* * *
—
THAT AUTUMN, Tommy was honorably discharged from the army. He had survived two grueling bouts of basic training when his superiors decided that his slow coordination made him unfit for combat. To Salka’s relief he returned to Santa Monica and enrolled at the local junior college. Berthold remained in New York, having made some progress toward a production of his play. Liesel Neumann came to Hollywood for a few days to make a film test. After spending time with her, Salka wrote to Berthold suggesting once again that they get a divorce. He’d be happier married to Liesel, she told him, and “as far as both of us are concerned, we will remain the same to each other as long as we live.” But again Berthold refused.
By late October, Heinrich and Nelly Mann had returned from Ananda Ashrama to a mountain of bills. Nelly had taken another odd job at a hospital, but the debts were overwhelming. She had been arrested twice for drunken driving over the past two years, the first of which had led her to a failed suicide attempt. Now she was scheduled to appear in court for a probation hearing and the prospect filled her with panic. On the night of December 16 she tried again to kill herself with an overdose of pills. This time she was successful.
In the days following Nelly’s death, Heinrich’s stoicism abandoned him. He was exhausted by grief, and wrote to a friend that he dreaded the loneliness he now faced. He admitted that this was the fifth time Nelly had set out to end her life: twice in France, twice in California, and now the final achievement.
Salka had run into Nelly shortly before she died. Pleased to see her laughing and joking, Salka arranged a lunch date, but the next day Nelly called to cancel. Katia Mann called Salka a few days later to tell her the terrible news.
Salka arrived for Nelly’s funeral at Woodlawn Cemetery on Pico Boulevard on December 20, a sunny winter day. There she found herself alone with the newly dug grave, covered with a lurid green carpet of artificial grass, she remembered, “such as they use on movie sets.” The hearse arrived. Its two attendants off-loaded the casket, chatting about baseball. Salka in a folding chair and Nelly in her coffin waited companionably together until the other guests assembled: Thomas and Katia, the Feuchtwangers, Helli Brecht, Ludwig Marcuse, Liesl Frank, and Salka’s Swiss friend Toni Spuhler, who had been helpful to Nelly during many personal crises. Heinrich Mann came last, a hulking shadow. He shook his head violently at the undertaker’s call for speeches. The polite young man read one psalm, shook Heinrich’s hand, and withdrew. The ceremony was over. The coffin would not descend into the grave until after the mourners had gone.
Heinrich groaned, held a handkerchief to his face, and staggered blindly away. “It was gruesome,” wrote Salka. Katia redirected Heinrich to her car and he rode back to the Palisades with her and Thomas. In his diary entry for that day, Thomas mentioned the funeral of “Heinrich’s unhappy wife, who had brought him a lot of trouble.” Possibly Thomas was thinking more of himself than of Heinrich. He had never quite seen the point of Nelly. He saw her as an unfair burden on the family and blamed her for Heinrich’s descent into debt. In 1941 Thomas had refused to provide an immigration affidavit for Nelly as he had for Heinrich, insisting that Nelly appeal to her own relatives in America to act as her sponsors, which she did.
When he heard the news of Nelly’s death, Klaus Mann, then serving in Italy with the U.S. Army, wrote to his mother Katia: “What an embarrassing, superfluous, ugly tragedy!…What deplorable, objectionable lack of consideration and self-control!…She should have stayed in Germany with people of her own kind.”
Heinrich did not believe that Nelly had brought him trouble. He knew that Nelly’s depression and alcoholism were illnesses and not moral failings, not occasions for shame. He praised Nelly’s steadfastness in the face of her challenges. He was completely diminished by his loss. “We were together, she and I, and now I’m alone,” he wrote to the novelist Hermann Kesten in New York.
Doubly exiled, Nelly never found a place among the intellectuals with whom she had fled to California. Her ribaldry and her anguish, both extreme, made them all uncomfortable. “But even those she shocked had no doubts about her devotion to her husband,” Salka wrote in her memoir. Nelly had carried Heinrich over the Pyrenees, had ventured onto a strange continent with its baffling language to create a new life for them both. Marta Feuchtwanger had been right to raise a glass to Heinrich’s wife at his seventieth birthday party. Nelly was as brave as any of them, maybe more so. She could have used more kindness.
Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle
“Dearest, dearest Berthold,” Salka wrote to her husband at that Christmas of 1944, “Nelly’s death was the last, sad event of this depressing year. The new one must be better.”
With her straitened finances, Salka could no longer make contributions to the EFF or anywhere else for refugee relief. She recognized that her house was now her most effective asset and she used it for whatever amenities it could supply: the Sunday parties went on, and houseguests occupied every available sleeping space. Before long Salka took a necessary next step in order to pay the mortgage and began to charge several of her guests a fee for room and board. One of them was Sonya Schulberg O’Sullivan, who was Budd’s sister and who had remained close to Jigee after Budd and Jigee divorced. Sonya’s husband, a lawyer, was serving overseas. In early March Sonya moved to Mabery Road along with her eighteen-month-old son Johnny, taking the upstairs bedroom next to Salka’s. Among the other paying guests, at thirty-five dollars a month each, was the actor Hurd Hatfield, who had recently starred in The Picture of Dorian Gray for Metro. Brecht’s Danish girlfriend, Ruth Berlau, moved into the room next to the garage, also as a paying guest. She was young and lively and could make Auguste laugh, lightening some of the dark hours.
Sonya remembered that Salka’s house “was a marvelous home for homeless people.” Salka treated her paying guests as if they were family, with everyone gathering for meals around the dining-room table. Salka had no money for clothes but managed to dress well, throwing a vivid scarf around her shoulders to disguise a ratty sweater. At the time Salka was without household help and did everything herself with outward good cheer. She drove twenty-five minutes to Beverly Hills to do the food shopping, as there were no decent grocery stores in Santa Monica. Sonya noted that on many afternoons Salka and Garbo spent hours alone in the master bedroom, with Salka’s German shepherd Prinz guarding the closed door.
Prinz was temperamental and Sonya remembered that if one leaned too close, as she once watched the actress Fay Bainter do, he would bite. One day Prinz bit Sonya’s son Johnny when they were walking with the dog through the little tunnel that led to the beach. Prinz was forever causing trouble for Salka but she loved him lavishly anyway. In the house at that time there was also another big dog named Sherry and a fat, moody dachshund named Frieda that belonged to Jigee. Frieda was a former show dog and had nothing but scorn for everyone except for Brecht, to whom she was amorously devoted.
In the mornings Johnny would wake early and Sonya would hear him toddling into Salka’s room, where they would romp on the bed for a while. “She was darling about it,” recalled Sonya, the sweet moment no doubt a bright spot at the beginning of Salka’s chore-filled day.
Sonya wrote letters to her mother Ad Schulberg that spring with the news from Mabery Road. She recalled a visit from the writer Gina Kaus, and a little dinner party with Thomas Mann and Ernst Lubitsch—“it was fun,” Sonya told Ad. She reported that she was helping Salka with the Americanisms in her scripts. “There is much to admire in her,” Sonya said to her mother about Salka. “I’m particularly impressed with her handling of her terribly bad luck and terrible prospects at the moment. She has nothing—no job no dough no husband no lover—only bills and dependents. Yet she manages to stay cheerful and scrubs the kitchen floor as if she enjoyed it.”
The war in Europe was in its last months. Sambor had been liberated by the Soviet army the previous August, and during January of 1945
the Russians launched an offensive that liberated western Poland. But there were still no responses to Salka’s attempts to locate Dusko.
Peter had finished his officer training and was now a second lieutenant with the OSS, the precursor to the CIA. He was sent to Germany, where his language skills enhanced his service in tactical intelligence operations. Peter’s letters home described the wholesale destruction as the Allies bombed Dresden, American troops crossed the Rhine, and the Russians marched into Berlin. “The well-known streets were now a bloody, senseless battlefield,” Salka wrote. “But to prevent one from having pity for the German people, new concentration camps and Gestapo murders with their infernal gruesomeness were discovered. When finally Hitler and Goebbels killed themselves in the bunker, a British newspaper quoted Shakespeare: ‘The day is ours, the bloody dog is dead.’ Still, the day is not ours and bloody dogs were still on the loose.”
As the war in the Pacific continued and the draft boards stepped up their recruitment, Hans showed up at Mabery Road with the news that he at last had been declared fit to serve in spite of his hearing disability. “I had never seen him so happy,” wrote Salka. Hans persuaded a recruitment officer that the benefits of his excellent German and decent French far outweighed the encumbrance of his awkward hearing aid, which some soldiers at the induction center had mistaken for a new sort of walkie-talkie. He was immediately sent to the East Coast to train for the Counter Intelligence Corps, and a few weeks later, as Peter had, he shipped out to Germany. All three of Salka’s sons could now call the army their proving ground as U.S. citizens in the fight against fascism.
Jigee and Vicky came to join the household after Peter left, and their presence lifted Salka’s spirits a bit. But anxiety and sadness plagued her still. In letters to Berthold, Salka called her depression “combat fatigue,” which worsened with the reports of Roosevelt’s death in April 1945. “I know we are winning the war,” she wrote to Berthold, “and I know Roosevelt’s death will not affect its outcome, but it is as if one had suffered a great personal loss.”
Brecht tried to cheer up Salka by suggesting that they write a film story together, as highly commercial a story as they could manage, to make a quick and profitable sale. Confidently he asked her: “Why shouldn’t we be able to do as well as any Hollywood hack?”
Salka immediately set him straight with a dose of timeless Hollywood wisdom: “what the producers want is an original but familiar, unusual but popular, moralistic but sexy, true but improbable, tender but violent, slick but highbrow masterpiece,” she told him. “When they have that, then they can ‘work on it’ and make it ‘commercial,’ to justify their high salaries.”
Every day for some months Salka and Brecht worked faithfully on their story, about a modern-day Joan of Arc. But they failed to meet the breezy criteria that Salka had articulated, as no studio offered to buy it.
That summer marked Berthold’s sixtieth birthday, which he observed in New York among a gathering of émigré theater folk. “At the end I had to speak and said that I consider this celebration a symbolic homage to all who are in exile,” he wrote to Salka. “It is a shame you were not there…Garbo came and was much noticed but not bothered.” Berthold was moved by letters of congratulation from Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Albert Einstein, Vicki Baum, Hanns Eisler, Lion Feuchtwanger, Jean Renoir, Alfred Döblin, Brecht, and others, and was most touched by a poem from Bruno Frank. Then Berthold reported: “Next morning at breakfast Liesel and I wondered where to get the housekeeping money for the coming week. Please don’t be alarmed, there are all kinds of prospects.” In questions of finances, there was little that alarmed Salka more than when Berthold begged her not to be alarmed. At some point before June 1945, Salka accepted a donation of two hundred dollars from the European Film Fund, when not so long ago she had been one of its chief contributors.
In June, Bruno Frank died in his sleep of heart disease. He’d been among the most stalwart of the exiles since his Sanary days, when he’d joined weekly reading circles with Thomas Mann and Aldous Huxley, and had remained a faithful champion of refugee causes. Bruno’s death saddened Salka, but she “was comforted by the thought that he had lived long enough to see the crumbling of the Nazi power.”
Then, in August, Franz Werfel died, at age fifty-four. The faulty heart that had worried him as he crossed the Pyrenees had at last given out. Werfel’s biographer Peter Stephan Jungk wrote that the author’s enormous success with The Song of Bernadette—which Thomas Mann called “a well-made bad book”—had offered Werfel a “restitution of justice” after his expulsion by the National Socialists, and Salka was glad to see that Werfel, like Bruno Frank, had survived to see the Germans surrender. But Werfel’s was a justice, Jungk continued, that “had not been evident in the fates of his fellow writers in exile who, almost without exception, lived at subsistence level,” and inflamed in many of them a lasting resentment.
Alma Mahler-Werfel, who made a point of never going to funerals, ostentatiously declined to attend her husband’s. Salka kept her own counsel, but years later, after Alma published a memoir in the late 1950s, Salka unloaded her feelings about Alma’s book into her diary. “I find it disgusting,” Salka wrote. “Only the part from Werfel’s diary she quotes is fascinating and wonderful writing. Though in translation the vulgarity of her style is less offensive than in German, the difference between her writing and Werfel’s is enormous and revealing. It could have been a wonderful book…if she would not have been determined to glorify and purify herself. The men in her life were extraordinary artists. Mahler and Kokoschka geniuses, Werfel an enormously talented poet and writer, but ruined by this monstrous bosom engulfing him and choking his heartbeat. She is the most Wagnerian non-singer one could imagine…What a monstrous self-adoration Alma has!”
Though she barely mentions it, Salka’s antipathy toward Alma was probably not assuaged by the fact of Alma’s lifelong anti-Semitism, which in spite of her marriage to a Jew included frequent expressions of admiration for Adolf Hitler and tirades about Jewish inferiority and unattractiveness. As was not unusual then or since, Alma recognized no contradiction in her own opinions and behavior. Her loud objections to the Jews as a people coexisted alongside her willingness to join them in exile.
* * *
—
BY AUGUST, Salka found she had been mistaken to think that the end of the war would bring her some long-awaited satisfaction. For her, the nuclear obliteration of 120,000 civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was yet another dimension of the boundless capacity for cruelty in these years of the devil. “Some people,” she mused later,
among them my own friends, whose humanity and compassion I had never doubted, thought that the thousands of burned bodies…were less terrible than a prolonged war, and the sacrifice of thousands of American lives. Some saw the great promise that the channeling of atomic energy held: warmth to the Arctic, cooling of the African desert, abundance for barren countries. Mercifully the future, although menacing, is unknown to us. Fumbling, we try to cope with the sins of the past and their reverberations upon the present.
9
UN-AMERICANS
The ultimate logic of racism is genocide.
—MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.
Tyranny is the absence of complexity.
—ANDRÉ GIDE
LOS ANGELES
1946–1953
SHE HAD KNOWN, and she had not known. She had known some, and she had not wanted to know all. She had known, but now she lost the luxury of pretending not to know, because the enormity of the truth had begun to assault her.
“The Nuremberg Trials were coming to an end,” Salka remembered of the time around October 1946, “and the pitifully small groups of survivors of Dachau and Auschwitz began to arrive in the States. The tattooed numbers on their wrists, the eyes which still reflected the horror, haunted me in sleepless nights.” Like every Jewish émigré in the States, Salka in Los Angeles and her
brother Edward in New York were trying to get information about what had happened to their loved ones. There was still no word from Sambor about Dusko. Every morning Salka intercepted the mail before her mother came downstairs, hoping to shield Auguste from bad news. On one of those mornings Salka opened a letter from Sambor that was addressed to Auguste and scrawled in pencil from a torn notebook page. It came from Viktoria, the woman who had been raised at Wychylowka as if she were part of the Steuermann family. Salka had bottle-fed Viktoria and changed her diapers. Her father had doted on Viktoria from the time of her birth in 1917 until his death in 1932.
Now twenty-nine, Viktoria had gotten through the war more or less intact. Her letter reported that she and her Ukrainian husband were well. She had four children, and she wondered whether Salka, “who had always been a sister to me,” could send them a package of food. She was sorry to mention some bad news: that Dusko had come to her house begging her to hide him in 1943, “but as we are living in a rented place I could not do it, and since the last German Aktion I have not heard from him again.” She was no longer in contact with Dusko’s girlfriend, Hania, who had left Sambor with their son Adam. She had no idea where they had gone.
The blithe tone of Viktoria’s letter shocked Salka to her core. She did not know which to feel first, grief or fury. She wrote in her memoir: “The German word ‘Aktion,’ the only one clearly written and correctly spelled, killed all my hope that Dusko was alive.”
An Aktion was the National Socialists’ name for each of their campaigns to obliterate the Jewish population of Europe, through the hunting, assembling, and mass shooting of Jews, and through the deportation of Jews to slave-labor or death camps. In Sambor all those efforts had occurred at regular intervals. As preliminaries, the conquering Germans had forced the Jews of Sambor to wear a white ribbon with a blue Star of David on their sleeves, and to hand over their possessions, beginning with their silver and gold, furs, and radios. Anyone who refused was shot. Then, in January 1942, the Germans established a ghetto just outside the city. By autumn, all Jews living in the town and in neighboring villages were forced into the ghetto. There the cramped houses were frequently searched, a shoot-on-sight curfew was imposed, and many suffered from hunger and typhus.
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