In the Garden of Beasts

Hannover, only to be fired for exhibiting too much moral scruple. He took a job as director of inland shipping for a civilian company but was later arrested in the vast roundup that followed the July 20, 1944, assassination attempt against Hitler. Diels survived the war and during the Nuremberg trials testified on behalf of the prosecution. Later, he became a senior official in thegovernment of West Germany. His luck ran out on November 18, 1957, during a hunting trip. As he was removing a rifle from his car, the weapon discharged and killed him.
    MARTHA GREW DISILLUSIONED with communism as practiced in everyday life. Her disenchantment became outright disgust during the “Prague Spring” of 1968, when she awoke one day to find tanks rumbling past on the street outside her house during the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. “It was,” she wrote, “one of the ugliest and most repugnant sights we had ever seen.”
    She renewed old friendships by mail. She and Max Delbrück launched a spirited correspondence. She addressed him as “Max, my love”; he called her “my dearly beloved Martha.” They bantered about their increasing physical imperfections. “I am fine, fine, just fine,” he told her, “except for a little heart disease, and a little multiple myeloma.” He swore the chemotherapy had caused his hair to grow back.
    Other men fared less well in Martha’s retroactive appraisal. Prince Louis Ferdinand had become “that ass,” and Putzi Hanfstaengl “a real buffoon.”
    But one great love now appeared to burn just as bright as ever. Martha began writing to Bassett, her former husband—the first of her three great loves—and soon they were corresponding as if they were back in their twenties, parsing their past romance to try to figure out what had gone wrong.Bassett confessed he had destroyed all the love letters she had ever sent him, having realized “that, even with the passage of time, I could never bear to read them, much less would I want anyone else to share them after I’ve gone.”
    Martha, however, had kept his. “Such love letters!” she wrote.
    “One thing is sure,” she told him in a November 1971 letter, when she was sixty-three years old. “Had we stayed together, we would have had a vital, varied and passionate life together.… I wonder if you would have remained happy with a woman as unconventional as I am and was, even though we would not have had the complications that came to me later. Still I have had joy with sorrow, productivenesswith beauty and shock! I have loved you and Alfred and one other, and still do. So that is the queer bird, still lively, that you once loved and married.”
    In 1979 a federal court cleared her and Stern of all charges, albeit grudgingly, citing lack of evidence and the deaths of witnesses. They longed to return to America, and considered doing so, but realized another obstacle remained in their path. For all those years in exile they had not paid U.S. taxes. The accumulated debt was now prohibitively high.
    They considered moving elsewhere—perhaps England or Switzerland—but another obstacle arose, the most stubborn of all: old age.
    By now the years and illness had taken a serious toll on the world of Martha’s recollection.Bill Jr. had died in October 1952 of cancer, leaving a wife and two sons. He had spent his years after Berlin moving from job to job, ending as a clerk in the book department of Macy’s in San Francisco. Along the way, his own left-leaning sympathies had caused him to run afoul of the Dies Committee, which had declared him “unfit” for employment by any federal agency, this at a time when he was working for the Federal Communications Commission. His death had left Martha the sole survivor of the family. “Bill was a very swell guy, a warm and fine person, who had his share of frustration and suffering—maybe more than his share,” Martha wrote in a letter to Bill’s first wife, Audrey. “I miss him so terribly and feel empty and alone without him.”
    Quentin Reynolds died on March 17, 1965, at the not-very-old age of sixty-two. Putzi Hanfstaengl, whose sheer size had seemed to make him invulnerable, died on November 6, 1975, in Munich. He was eighty-eight. Sigrid Schultz, the Dragon from Chicago, died on May 14, 1980, at eighty-seven. And Max Delbrück, presumably with a full head of hair, passed away in March 1981, his exuberance quenched at last. He was seventy-four.
    This great withering was very sad