Address Unknown: A Novel

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Introduction

Schulse-Eisenstein Galleries

Schloss Rantzenburg

Schulse-Eisenstein Galleries

Schloss Rantzenburg

Schulse-Eisenstein Galleries

Deutsch-Bölkische Bank und Handelsgesellschaft

Schulse-Eisenstein Galleries

Deutsch-Bölkische Bank und Handelsgesellschaft

Eisenstein Galleries

Eisenstein Galleries

Eisenstein Galleries

Deutsch-Bölkische Bank und Handelsgesellschaft

Cablegram

Eisenstein Galleries

Eisenstein Galleries

Eisenstein Galleries

Schloss Rantzenburg

Eisenstein Galleries

Eisenstein Galleries

Afterword

About the Author

Also by Kathrine Kressmann Taylor

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

When I was growing up in Scotland, World War II still cast a long shadow. Sugar rationing did not end until 1953, meat rationing until 1954. The comic I read every week carried a story about Biggles, the intrepid pilot, flying lone missions, while Remembrance Day, when we had two minutes of silence at school and everyone wore poppies, was a deeply solemn occasion. After hearing about the prisoners of Colditz, I tried with two friends to dig an escape tunnel in the woods. I no longer remember what we were escaping from – only that we gave up after a few feet. Did we know about anti-Semitism? Very vaguely. My adoptive mother, who grew up in London during the 1930s, told me that everyone knew about the anti-Semitism in Germany – after Kristallnacht the Kindertransport brought nearly 10,000 Jewish children to London – but she didn’t learn about the concentration camps until after the war ended. Her impression was that the adults around her knew nothing about them either.

Despite many subsequent wars, World War II still has a strong hold on our collective memories and imaginations; it is not only a part of history but also a part of our communal mythology, as the many books, fiction and nonfiction, published every year testify. Novelists can count on readers to know, in some detail, the main facts of the war and can shine a light on some new aspect of the struggle, as happens in Mamta Chaudhry’s Haunting Paris, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, Walter Kempowski’s All for Nothing, Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Jim Shepard’s The Book of Aron, to name a few. These novelists are looking back, fully aware of the dramatic ironies. But Kathrine Kressmann Taylor’s Address Unknown is not a historical novel. She was born in 1903 in Portland, Oregon, and she was writing about the present, about what she observed and understood in the world around her. The rapturous reception the novel received when it was published in 1938, under the name Kressmann Taylor, suggests that she was not alone in her awareness of what was happening in Europe, but few, if any, American novelists were writing about Hitler’s rise to power. I read Address Unknown in November 2020, and I have been thinking about it ever since.

There are certain novels that have the remarkable quality of being both timely and prophetic. Think of Kafka’s The Trial, Orwell’s 1984, Ellison’s Invisible Man and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Each creates a very particular world that simultaneously holds up a mirror to the present