When American GIs walked into a camp, the shock was so horrendous that they’d just break down in tears. They’d fall on the ground. Some of them had to be immediately treated by doctors. These are the liberators I’m talking about now, not the inmates.
Medieval painters painted visions of hell, but this was the real thing: a graveyard of corpses and half-dead people. Imagine walking into a place where there are skeletal remains and burnt bodies and the smell of flesh. The stench was impossible to deal with. You would see people piled high on bunks, two and three and four deep. Some were dead, some were alive, and it took some time to figure out who was dead and who was alive. All were gaunt. Their eyes bugged out of their faces. They whimpered. There was the smell of urine and feces and rotting flesh.
ROBERT TOWNE: Eisenhower saw Buchenwald and Dachau the minute they were liberated. His reaction to them was instructive. He insisted that cameramen from all over the world get there and photograph these things. He pulled General Patton and other officers in and said, “You’ve got to look at this, because there will come a time when people will not believe that this actually happened. It’s too appalling.” All you can say for sure is that for someone who was there, it would be the existential moment of his life. It would have to have a lifelong effect on you. I can’t imagine it otherwise.
ROBERT ABZUG: There is a famous photo of Kaufering Commandant Eichelsdorfer, standing amid the dead bodies, and the odd part about it is, there he is. He has a straight face, as if this were everyday work. That was the way it happened. The numbness the GIs felt from the sensory overload the Germans also felt, not only because they were ardent Nazis but because they came to live with it. It was daily life, whether you were a guard or a commandant. It was a job. It’s clear in the photograph that this was the everyday world for Eichelsdorfer.
Johann Baptist Eichelsdorfer, the commandant of Kaufering IV.
—
ALEX KERSHAW: As Nazi Germany fell apart in the spring of 1945, the prime objective of counterintelligence officers like J. D. Salinger was to try to find the criminals, the Nazis who had created the unimaginable. I befriended an intelligence officer who had the same rank and interrogation duties Salinger had in the spring of 1945. On one occasion, the officer entered a camp hospital, searching for Nazis. He discovered a few in the hospital beds pretending to be wounded or concentration camp survivors—Germans who had taken the shredded uniforms of camp inmates to avoid arrest, pretending to be Jewish forced laborers. They looked unnaturally healthy compared to their disguise. The officer told me counterintelligence officers lost patience with German prisoners after they discovered the camps. Uncooperative Nazis received severe interrogations. It was very hard for interrogators to remain patient when they knew the well-fed German in front of them had probably shot and killed countless civilians.
ROBERT ABZUG: Some GIs handed their weapons to the few healthy prisoners and allowed them to tear apart or shoot (or both) captured German camp guards. There was a whole cycle of almost uncontrollable revenge. It got out of hand for a little while. For a soldier like Salinger, who’d been through so much violence, one would have to wonder, what was the final psychic straw in this illogical world turned upside down? At least in battle you had an enemy.
There was something different about the liberations that pushed soldiers like Salinger over the edge. When you’re in the military and fighting battles, there is logic to it. When the soldiers came upon these camps, there was no battle to win. They were at an extremely vulnerable moment, because for most of them this was the very last thing that was going to happen to them during the war.
—
EBERHARD ALSEN: The fact that Salinger was half-Jewish must have made his experience of seeing the atrocities that the Germans committed against Jews even more devastating.
ROBERT ABZUG: Here he was, a survivor of horrendously anonymous, mechanized killing on a vast scale, but the pervading horrors of the camps reminded him he was Jewish.
LEILA HADLEY LUCE: I never thought of Jerry as being Jewish. I never thought of any of my friends as being Jewish. They were just friends. He did remind me that he was very concerned about the Holocaust. He was very emotionally distressed by this, and by the concentration camps.
DEBORAH DASH MOORE: Salinger and the Allies discovered what had been done and wondered, Did we actually win the war? Or did we come too late? Mind-eating questions with no appropriate answer. They already knew; they’d seen and fought it. Europe was a graveyard. Suddenly it was a massive Jewish graveyard.
DAVID SHIELDS: While he was not on the front lines of combat, he was certainly on the front lines of the Holocaust, and it stayed with him forever.
RICHARD STAYTON: We have a hard time understanding, because we aren’t Salinger; we weren’t there. I’ve known other GIs who liberated camps and weren’t Jewish. The experience broke apart their psyches, too. They’ve never recovered, either.
—
ALEX KERSHAW: Of the 337 days the war lasted for the American soldier in Europe, Salinger was in combat for 299. How damaged he was we don’t know. After two hundred days of combat, you are insane. They did the studies. Even the strong guys, after two hundred days, would lose it. After taking another village, they’d be found somewhere on their own, crying silent tears. Salinger’s division was in combat longer than any other division in the European theater. He saw the worst fighting you could possibly see, maybe, in the entire Second World War. Anyone who lived through this level of fierce combat this long would have been profoundly affected.
PAUL ALEXANDER: Salinger told [Whit] Burnett he simply could not describe the events of the last three or four weeks [of the war]. What he had witnessed was too horrendous to put into words. Yet even as he was making this gut-wrenching and dramatic revelation, Salinger still felt compelled to discuss, of all things, business. Apparently, Burnett had last written to suggest that Salinger publish his novel before his story collection. In response, Salinger agreed, adding that he could be finished with the novel in six months once he returned to the States. That’s how Salinger left it with Burnett before he thanked him for accepting “Elaine,” the story the New Yorker had rejected. “Elaine,” which centers on a mildly retarded girl with few prospects for happiness, was a longish, informal-feeling piece written before Salinger’s experiences in late 1944.
J. D. SALINGER (“Elaine,” Story, March–April 1945):
But now—the sudden vast, lonely expanse of a deserted public beach at dusk came as a terrible visitation upon her. The beach itself, which before had been only a fair-sized manifestation of tiny handfuls of hot sand which could slip with petty ecstasy through the fingers, was now a great monster sprawled across infinity, prejudiced personally against Elaine, ready to swallow her up—or cast her, with an ogreish laugh, into the sea.
—
ALEX KERSHAW: I talked to liberators of the camps who said the prisoners would go to the wire and hands would be thrust through, hands that you could hardly recognize as a human hand. There was bone and it was begging. For what? Maybe the flesh the GIs were wearing.
ROBERT ABZUG: The scene is not one of battle; the scene is one of the desecration of humanity. One soldier talked about living skeletons’ feeble attempts to applaud the liberating GIs. They couldn’t even put their hands together properly; it was almost like act without sound.
DEBORAH DASH MOORE: At the beginning of Nine Stories Salinger asks the Zen question: What is the sound of one hand clapping? Well, we know the sound of two. One of the Jewish soldiers who entered a camp heard the sound of people trying to clap for the American GIs. Because there was no flesh on their hands, it sounded strangely muted, otherworldly.
ALEX KERSHAW: For Salinger and his generation of Americans who liberated those camps, the legacy of the war hung on that disconnection, those memories, and many other war moments like it, where at the end of all the suffering and dying, you came to a place of irrefutable justification for the preceding slaughter, a hell needing redemption—you
came face-to-face with the greatest victims of that war, the Holocaust victims, but the event has destroyed human experience as they all knew and once understood it. In the memory of witnesses like Salinger, there was nothing that could cleanse or salve, resurrect, or make sense of it. Even those rescued were destroyed.
Kaufering IV.
In Salinger’s greatest triumph is the worst tragedy. In the last chapter of a war out of proportion to any that had gone before, of good-versus-evil where good had won, the good, soul-cleansing final chapter was, perhaps, the most soul-destroying and disillusioning.
LESLIE EPSTEIN: We know, as Seymour [a key figure in many of Salinger’s stories and novellas] knew, what men are. No more naïveté, no more denial. There isn’t one of us who isn’t in some way writing about the war—and the Holocaust, too, though we may not fully know it.
—
ALEX KERSHAW: It had been an epic and enormously costly deployment for the 4th Division, an incredible journey. Salinger saw the worst fighting you could possibly see. It’s impossible to imagine what Salinger must have experienced as he endured such enormous pain and suffering and damage done to other human beings around him. He had seen the worst that man can do to man. What Salinger experienced was a continual assault on his senses, physically, mentally, spiritually.
EBERHARD ALSEN: Salinger’s daughter, Margaret, examined the letters that her father wrote during the spring and summer of 1945 and reports that his “handwriting became something totally unrecognizable.”
DAVID SHIELDS: It’s hard not to make the case that, in some sense, the war finally caught up to Salinger.
EBERHARD ALSEN: Salinger’s nervous breakdown was not due to the stress of combat . . . because he was not an infantryman. Kaufering Lager IV was what broke Salinger.
7
VICTIM AND PERPETRATOR
The war was over; Salinger’s war is just beginning. Hospitalized in Nuremberg for “battle fatigue” [Post-traumatic Stress Disorder], he recovers, marries a German woman, and brings home the “most violent kind of happiness.”
NBC BROADCAST: The National Broadcasting Company delays the start of all its programs to bring you a special bulletin. It was announced in San Francisco half an hour ago, by a high American official, not identified, that Germany has surrendered unconditionally to the Allies, no strings attached.
ALEX KERSHAW: There would be no more firing, no more death, no more killing, no more destruction. It was over. They could look forward to life. The sacrifices that had been made, the horrors they’d seen, were over. V-E Day meant that they were on their way home. Salinger survived, but he was terribly, terribly damaged.
JOHN McMANUS: Howard Ruppel, a paratrooper in the 517th Parachute Infantry Regiment, wanted nothing to do with anyone or anything about the war. In an effort to forget the war, he refused to join veteran organizations.
HOWARD RUPPEL: I didn’t want to rehash, refight . . . re-create images, or relive memories in a social atmosphere. I sought no recognition or special attention. I didn’t want to be thought of as a hero. I didn’t want my past life to interfere with my future life. I wanted to get on with living, in the manner I chose.
LAWRENCE GROBEL: Salinger went through a psychic breakdown during World War II. I don’t have any doubt it had an enormous effect on his sense of humanity. Why do people go to war? Why do they kill each other? How can there be a Dachau or an Auschwitz? He had seen the other side of man.
EBERHARD ALSEN: Salinger’s subversive comments about the war in his fiction are tame compared to what he wrote in a letter to Elizabeth Murray on May 13, 1945. He wrote that even though World War II was over, his “own little war over here will go on for some time.” He admits that his “most casual thoughts over here are edgy with treason. It’s been a mess, Elizabeth. Wonder if you have any idea.” He says he’s happy to have missed the V-E Day celebrations back home (they “would have been too poignant, too moving for this kid”); instead, he celebrated V-E Day by “wondering what close relatives would think if I fired a .45 slug neatly, but effectively through the palm of my left hand [a notorious way for soldiers to get cashiered out of a war zone], and how long it would take me to learn to type with what was left of my hand.” Salinger concludes by saying, “I have three battle stars and am due a fourth, and I intend to have them all grafted onto my nostrils, two on each side.” Salinger wound up receiving five battle stars and a Presidential Unit Citation for Valor. “What a tricky, dreary farce, and how many men are dead.”
ALEX KERSHAW: In July 1945 he hospitalized himself in Nuremberg and was treated for combat stress reaction, battle fatigue.
SHANE SALERNO: It wasn’t one event that put Salinger in the hospital in Nuremberg. It was a culmination of events: going through eleven months of war, being forced to witness atrocities beyond human imagination. He submerged his feelings—fear, anguish, pain—about losing his brothers-in-arms. Submerging that pain has a cost. At the end of the war, Salinger finally had time to think about what he had just endured over the past year. All of those memories, all of those feelings finally erupted, to devastating effect. And he became so profoundly despondent—he used the word “despondent” himself—that he could no longer function. And he admitted himself to the hospital for psychiatric evaluation.
—
EBERHARD ALSEN: It was extraordinary to visit the hospital where Salinger was treated for two weeks for his nervous breakdown, particularly since the layout of the place hasn’t changed very much. For instance, a couple of the windows still had steel bars over them.
LEILA HADLEY LUCE: I felt he’d been seriously distressed by the war. He didn’t exactly say that he’d had a nervous breakdown, but you felt—I felt—that was what had happened to him, because he’d been hospitalized in Nuremberg.
EBERHARD ALSEN: It is from there that he wrote to Hemingway in July 1945. In the letter, Salinger reports that he has checked himself into “a General Hospital in Nurnberg” because he has been in “an almost constant state of despondency.” He tries to downplay his mental collapse by making fun of the psychiatrists asking him about his childhood and his sex life, but he also makes it clear why he checked himself into a civilian and not a military hospital.
The letter is not dated, but Salinger’s reference to the 4th Division having already returned to the United States shows that it must have been written after June 25, 1945. This means that Salinger’s nervous breakdown occurred probably just weeks after the end of the war. We know that he committed himself to a civilian hospital in order to avoid a psychiatric discharge from the army, and that his stay at the Municipal Hospital in Nuremberg was for only two weeks. He wrote Hemingway about his breakdown because he knew Hemingway had seen combat firsthand, not just during World War II, when he was an honorary war correspondent, but during World War I, when he was severely wounded. Salinger probably felt Hemingway would understand what he was going through.
J. D. SALINGER, excerpt from letter to Ernest Hemingway, undated:
Dear Poppa,
I’m writing from a General Hospital in Nurnberg. There’s a notable absence of Catherine Barclay’s [the heroine of A Farewell to Arms], is all I’ve got to say. . . . There’s nothing wrong with me except that I’ve been in an almost constant state of despondency and I thought it would be good to talk to somebody sane. . . . How is your novel coming? I hope you’re working hard on it. Don’t sell it to the movies. You’re a rich guy. As Chairman of your many fan clubs, I know I speak for all the members when I say Down with Gary Cooper. . . . I’d give my right arm to get out of the Army, but not on a psychiatric, this-man-is-not-fit-for-the-Army life ticket. I have a very sensitive novel in mind, and I won’t have the author called a jerk in 1950. I am a jerk, but the wrong people mustn’t know it. . . . Removed from the scene, is it much easier to think clearly? I mean with your work. . . . The talks I had with you were the only hopeful minutes of the whole business. . . .
P.S. . . . My book of stories project collapsed. Which is really a good thin
g, and no sour grapes. I’m still tied up with lies and affectations, and to see my name on a dust jacket would postpone [the letter cuts off here].
SHANE SALERNO: In September 1945, Salinger declines Simon & Schuster’s offer to publish his story collection. “They write letters like civilians,” he says, calling them a “smart-ass publisher.”
DAVID SHIELDS: During the war, Salinger had written, in a letter, “I carry a .45 on my hip these days. Woe to the critic who, on reading my collected stories, might call me ‘promising’ or ‘bears watching’ or ‘immature.’ ”
What is most interesting about Salinger’s letter to Hemingway is the way it careens from charming performance to anguished confession to craven sycophancy. On the one hand, the letter is uncannily prescient—about the former nurse who would become Salinger’s third wife, his push-pull relationship with the movies, the fine line between Holden/Salinger’s being sensitive and being a jerk; on the other hand, it’s an unintentional portrait of a psyche coming undone; this is Sergeant X, in serious distress.
It’s also Kenneth Caulfield, Salinger’s alter ego in “An Ocean Full of Bowling Balls,” written at this time. “Ocean” was never published; it was sold to the Women’s Home Companion in 1947 but determined to be too “downbeat.” Salinger later bought back the story and, as he did with “The Last and Best of the Peter Pans,” donated it to Princeton University’s Firestone Library. He left instructions that the story can be read only under supervision and cannot be published until 2060.
In “Ocean,” Vincent, a writer, writes a story about a man who tells his wife that he goes bowling every week when in actuality he visits another woman instead. After his death, his widow discovers the affair and throws the bowling ball out the window. When Vincent shows the story to his brother Kenneth, Kenneth says that he doesn’t like it; it’s too harsh in its treatment of both the husband and the wife. In Kenneth’s view, Vincent should write about more positive things. Vincent and Kenneth go to the beach, where Kenneth reads to Vincent their brother Holden’s letter from summer camp in which Holden criticizes the hypocrisy of the adults there.
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