Hitlerland

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.”

As the German friend in his novella had predicted, the publication of I Have a Thing to Tell You led to the banning of Wolfe’s books in Germany, and he never returned to that country. In an interview in the Asheville Daily News, his North Carolina hometown paper, Wolfe talked about his last trip to Germany. “I came away with the profoundest respect and admiration for the German people, but I feel that they are betrayed by false leadership,” he declared. Reflecting more broadly on his European experiences, he added: “I saw a certain perfection and finish in European life that we do not have here. However, there is a poisonous atmosphere of hatred. I finally wanted to come back home.”

Despite the title of his posthumous novel, Wolfe did make it home.

8 “A Mad Hatter’s Luncheon Party”

During the summer of 1936 when Thomas Wolfe visited Berlin for the last time, it was “the season of the great Olympic games,” as he wrote in his novel You Can’t Go Home Again. George Webber, his alter ego and main character, observed how “the organizing genius of the German people… was now more thrillingly displayed than he had ever seen it before. The sheer pageantry of the occasion was overwhelming, so much so that he began to feel oppressed by it.” Webber—in reality, Wolfe—felt oppressed because he was acutely conscious of the ominous nature of this pageantry. “It so evidently went beyond what the games themselves demanded… It was as if the games had been chosen as a symbol of the new collective might, a means of showing to the world in concrete terms what this new power had come to be.”

The irony was that Hitler and the Nazis had a long history of virulent opposition to the whole idea of holding the Olympics or other international sporting events in Germany. In 1923, the Nazis had protested against the German Gymnastics Festival that was held in Munich because it was open to “Jews, Frenchmen and Americans,” as a petition that Hitler signed put it. In 1932, right before taking power, the Nazi leader called the Olympics a “plot of Freemasons and Jews”—even though the decision to bring the games to Berlin had already been taken a year earlier. And once the Nazis were in command, they still chafed at the notion of an international competition that would include Jews and blacks. The Volkischer Beobachter fumed that it was “a disgrace and a degradation of the Olympic idea” that blacks could compete with whites. “Blacks must be excluded,” it concluded. “We demand it.”

But Hitler and the Nazis also insisted that the young should be physically fit, engaging in a broad array of sports training on a regular basis. The idea was to strengthen the bodies and aggressive character of their young followers, as well as their allegiance to the movement. “For us National Socialists, politics begins in sport—first, because politics guides everything, and second, because politics is already inherent in sports,” declared Bruno Malitz, who was in charge of sports for the Berlin storm troopers.

Right after the Nazi takeover, Theodor Lewald, the president of the German Olympic Committee and a fervent promoter of hosting the games in Berlin, set up a meeting with Hitler, Goebbels and Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick to convince the new rulers to support his cause. He argued that the games would more than pay for themselves because of the revenue they would generate—and, more important, there would be an “enormous propaganda effect.” Conjuring up the image of about 1,000 journalists converging on Berlin for the games, he pointed out that nothing could “even remotely match” their propaganda value. This proved to be a winning argument.

For precisely the same reason, many Jewish groups in the United States, along with an array of other activists, particularly from the left, pushed hard for a boycott of the Berlin Olympics. They pointed out that the