Annelise joined George after a few weeks, leaving the children in the comparative safety—and certainly the easier life—of neutral Norway. The fear of bombs in Berlin, she wrote Jeanette, was not great, since it was far away, well defended, and “the British seem to content themselves by throwing pamphlets.” The blackout, however, was extreme. Going home each evening, George recalled, involved groping in pitch blackness from column to column of the Brandenburg gate, feeling my way by hand after this fashion to the bus stop; the waiting for the dim blue lights of the bus to come sweeping out of the obscurity; then the long journey out five and a half miles of the “east-west axis”; the dim, hushed interior of the bus, lightened only by the sweeps of the conductor’s flashlight; the wonder as to how the driver ever found his way over the vast expanse of unmarked, often snow-covered asphalt… ; the eerie walk home at the other end, again with much groping and feeling for curbstones; [and finally] the façade of what appeared, from outside its blackout curtains, to be a dark and deserted home; and the ultimate pleasant discovery, always with a tinge of surprise, on opening the door that behind the curtains was light, at least a minimal measure of warmth, …a wife, and a coziness all the more pronounced for the vast darkness and uncertainty of the war that lay outside.
The Kennans had rented a house they could ill afford, George explained to Jeanette, in order to have a place where they could do something for friends: “At least give them a meal or a bed when they need one most.”29
One guest was a German Baltic woman George had known in Riga, who now had three children. Terrified that the Soviet Union was about to absorb the Baltic states—it did in 1940—she and her family had fled to Germany with one suitcase each on three hours’ notice. All they could expect, George believed, was resettlement in the apartment of “some miserable Pole who had himself been kicked out on three hours’ notice.” They would take over that family’s belongings in compensation for their own, and then be expected to begin life over again “surrounded by the fanatical hatred and resentment of the neighbors.” If George went broke putting up such friends for a few days at a time, he wrote his sister, then “I’ll come back to Wisconsin and you can all support me… until I learn how to make baskets or breed cows or something.” The family stayed with the Kennans for three months.30
Meanwhile the office routine was demanding—“people have stupidly neglected to provide any holidays in the prosecution of wars”—but rewarding: “My tasks and responsibilities are such that if I cope with them successfully I need have no qualms about running even the largest of our Foreign Service establishments, in the future.” The years ahead would be full of difficulty, with an element of danger thrown in. There was at least the comfort, though, that if he had any belief left in the value of living when he came home, “it will not be for want of contact with the seamier aspects of human nature.”31
There was, of course, still Norway. George and Annelise rejoined the children in Kristiansand for the Christmas of 1939, walking around the tree holding hands, opening presents, and attending amateur theatricals, while relishing “peace, lights, shops, food, smart clothes, smiling faces, mountains, snow, and normalcy.” More Norwegian seamen than French soldiers had died as a result of military action, George reported to Jeanette on the last day of the decade, but the war was still, “as for you at home, a matter of voices on the radio and headlines in the papers. Let’s hope that it will long continue to remain so.”32
VI.
Apart from proclaiming neutrality and establishing a western hemispheric security zone, President Roosevelt’s first significant diplomatic initiative after the war broke out came in February 1940, when he sent Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles on a mission to Rome, Berlin, London, and Paris. The purpose of the trip was left vague, but Roosevelt probably meant it to show that he had neglected no possibility, however remote, of helping to settle the conflict. Welles was not to visit Moscow—FDR was still angry about the Soviet attack on Finland two months earlier. But on the assumption that Welles might want information on the U.S.S.R., Kennan was assigned to meet him in Italy and accompany him through Switzerland and Germany. Welles asked for none, leaving Kennan with little to do but follow him around and help with the travel arrangements. Nothing came of the mission, but George did get himself, or at least part of himself, photographed in Life: everyone else was in the picture, he wrote Jeanette, “but all you could see of me was a hump in the table cloth, which denoted my knee.”33
The visit to Rome did provide a chance to compare Mussolini’s regime with Hitler’s. Kennan thought the Italian dictator wise to have preserved the monarchy. The future of Europe, he wrote in a paper he finished while on the trip, might well lie in the survival of an aristocracy “pliable enough, irrational enough, and at the same time stable enough, to bridge all the delicate contradictions of the continent.” Hitler was well on the way to unifying it, but he was doing so without any sense of responsibility for European culture as a whole. Monarchies, for all their foibles, at least had that. One ought not to shrink, therefore, “at the restoration of the Mozart court and the chocolate soldier. It is the real soldiers that are dangerous.”34
Kennan saw plenty of them on both sides of the Rhine while escorting the Welles mission from Berlin to Basel. They were not shooting at each other, but that was unlikely to last, at which point the war was bound to take its toll, even in Scandinavia. For the moment, though, George wrote Jeanette in February, “the little rascals will have to stay in Norway and take their chances along with several hundreds of thousands of Norwegian kids.” Annelise joined them there in March.35
On April 4 George, back in Berlin, got information that changed his mind: “I had reason to call her long distance and ask her to bring the children back at once.” He met them in Copenhagen on the sixth: Gracie and Joan were dressed in twin blue coats, with Happy Hooligan bonnets. The family returned by train to Berlin and on the eighth learned that a German ship had been torpedoed off Kristiansand. Mounting rescue efforts with characteristic thoroughness, the Norwegians wondered why the survivors all seemed to be young men of the same age with military haircuts. The next morning the Germans announced the occupation of Denmark and Norway. “At noon, Annelise and I heard together, with a feeling of sickness and horror, of the bombing of Kristiansand and the shelling of the town from the sea.” She had taken it all with “composure and dignity,” George wrote Jeanette on the fifteenth, “[b]ut it is naturally a cruel strain on her, and it is something which I am afraid neither of us will ever quite get over, however it turns out.”
Kristiansand, he added, had always seemed a little unreaclass="underline" “So much decency and comfort and health [existing] side by side, within a few hundred miles distance, with such overpowering forces of nastiness and perversion and brutality.” But now at least things were clear. “The worst has happened, and there are no more questions to be asked… no more wondering about who is right and who is wrong.” It would be, henceforth, a simple matter “of who gets whom, as Lenin put it. And we know only too definitely which side we are on.”
What was not clear was where the family would go next. The embassy did not want wives with children staying in Berlin. The Kennans owned no home in the United States. George suggested France, but Annelise wisely objected: “I would be just two steps ahead of the German army with two children. I don’t think this is a very realistic idea from somebody who is very smart.” So they decided, in the end, on Highland Park. “We knew that we could stay with [Jeanette] for the summer. And that was as far as we thought.”36