The Love-Charm of Bombs

by Lara Feigel

  Soon after Rose Macaulay arrived home for bed on the morning of 27 September, the all clear siren began to sound across London. This was a single note, sustained for two minutes. It was as haunting a wail as the danger signal, but Londoners had learnt to find it reassuring after three weeks of bombing. As yet no one had assessed the total damage of the night but in all there had been 481 fires reported. Of these, six were classified as serious, requiring up to thirty pumps; sixty-five were medium, including twenty in central London; and 409 were small. Each of the small fires could have caused the level of destruction that Macaulay found at her incident in Camden Town.

  All over the city, people now began to emerge from the shelters and wander home. The previous day The Times had issued a report urging shelterers not to crowd immediately into the streets after the all clear sounded, but most people found it difficult to resist the urge to go outside into the dawn. The returning daylight brought the brief, ecstatic holiday from fear that Bowen described in The Heat of the Day. Seen through relieved, exhausted eyes, the ruins and barrage balloons became especially picturesque once they were tinged with pink from the sunrise.

  Hilde Spiel, c. 1939

  In Wimbledon, Hilde Spiel now removed the mattresses from the windows and returned them to the beds, where the family had been trying to sleep on uncomfortable bare bed frames. She had slept very little that night. There had been bombing planes above Wimbledon almost all the time, and one of the night’s six serious fires was in Merton High Street, just a mile south-east of Spiel’s flat. Spiel and her husband, daughter and parents remained inside their cramped flat during even the most severe raids. The three-storey concrete apartment house had no air-raid shelter or cellar and they were reluctant to go to the dark and uncomfortable public shelter. At the start of the war, the government had expected raids to be clear-cut events lasting up to an hour, and the shelters had not been built as all-night refuges. In November a Wimbledon doctor wrote angrily to Parliament complaining about the ‘glaring deficiencies’ in the borough’s shelters.

  There are no bunks, and the Shelterers sleep either on the wet floors or on the wet benches. The Sanitary accommodation is inadequate and in the Trench Shelters is indecent as the closets are covered by a sacking curtain which exposes to view the person sitting on the seat.

  Spiel and her family would rather remain at home where between sirens and thuds they played Schubert records for consolation or listened to Beethoven symphonies on the radio. Spiel later wrote that ‘since those days that heroic music has never again moved me so passionately’.

  Hilde Spiel’s husband, Peter de Mendelssohn, usually managed to ignore the raids, writing away at his desk as the bombs crashed around him. He worked at the Ministry of Information by day so the nights were the only time he had to write his own books. Too focused to be distracted by danger, he was determined to make his name as a novelist in England. Hilde found it harder to remain calm than her husband did and she resented his mental seclusion. Like him, she was buoyed up by the resilience of the English. She later wrote that enduring the bombing was easier in London than elsewhere ‘because of the daily example of English stoicism, English equanimity, English humour, which lay before your eyes’. But she was worried about her eleven-month-old daughter, Christine, whom they periodically wondered about sending to wait out the war in America. The official ARP Guide assured Londoners sheltering in their homes that although any house hit by an HE bomb was ‘almost sure to collapse’, the danger of houses falling as a result of nearby explosions was very small. This did not provide much reassurance when there were bombers directly overhead, though, especially as the guide added that ‘other dangers of a less spectacular kind’ such as blasts and splinters could cause more casualties than direct hits. Hilde was also distracted by the anxious screams of her mother, Mimi, who was hysterically frightened by the raids and showed no inclination to mimic the calmness of the surrounding Londoners.

  In the preface to her wartime stories, Elizabeth Bowen recalled her awareness throughout the war that compared with those on the continent the British could not be said to suffer. ‘Foreign faces about the London streets had personal pain and impersonal history sealed up behind the eyes.’ For Spiel the Blitz was more difficult than it was for Bowen because whereas Bowen was surrounded by friends and admirers, and was successfully pursuing a glamorous literary career, Spiel was abruptly cut off from friends and from a literary scene in which she had been just beginning to shine.

  When Hilde Spiel left Vienna for London in 1936 she was the author of a prize-winning novel, Kati on the Bridge, and was feted and adored in Vienna’s café society. She was a passionate young woman of twenty-five, sustained by illusions and by intense and impulsive love affairs with men who were about to change the world. Everything, including politics, was personal. In 1930 she had joined the socialist torchlit march around the Ringstrasse, pressurising her mother to join her in signing up to the Social Democratic Workers’ Party. But her own party membership was largely the result of a love affair with a socialist newspaper editor and she was prepared to lay aside political commitments when they impinged on more pleasurable aspects of life. Devastated by the brutal defeat of the elected socialists in the Austrian Civil War in February 1934, she became determined to leave Austria. However, she was even more determined to complete her studies first. And in the meantime she enjoyed herself, winning second prize for the best suntan at the local swimming pool that summer.

  In her early twenties Hilde took on one brilliant older man after another as her mentor – philosophers, writers, political thinkers – attending their lectures, sometimes accompanying them around Europe, adoring and adored in turn. Writing, loving, trying out herself and life for size, she was sustained by Vienna itself, which provided her with ‘a climate of the most beautiful illusions’; this was a city in which the increasing menace of fascist brutality coincided with a longstanding tradition of courtly chivalry. Hilde’s father Hugo had two deep scars to the left of his chin as a result of youthful duels. Before Hilde’s mentor, the philosopher Moritz Schlick, was shot dead as a Jew in the summer of 1936 he rode a horse each day in Vienna’s Prater. Sometimes the intensity of life in Vienna with its dramas and contradictions became unbearable. Periodically Hilde escaped alone with her skis to the Alps where she threw herself down mountains, forcing herself to achieve more and more exhausting physical feats.

  Hilde Spiel (left) on the boat on her way to London, 1936; Peter de Mendelssohn, 1939

  Shortly before their move to London in 1936 Hilde had accepted Peter de Mendelssohn’s insistent claim that she was destined to be his wife. Two years earlier Peter had arrived in Austria from exile in Paris with an unanswered fan letter from Hilde in his pocket, announcing to friends en route that he was on his way to Vienna where he was to marry a girl called Hilde Spiel. He had been recently liberated from his first marriage after his wife left him to return to her father’s German estate, fed up with the privations of exile in Paris. Hilde was swayed by Peter’s energy and determination; and she had, after all, written that fan letter professing herself to be ‘enchanted’ by his novel a year earlier. A month after Peter’s arrival, she noted in her diary that he was ‘definitely the man for me’. But she remained independent, falling in love in April 1935 with an Italian diplomat called Tino (‘a man like a tree, handsome, tall, mustached, and a fascist by conviction’) and then in 1936 with the gloomy Italian writer Alberto Moravia.

  When she did finally marry Peter and move to London later that year, Hilde was expecting an adventure. The move was politically motivated. Hilde was racially Jewish and it was clear to them both that Hitler would soon encroach on Austria. But Hilde also considered herself an urbane Anglophile and she was excited by the prospect of a new life in England. However by September 1940 she had found herself, aged twenty-nine, a penny-pinching housewife who spent her days looking after her small daughter and parents in a suburban terraced house, queuing at the fishmonger’s shop and meting
out ration coupons while she waited for her husband to return from work. Gradually, fear and monotony were muting her emotions. She would look back on the whole war as a ‘dreary and wretched’ period offering merely ‘varied but still monotonous danger’. She felt that she was gradually deterred from expressing violent emotions, both by the example of English stoicism and under the pressures of the otherwise unbearable war. The calmness with which she forced herself to confront the bombers circling Wimbledon came at the expense of strong feeling and, she later realised, of creative inspiration.

  For both Hilde and Peter the Blitz was doubly difficult because they were aware that the aeroplanes were piloted by their compatriots. In a 1975 essay on ‘The Psychology of Exile’, Spiel described the ‘split consciousness’ or ‘schizophrenic spiritual and mental attitude’ of Austrians and Germans who, more than the British, had ‘to welcome the horrible evil of war because otherwise a terror without end stood in view’. A pacifist by inclination, Spiel, even more than Macaulay, had to lay aside her horror of war and be grateful to Britain for fighting her homeland. At the same time, she could not forget that the bombs falling from the sky were potentially dropped by former friends. She and other exiles were longing for the defeat, ‘even the annihilation . . . of those whose fibres were bound with theirs through origins, childhood experience, landscape, friendship and blood relationships’.

  In September 1940, Hilde Spiel was also in a more difficult position than Bowen, Macaulay, Greene or Yorke because she had dependants in immediate danger from the bombs. A week later, Peter would evacuate both Hilde and Christine to Oxford, but for now Christine was at risk as much as her parents. Christine had been born in Cambridge on 31 October 1939, two months after Britain’s declaration of war. With hindsight in her autobiography Hilde wondered what had induced them, in the brief breathing space between the Munich crisis and the outbreak of war, to think of bringing a child into the world. It was, she decided, ‘Peter’s zest for life, his most irresistible characteristic as a young man, which carried me along with him.’

  Now, Christine inspired her mother with a helpful determination to survive but also with a more paralysing fear. Since the air attacks on Britain began in the summer, Hilde had been worrying about her daughter’s safety. ‘France conquered. We still live,’ she noted on 25 June in the small appointment diary where each night she distilled the personal headlines of the day in cramped English handwriting. ‘Yesterday the first air attack since last September. I would like to at least try to save Christine.’ Wondering in August if they would ever love life again, Hilde wrote at the bottom of that week’s page in her diary that she was ‘never yet so despondent and without hope’, seeing her daughter as the only reason to live. ‘We are daily threatened by an invasion which signifies our certain death. Sometimes I would choose that of all other choices. But I have Christine and I love her so and want to see her growing up.’

  Hilde’s anxiety for her daughter was exacerbated by her mother’s excessive fears. Since arriving in London in August 1938, Hilde’s mother and father Mimi and Hugo Spiel had seemed more like children than parents and Hilde felt burdened by their sudden helplessness and by their continual presence in her already crowded home. She was aware, though, that Mimi was entitled to hysteria. In Vienna, Mimi had been as warm, charming and elegant as her daughter. She was temperamentally cheerful but easily broken, and in the past two years the Spiels had endured their share of the personal pain and impersonal history which Bowen saw as clouding the faces of exiles from the continent. In April 1938 they had watched in disbelief as thousands of Austrians apparently welcomed the Nazis into Vienna. They had then made a dangerous and circuitous journey to London, losing their livelihood and possessions in the process.

  Hilde and Peter had been trying to persuade Mimi and Hugo to leave Austria since 1937. They themselves saw exile as the only possible course of action, even for non-Jews such as Peter. In a broadcast which Hilde described as encapsulating ‘exactly how I felt at that time’, Peter later stated that emigration from a totalitarian country was necessary because it rendered impossible the retreat into a false compromise. If, he said, a person blocks a path for himself ‘of which he knows that outwardly it is convenient, but inwardly will take him to hell, then this cannot be in vain’.

  Hugo (left) and Mimi Spiel in Austria before the war

  For Hilde’s parents, exile was vital not just morally but practically. Although they had both converted to Catholicism, they were racially Jewish; it was evident to Hilde long before it became evident to her parents that they would be in danger in the event of a Nazi takeover. Spending Christmas with the Spiels in 1937, Peter begged them to leave the country, but Mimi protested that she could not bear to abandon her friends or her beloved suburb of Döbling. ‘The SS will march through Döbling,’ Peter insisted; ‘your friends will betray you, or they will be in dreadful danger themselves.’ By the time the Spiels had admitted the truth of Peter’s claims, it had become much harder to leave. ‘It is horrible and unbearable,’ Hilde wrote in her diary as she learnt the news about the Anschluss in April. ‘My parents are in the line of fire. The devil is in charge.’ That June Ferdinand Kuhn, the American foreign correspondent in London, promised to help Hilde by granting her parents an American affidavit. But it was not clear that they would be able to get out. ‘At night I dreamt that my father was brought to me half thrashed to death at the border,’ she wrote. ‘I saw all, his body full of wounds and blood.’

  By September 1938, the Spiels had in fact managed to get out of Austria, and Hilde and Peter rushed to Bandol in France to meet them. But reaching Bandol on 10 September, Hilde learnt that her parents were stranded in Zurich with no money, having been refused entry to France. She sent the last of her own money and returned to London, where her parents finally arrived, exhausted, on 19 September 1938. Hilde led her fearful mother around the town, frightened by the news of Hitler’s increasingly forceful encroaches on Czechoslovakia. They waited anxiously for the impending war, and then felt personally let down by the British when Chamberlain signed the Munich agreement on 29 September. ‘The Czechs are betrayed,’ Hilde wrote in her diary. ‘There will be no war. Should one not leave Europe?’ She later recalled that ‘if we ever experienced England in a moment of shame, then it was on the day of Neville Chamberlain’s return from his last meeting with Hitler . . . The jubilation in the land, the headlines about this illusory promise distressed us greatly.’

  A year later the war which Hilde had desired and feared came at last, but the British betrayed the Spiels once again, this time more personally, by sending Hugo to an internment camp in the summer of 1940. Initially, German and Austrian refugees had been treated more liberally than in the First World War. Some were interned immediately after the outbreak of war, but the Home Secretary, John Anderson, urged Parliament to ‘avoid treating as enemies those who are friendly to the country which has offered them asylum’. He was keen to differentiate Britain as a liberal democracy from Germany with its discrimination against ‘aliens’. However, in the spring of 1940 when the invasion of Britain began to seem more probable, the popular press urged the government to round up refugees on the grounds that they could easily be enemy agents. ‘In Britain you have to realise that every German is an agent,’ the Daily Mail proclaimed in May 1940. At this point a third of the ‘enemy alien’ population was interned and no German or Austrian was free from suspicion. There was even a police swoop on Hampstead Public Library.

  For Hugo Spiel, the internment came at a particularly bad time. In Vienna, he had invented a new mode of producing synthetic rubber. At the time of his move to London he was engaged in a patent dispute to gain recognition for his discovery. It became evident that he was unlikely to win the dispute, but he was nonetheless offered a post at DuPont in America in which he would use his skills. He was interned just at the moment when the immigration papers had finally been obtained, and Hugo and Mimi were unable to take up places which had already been booked fo
r them on an ocean liner. By the time that Hugo came back from internment, all non-military shipping across the Atlantic had been suspended. The Spiels were forced to remain in London, dependent on the limited financial support of the Woburn House refugee aid organisation and on the help of Hilde and Peter, who themselves spent most of the war on the verge of bankruptcy.

  Hilde and Peter were more secure in their British identity than Hilde’s parents. On first arriving in Britain, Peter had found a job working as the second-string London correspondent for two Czech newspapers whose London headquarters were based in the offices of The Times and run by a former Viennese acquaintance of Hilde’s, Peter Smolka. At the age of fourteen Smolka had stolen Hilde’s seat at a foundation congress of the Paneuropa movement. Now he had become a colleague, as Hilde frequently ended up helping her husband with his work during political crises. She also took a job herself, working for the Austrian screenwriter Berthold Viertel, who had previously provided Christopher Isherwood with his first foray into filmmaking by employing him as his co-writer for Little Friend (1934). By March 1939 Czechoslovakia no longer existed as an independent state and Smolka’s newspapers were shut down. Luckily, he immediately acquired and reactivated a news agency called Exchange Telegraph, and Peter de Mendelssohn could continue to assist him. Once war was declared, the agency was taken over by the British government and run by the Ministry of Information via neutral Portugal. Smolka was transferred to the Russian section of the Ministry and Peter de Mendelssohn became the director of the agency. He was an employee of the British government, which rendered Hilde and Peter safe from the threat of internment, and meant that Peter could use his influence in helping to free Hugo Spiel.

  Both Hilde and Peter were determined to make the best of exile, embracing England and all things English, and attempting to integrate as much as possible. They even started to write their letters to each other in English. Although Hilde’s first love was for France, she came to appreciate England very quickly, chiefly through reading the novels of Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen (whom she would later tell Christine was her favourite author). Evacuated to Cambridge while she waited to give birth in October 1939, Hilde wrote to Peter that she had got hold of Bowen’s The Death of the Heart.