Fortunately, during this early period of Lisa’s decline Nori was spending more time in Sanary than away, his girlfriend, Doris, having returned to Berlin. Despite his wife’s unrelenting hostility towards him, Nori did his best to look after her, to do what he could to keep the house in order, leaving Sybille free to enjoy some life of her own. As soon as Lisa had retired to bed, Sybille would often walk into town, these nocturnal expeditions a vital escape from the stresses of life at home. Accustomed since early adolescence to eating alone in hotels and restaurants, she enjoyed sitting by herself in one of the cafés overlooking the harbour, drinking brandy and soda and watching the evening promenade. On summer nights there would often be dancing in the square to a couple of accordions, festivities in which Sybille, dressed in “the kind of sailors’ clothes I liked,” enjoyed taking part. Her partners were usually girls of her own age, with some of whom she found herself wandering off afterwards for a stroll, “à deux under the night sky…with perhaps worse to follow.” In her diaries the letters “NR” (“Nuit Romantique”) are frequently noted in pencil.
At the end of the year, in November 1933, Sybille spent a couple of weeks with the Huxleys in Spain. She and Eva Herrmann, who had returned from New York, travelled together to Madrid, where they joined Aldous and Maria, the four of them embarking on “an exhilarating and happy time.” From Madrid they drove to Toledo, Segovia, Ávila, where long days were spent sightseeing followed by “evenings of ease, theatre, late dinners, talk, affection, laughter.” The only difficult moment came when they arrived at the airport for the flight home, to find in place of the regular Air France plane a Lufthansa aircraft with a large swastika displayed on its tail. As both Sybille and Eva refused to travel under the Nazi emblem, the Huxleys agreed to wait until the next day when they were able to take a Spanish flight onward.
Returned home, Sybille was depressed to find that her mother’s behaviour was growing ever more violent and vindictive. Lisa’s fury with her husband was unrelenting, her rages, fuelled by drugs and drink, now almost beyond control. She even tried to persuade her daughter to join her in taking morphine. “Lisa is the hole into which everyone sinks,” as Nori glumly remarked. Then one night Sybille was woken by the sound of her mother screaming at Nori; frightened and appalled, she pulled the covers over her head and tried to go back to sleep. Early the next morning she was woken by her stepfather coming into her room, fully dressed, briefcase in hand. He could no longer cope, he told her; he was leaving, his suitcases already in the car. “Look after her,” he said. “I shall send some money when I can.” He embraced Sybille lovingly, and then he was gone, leaving her with nothing of his except his Remington typewriter.
From the moment of Nori’s departure, the problems arising from Lisa’s condition were to escalate rapidly, at times almost overwhelming her close friends and family. As before, Maria Huxley was to provide the most practical advice and support, with Katzi, too, giving what help she could, as did Lisa’s mother in Berlin. More immediately, however, Sybille was confronted with a situation that potentially was far more threatening.
Since the arrival in Sanary of the Mann family, Sybille had spent much time in the company of Klaus, whose courage in voicing opposition to the Nazi regime she passionately admired. Now Klaus was in the process of publishing a literary review, to be entitled Die Sammlung (“The Collection”), essentially to provide an uncensored voice mainly for German émigré writers and intellectuals. Within a very short time the project had attracted considerable backing: Heinrich Mann, André Gide and Aldous Huxley had agreed to stand as sponsors, while a distinguished list of contributors was soon assembled, among them Albert Einstein, Bertolt Brecht, Jean Cocteau, Boris Pasternak and Ernest Hemingway. Eager to be included, Sybille was thrilled when Klaus agreed to accept an article of hers.
The first issue of the journal was to appear in September 1933. In April Aldous Huxley’s book on Mexico and Central America had been published, and it was this, Beyond the Mexique Bay, that Sybille chose for the subject of her dissertation. She wrote the essay first in English before translating it into German, showing both versions to the novelist Lion Feuchtwanger for his comments. His reaction was far from favourable: Sybille was told that it was “juvenile in concept, clumsy in execution…My grammar and style pained him.” Although Sybille was grateful for the care and patience with which he analysed her text, she decided to change nothing, leave everything as it was. Most of the article took the form of a lengthy encomium on Aldous’s book, but at the very end Sybille had decided to include a couple of damning sentences voicing criticism of Hitler’s Germany: “Huxley’s vor ein paar Monaten ausgesprochene Hoffnung, dass Furcht und Abneigung gegen Hitler-Deutschland zu Verständigung und rationeller Zusammenarbeit der anderen Nationen führen könne, scheint heute kaum mehr begründet…[der] Abgrund, [in den] Leidenschaften ohne die Hemmungen der Intelligenz und mit Ermutigung der bodenlosen Dummheit führen können, ist das Deutschland der Nationalmenschlichen.” (“The hope Huxley expressed a few months ago that fear and dislike of Hitler’s Germany might lead to compromise and rational collaboration between other nations scarcely seems justified now…[the] abyss [into which] passion untrammelled by intelligence and urged on by bottomless stupidity might well take us, is Nazi Germany.”)
Looking back on the episode many years later, Sybille wrote of her article, “I merely wanted—very strongly—to stand up and be counted.” And counted she was. In Germany the reaction to the publication of Die Sammlung was punitive and immediate: Klaus Mann, whose works were already on the Nazi blacklist, was declared guilty of high treason and stripped of his citizenship. For Sybille, the consequences, if less vicious, were ominous nonetheless. One morning a document arrived in the post informing her that the money held in her name in Berlin had been confiscated. “That money…the capital from my father’s estate…was gone. Irrevocably, it became clear. They—the regime—had taken connaissance of my partly Jewish descent.” To protect her status the obvious first step was to apply for French citizenship, which surely would not be rejected; over the past years her carte d’identité had been regularly renewed without question. Now, however, her application was refused. The welcome offered by France to the first wave of émigrés had been short-lived; restrictive measures had recently been introduced, with many refugees denied entry, others escorted to the border to be returned to Germany. Those Germans already settled in France were no longer able to regard their residency as secure.
As before Sybille turned to the Huxleys for help, and they, understanding only too well the dangers of her situation, promised somehow to find a way of ensuring her safety for the future.
Skip Notes
* Interestingly, Mann in his diaries gives no indication of ever having met “Frau Marchesani” before arriving in Sanary.
five
SAILING INTO THE UNKNOWN
The furore caused by the publication of Die Sammlung was alarming, and Sybille was profoundly shaken by the experience, although she never for a moment regretted her involvement. Her loathing for Germany, which began in childhood and intensified over the coming decade, was never to leave her, and it was only many years later that she was able to bring herself briefly to return to the country of her birth.
More immediately, however, she was faced with the daunting problem of how to cope with Lisa, who had sunk into a drug-induced stupor after the departure of Nori. The only member of the family now prepared to take responsibility was Lisa’s mother, Anna Bernhardt. Anna’s relationship with her daughter had always been difficult, as Lisa, headstrong and impatient, resolutely resisted any attempt at guidance or control. After Sybille was born, Anna had transferred her maternal feelings to her granddaughter, to whom she had remained devoted, despite their long periods of separation. She wrote regularly to Sybille, long letters usually in English, giving detailed accounts of her daily life, her friends and relations, recollections of the travels she had so mu
ch enjoyed in the past; she wrote about her love of reading, in English, French and German; and also about her passion for good food: Anna was an accomplished cook and regularly included favourite recipes with detailed instructions on how to carry them out.
A member of a wealthy family, married in Hamburg to a rich man, Anna had been accustomed to a comfortable existence in a large house waited on by a staff of well-trained servants. Since the post-war inflation, however, her income had drastically diminished, and now in her early seventies she was reduced to living in near poverty in Berlin. “I prefer Berlin,” she told Sybille. “It is so vast that I can conceal my shabbiness.” Anna was currently lodging in one small room in a pension on Budapester Strasse—her window looking out not onto the Zoologischer Garten at the front but over a dank interior courtyard at the back. In such straits she was able to offer Lisa little financial help, although in practical terms it was Anna from this time onward who was to organise almost everything. Her feelings of hostility and resentment towards her self-centred daughter had grown over the years: Lisa was a vampire, Anna said, selfish, vain, hot-tempered, never considered anyone’s interests but her own. “Lisa n’a jamais supporté d’être éclipsée et persiste à être plus centre in the scene” (“Lisa can’t bear to be eclipsed and must always be the centre of attention”). Yet Anna never questioned the fact that the problem of Lisa was hers to solve, and despite the endless complaining, about Lisa herself, about the lack of money, about the complex legal issues, she remained unflinching in her determination to deal with the situation as best she could.
Lisa’s condition, her alcoholism and reliance on morphine, was now so serious that Anna decided she must be brought back to Germany as quickly as possible. There was a private sanatorium at Lichterfelde, on the outskirts of Berlin, where the distinguished Austrian physiologist Manfred Sakel had developed a form of shock therapy for drug addiction, which at the time was considered highly successful. This, Anna decided, was the place for Lisa, and here she hoped her daughter could be safely interned. Sybille was dismayed when she learned what was planned for her mother. “I am worried and out of sorts,” she told Toni Muir, “and have to write presently a long birthday letter to my grandmother to whom I must be nice because she is lonely and disappointed and also out of fear because she is behaving incredibly nasty [sic] towards Lisa, who is rather in her power. They want to intern her in a German asylum. Terrible. And what can one say against it.”
Fortunately Lisa still had a modest income from her German investments, as well as a few pictures, some silver and china which could be sold to help cover her expenses. The most immediate problem concerned her citizenship. Since her marriage to Nori, Lisa had held an Italian passport, which would prevent her from claiming German nationality, even the right to residence in Germany. As it turned out, however, her Italian nationality was questionable: as both she and Nori were Roman Catholic, and as Lisa when she married him was a divorced woman whose first husband at the time was still alive, then technically her second marriage could be annulled. “If this statement is agreed by Court and Embassy,” Anna triumphantly declared, “Lisa is free, Frau Schoenebeck and German!”
Nori, meanwhile, had lost no time in unshackling himself from his marriage, initiating divorce proceedings within days of his leaving Sanary. He had previously been in touch with Anna over various problems to do with Lisa’s condition, and it was now that he arrived in Berlin to meet her. Their relations were extremely amicable, and together they dealt with the complex procedures required to obtain permission for Lisa’s repatriation, with Nori agreeing to make over to her as much as he could afford from his own very modest finances.
After this first stage was completed, Nori departed for his family home at Bolzano. That early morning when he had suddenly walked out of the house in Sanary was almost the last occasion on which Sybille was to see her stepfather. Despite the unpleasantness of the divorce proceedings, however, the two of them stayed in touch, maintaining an affectionate if sporadic correspondence, Nori keeping Sybille informed of his eventual second marriage to an Italian wife and an agreeable existence running a golf club in San Remo. Here many years later Sybille went to visit him for what turned out to be a fond reunion, although for Sybille it was a somewhat strange experience: “I thought of Lisa, and asked her not to mind.”
Meanwhile, on that morning of Nori’s departure, Sybille, unable to cope with her mother, had moved to the Villa Huley, reliant as ever on the kindness of Maria. The following month, in February 1934, the Huxleys took her with them to Italy for several weeks, returning to Sanary at the end of April. During this time Lisa again stayed at the clinic in Nice while the complex bureaucracy involved in the move to Berlin was set in motion. In the event it was not until June that she finally left France, accompanied on the train by a nurse, the expenses of the journey shared between Nori and Anna. Sybille and the Huxleys were present at her departure. “The last I saw of my mother was at Toulon station being lifted through the window of a wagon-lit carriage on a northbound express. Aldous & Maria stood with me on the platform.” Sybille never set eyes on Lisa again.
During the stressful period of Lisa’s addiction, Sybille had received help not only from the Huxleys but also from her sister. After Nori left, Sybille had written to Katzi in Paris, imploring her to return to Sanary. Katzi willingly agreed: she was fond of her stepmother, with whom she had enjoyed an affectionate and much easier relationship than that existing between mother and daughter. From the early stages of Lisa’s dependence on morphine, Katzi had been aware of the problem, and now, seeing for herself the seriousness of the situation, she had determined to try to moderate Lisa’s behaviour. Just as she had all those years ago with Sybille at Feldkirch—“Don’t tell lies,” “Have you washed your hands?,” “No, you can’t have it”—Katzi began laying down the law. “My sister, ferociously disgusted by drugs, had an aptitude for kindly and effective authority…Now my mother gave in to her up to a point. For a while.”
Although they were so different in temperament, Sybille had been devoted to Katzi, who since her early childhood had been unfailingly supportive. And yet in later years when recalling this troublesome period Sybille was curiously ambivalent. “[I] could not love her as we had loved each other in my childhood and after…There was an estrangement, one-sided perhaps, not open.” In fact there were serious reasons for what Sybille described as her “inner withdrawal,” although she gave little indication of what these might be, referring only in passing to her disapproval of Katzi’s passive acceptance of the deplorable state of affairs in Germany. “If she was against what was currently going on in Germany, she did not detest it enough. This grieved me.” In reality the truth was far more complex.
From the time of the Dincklages’ first arrival in Sanary in 1930, the couple had proved themselves popular. They were both sophisticated, charming and very good-looking, Katzi “élégante et mondaine,” Spatz clever, amusing and delightfully flirtatious. They were excellent tennis players, loved parties—they themselves entertaining frequently at their own residence, La Petite Casa—and both willingly turned a blind eye to each other’s sexual liaisons. In Paris they lived in a spacious apartment on the rue Pergolèse, Spatz comfortably supported by a large income provided, as was later revealed, by German military intelligence. An excellent linguist, Spatz held the post of cultural attaché at the German Embassy, although, significantly, he was not a member of the Nazi Party—a fact which his French friends, mistakenly as it turned out, found reassuring.
Sybille had always been wary of Spatz, “a ruthless social butterfly with a heart of steel,” although she was glad of his presence in Sanary, which allowed her to spend time with her sister. Sometimes she and Katzi met alone, more often she and the Dincklages lunched and dined with friends: the Huxleys, the Meier-Graefes, and Pierre and Jacqueline Mimerel, Pierre in particular forming a warm friendship with Spatz. Unsuspected by any of them at this period was Spatz�
��s undercover work for military intelligence, his mission to supervise an espionage operation focused on the French naval bases at Toulon and at Bizerte in Tunisia. In this he proved remarkably successful. Accompanied by Katzi, he himself had visited Bizerte in 1931, and while in Sanary had established a network of French as well as German agents, who in return for generous pay reported back to him in Paris. The Sûreté, highly suspicious, had kept Dincklage under observation for a number of years, although it was not until 1935 that a Paris newspaper publicly exposed him as a Gestapo agent.
Shortly before this revelation, Spatz had discreetly divorced Katzi, acting in compliance with the newly introduced Nuremberg Laws forbidding marriage between Jew and Aryan. The divorce was kept secret for some time to come, the couple continuing to appear as man and wife, until inevitably the rumours began—Sybille first learned about her sister’s divorce when she overheard a German couple discussing it. Katzi meanwhile behaved as though nothing had changed, although she now spent more time on her own in Sanary while Spatz was constantly on the move, undertaking missions in Paris, London and North Africa. As before, the two of them continued to engage in a number of affairs, for Spatz the most significant a lengthy relationship with the couturière, Coco Chanel, while among Katzi’s lovers were two Frenchmen, both at the time secretly working for Dincklage’s intelligence network.
Profoundly as Sybille would have abhorred these liaisons had she been aware of them, there was one affair of Katzi’s of which she entirely approved. Not long after Lisa left France, the Huxleys went to London and Sybille moved in with the Mimerels. Here Katzi often came to see her, and before long began an affair with Pierre. In the Mimerels’ marriage up to now it was always Jacqueline who strayed, rarely without a good-looking young man following adoringly in her wake, with Pierre, the mari complaisant, tolerating his wife’s infidelities while showing little interest in indulging in anything similar himself. Now for the first time he fell in love, he and Katzi embarking on a brief but happy romance. Sybille was delighted for both their sakes—“Pierre never looked back…My frivolous, life-enhancing sister had been the right thing at the right time”—and it was only many years later that she learned of the pain their liaison had caused Jacqueline. “Il m’a forcé à prendre ta soeur chez nous” (“He forced me to take your sister into our house”), Jacqueline told her, explaining how devastated she had been to find that Katzi “was the turning point in P[ierre]’s life, and that after her he never ceased de courir après les filles [to run after girls].”
Sybille Bedford Page 12