Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War

by Vaill, Amanda

  She and André Friedmann had both had brushes with the fascist police, too; and like him she’d refused to be cowed by the experience. Held in prison for two weeks after helping to write, edit, and distribute anti-Nazi leaflets before the 1933 German parliamentary elections, she’d shared smuggled cigarettes with the other women inmates, taught them American popular songs, and showed them how to communicate with each other during lockdown by tapping on the walls of their cells—all the while telling her captors she was just a silly girl who didn’t know anything about politics. When an outraged letter from the Polish consul at last secured her release (technically, she was a Polish citizen) she fled to Paris, but the city was hardly more hospitable to her than it had been to the young Hungarian photographer. Even though she found friends from Germany such as Ruth Cerf and Willi Chardack, she couldn’t get a residency permit, so she had to work off the books as a secretary for starvation wages. The room she shared with Ruth was so cold, and they had so little money for food, that on winter weekends they’d stay in bed all day to keep warm and conserve energy before venturing out to their favorite haunt, the café La Capoulade on the corner of the Boulevard Saint-Michel and the rue Soufflot, where they could huddle next to one of the huge charcoal braziers to talk politics and philosophy.

  Maybe because Gerta preferred the company of the Sorbonne students, political theorists, and exiled SAP members at the Capoulade, while André liked the more freewheeling artistic atmosphere at the Dôme, they saw little of each other in the months after their first meeting, although Gerta did give him story ideas and big-sisterly advice about what clothes to wear or what to read. (Left to himself, he’d read detective stories; she was more inclined to books like John Dos Passos’s epic modernist novels Manhattan Transfer and 1919, the story of John Reed, “the last of the great race of war correspondents who ducked under censorship and risked their skins for a story.”) By this time she was in a liaison with Willi Chardack—her old flame Georg Kuritzkes had gone to study medicine in Italy—while André was having a desultory affair with a striking red-haired German fashion photographer named Regina Langquarz, who called herself Relang and sometimes let André use her darkroom. But in the spring of 1935, while he was in Spain shooting two assignments for his old Dephot boss, he’d written Gerta a letter in which, after describing the Holy Week celebrations in Seville where “half [the people] are drunk [and] the crowd is so thick that one can get away with fondling the breasts of all the señoritas,” he confessed that “sometimes … I’m completely in love with you.”

  Gerta kept him at arm’s length until that summer; but then she invited him to accompany her and Willi Chardack—with whom she was no longer romantically involved—and another male friend to the tiny island of Ste. Marguérite in the south of France, a half-hour’s ferry ride from Cannes. For almost three months the four young people lived on tinned sardines and slept in tents under the umbrella pines near the fortress where the Man in the Iron Mask had been imprisoned; during the long sunlit days they rambled over the island’s garrigue or swam in the sea, and André taught Gerta how to use his camera. Soon the two of them had become lovers. When they returned to Paris in the fall, suntanned and inseparable, André told the Hungarian photographer André Kertesz, who had become a mentor, “Never before in my whole life have I been so happy!”

  Gerta took him in hand, as if he were a school project. “It’s impossible how you live,” she told him. Together they found a modern one-room apartment in the Seventh Arrondissement with a view of the Eiffel Tower; although its divan bed was so narrow they couldn’t both sleep on their backs at the same time, it had a tiny kitchen where they could prepare meals (“I do the washing up and break all the glasses,” he wrote to his mother), so they spent less time (and money) in cafés. They began working together, André shooting photographs and Gerta typing up accompanying stories to submit to magazines, or Gerta taking photographs and André making enlargements; soon he got her a full-time job as a sales representative for the photo agent Maria Eisner, his friend from Berlin days. “Because Gerta is so pretty, the editors buy from her,” he boasted; and it didn’t hurt that she spoke three languages and could negotiate with foreign clients. She’d already persuaded André to start wearing a necktie and have his hair cut—“It has a part in it, and I am shaved to hell,” he half-complained; now she spent one of her early paychecks to buy him a winter coat.

  Gerta wasn’t like any girl he’d ever had before; she was sensual and direct, with no sense of pudeur. She’d entertain friends while she was half-naked, bathing or dressing; and her enjoyment of their lovemaking seemed uncomplicated by anxiety that she might get pregnant—probably because she had a clever gynecologist who made such fears irrelevant. André was devastated when their relationship hit a bad patch in December—maybe, some of their friends thought, he was upset that Gerta slept with other men if she felt like it. Others thought she was pressuring him to be more committed politically, and he jokingly resisted: ugh, those Party girls are too ugly for me. In any case Gerta moved out; André, desolate, ill, and in despair over a temporary lack of work, considered abandoning photography altogether. By the spring, though, they’d made up—if you loved Gerta, you forgave her, no matter what—and they were living, and working, together again, in a room at the Hôtel de Blois in the rue Vavin. André had scored a contract with Maria Eisner’s Alliance Photo agency that paid him a thousand francs a month for shooting enough material for three reportages a week.

  But he and Gerta wanted more, and faster; and in April they cooked up a brilliant plan. They would reinvent themselves as “Robert Capa,” a rich, famous (and imaginary) American photographer, whose pictures would actually be taken by André, with Gerta, in her job at Alliance, cutting deals for their publication with magazines and newspapers. “What, you don’t know who he is?” she’d ask derisively; and then, because “Capa” was so famous, demand that editors pay three times the prevailing rate for his photographs. If anyone wanted to actually meet the elusive lensman, she’d put them off by saying, “That bastard has run off to the Côte d’Azur again with an actress.”

  At the same time as this pseudonym made its debut, Gerta also decided to give herself a new name: Gerda Taro. Like “Robert Capa,” it was short, glamorous, of indeterminate ethnicity, the sort of name that makes you think you must already have heard of it. Oh, of course, Gerda Taro. Isn’t she a movie star? A poet? A photographer? Writing to his mother about his own transformation, Capa said, “It is like being born again (but this time without hurting anybody!).” He might have been writing about Gerda as well. From this time on each acquired a secondary self, a cosmopolitan, successful doppelgänger that was all they had each strived to be, and were now becoming.

  For things were looking up: the strikes and Popular Front demonstrations of the spring were full of opportunities for the kind of vivid, visceral pictures that were becoming the young photographer’s trademark. Then, in June, just before he went to Verdun to cover the peace demonstrations, the newly born Robert Capa had his first scoop. Italy had just invaded Abyssinia, and the country’s deposed emperor, Haile Selassie, was appearing before the League of Nations to ask for sanctions against the invaders, something the League, in the end, declined to do. In Geneva to photograph the proceedings, Capa witnessed a much more compelling drama than the staid images of delegates the other news photographers focused on: the arrest of a protester, who was thrown into an open police car and bound and gagged right in front of Capa’s camera. The resulting pictures, more than anyone else’s, told you what was really going on in Geneva: that the League of Nations, designed to be a peaceful forum to settle international grievances, had become nothing but a place to silence them.

  Not surprisingly, Lucien Vogel, editor of the weekly newsmagazine Vu, was eager to publish Capa’s Geneva photos, but he wasn’t fooled by Gerda’s assertions about the man who’d taken them. “This is all very interesting about Robert Capa,” he said dismissively—and then ordered her to send �
��that ridiculous boy Friedmann who goes around shooting pictures in a dirty leather jacket” to see him immediately. In the Paris magazine world this command was like a royal summons. Vogel, a balding, Proustian figure who favored stiff collars and waistcoats, was married to Cosette de Brunhoff, the editor of Vogue; before founding Vu he’d cut a swathe in the media world as an editor and art director of Art et décoration and La Gazette du bon ton. Vu, whose documentary images and dynamic layouts gave the printed page the immediacy of a newsreel, had a circulation of almost half a million readers; under the art direction of the Constructivist-influenced Alexander Liberman, it published all the best photographers: Man Ray, Brassaï, Capa’s mentor Kertesz, his friend Cartier-Bresson, and others.

  So the newly minted Robert Capa anxiously presented himself at Vogel’s sixteenth-century chateau, La Faisanderie, for one of the Sunday-afternoon “at homes” to which all the gratin of the political and media worlds were invited. And Vogel, who claimed that all he had to do was stroll the length of his vast lawn with you before he knew whether you belonged, took the young man by the arm for a chat. By the time they returned to the house, Capa had passed the lawn test: Vu published Capa’s pictures from Geneva, with a byline (by no means a usual occurrence), as well as the photos he took of the raucous Popular Front celebrations in Paris on Bastille Day, July 14.

  Then, a week after he’d gone to Verdun to photograph the Peace Pilgrims’ demonstration, the first news came from Spain of an uprising by the army against the government. At first, the reports were dismissive: leftist papers claimed the rebellion was being “crushed,” while more conservative ones said the situation was “confused.” By the end of the week, though, it was obvious that something very big was happening in Spain, and both Capa and Taro—who had been shooting pictures herself and developing them in a darkroom she shared with Capa and his friend and colleague Chim in the rue Daguerre—felt the adrenaline rush of a scoop in the making. Chim, in fact, had been in Spain all summer, and was still there, working on a series of features about the political and social situation—much as they loved him, why should he have a monopoly on this story?

  Fortunately, Vogel seemed to agree. He immediately plunged into planning for a special issue of Vu devoted to the unfolding events in Spain, which would call on the talents of a fleet of journalists, among them Robert Capa and the as-yet-unpublished Gerda Taro. Vogel would give them accreditation and charter a plane to fly them to Barcelona, after which they’d fan out across the country to chronicle what was happening there. On the strength of Vogel’s offer, Gerda quit her job at Alliance, and she and Capa set about getting the necessary papers for their trip. Here was a chance to document the struggle between fascism and socialism that was already consuming their homelands and might soon spread to all of Europe. It would all be a most extraordinary adventure, and it would make them famous. Together. They could hardly wait.

  July 1936: Brno

  Ilse Kulcsar had been underground for almost two years when she heard the news about Spain. Well, not underground exactly; she and Poldi—her husband, Leopold Kulcsar—went by their own names in this Czechoslovak university city, where they edited a leftist newspaper and met with the other Austrian political exiles who gathered in the coffeehouses near Masaryk University, smoking and talking about the precarious state of the world. But when they’d crossed the frontier into Czechoslovakia in November 1934, they’d done so with false passports; they knew that if either of them ever set foot in Austria again they’d be arrested and possibly executed—even though, or maybe because, Ilse’s uncle by marriage, Johann Schober, a former chancellor of Austria, was currently president of police.

  Living dangerously, however, is what they did: Ilse’s father, a mild-mannered school headmaster and government councilor, described his daughter’s existence as a powder keg. Always gifted and forthright—the words her father used were passionate and turbulent—Ilse had turned her back on the conventions of her Viennese childhood, the strolls in the Belvedere gardens, the afternoons at the opera, kaffee mit schlag at Sacher: instead of pursuing a degree in medicine or science, as her father hoped, or in music, her mother’s choice, she’d enrolled in the new field of political science at the University of Vienna. Convinced that capitalism was doomed, she had joined the fledgling Communist Party of Austria. Because she was a persuasive speaker, the Party sent her to make presentations to workers’ groups in Scandinavia (where she’d spent time as an exchange student as a child) and England. It was through the Party that she’d met Leopold Kulcsar, a blond working-class youth whose ice-blue eyes burned with a fierce intelligence that belied his lack of formal education. They were married with her parents’ reluctant consent (they would only have lived together anyway, her father realized) and almost immediately got into trouble trying to smuggle Party funds across the Hungarian border to a Romanian opposition leader. Something had gone wrong, wrong enough that they were picked up by Horthy’s secret police and thrown into jail in Budapest for four months. But the Party never lifted a finger to help them—it was Ilse’s parents who scraped together money for lawyers to get them out of Hungary—so they’d quit in disgust.

  That wasn’t the end of their political involvement, however. Joining the more moderate Social Democratic Workers’ Party, they’d dedicated themselves to writing and speaking against the efforts by Austria’s chancellor, Engelbert Dolfuss, to break the power of the socialists—whose policies favoring worker housing, free clinics, and children’s day care made them popular in Vienna and distrusted in the conservative, Catholic countryside. Then, in February 1934, fighting broke out in Vienna between armed militias of the conservatives (the Heimwehr, or Home Guard) and the socialists (the Republikanischer Schutzbund, or Republican Protection Association), and Dolfuss sent the army to fire on the socialists. Hundreds of people were killed and thousands more arrested; the Social Democratic Party was outlawed and its members hunted down; and the conservatives replaced Austria’s constitutional democracy with an authoritarian regime modeled on Mussolini’s. Kulcsar was briefly imprisoned, but he was released when he argued that he wasn’t involved in the fighting, just covering it as a journalist. At that point he and Ilse made a fateful decision.

  Using their apartment on the Herrengasse as a headquarters, they started a resistance cell that they called Der Funke, “The Spark,” a translation of the name of Lenin’s original revolutionary unit, Iskra. The idea was to get medical aid to victims of the fighting—many of whom had been hiding out in Vienna’s sewers for weeks—and spirit them and others out of the country with false papers. Der Funke would also stay in illicit contact with the exiled Social Democratic leaders and bring in underground literature from abroad. All of this would cost money, more money than two impecunious journalists could scrounge up, so they were glad to recruit as a member a young American heiress named Muriel Gardiner, who had come to Vienna to study psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud and would become a valuable colleague of theirs. Another member was an English economics student, Hugh Gaitskell, later head of Britain’s Labour Party; not officially in the cell, but in contact with it, were two other Englishmen, one a tall, blond, pink-faced poet, Stephen Spender, who (somewhat surprisingly, since his previous relationships had all been with men) was having an affair with Muriel Gardiner, the other a dark, extremely charming aspiring journalist, recently married to an Austrian girl who, like him, was a Communist. His name was Harold Adrian Russell Philby, but everyone called him Kim.

  The Spark was successful at first, using contacts in England to channel aid from British trade unions, and getting the word out about what had really happened in Vienna. But then the unthinkable happened. The Austrian police arrested a courier that the group used to carry money, messages, and illegal documents between Vienna and their exiled leadership in Brno, and through the courier—who was having a romance with the Kulcsars’ maid—Ilse and Poldi’s cover was blown. It would be only a matter of hours before they were picked up and imprisoned, or worse. Fleeing
to a little inn in the mountains two hours south of Vienna, where Ilse had spent carefree summers as a child, they waited for terrifying days until Muriel Gardiner could bring them the false papers they needed to escape. Finally, near midnight on a stormy evening, she appeared—soaked to the skin, having traveled by bus and on foot up the icy road in the rain to deliver the precious documents; the next day, with their photographs neatly inserted into two strangers’ passports, Ilse and Poldi crossed the Czech border and made their way to Brno.

  That was in November 1934, and nearly two years of life in exile had been hard. Ilse missed her family, and Brno’s medieval alleyways and sleek new Bauhaus apartment buildings made her homesick for her beloved Baroque Vienna. She and Poldi were working together to launch a new, multinational socialist review for which she planned to write, and that was exciting; but the rootlessness and petty infighting in their circle of émigrés were wearing Ilse down. Developments in Germany, where Hitler had just occupied the Rhineland and was making noises about annexing northern Czechoslovakia, were far from reassuring; things were worse at home, where Dolfuss (having eliminated the leftist opposition) had been assassinated by Austrian Nazis and, Muriel Gardiner reported, many of their former associates were being arrested.

  But the real trouble, for Ilse, was with her husband. There was the business of the money: back in Vienna, Poldi had been the bookkeeper for the Spark, and before they left he’d apparently started skimming off some of its funds into a special account he had—for what? There was his domineering streak, his need to tell her what to do, what to think. Then there were his contacts with a shadowy network of operatives in Germany and elsewhere, in which he used the code-name “Maresch.” Most ominous of all was the new hardness he’d begun to demonstrate: speaking of a comrade he suspected might be a turncoat, he’d said, with a look that blended pleasure and cruelty, “If it is true, we shall have to put him out of the way.”