The Living and the Lost
Page 29
I also have a small personal anecdote about another star of the movie who is no longer well known. Richard Widmark was a member of an arts club to which I belong. One evening some years ago, a friend, who was also a huge fan, and I decided to break club tradition—privacy was to be respected at all costs—by approaching Widmark while he was sitting comfortably in a corner of the club with a drink, reading. We knew we were interrupting him, but who would mind being disturbed by two members of a younger generation telling him how much they admired his work?
We screwed up our courage, approached him, and began to sing his praises. He looked up, smiled that smile we knew so well, and said he was sorry but he didn’t have his hearing aids in and couldn’t hear a word we were saying. My fandom remained unacknowledged but undiminished.
The other well-known, perhaps even better-known, film is The Third Man, which turns out to be better than the book on which I thought it was based. The reason the film is superior is explained by Graham Greene himself in an introduction to one edition. “The Third Man was never written to be read but only to be seen.” In other words, it started as an idea for a film, but for his own creative purposes, Greene tells us, he had to write the story, which was subsequently published. Of course, both the film and novella are set in Vienna, but the ambiance, with its rampant crime and perilous black market, its shortages of goods and abundance of spies, is so close to Berlin at the time that the two cities might be interchangeable.
Another favorite film is The Big Lift, which can’t hold a candle to The Third Man, few movies can, but which has Montgomery Clift, again, this time as a GI in Berlin during the Airlift. There are two wonderful scenes. In one, Clift suspects that an elderly German is spying for the Soviets. The man admits he is counting the number of planes the Americans are flying in for Russian intelligence. Clift, confused, replies that the Americans print that information publicly every day. Yes, the spy agrees, but because it is printed, the Russians don’t believe it.
In another scene, Clift’s GI buddy is bullying and belittling his Fraulein girlfriend, as men of all nations have been known to do throughout history. The Fraulein tells him he sounds just like a Nazi, which stops the buddy in his tracks. It also turns him into a more sensitive man, a rapid transformation I applaud but doubt.
One, Two, Three is set in Berlin before the Wall was built but as the Cold War was heating up. Featuring thrilling shots of two young actors, Pamela Tiffin and Horst Buchholz, speeding between East and West Berlin on a motorcycle with carefree abandon, and an over-the-top performance by James Cagney, the movie is a hilarious take on both Soviet and American foibles. The sad irony of the political and cultural spoof is that shooting began before the Wall went up, but by the time the film was released in 1961 the Wall not only divided the city but was a symbol of brutality and oppression around the world. As a result, the movie did badly at the box office in both the U.S. and Germany, but when it was re-released in 1985, it became a success, especially in West Berlin.
A more realistic movie about Germany under the Allied Occupation is Town Without Pity, a grim tale of rape, suicide, and community cruelty. One of the most interesting aspects of the film to me is the light it sheds not on the Occupation of Germany but on postwar America. Based on a book by a German writing under the name of Manfred Gregor, the screenplay was written by Dalton Trumbo, who, due to the blacklist, didn’t get credit for that film or for so many other gems until years later. The aftermath of a war does not always reflect what it was fought for.
Books set in the Occupation are even more rare than films. One fascinating and almost unknown novel is Last of the Conquerors by William Gardner Smith, a Black GI who served in Germany after the war. The book is a clear indictment of a segregated Army and country pretending to spread democracy and equality to a nation that treats Blacks perhaps not well, but better. The book’s portrait of American bigotry is honest, painful, and relevant to our moment. One scene reveals not only the depth but the breadth of American prejudice. During a drunken evening on the town, the protagonist’s white commanding officer (all Black units had white officers) boasts, patronizingly and hypocritically, that he’d match his Black soldiers against any in the Army, but he has to admit the Germans did get it right about Jews. The novel, while polemic, is well written with a clearly Hemingwayesque touch. An interesting footnote to the book is the difficulty of obtaining a copy these days. The one I read came from the New York Public Library, but a quick check of used books online reveals an old paperback that was originally 75 cents now selling for $35 and a hardcover priced at $475.
A lighter and later take on the Occupation is David Lodge’s first novel, Out of the Shelter. This autobiographical coming-of-age story, which Lodge had trouble getting published, is the tale of a young British boy’s summer-long visit to his sister, who’s working for the Americans in Germany during the Occupation. His awakening from a cosseted English childhood of rigid rules and postwar scarcity to a wider world of less certain moralities and astonishing American abundance is at once touching, funny, and written with Lodge’s usual grace and wit.
Deutschland by Margaret Bourke-White paints a raw and wrenching portrait of Germany in the immediate aftermath of the war. The photographs of the suffering and destruction are shocking. The firsthand observations are immediate, occasionally wry, and cover everything from the black market, to the relative appeal of American, British, and French soldiers to German girls, to social dancing classes.
Meyer Levin’s memoir, In Search, ranges over the years before and after the Occupation as well as the period itself. His observations are personal, often searing, and deeply affecting. He tells of Jewish GIs who, forbidden to fraternize with Germans, leave matzos on doorsteps of German Jewish organizations on the eve of Passover, of being snubbed by a German Jewish woman with whom he felt an instinctive connection but who found him socially inferior, and of his darkest thoughts about retribution and revenge. As the title of his memoir indicates, Levin was in search of the meaning of his Jewish identity. A few years later, his French wife gave him a copy of the French edition of The Diary of Anne Frank. Deeply moved, he was instrumental in its publication and success in the U.S.
Perhaps the most sweeping view of the Occupation can be found in The Smoking Mountain by Kay Boyle. An editor at The New Yorker asked Boyle, who was in Germany under the Occupation, for a fictional account. One of the interesting aspects of this gripping collection is that while most of the short stories—except for the first, which is clearly reportorial—work as fiction, they are grounded in Boyle’s experiences in a fraught world where victors and vanquished, Germans and Americans, military and civilians, all struggle to find a way to coexist. In Boyle’s gimlet eye, few come out blameless.
A Conversation with Ellen Feldman
What was the inspiration for The Living and the Lost?
Often I’m not sure about the origins of a novel, but in this case I can say the central theme was inspired by an anecdote I read while researching my last book, Paris Never Leaves You. I won’t repeat the story because that would be a spoiler. At the time, I knew I couldn’t use the incident in Paris, but I could not stop thinking about it. Gradually it began to take form in my imagination as a completely different novel.
So the story of Americans in Berlin during the Allied Occupation came from earlier research?
Only partly; their emotional and moral plight came from that anecdote, but I wasn’t sure how to work their dilemma out in a novel until my stepson, a bibliophile who deals in old and sometimes rare books, gave me a copy of The Smoking Mountain by Kay Boyle. She was in Germany during the Occupation, and her account of it set me thinking and researching. The more I learned, the more I knew this was Millie’s milieu.
Did other research lead you in new directions?
That’s the fun of research. I always discover new worlds and new stories that lead me deeper into the characters and their lives. This time I stumbled across the story of the Ritchie Boys, young men
and boys who fled Nazi regimes in Europe, came to America, were originally regarded as suspect or downright dangerous, and ended up fighting courageously for their adopted country. They were an inspiring group with a variety of fascinating individual stories.
Judging from what you’ve said so far, the research sounds as if it was exhaustive, but not especially personal.
The original idea for the book was personal. I am always interested in guilt, forgiveness, and how we move forward into the future without being crippled by our past. But I did stumble across a more personal connection to the material while researching the book. In a memoir of the period, I learned that in the wake of Kristallnacht, Bryn Mawr College took up a collection to establish two scholarships for non-Aryan German girls. Since I’m a graduate of Bryn Mawr, this discovery made me especially happy and proud. I did some digging and found an oral history of the college that painted a vivid picture of campus life before and during the war. It also inspired Millie’s experiences with the two friends who took her home for weekends and their very different families. The more I read, the more vividly I remembered my own time at Bryn Mawr and drew on it to create the ambiance and physical settings of those scenes. Some of the faculty and my fellow students also inspired some of the characters who inhabit the book.
Berlin is almost a character, perhaps one of the main characters, in the novel. Have you been there, and what are your feelings about the city?
My feelings about the city have evolved over the years. As a teenager, I was on a student tour of Europe, and I still remember one boy leaving the group as we entered Germany and rejoining us when we left. His parents were Holocaust survivors. The experience affected me deeply.
Many years later, when I published The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank, I returned to Germany several times on publicity tours. My initial reaction was fear and discomfort. Those feelings dissipated quickly. I found a country that has worked hard to deal with its past, as my characters in this novel must. And I found Berlin a vital and exciting city changing literally by the day. An interesting footnote was that when I was there the first time, the second language of East Berliners was Russian, of West Berliners English, which reflected the conditions of the Occupation and Cold War, a subject I explore to some extent in the book.
Your last novel, Paris Never Leaves You, was set in France during World War II and in New York ten years later. The Living and the Lost is set in Germany and America before the war and Berlin under the Occupation. You’ve also published two other books about America during and after the war, Next to Love and The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank. Would you say this period and these issues are your special field of interest?
In a sense the era is not an interest but an obsession. I was born into an America still shadowed by World War II and in the throes of its prosperous aftermath. All of my characters are haunted by their pasts. Perhaps writing these novels is my form of being preoccupied with my own past and my pre-past as it came down to me through the stories of my parents and various relatives and family friends. But I have written on other subjects as well and am currently at work on a novel inspired by four real-life immigrant women who went on to great success. It’s set mostly in Hollywood during the early days of the moving picture industry and hasn’t a thing to do with World War II or its aftermath. I have to admit, living in the glamorous unreal world of Jazz Age movie studios is a pleasant respite from the horrors of war and its aftermath, though that doesn’t mean my characters don’t face difficult decisions and daily disappointments or that I don’t anguish over their setbacks and heartbreak.
ALSO BY ELLEN FELDMAN
Paris Never Leaves You
Terrible Virtue
The Unwitting
Next to Love
Scottsboro
The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank
Lucy
About the Author
ELLEN FELDMAN, a 2009 Guggenheim fellow, is the author of Paris Never Leaves You (published in over twelve countries), The Unwitting, Next to Love, Scottsboro (shortlisted for the Orange Prize), The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank (translated into nine languages), and Lucy. Her novel Terrible Virtue was optioned by Black Bicycle for a feature film. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraphs
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Sources and Acknowledgments
Reading Group Gold
Reading Group Questions
Movies & Books
A Conversation with Ellen Feldman
Also by Ellen Feldman
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
First published in the United States by St. Martin’s Griffin, an imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group
THE LIVING AND THE LOST. Copyright © 2021 by Ellen Feldman. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Publishing Group, 120 Broadway, New York, NY 10271.
www.stmartins.com
Cover design by Olga Grlic
Cover art: couple © Magdalena Russocka/Trevillion; train station © Walter Sanders/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-78082-9 (trade paperback)
ISBN 978-1-250-82181-2 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-78083-6 (ebook)
eISBN 9781250780836
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First Edition: 2021