Russian emigre to lunch. Burning eyes, deep pride, resentment and mistrust. Reputedly a tendency to tuberculosis. We discuss language, perfunctorily, he commenting on the fact that translations of foreign books into Russian are natural and veracious, whereas Russian novels, translated into foreign languages, lose all their Russian character.” He was Vladimir (Volodya) Kozhenikov, who with his mother and sister eked out a precarious existence in a cellar in Spandau. George met Volodya through Cyrus Follmer, then serving as vice-consul in Berlin, and “we became good friends.” On the day George took his final examination in Russian at the Oriental Seminar, Volodya had wanted to stand outside ready to whisper him answers. Still mindful of the Princeton honor code, George refused, but he became an adopted member of the Kozhenikov family. ⁵⁰

The Kozhenikovs survived “only by a series of those miraculous last-minute rescues that God reserves for the truly innocent and utterly improvident.” George and Cyrus did what they could to keep them afloat. “They are a tremendously proud family and it’s not easy for them to take help,” George explained to Jeanette. The spontaneity of their devotion embarrassed him: “enthusiastic visits at unexpected hours, elaborate gifts they couldn’t possibly afford.” But he was pleased to be accepted as a Russian. “Sharing their woes and crises, I felt like a Russian myself.”⁵¹

George understood later—whether at the time is less clear—that Volodya was homosexual. “I always had these curious friends,” he would recall many years later, “people who are a little unusual—the Boheme— they understand me, better than do the regular ones. This has nothing to do with physical relations.” Meanwhile Shura, Volodya’s younger sister, had fallen in love with George, something she didn’t admit to him until after her brother’s death: her mother had ruled out the relationship on the grounds that George was too pozhivzhie—he had “lived a little too much.” “I was much more sophisticated,” he admitted, “and I had had my ladies, too.”⁵²

VII.

By early 1931 Kennan’s professional success seemed assured. The Russian language, he explained to Walt Ferris, a Foreign Service friend, had come “so naturally (if not easily) that I hope in time to know it about as well as my own.” Given the family interest—the first Kennan—becoming a specialist for that part of the world “fits in very conveniently with my preferences.” More significantly, George was developing his own views on the country in which he lived, and the one he would spend most of his life studying.

The Germans, he wrote Ferris, were “a strong, coarse people, with a tremendous capacity for physical and intellectual labor and a total inability to comprehend the finer and the (for them) stranger elements of human psychology. Their only god is personal strength, and their only conception of the relation between human beings in essence that of slave and master.” All of their thinking on love, friendship, enmity, education, and politics proceeded from this; even their humor was “obscene without being witty,” and their language “involved without being delicate.” Their sentimentality was dangerous because it contained no smile: “They are the final hope.... they are now the final despair of western European civilization.”

As for the Soviet Union, its system was unalterably opposed to that of the United States. It followed, therefore,