George F. Kennan : an American life

dictator wise to have preserved the monarchy. The future of Europe, he wrote in a paper he finished while on the trip, might well lie in the survival of an aristocracy “pliable enough, irrational enough, and at the same time stable enough, to bridge all the delicate contradictions of the continent.” Hitler was well on the way to unifying it, but he was doing so without any sense of responsibility for European culture as a whole. Monarchies, for all their foibles, at least had that. One ought not to shrink, therefore, “at the restoration of the Mozart court and the chocolate soldier. It is the real soldiers that are dangerous.”³⁴

Kennan saw plenty of them on both sides of the Rhine while escorting the Welles mission from Berlin to Basel. They were not shooting at each other, but that was unlikely to last, at which point the war was bound to take its toll, even in Scandinavia. For the moment, though, George wrote Jeanette in February, “the little rascals will have to stay in Norway and take their chances along with several hundreds of thousands of Norwegian kids.” Annelise joined them there in March.³⁵

On April 4 George, back in Berlin, got information that changed his mind: “I had reason to call her long distance and ask her to bring the children back at once.” He met them in Copenhagen on the sixth: Gracie and Joan were dressed in twin blue coats, with Happy Hooligan bonnets. The family returned by train to Berlin and on the eighth learned that a German ship had been torpedoed off Kristiansand. Mounting rescue efforts with characteristic thoroughness, the Norwegians wondered why the survivors all seemed to be young men of the same age with military haircuts. The next morning the Germans announced the occupation of Denmark and Norway. “At noon, Annelise and I heard together, with a feeling of sickness and horror, of the bombing of Kristiansand and the shelling of the town from the sea.” She had taken it all with “composure and dignity,” George wrote Jeanette on the fifteenth, “[b]ut it is naturally a cruel strain on her, and it is something which I am afraid neither of us will ever quite get over, however it turns out.”

Kristiansand, he added, had always seemed a little unreal: “So much decency and comfort and health [existing] side by side, within a few hundred miles distance, with such overpowering forces of nastiness and perversion and brutality.” But now at least things were clear. “The worst has happened, and there are no more questions to be asked . . . no more wondering about who is right and who is wrong.” It would be, henceforth, a simple matter “of who gets whom, as Lenin put it. And we know only too definitely which side we are on.”

What was not clear was where the family would go next. The embassy did not want wives with children staying in Berlin. The Kennans owned no home in the United States. George suggested France, but Annelise wisely objected: “I would be just two steps ahead of the German army with two children. I don’t think this is a very realistic idea from somebody who is very smart.” So they decided, in the end, on Highland Park. “We knew that we could stay with [Jeanette] for the summer. And that was as far as we thought.”³⁶

George was able to get everyone to Genoa—the port where, sixteen years earlier, he and Nick Messolonghitis had thrown themselves on the mercy of a harried American vice-consul—and on May 4, 1940, Annelise, Grace, and Joan boarded the SS Manhattan, the ship they had shared, four years earlier, with the American athletes on their way to the Berlin Olympics. It was supposed to sail at eight o’clock that evening, but after dinner George went back to the dock, suspecting the ship might still be there. It was, although the gangplank had been taken up.

A friend on deck kindly went below and summoned Annelise to the porthole, which was just at the level of the dock but some eight feet away. There, separated by those eight feet which were already just as effective and as irrevocable as eight thousand miles, we stole a half an hour from the semi-eternity of separation which had already begun.

At last the ship began to move, and soon “there was only a very tiny arm, waving with frantic despairing cheer, to indicate the particular cubby-hole of floating steel to which I had entrusted my only treasure of reality and permanence.”³⁷

VII.

On May 6, while on his way back from Genoa, Kennan heard radio reports of increasing tension in the Mediterranean: “I reflected with smug satisfaction that my family must by that time be somewhere west of Gibraltar.” On the eighth, in the train to Berlin, he got into a conversation with a German American, now a Nazi, full of boasts about Germany’s strengths and the weaknesses of the United States. Kennan consoled himself with the thought that if his country did harbor strengths, they would be of the kind that his traveling companion would be “unable to comprehend anyway.” On the tenth he got word that the long-expected German invasion of Holland and Belgium was about to begin: “I rode to the office breakfastless, clutching my shaving articles.”

On the fourteenth he dined with a German friend who would be off the next day to join the army. “As a reasonable and patriotic and loyal man, it was the only honorable thing to do, and I understood him. A sense of it being the end of all things hung over us, but our training stood us in good stead; we had a few drinks, and we were a gay little company.” On the seventeenth—the Norwegian national holiday—Kennan took his dogs for a walk, let them chase rabbits in vacant lots, and came home “in complete depression, reading of the advance of the German armies in Belgium and France, and wondering how I could adapt myself to a world where Europe lived under the domination of Germany.”³⁸

Early in June, with France on the verge of defeat, rumors began circulating that the Italians were about to declare war. Kennan walked to the Italian embassy on the afternoon of the tenth, joining a cheerful, indifferent, obedient crowd the German authorities had ordered up, “like the Moscow proletarians bound for a parade.” On the veranda were some of the staff, with their wives. The women were dressed as though for a garden party. “I knew most of them and slunk around in the crowd to avoid their seeing me.” The sound trucks boomed out Mussolini’s speech from Rome, and the Germans, understanding nothing, applauded politely. Later that evening Kennan sat with American friends on his own veranda, drinking highballs and listening to antiaircraft fire in the distance, while another more distant radio voice—Roosevelt’s—proclaimed that “the hand which held the dagger had thrust it into the back of its neighbor.”³⁹

Four days later, equipped with a German permit, Kennan traveled into the Netherlands to reestablish communications with American diplomats there. The train passed boxcars taking prisoners of war east. Their pale faces and bewildered eyes made him wonder whether the day had not passed when free peoples made the better soldiers. Now, in an age of the machine, slave peoples had the advantage, for it was the machine that counted, and “the machine—in contrast to the sword—was best served by slaves.”

As the train entered Holland, a Nazi businessman and a Dutch fifth columnist were congratulating each other. “I had to grip the cushion of the first-class compartment to keep from butting in and attempting to blast some of the complacency and hypocrisy of the conversation.” In the end, Kennan could not resist, warning the Dutchman that

he would indeed have a hard time creating a Dutch national-socialist movement: for either it would be truly Dutch, in which case it would be only an unsuccessful competition for the German movement, or it would be pan- Germanic, in which case all the values of Dutch nationalism would be sacrificed and the adherents, instead of being superior Dutchmen, would only be inferior Germans.

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