George F. Kennan : an American life

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.”⁴⁰

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 Cafe 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.”⁴¹

VIII.

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 Elias, the Czech prime minister of the German “protectorate.” It was, Elias 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.⁴²

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 charge 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.⁴⁴

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.⁴⁵

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.”⁴⁶

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.”⁴⁷

The trip back, with Annelise, took five weeks: they did not reach Berlin until April 12. “I don’t know how I can