Address Unknown: the great, forgotten anti-Nazi book everyone must read (original) (raw)

Some of the largest themes have been addressed in the shortest books. That is especially true in the realm of what might be called political fiction. The single best evocation of communism – and especially the distance between the ideal and the Soviet reality – remains George Orwell’s brief allegory, Animal Farm. In the same way, few works have conveyed the brutal nature of imperialism more effectively than Joseph Conrad managed in fewer than a hundred pages in Heart of Darkness. A third place in that small space on the shelf could be allocated to an even briefer work: Address Unknown, a story so short it can be read on a morning bus ride. Yet somehow it distils the essence of the ideology that, along with the other two, casts a deathly shadow over the 20th century. Across a few economic pages it touches the heart of the Nazi darkness.

Address Unknown was first published in Story magazine in September 1938, and then in book form a year later, becoming an instant bestseller. It has been translated across the world, adapted into a 1944 film and into multiple productions for the stage and radio – all under the name of Kressmann Taylor, after Story’s editor, along with Kathrine Kressmann Taylor’s husband, Elliott, decided it was “too strong to appear under the name of a woman”. The impact was immediate, the story credited with having “jolted America”, alerting it to the horror unfolding in Nazi Germany.

Photograph: Simon & Schuster

It consists of nothing more than an intermittent correspondence between two friends. Yet the epistolary form is deceptively efficient, supplying backstory, plot, character, dialogue and more than one narrative voice before a conventional novel might have cleared its throat. Within a page or two, we are in the world of Martin and Max, both German, the latter a Jew now living in San Francisco, the former now back in Munich – two men who have been business partners, friends and whose families have, as we shall discover, been intimately connected.

Their exchange, spanning just 16 months between 1932 and 1934, illuminates not just the specific texture of the early Nazi period, but something more timeless. It serves as a guide to the way any politics of identity – especially one that invokes “the people”, rooting that idea in blood and soil – eventually, and often very rapidly, divides and polarises. Max and Martin have shared “the fireside”, there finding “warmth and understanding, where small selfishnesses are impossible and where wine and books and talk give a different meaning to existence”. But even the very best of friends can be rent apart. Once a dividing line is drawn, it’s astonishing how swiftly people can break from those who stand on the other side of it. In that sense, Address Unknown is a warning. We tell ourselves, as these characters do, that friendship is eternal, that some bonds will never be broken. This short story warns us that ideology, once it has turned to fever, is stronger than friendship.

That’s because any total, all-consuming creed will first separate “us” from “them”, and then separate “them” from the rest of the human family. Dehumanisation has been the overture to every genocidal opera (though it’s worth stressing that Taylor was writing in 1938, before the Nazis’ “final solution to the Jewish problem” was under way). It happened that way in Rwanda in the 1990s, when the pro-government radio station started telling Hutus to see the Tutsi minority not as people but as inyenzi, or cockroaches, and as inzoka, or snakes. And it happens in the correspondence that forms Address Unknown, as steadily Martin comes to see Max not as a friend, not even as Max but as a representative of “the Jews”. The antisemitism that comes out of Martin’s mouth – “The Jewish race is a sore spot to any nation that harbours it” – thus shocks not because we don’t expect a German in 1933 to be expressing anti-Jewish racism, but because it is expressed by one man towards another who used to be his friend.

If that shift from seeing the individual, Max, to seeing only a collective, “the Jewish race”, resonates today, it might be because the political rhetoric of our time keeps making a similar move, one visible beyond the resurgence, on left and right, of antisemitism. On the United States border, to take just one example, there are not individual mothers and fathers and children trying to come to America, but rather – at least in the language of the current US president and his cable TV amplifiers – a “caravan”, an “invasion”. If there is a Texan Martin writing to a Mexican Max today, perhaps he too can no longer quite see his old friend as a person.

Taylor is perceptive too about how racism sneaks up on the individual who lets it in. Martin tells Max it wasn’t that, in the past, he didn’t notice the fact that Max was a Jew, but rather that he made an exception for him. “I have never hated the individual Jew,” Martin writes. “Yourself I have always cherished as a friend, but … you will know that I speak in all honesty when I say that I have loved you, not because of your race but in spite of it.” The exempting of the occasional good Jew from a merited disdain for the Jewish people as a whole has long been a feature of antisemitism, and it’s a device that remains in use to this day.

Hitler with German president Paul von Hindenburg in 1933. Photograph: AP

Nor are self-described liberals or progressives immune from the virus of bigotry. Max tells Martin he has faith in his old friend’s “liberal mind and warm heart”. And, sure enough, Martin is not seduced by Adolf Hitler immediately. “Is he quite sane?” he asks himself. “I do not know.” But it does not take too long for him to succumb. Soon he is adoring “the Gentle Leader”, ready to assent to whatever surgery might be required to cut out “the cancer” that ails the Fatherland.

In this way, the story traces the universal contours of fascism – the leader-worship, the compulsory group-think, the surveillance, the summons to men to act as men – as well as the particular topography of the Nazi landscape. In Address Unknown, Jews are associated with art forms that Hitler would have despised – modern painting and theatre – as well as with commerce. On this point, Taylor shows good moral sense: she makes clear that, however much Nazi propaganda might have insisted otherwise, Aryan Germans were as implicated in buying and selling, profit and loss, as the Jews they loathed for those very activities. Max makes money selling art, but so does Martin.

All of this is achieved with concision even as it leaves room for some memorable writing. “The old wound has healed, but the scar throbs at times, my friend,” writes Martin. Later, speaking of the change of mood in his country, he says: “The old despair has been thrown aside like a forgotten coat.” As if that were not enough, Address Unknown comes with a killer twist.

That this short, fleeting story has lasted so long is not only because of its artistic achievement, and not only because, written in 1938, it astonishingly anticipated the horror that was yet to come. It is because its prescience is not confined to its time. It saw into our own future too.