by Erik Larson
She looked away. “I love you, Boris. You know it. And you know how hard I try not to.”
Boris turned to watch the water. “Yes, I know it,” he said with sorrow. “It is not easy for me either.”
Boris could never be subdued for long, however. His smile reappeared—that explosive smile. “But,” he said, “your country and mine are now friends, officially, and that makes it better, makes anything possible, doesn’t it?”
Yes, but…
There was another obstacle. Boris had been keeping a secret. Martha knew it but had not yet told him so. Now, facing him, she made her voice very quiet.
“Also,” she said, “you are married.”
Once again Boris stepped away. His complexion, already flushed from the cold, grew perceptibly redder. He moved to the railing and leaned on his elbows. His long frame formed a slender and graceful arc. Neither spoke.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have told you. I thought you knew. Forgive me.”
She told him that she had not known at first, not until Armand and her parents showed her Boris’s entry in the diplomatic directory published by the German foreign office. Next to Boris’s name was a reference to his wife, who was “abwesend.” Meaning absent.
“She is not ‘absent,’” Boris said. “We are separated. We have not been happy together for a long time. The next diplomatic listing will have nothing in that space.” He revealed as well that he had a daughter, whom he adored. It was only through her, he said, that he continued to have contact with his wife.
Martha noticed tears in his eyes. He had cried in her presence before, and she always found it moving but also discomfiting. A crying man—this was new to her. In America, men did not cry. Not yet. Up until now she had seen her father with tears in his eyes only once, upon the death of Woodrow Wilson, whom he counted as a good friend. There would be one other occasion, but that was to come in a few years’ time.
They went back into the restaurant, to their table. Boris ordered another vodka. He seemed relieved. They held hands across the table.
But now Martha offered a revelation of her own.
“I too am married,” she said.
The intensity of his response startled her. His voice fell and darkened. “Martha, no!” He continued to hold her hands, but his expression changed to one of puzzlement and pain. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
She explained that her marriage had been a secret from the start, to all but her family—that her husband was a banker in New York, she had loved him once, and deeply, but now they were legally separated, with only the technicalities of divorce remaining.
Boris dropped his head to his arms. Under his breath he said something in Russian. She stroked his hair.
He stood abruptly and walked back outside. Martha stayed seated. A few moments later, Boris returned.
“Ach, dear God,” he said. He laughed. He kissed her head. “Oh, what a mess we’re in. A married woman, a banker, a foreign diplomat’s daughter—I don’t think it could be worse. But we’ll figure it out somehow. Communists are used to doing the impossible. But you must help me.”
It was nearly sundown when they left the restaurant and began their drive back toward the city, the top still down. The day had been an important one. Martha recalled small details—the onrushing wind that tore her hair loose from its coil at the back of her head, and how Boris drove with his right arm over her shoulder, his hand cupping her breast, as was often his custom. The dense forests along the roads grew darker in the fading light and exuded a rich autumnal fragrance. Her hair flew behind her in tendrils of gold.
Though neither said so directly, both understood that something fundamental had occurred. She had fallen deeply for this man and could no longer treat him in the same way she treated her other conquests. She had not wanted this to happen, but it had, and with a man whom the rest of the world saw as unsuitable in the extreme.
CHAPTER 26
The Little Press Ball
Every November the Foreign Press Association in Berlin threw a dinner and ball at the Hotel Adlon, a glamorous affair to which many of the city’s most prominent officials, diplomats, and personalities were invited. The event was nicknamed the Little Press Ball because it was smaller and far less constrained than the annual banquet hosted by Germany’s domestic press, which had become even stuffier than usual due to the fact that the country’s newspapers were by now almost wholly under the control of Joseph Goebbels and his Ministry of Public Enlightenment. For the foreign correspondents the Little Press Ball had immense practical value. Wrote Sigrid Schultz, “It is always easier to pump a man for a story after he and his wife—if he has one—have been your guests and danced at your ball than if you see him only in business hours.” In 1933 the Little Press Ball was held on the evening of Friday, November 24, six days before the city’s American population would celebrate Thanksgiving.
Shortly before eight o’clock, the Adlon began receiving the first of a long procession of big cars, many with headlights the size of halved melons. Out stepped an array of senior Nazis, ambassadors, artists, filmmakers, actresses, writers, and of course the foreign correspondents themselves, from countries large and small, all bundled in big coats and furs against the damp, near-freezing air. Among the arrivals were the German state secretary Bernhard von Bülow; Foreign Minister Neurath; French ambassador François-Poncet; Sir Eric Phipps, the British ambassador; and of course the ubiquitous and gigantic Putzi Hanfstaengl. Here too came Bella Fromm, the “Auntie Voss” society columnist, for whom the banquet would prove to be edged with darkest tragedy, albeit of a kind grown increasingly common in the Berlin beyond public view. The Dodds—all four—arrived in their old Chevrolet; Hitler’s vice-chancellor, Franz von Papen, came in a significantly larger and fancier car and, like Dodd, also brought his wife, daughter, and son. Louis Adlon, beaming in tux and tails, greeted each splendid arrival, while bellmen took away furs, coats, and top hats.
As Dodd was about to find out, in a milieu as supercharged as Berlin, where every public action of a diplomat accrued exaggerated symbolic weight, even a mere bit of conversational sparring across a banquet table could become the stuff of minor legend.
THE GUESTS MOVED into the hotel, first to the elegant drawing rooms for cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, then to the winter-garden hall, beclouded with thousands of hothouse chrysanthemums. The room was always “painfully crowded,” in Schultz’s appraisal, but tradition required that the ball always be held at the Adlon. Custom also called for guests to arrive in formal wear but “without any display of orders or official rank,” as Fromm wrote in her diary, though a few guests anxious to display their enthusiasm for the National Socialist Party wore the drab brown of the Storm Troopers. One guest, a duke named Eduard von Koburg, commander of the SA’s Motorized Forces, walked around wearing a dagger given him by Mussolini.
The guests were shown to their seats at tables of a kind favored by banquet organizers in Berlin, so agonizingly narrow they put guests in arm’s reach of their peers at the opposite side. Such close quarters had the potential to create awkward social and political situations—putting, say, the mistress of an industrialist across from the man’s wife—so the hosts of each table made sure their seating plans were reviewed by various protocol officials. Some juxtapositions simply could not be avoided. The most important German officials had to be seated not only at the head table, which this year was hosted by the American correspondents, but also close to the captains of the table, Schultz and Louis Lochner, chief of the Berlin bureau of the Associated Press, and to the table’s most prominent U.S. figure, Ambassador Dodd. Thus Vice-Chancellor Papen wound up sitting directly opposite Schultz, despite the fact that Papen and Schultz were known to dislike each other.
Mrs. Dodd also took a prominent seat, as did State Secretary Bülow and Putzi Hanfstaengl; Martha and Bill Jr. and numerous other guests filled out the table. Photographers circled and took picture after picture, the flare from their “flashlights”
illuminating whorls of cigar smoke.
Papen was a handsome man—he resembled the character Topper as played on television years later by the actor Leo G. Carroll. But he had an unsavory reputation as an opportunist and betrayer of trust and was deemed by many to be arrogant in the extreme. Bella Fromm called him the “Gravedigger of the Weimar Republic,” alluding to Papen’s role in engineering the appointment of Hitler as chancellor. Papen was a protégé of President Hindenburg, who affectionately called him Fränzchen, or Little Franz. With Hindenburg in his camp, Papen and fellow intriguers had imagined they could control Hitler. “I have Hindenburg’s confidence,” Papen once crowed. “Within two months we will have pushed Hitler so far into a corner that he’ll squeak.” It was possibly the greatest miscalculation of the twentieth century. As historian John Wheeler-Bennett put it, “Not until they had riveted the fetters upon their own wrists did they realize who indeed was captive and who captor.”
Dodd too viewed Papen with distaste, but for reasons stemming from treachery of a more concrete variety. Shortly before the United States had entered the past world war, Papen had been a military attaché assigned to the German embassy in Washington, where he had planned and abetted various acts of sabotage, including the dynamiting of rail lines. He had been arrested and thrown out of the country.
Once all were seated, conversation ignited at various points along the table. Dodd and Mrs. Papen talked about the American university system, which Mrs. Papen praised for its excellence: during the Papens’ tenure in Washington, their son had attended Georgetown University. Putzi was his usual boisterous self. Even seated he towered above the guests around him. A strained silence occupied the cleft of linen, crystal, and china that separated Schultz and Papen. That a chill existed between them was obvious to all. “When he arrived he was as suave and polite as his reputation required,” Schultz wrote, “but all through the first four courses of the dinner the gentleman ignored [me] with remarkable consistency.” She noted: “This was not easy to do because it was a narrow table and I sat just about three feet opposite him.”
She did all she could to draw Papen into conversation, only to be rebuffed. She had promised herself that she would “try to be the perfect hostess and steer clear of controversial subjects,” but the more Papen ignored her, the less inclined she was to do so. Her resolve, she wrote, “wore thin in the face of Papen’s obvious bad manners.”
After the fourth course, when she could resist no longer, she looked at Papen and, deploying what she described as “the most naive sounding tones” she could muster, said, “Mr. Chancellor, there is something in the Memoirs of President von Hindenburg which I am sure you can elucidate for me.”
Papen gave her his attention. His eyebrows were flared upward at the ends like feathers and imparted to his gaze the cold focus of a raptor.
Schultz kept her expression cherubic and continued: “He complains that in the last war, in 1917, the German High Command never heard anything about the peace suggestions of President Wilson and that if he had known about them the dangerous submarine campaign would not have been launched. How was that possible?”
Despite the quiet of her voice, suddenly everyone at the table within eavesdropping distance became silent and intent. Dodd watched Papen; State Secretary Bülow leaned in toward the conversation with what Schultz described as “a gleam of wicked amusement in his eyes.”
Papen said brusquely, “There never was such a thing as a peace suggestion by President Wilson.”
A very foolish thing to say, Schultz knew, given the presence of Ambassador Dodd, an expert on Wilson and the period in question.
Quietly but firmly, his voice bearing the lingual mists of North Carolina—“every bit the Southern gentleman,” Schultz recalled—Dodd looked at Papen and said, “Oh yes there was.” And gave the precise date.
Schultz was delighted. “Papen’s long horsey teeth grew longer,” she wrote. “He did not even try to emulate the quiet tone of Ambassador Dodd.”
Instead, Papen “just snarled” his reply: “I never understood anyhow why America and Germany got to grips in that war.” He looked at the faces around him “triumphantly proud of the arrogance of his tone,” Schultz wrote.
In the next instant Dodd won Shultz’s “undying admiration and gratitude.”
MEANWHILE, AT ANOTHER TABLE, Bella Fromm experienced an anxiety unrelated to the conversations around her. She had come to the ball because it was always great fun and very useful for her column on Berlin’s diplomatic community, but this year she arrived suppressing a deep uneasiness. Though she was enjoying herself, at odd moments her mind returned to her best friend, Wera von Huhn, also a prominent columnist, whom most everyone knew by her nickname, “Poulette,” French for “young hen,” derived from her last name, Huhn, which in German means “chicken.”
Ten days earlier, Fromm and Poulette had gone for a drive through the Grunewald, an eleven-thousand-acre forest preserve west of Berlin. Like the Tiergarten, it had become a haven for diplomats and others seeking respite from Nazi surveillance. The act of driving in the forest provided Fromm one of the few moments when she felt truly safe. “The louder the motor,” she wrote in her diary, “the more I feel at ease.”
There was nothing carefree about this latest drive, however. Their conversation centered on the law passed the preceding month that barred Jews from editing and writing for German newspapers and required members of the domestic press to present documentation from civil and church records to prove they were “Aryan.” Certain Jews could retain their jobs, namely those who had fought in the past war or lost a son in battle or who wrote for Jewish newspapers, but only a small number qualified for these exemptions. Any unregistered journalist caught writing or editing faced up to one year in prison. The deadline was January 1, 1934.
Poulette sounded deeply troubled. Fromm found this perplexing. She herself knew about the requirement, of course. Being Jewish, she had resigned herself to the fact that she would be out of a job by the new year. But Poulette? “Why should you worry?” Fromm asked.
“I have reason, Bella darling. I wrote for my papers, chased all over the place getting them. Finally I found out that my grandmother was Jewish.”
With that news her life had been abruptly, irrevocably altered. Come January she would join a wholly new social stratum consisting of thousands of people stunned to learn they had Jewish relatives somewhere in their past. Automatically, no matter how thoroughly they had identified themselves as Germans, they became reclassified as non-Aryan and found themselves consigned to new and meager lives on the margins of the Aryans-only world being constructed by Hitler’s government.
“Nobody knew anything about it,” Poulette told Fromm. “Now I lose my living.”
By itself the discovery was bad enough, but it also coincided with the anniversary of the death of Poulette’s husband. To Fromm’s surprise, Poulette decided not to attend the Little Press Ball; she was feeling too sad to go.
Fromm hated to leave her alone that night but went to the ball all the same after resolving that the next day she would visit Poulette and bring her back to her house, where Poulette loved to play with Fromm’s dogs.
Throughout the evening, in the moments when her mind wasn’t engaged by the antics of those around her, Fromm found herself haunted by thoughts of her friend’s uncharacteristic depression.
TO DODD, PAPEN’S REMARK ranked as one of the most idiotic he had heard since his arrival in Berlin. And he had heard many. An odd kind of fanciful thinking seemed to have bedazzled Germany, to the highest levels of government. Earlier in the year, for example, Göring had claimed with utter sobriety that three hundred German Americans had been murdered in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia at the start of the past world war. Messersmith, in a dispatch, observed that even smart, well-traveled Germans will “sit and calmly tell you the most extraordinary fairy tales.”
Now here was the nation’s vice-chancellor claiming not to understand why the United
States had entered the world war against Germany.
Dodd looked at Papen. “I can tell you that,” he said, his voice just as level and even as before. “It was through the sheer, consummate stupidity of German diplomats.”
Papen looked stunned. His wife, according to Sigrid Schultz, looked strangely pleased. A new silence filled the table—not one of anticipation, as before, but a charged emptiness—until suddenly everyone sought to fill the chasm with flecks of diverting conversation.
In another world, another context, it would have been a minor incident, a burst of caustic banter readily forgotten. Amid the oppression and Gleichschaltung of Nazi Germany, however, it was something far more important and symbolic. After the ball, as had become custom, a core group of guests retired to Schultz’s flat, where her mother had prepared piles of sandwiches and where the story of Dodd’s verbal swordplay was recounted with great and no doubt drunken flourish. Dodd himself was not present, inclined as he was to leave banquets as early as protocol allowed and head for home to close out the night with a glass of milk, a bowl of stewed peaches, and the comfort of a good book.
DESPITE HER MOMENTS of upwelling anxiety, Bella Fromm found the ball delightful. Such a pleasure to see how Nazis behaved after a few drinks and to listen in as they julienned one another with lacerating commentary delivered in a whisper. At one point the dagger-carrying duke, Koburg, happened to strut past Fromm as she was conversing with Kurt Daluege, a police official whom she described as “brutal and ruthless.” The duke seemed to want to project arrogance, but the effect, Fromm noted, was comically undermined by “his stooped, dwarf-like figure.” Daluege told Fromm, “That Koburg walks as though he were on stilts,” then added with menace: “It might leak out that his grandmother deceived the Grand Duke with that Jewish court banker.”