At only 66 pages, Address Unknown by Kressman Taylor proves that you don’t need to write hundreds of pages to deliver a gut-wrenching story. This book can be borrowed for free and read online from the Internet Archive library.
Address Unknown tells the story of two friends that co-own an art dealing business. Max is a Jew living in San Francisco, and Martin is a German who returns with his family from California to Germany. The story is told in an epistolary manner, with letters dated from 1932 to 1934.
Max congratulates Martin on his recent return to Germany in the first letter. In another letter, Max asks warily about a man called Hitler, to which Martin replies: “But I ask myself, is he [Hitler] quite sane?… To you alone, Max, I say I do not know. I do not know. Yet I hope.”
As the letters continue, Martin’s tone changes from hoping Hitler is not a black angel to “our Gentle Leader”. To Max’s troubled reports of flogged or tortured Jews, Martin replies, “as for the stern measures that so distress you, I myself did not like them at first, but I have come to see their painful necessity” or that “a few must suffer for the millions to be saved.” Martin also asks Max to stop writing as Max’s letters could be intercepted. In that situation, Martin would lose his official position, and his family would be in danger.
But Max continues his letters, as his sister’s whereabouts madden him. Max’s sister, Grisselle, an actress who played in Berlin, went missing after telling the German audience she was a Jewess. Responding from bank stationery (less likely to be censored), Martin tells Max his sister is dead. Max turned Grisselle away when she ran for help to his house, followed by stormtroopers. Even though Gisselle “has displayed her Jewish body on the stage before pure young German men”, Martin couldn’t bring himself to hold her and turn her over to the stormtroopers (in a previous letter, it was implied that Martin and Griselle had an affair before Martin left California with his family). So, Martin told Grisselle that she must run away from his house. Stromtroopers caught sight of her and after a few minutes, her screaming stops.
Martin asks Max again never to write, adding, “[a]nd I will no longer have any dealings with Jews, except for the receipt of money.”
The story ends with Max’s twisted, cold-blooded revenge that I will not reveal.
As this short story was written in 1938, anticipating the horrors yet to come, Address Unknown is a prophetic and terrifying reading about “what happens to real, living people swept up in a warped ideology” (author’s comment).
In the afterword, the author describes the inspiration behind this story:
A short time before the war, some cultivated, intellectual, warm-hearted German friends of mine returned to Germany after living in the United States. In a very short time, they turned into sworn Nazis. They refused to listen to the slightest criticism about Hitler. During a return visit to California, they met an old dear friend of theirs on the street, who had been very close to them and who was a Jew. They did not speak to him. They turned their backs on him when he held his hands out to embrace them. How can such a thing happen, I wondered. What changed their hearts so? What steps brought them to such cruelty?
These questions haunted me very much, and I could not forget them. It was hard to believe that these people whom I knew and respected had fallen victim to the Nazi poison.
I read this book a few times in a row. There is a magnetic and enthralling quality in this story that reveals how a strong friendship or any other form of human relationship can be easily destroyed in the face of propaganda.
Considering the war happening now and the “motivation” behind it, when hatred starts eating your throat, we remember that monsters are real, and they look like you and me. It might look like, as a society, we didn’t progress much from the 30s-40s.
Except for one thing. Nowadays, the story is published under the author’s full name, Kathrine Kressmann Taylor. In 1938, the editors thought the story to be “too strong to appear under the name of a woman.” So times do change, even though the pace of change might look excruciatingly slow. And we should never, ever start becoming complacent when things change for the better and expect only growth. There is too much at stake.