Wisconsin was an exception. Despite the loneliness of its highways and the bleakness of its small-town life, it was, Kennan believed, a “compact commonwealth” with an admirable balance between industry and agriculture, a sturdy population, and a tradition of humaneness and good nature. Could it not become, like some of the small neutral countries of Europe, a refuge for decency and common sense? But this too was personalizing the country: Wisconsin was home and therefore his own refuge. It was a place where he could “conceivably be content,” confident that he was doing something worthwhile. Salvation lay in smallness, whether of government, avocation, or aspiration.
The time for that, however, had not yet come. Kennan was “much too broke and in debt” to contemplate retirement from the Foreign Service. Moreover, Europe was heating up, what with Hitler’s annexation of Austria in March and his demands for Czechoslovakia’s German-speaking Sudetenland: “I did not want to miss the climax.” So Kennan made his plea to his friends in the State Department, and they responded, in August, with instructions to depart as soon as possible for Prague.41 It would be, also, a “compact commonwealth,” but one surrounded, unlike Wisconsin, by Nazi German authoritarianism.
SEVEN
Czechoslovakia and Germany: 1938–1941
“ALL IN ALL, I THINK IT IS AN EXCELLENT SOLUTION,” KENNAN wrote Bullitt in August 1938. The assignment to Prague was “eminently satisfactory.” He would be the only secretary in the American legation. He knew German, “and I find that I can read Bohemian with little difficulty, after the effort I’ve put in on Russian.” His time in Vienna had given him an interest in Central Europe. The only disappointment was that “I cannot have another chance to work with you.”1
The timing could hardly have been better—or worse. On September 12 Hitler threatened military action against Czechoslovakia if it did not give up the Sudetenland. The resulting war scare led British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, on the fourteenth, to request a meeting: it took place the following day at Berch-tesgaden, the dictator’s mountain retreat. That same day The Washington Post ran a photograph of George and Annelise with Grace and Joan, aged six and two, under the headline “Alexandrian and Family Headed for Danger Zone.” The editorial cartoon that day showed a skeletal finger turning the clock back from 1938 to 1914. The Kennans sailed from New York aboard the SS Washington on September 21, only to run into the great hurricane that would, when it hit Long Island and New England later that evening, kill some seven hundred people. “It was a fitting and ominous beginning,” George recalled, “to the coming tour of duty in Europe.”2
The ship’s radio allowed its passengers to follow the developing crisis, but only sketchily. They did get the news that Chamberlain had met Hitler again at Bad Godesberg on the twenty-second, that Hitler had rejected the compromise Chamberlain proposed there, and that war was rumored to be only days away. Alarmed, the State Department advised George by radiogram that “[y]our family should not proceed to Prague at this time.” They landed at Le Havre on the twenty-eighth, where they learned that Hitler and Chamberlain would hold a third meeting at Munich the next day with the Italian prime minister, Benito Mussolini, and the French premier, Édouard Daladier. With no way to know whether to expect war or peace, the disembarkation took place in “almost complete pandemonium.” “For me,” George remembered, “the war really began on that day.”3
Despite the confusion, he managed to telephone the American embassy in Paris, which told him to bring himself and his family there. They arrived by train that evening, driving to the hotel through blacked-out streets, to find an airplane ticket to Prague for George only—the family would go to Norway.
I got up alone the next morning in the darkness, and kissed my children good-by as they lay asleep in their beds…. [F]or the first time there was brought home to me a tiny part of that vast human misery summed up under the term of war-time separations. During the next four years, I was destined to see my children only on rare and brief occasions; and it was a loss which no victories, no reparations, no acquisitions of power could ever make good.
Kennan’s plane, the last one for weeks from Paris to Prague, departed shortly before the one that would fly Daladier to Munich. Bombers were visible on German airfields, ready to take off. Czechoslovakia looked more peaceful, “[b]ut there were hundreds of thousands of men, down there, poised to shoot at each other, or not to shoot, depending on the outcome of the events of the day.”4
The silence in Prague, when Kennan arrived, was unsettling for someone so recently in New York. It seemed implausible “that this quiet spot, where the swallows wheeled in the sunshine over roofs of Spanish tile and the sound of church-bells drifted down the hillsides, [could be] the center of world attention, and might within twenty-four hours be laid waste by German bombers.” But the city was packed with people snapping up newspapers, while correspondents clustered around radios in the hotels, waiting for word from Munich. As rumors of the settlement began to come in, “horror and bitterness” swept the city. Kennan had to be careful, walking through the darkened streets, not to speak English loud enough to be overheard. The next day the Czechs listened to the official announcement “with all the excruciating sadness of a small people” who had tried to preserve their independence, “only to be cheated at last of the fruits of their efforts.” They faced a future over which they had no control, seeking solace where they could while “the hand of misfortune—ponderous and relentless—smashed one after another of their most cherished creations.”5
I.
“Prague is wonderfully beautiful,” George wrote Frieda Por in mid-October, “but it is a sad time that I have experienced here.” With the Germans occupying Czech territory to the north, west, and south, the city was almost completely cut off. It had, hence, a museumlike atmosphere.
The old streets, relieved of motor vehicles by an obliging army, had recovered something of their pristine quiet and composure. Baroque towers—themselves unreal and ethereal—floated peacefully against skies in which the bright blue of autumn made way frequently for isolated, drifting clouds…. And the little groups of passers-by still assembled hourly in the market place, as they had for centuries, to watch the saints make their appointed rounds in the clock on the wall of the town hall.
But the world had bid farewell, it seemed, to the civility these monuments represented: this was a new and more brutal age. In the church near the City Hall, a priest instructed his congregation on how they should respond to the Munich betrayal. “Let them turn their faces from it. Let them abandon all hope of the virtue of the human race and seek their solace in a just, unbending, and stern God.” Meanwhile, on the square outside, “[f]at Jews sat gloomily over their coffee cups and German papers.”6
George’s legation duties were light. “The work—after all the headaches of Moscow and the Department’s Russian desk—seems like child’s play,” he wrote Cousin Grace. The minister, Wilbur J. Carr, was “as nice and kind as he can be.” But there were, as always, irritating Americans to deal with. One was “an attractive young lady,” indignantly tossing “a most magnificent head of golden hair,” who demanded to know what the legation staff of eight proposed to do about the thousands of refugees from the Sudetenland who would be descending on Prague in the next few days. “We relegated her… to the category of ignorant, impractical do-gooders, and were relieved to get her out of the office.” She turned out to be the journalist Martha Gellhorn, later a close friend, and George realized in retrospect that both had lessons they could have taught each other.