George was making that trip to meet Annelise, who was driving their American car south—it had, with the family, crossed the ocean on the SS
Finally, just as I was beginning to despair, she showed up—tearing like a bat out of hell and armed with that determined look, in the face of which neither time nor tide nor sleet nor rain are of any particular avail. When she saw me she stopped with a screeching of brakes that brought the village to its feet and the doughty Danes were treated to the sight of what they must have considered one of the quickest and most successful pick-ups on record.
They got back to Flensburg that evening, and “I subsided into bed with a fever of 101° and teeth rattling like a machine gun.”
After a long wet drive the next day the Kennans checked into the Bristol Hotel in Berlin, where they ran into old Moscow friends, the journalists Demaree Bess and Walter Duranty. It was a new experience to find themselves there “at the peak of Germany’s amazing development of strength, [recognizing] that here was at last a power—in a sense Moscow’s own monstrous progeny—prepared to meet the Kremlin on its own terms.” The Kennans lunched with Cyrus Follmer the next day, had tea with the Kozhenikovs, “who hadn’t changed a bit,” and then dinner with Charlie Thayer, now stationed in Berlin. After dinner, in his apartment, they sat up most of the night listening to Russian music while “talking, talking, talking as I suppose only people can who have lived in Russia and felt that strange, direct need for human communication which seizes everybody in that vast, drab country.”
The car broke down on the way back to Prague, requiring its temporary abandonment in a village next to a new industrial plant—a project of the Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering—where “[g]reat chimneys faded up into the night sky and enormous spurts of red flame lit the dark countryside.” But on the third-class train into Dresden, tired German workmen sat silently, heads in hands, saying nothing about National Socialism. Dresden mechanics, “whose urban prestige demanded that they outdo their provincial colleagues,” got the car going again, and it got the Kennans to Prague without further incident.10
They found there an apartment in a seventeenth-century palace. With walls a foot thick and nothing symmetrical, “you had a feeling of security as great as though you had been in an air raid shelter.” It didn’t matter that the Czech army was auctioning off its horses in the courtyard. The animals, at least, were indifferent to their fate. Grace and Joan arrived in time for Christmas, along with the handmade red cribs that had accompanied them to Moscow and Alexandria. “[F]or a few brief months, while the clouds of war and desolation moved steadily closer and an uneasy lightning played on the horizons of Europe, we again had the luxury of a home.”11
There was still a diplomatic community, and although social life was not very cheerful, “it is quite enough as far as we are concerned,” Annelise wrote Jeanette, “George particularly!” There were opportunities for tennis, horseback riding, ice skating, even dancing: “The other night I found myself having scrambled eggs and sausages at 5 o’clock in the morning. I hadn’t been up so late since we were in Russia.” Nonetheless, she noticed, the world outside was making itself known. “One Sunday we visited at an estate which is now in Germany. While we had tea the Gestapo was announced. Queer feeling.” George urged his sister to visit while there was still time. Prague had been preserved “only by a damn thin margin.”12
II.
Despite his sympathy for the Czechs, Kennan’s first reaction to Munich had been one of relief. Their country’s fortunes, he was sure, lay in the long run “with—and not against—the dominant forces of this area.” The Allies had erred in breaking up the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I, and certainly in leaving three million Germans within Czechoslovakia’s boundaries. No state could have survived as a democracy under those circumstances. At least Munich had preserved “a magnificent younger generation—disciplined, industrious, and physically fit—which would undoubtedly have been sacrificed if the solution had been the romantic one of hopeless resistance rather than the humiliating but truly heroic one of realism.”13
That view assumed, though, that the Munich settlement would stick. Kennan’s travels around the country quickly convinced him that it would not. The Germans were demanding what amounted to extraterritoriality, with jurisdiction over everyone of their nationality in Czechoslovakia. They were building no customs houses or passport control facilities along the new borders. Their businessmen were avoiding long-term deals with Czech counterparts. The army was under pressure to yield to German control. And the authorities in Slovakia and Ruthe-nia, which made up the eastern half of the country, had been completely won over by the Germans. “They are making awful fools of themselves; dressing up in magnificent fascist uniforms, flying to and fro in airplanes, ... and dreaming dreams of the future grandeur of the Slovak or Ukrainian nations.”14
Germany’s racial policies also threatened the status quo. If left alone, Kennan reported in February 1939, Czechoslovakia would treat its Jews relatively humanely: there was not, in itself, “the basis for a really serious and widespread anti-Semitic movement.” Yet German demands were already forcing Jews out of government, university, and other professional positions, and there were calls for more radical measures to eliminate Jewish influence. Because the Czechs on their own would be reluctant to go that far, meeting those requirements “might very well necessitate readjustment in the Prague government.”15
The final blow to the truncated Czechoslovak state came early in March when the Slovaks, with German approval, demanded complete independence. Hitler then executed long-standing plans to occupy all remaining Czech territory. Kennan got the word at four-thirty on the morning of the fifteenth. “Determined that the German army should not have the satisfaction of giving the American Legation a harried appearance, I shaved meticulously before going to the office.” He and the staff spent the morning burning their records on the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which was helping Jews escape from Central Europe, lest the Nazis seize them. Meanwhile, ashen-faced applicants for asylum were lining up outside, but there was no authority to grant it, and there would have been few facilities for providing it. “Their faces were twitching and their lips trembling when I sent them away.”
“People were caught like mice in a trap,” Annelise wrote to Jeanette a few days later. “The Jews are panic- stricken. Our Consulate is swarmed with them. We have heard about many suicides already. I feel sor[r]y for them, but not half as sorry as for the Czechs.” One Jewish acquaintance, who George knew had worked with the Americans for many years, showed up at the apartment. “We couldn’t possibly keep him.” The legation was about to be withdrawn, in which case American diplomatic privileges would probably be revoked, and “[h]e’d only have been in worse shape for having been found in our place.” Besides, there were ten thousand others: “I told him that I could not give him asylum, but that as long as he was not demanded by the authorities he was welcome to stay there and to make himself at home.”
For twenty-four hours he haunted the house, a pitiful figure of horror and despair, moving uneasily around the drawing room, smoking one cigarette after another, too unstrung to eat or think of anything but his plight. His brother and sister-in-law had committed suicide together after Munich, and he had a strong inclination to follow suit. Annelise pleaded with him at intervals throughout the coming hours not to choose this way out, not because she or I had any great optimism with respect to his chances for future happiness but partly on general Anglo-Saxon principles and partly to preserve our home from this sort of an unpleasantness.
