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

by Vaill, Amanda

  After November 8, however, things seemed to change overnight. The headlines in L’Humanité told the story: “MADRID HOLDS!” “MADRID RESISTS FIERCELY!” and—over one of Barea’s rescued images of the murdered children of Getafe—“‘NO PASARAN’—MADRID, LIBERTY’S VERDUN.” Madrid was still a big, big story, bigger than ever; and if you wanted photos of actual combat all you had to do was take a tram to University City or the Parque del Oeste and get off right at the front.

  Gerda didn’t change her Italian plans. She had, after all, just bought herself a new travel wardrobe, including a very pretty lacy brassiere that she gaily modeled for Capa and the Hungarian photographer Kati Deutsch—Capa’s first teenage crush in their Budapest days—who’d dropped by the Hotel de Blois to reminisce and talk shop. But Capa immediately set about trying to get assigned to go to Madrid on his own. He’d just cut his ties to Vu, which had been losing advertisements because of its outspoken support of the Spanish government, and had been sold to a rightist businessman who promptly fired Lucien Vogel. Now Capa had a contract with Regards, whose stance on the Spanish war was made clear by the cover of the October 26 issue, showing a French soldier in a gas mask against the backdrop of a spookily realistic air-raid simulation: “PARIS BOMBED: SPAIN DEFENDS OUR LIBERTY,” it said.

  On Saturday the fourteenth Regards gave him a letter to take over to the Spanish Embassy in the Avenue George-V, asking that Capa be fast-tracked for a visa; by Monday, visa in hand, he was packed and ready to go. He picked up a letter of introduction from his editors that stated he was their exclusive correspondent in Madrid and took the night train to Toulouse, where he stopped only long enough to send Gerda a postcard before boarding a flight to Valencia and getting a ride to Madrid. If he was anxious about Gerda’s trip to Italy, or jealous of Kuritzkes, he apparently knew better than to say so.

  In Madrid he was assigned quarters at the Hotel Florida. At its opening a dozen years before, the Florida had been a posh hostelry in a swank location—a ten-story marble-clad jewel box with centrally heated, opulently furnished rooms surrounding a glass-roofed atrium, around the corner from the smart shops of the Gran Via, face to face with the modern picture palaces of the Plaza de Callao, and just down the street from the Telefónica. Now it was a target for the same shells and bombs that were aimed at its neighbor; and it had become a haven—not for successful business travelers or wealthy tourists, but for a polyglot collection of journalists, French and Russian pilots, and opportunistic ladies of the evening. The pilots and the tarts (and some of the journalists) spent their evenings getting roaring drunk in the little bar, and when shells weren’t whistling over the building the night was punctuated by shrieks and slamming doors and running feet.

  Such antics would certainly help keep his mind off whatever Gerda was up to in Italy; but Capa had barely slung his bag into his room before he had to go get his papers from the foreign-press censors in the Telefónica—which is probably where, on November 19, he met Gustav Regler. Blond, fine-featured, and pale from nerves and lack of sleep, Regler was a German Communist writer, a refugee from the Reich, who’d originally come to Spain bringing a printing press, film projector, and propaganda films as gifts from the International Union of Authors to the Loyalists, and had then stayed on to become the political commissar of the Twelfth International Brigade. He had known Ilsa Kulcsar “from before,” as Barea put it, from their years in European leftist journalism, and since his regiment was stationed on Madrid’s northwest perimeter he liked to come to the Telefónica when there was a lull in the fighting, to talk about old times and flirt mildly with her, to Barea’s concealed fury. So it would have been natural for Ilsa to pass the eager young photographer from Regards along to Regler—particularly given that Regler’s commander, a chunky, jovial, mustached former Red Army officer whose nom de guerre was General Pavol Lukács, was a compatriot of Capa’s, a Hungarian novelist named Máté Zalka.

  Regler was instantly charmed by Capa, describing him as “this small beautiful boy whom everybody loved.” He immediately whisked his new acquaintance off to Lukács’s headquarters in the outlying suburb of Fuencarral, where the general was trying to plot maneuvers with the inadequate help of a map torn out of an old Baedeker guidebook. Introductions took place in German; then Lukács broke into Hungarian. “What do you really want?” he asked Capa. “To see the enemy,” Capa said. “We haven’t found him yet,” Lukács responded tersely. Turning to his political commissar he muttered, “How do you know he’s not a spy?” Capa overheard him and was indignant. “Are you discussing my reliability?” he asked. He extended his Leica toward the general. “Here’s my passport.”

  Disarmed, Lukács agreed to let him go out on a patrol with Regler and another officer: word had come that some of Franco’s Moors were bivouacked in the barns of an old estate, the Palacita de Moncloa, on the Manzanares, and Lukács wanted confirmation. The patrol should try to determine the enemy’s positions, he said, but on no account should they fire at them. Capa was perfectly amenable. “If shooting can be avoided, I don’t mind,” he confided to Regler.

  The three men set out for the river and were soon making their way cautiously along its eastern bank. Suddenly firing broke out, and Capa, Regler, and the other officer threw themselves down in the frost-rimed underbrush and waited for it to be over. Finally the guns fell silent; but when the men rose to continue their reconnaissance, Capa said he needed a minute to change his trousers: “My guts aren’t as brave as my camera,” he explained.

  He made himself tough to do his job, however, Regler said later. In the next few days Capa went out with other patrols from the Twelfth International Brigade’s Thaelmann Battalion, a force mostly made up of German Communists with a smattering of English and Scandinavians, as they set up machine-gun positions in farm buildings along the western perimeter, or by the North Station, where they pulled suitcases out of the left-luggage office to form makeshift barricades. Another time, he followed Asturian dinamiteros as they used slingshots to lob grenades over the city’s former slaughterhouses and into the insurgent lines. And he and Louis Delaprée both went to cover the battle that had been playing out in the recently completed Bauhaus-style buildings of Madrid’s university.

  To get there you rode the streetcar—not the metro, which might take you too far, into enemy territory—to the end of the line; then you had to run, bent double, through a hail of machine-gun bullets and shell debris that Delaprée called “a good approximation of hell” until you reached the shelter of the buildings. Once there, you found yourself in a world of surreal shadows, where (said Capa) “the abnormal … had become normal”: makeshift gunners’ nests, built from piles of textbooks, cross-hatched with diagonal stripes of shade from venetian blinds; a cannon positioned on a library table; soldiers seated at a classroom piano, singing lustily, while behind them a disused blackboard still showed a bygone professor’s scribbles and students’ old papers littered the floor. The air echoed with commands shouted in a Babel of languages, because the fighters were German (the Thaelmann Battalion) or French (André Marty Battalion) or Polish (Dombrovsky Battalion). Fighting was at close quarters, and ugly: Thaelmann Battalion soldiers put grenades in the elevators in the Clinical Hospital building, then sent them to the next floor to explode in the faces of the Nationalists’ Moroccan troops.

  Capa witnessed only a fraction of this activity, but his photographs captured University City’s atmosphere of chiaroscuro chaos; and he soon found an even more powerful if less obviously dramatic story, whose heroes were ordinary men and women, suddenly thrust into front lines they hadn’t known were there. For when Franco had found the prize of Madrid withheld from him by the unexpected strength of the International Brigades and the milicianos, he’d announced that he would rather destroy the city than cede it to the “Marxists,” and invited Germany’s new Condor Legion to test how a civilian population would react to methodical quarter-by-quarter firebombing. Now, night after night, the Junkers swept over Madrid as t
hey would one day sweep over London, and Glasgow, and Coventry—and as American B-17s would sweep over Dresden and Berlin; in their wake they left a landscape like none anyone had ever seen before. And as Capa walked the streets of the city in those November days, he passed the tumbled carcasses of burnt-out automobiles, lampposts transformed into Giacometti sculptures by the heat of incendiary bombs, vacant lots strewn with shattered masonry and charred timbers. On block after block, buildings whose facades had been sheared away by bombs or shellfire gaped open like oversize dollhouses.

  What had happened to the people who had lived there? Were they the elegant young couple—she in a fur wrap, he in a beautifully tailored camel’s hair coat—standing next to a pile of their belongings on the sidewalk of what had once been a graceful street and was now a wasteland? The haggard woman, cloaked in a blanket, her lined face a mask of sorrow, whose children had just been killed? Her black-clad sisters, somehow finding the strength to smile at the camera as they stood in line waiting for bread? The two little girls sitting on a curbstone chatting, seemingly oblivious to the pockmarked wall behind them or the fallen bricks at their feet? The mother and son staring with vacant, haunted eyes out of the gloom of the subway tunnel that was their air-raid shelter? There were no answers here, only questions. But Capa kept on taking pictures because, as he said, “Into the future one dares not look.”

  * * *

  When he wanted to think, sometimes Barea took the elevator up, past the partially gutted and deserted rooms of the Telefónica’s upper stories, to the terrace that ran around the clock tower at the top. “I don’t like coming up here,” said the girl who ran the lift. “It’s so lonely. I always think the lift is going to shoot out of the tower into thin air.” But Barea liked the silence and the solitude.

  He and Ilsa had got the censors’ office working well now, he thought. After the German government recognized Franco’s Nationalists and closed its Madrid embassy, the two of them had taken a huge gamble by allowing journalists to report on a police raid of the vacated premises that turned up links to the pro-insurgent Fifth Column. The day the news broke Koltsov had called them up in a fury, threatening to have them both court-martialed for leaking sensitive information, but he’d reversed himself when international reaction to the stories had been positive, and the journalists had practically cheered. Lester Ziffren, the reporter for the American agency United Press International, was going around saying that the Madrid press office had “the most reasonable war censorship that can be expected”—a backhanded compliment, maybe, but still a compliment.

  Then, because Ilsa said “you must feed the animals in the zoo,” she and Barea—at Gustav Regler’s suggestion—had arranged for some of the correspondents to visit the Eleventh International Brigade. They had also persuaded its commander, General Emilio Kléber, another of the Brigades’ Red Army officers (real name: Manfred Stern), to talk to the journalists and be available for photographs. Up until now it had been forbidden to mention the participation of the International Brigades in press reports; but now Barea and Ilsa were pledging to provide the information and make sure that it would go out uncensored.

  The maneuver had succeeded beyond their expectations. Capa, Delmer, Delaprée, Barbro Alving of Sweden’s Dagens Nyheter, a woman with the gender-neutral pseudonym of “Bang,” and others had all made the trip to Kléber’s headquarters; Capa photographed the touchingly youthful infantrymen, idealists from far-off countries, as well as the grizzled, charismatic Kléber, an icon of unglamorous toughness in his worn uniform and woolen sweater and two-day growth of beard, while the others wrote enthusiastic reports of the Brigades’ activities, their polyglot energy (“the Babel front,” Delaprée called it), their optimism.

  So, Barea wondered, looking out over Madrid from his perch, why wasn’t he happier about his success? On the other side of the silver loop of the Manzanares he could see puffs of smoke from the big guns, and tiny, ant-like soldiers running this way and that, as if the war were a movie on a distant screen. This was the stuff the journalists down on the sixth floor were clamoring after: the guns, the tanks, the line of fire. But the glowing press accorded to the Brigades—press that he and Ilsa had arranged—ignored, even obscured the courage of the people of Madrid, and of the milicianos who had borne the brunt of the fighting in the beginning. Who would tell their stories to the world outside Spain?

  Already some of those who could were leaving. Capa had to return to Paris because his visa would expire at the beginning of December; he was eager to be reunited with Gerda and wanted to supervise the layouts of his photo-essays for Regards. Louis Delaprée, who had come to Madrid intending to be an impartial witness, but whose reportage had become increasingly filled with Bosch-like images of murdered women and children, was sickened because his editors at the conservative, celebrity-oriented Paris-Soir had spiked his pieces about bombing victims so they could run gossipy drivel about Edward VIII’s romance with the American divorcée Wallis Simpson. So he’d decided to leave as well. He’d hoped he might write a book that would make it impossible for a war such as this ever to happen again, but he wondered now if it would have an audience. He brought Barea a final dispatch for Paris-Soir: “You have not published half my articles,” it began. “That is your right. But … for three weeks I have been getting up at 5 a.m. to give you the news for your first editions. You have made me work for the wastepaper basket … I am sending nothing more. It is not worth the trouble. The massacre of a hundred Spanish kids is less interesting than a sigh from Mrs. Simpson, the royal whore.”

  Barea read through the pages and stamped them with his official seal, while Delaprée perched himself on Barea’s camp bed, looking like a large bird incongruously wearing an overcoat and red scarf against the cold. “I hate politics, as you know,” he said; “but I’m a liberal and a humanist.” When he got back to Paris, he said, he would try to protest France’s nonintervention policy with friends of his in the government; but he couldn’t promise anything.

  Neither of them knew that at that very moment, in London, the novelist Virginia Woolf was staring at the photographs Barea had rescued of the dead children of Getafe, at Capa’s images of the bombed buildings of Madrid, and reading some of Delaprée’s dispatches; nor did they suspect that the photographs and dispatches would help crystallize the argument in her long essay entitled “Three Guineas” which attacked, in the name of preventing war, the patriarchal society that produced it. And if they had known it might have made no difference. For Barea was feeling increasingly cynical. When a former associate of Ilsa’s from Vienna and Brno, the Austrian Social Democratic leader Julius Deutsch, came to tour the front, his guide—a Spaniard suspicious of German-speakers—had taken Barea aside. “Tell me, compañero,” the guide had asked him, cocking his head in the direction of the two foreigners, “what do they seek in Spain? It can’t be anything decent.” And Barea had laughed, bitterly, because the thought so closely mirrored his own worst ones. Deutsch, Koltsov, Delmer, Capa, Delaprée, all of them—what was this war to them, beyond an opportunity?

  Even Ilsa, he feared, was no different: just another foreigner who had no real stake in what happened in Spain, for whom the politics mattered more than the people. He couldn’t know, however, what she told the other journalists when he wasn’t there. “We are here for the story,” she would say. “But they—” meaning the Spanish, the Madrileños—“are here for their lives.”

  November 1936: Key West

  At the big stucco house on Whitehead Street, Ernest Hemingway was playing host to a reporter from the Key West Citizen. Pauline wasn’t there that day; she’d gone to New York for a couple of weeks of Christmas shopping and theater and big-city good times after her three months in the mountains. But Key West’s most famous resident, newly back from Wyoming and a visit with his wealthy in-laws in Piggott, Arkansas—and looking, his old friend John Peale Bishop wrote in The New Republic, like “the legendary Hemingway,” sunburned and swaggering—proudly led the Citizen�
�s reporter around, pointing out where he planned to build a trophy room for his African kudu heads and where the new saltwater swimming pool, the first ever on the island, would go. When the reporter left, Hemingway went back to his second-floor writing room to work on his new novel, because trophy rooms and swimming pools are expensive, no matter how much money your wife’s family has; and a lot more than money was riding on this manuscript.

  Despite his confident-sounding pronouncements to Max Perkins and Arnold Gingrich, he was having trouble weaving the disparate strands of the Harry Morgan stories into one satisfactory web. Morgan was going to die, of course: shot in the guts in the course of a bank robbery gone wrong, gasping to the Coast Guard officers who have picked him up, “A man alone ain’t got no bloody fucking chance.” But Hemingway was still groping for “the old miracle you have to finish with” (as he described it to Gingrich). He believed he might be close to nailing it: one of his wealthy characters, the millionaire sportsman Tommy Bradley, would become a convert to the Cuban revolutionary cause, and would ferry a load of dynamite to Cuba so as to blow up a bridge and stop the counterrevolutionaries from winning a critical battle. But the logistics of the thing were fuzzy: he was thinking he’d have to make a trip of his own to Havana, where he frequently stayed in the Hotel Ambos Mundos, to check the geography.

  In the meantime, here was a letter from John Wheeler, general manager of a journalistic consortium called the North American Newspaper Alliance, which commissioned and syndicated articles to a number of the leading American and Canadian papers. After mentioning their “many mutual friends,” from the prizefighter Gene Tunney to the writer Ring Lardner, Wheeler got down to business: apparently Walter Winchell—a commentator who’d parlayed a gift for weaponized media and political gossip into a widely circulated column in the tabloid New York Mirror, a hugely popular radio show on NBC, and a regular table at New York’s most celebrated nightspot, the Stork Club—was reporting that Hemingway was going to Spain to cover the war there. If this was true, Wheeler said, NANA wondered if Hemingway would do it for them.