The box had been quite badly knocked about. I took it home with me to my apartment a few years ago. This was after my father had died and my mother was starting to clear the house where my sisters and I grew up. “Imm’s posthumous papers” was written by hand on the lid. Imm was what my parents called my grandfather, and I knew the box contained documents that had belonged to him. Sometimes I would glance up at it, sitting there on a top shelf. For some reason over Christmas 2015 I lifted it down and began to look through the contents. I lost myself in letters and articles, verdicts and interrogation reports. I began to see the outline of a story that was anything but straightforward.
Immanuel, my grandfather, came to Sweden as a refugee in the autumn of 1939, with his wife, Lucia, and two teenage sons. He was a journalist. As the son of the cantor at the synagogue in Königsberg and a committed Social Democrat, he was no longer able to work for German newspapers. From the end of the 1920s he had been a correspondent in Warsaw. Just a few months before the Germans invaded Poland, he left via Latvia and Helsinki. They crossed the Baltic Sea to Sweden by boat. In Stockholm he continued to write under the byline Dr. B. for the liberal Swiss newspaper Basler Nachrichten. He was also given work as an editor for a German exile publishing house, run by one of Germany’s leading publishers, Gottfried Bermann Fischer. During the war years the company published many of the most significant writers banned by the National Socialists, including Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig.
During those years Stockholm was home to numerous notable refugees from the German-speaking world. Some were in transit, others settled for life, like the author Peter Weiss. Lise Meitner, the important Austrian nuclear physicist, arrived in Sweden simultaneously with Bermann Fischer and became a close friend of the family. Bertolt Brecht arrived the following year with his wife, Helene Weigel, the legendary actress. Like the publisher, they left for the United States via Russia and Japan in 1940, the same year that the young Social Democrats Willy Brandt and Bruno Kreisky made Stockholm their home. The German-Jewish philosopher Ernst Cassirer had already escaped to Sweden in 1936 and left on the same boat to New York as linguist Roman Jakobson in May 1941, after the eastern route via Moscow and Yokohama had been closed. A German occupation of Sweden seemed likely to many, and emigration was an option considered by Jewish families in Sweden too, including the important publishers Bonnier. The fact that Dagens Nyheter, the most important Swedish newspaper, had Jewish owners did not exactly ease the government’s relationship with Berlin. In spite of growing pressures, the Bonnier family never sold the newspaper and decided not to emigrate. As we know, Sweden remained neutral during the war and, unlike Denmark and Norway, managed to avoid occupation. The Wallenberg family, the country’s most powerful industrialists, somehow succeeded in keeping both the British and the Germans satisfied. Modern assessment of Sweden’s role during the Nazi era has focused on the compromises and negotiations required to keep the Germans happy, including the continuous shipping of iron ore. The critical debate is still very much alive: Was Swedish neutrality hypocritical?
During World War II Stockholm was home not only to interesting intellectuals but also to secret agents. Historians have referred to the city as a Nordic Casablanca. Through Bermann Fischer, Immanuel came into contact with a group of Englishmen based in Stockholm and producing anti-Nazi propaganda. What he was unaware of was that these same people were planning to sabotage the transport of Swedish iron ore. The order for the attack came from the very top. Winston Churchill, who until the spring of 1940 was First Lord of the Admiralty, was prepared to use violent means to halt the transport of iron to Germany. One Alfred Rickman, a man of many talents, had been commissioned to blow up the ore port in Oxelösund, but was exposed before the sabotage could be carried out.
On February 8, 1940, the Swedish postal service intercepted a letter that, on closer inspection, was found to contain a short message written in invisible ink. It revealed that the British Secret Service had a contact person in Stockholm named Rickman. It was this message that put the police on Rickman’s trail, enabling them to arrest the whole team and confiscate the explosives. The significance of stopping the attempt has been discussed at length by military historians. If the attack had been carried out, neutral Sweden might have been dragged into the war. The letter written in invisible ink is sometimes mentioned as a curious feature in the affair.
The journalist who thus exposed the Englishman was my grandfather. It appeared that he was in contact with an agency in Berlin that procured articles for minor German-language newspapers in Poland. He was arrested and sentenced to eight months’ imprisonment for spying for the Germans. The British would-be bombers received considerably longer prison sentences. The publisher Bermann Fischer was also arrested but was released after a few weeks. He was deported from Sweden and with his family managed to make the journey to New York via Russia, Japan, and California.
Those who have written about the Rickman affair have assumed that the letter writer was a German spy working for the German security service, or directly for the Gestapo. At first sight, this might seem likely. But anyone who is more familiar with the letter’s author, the son of a famous Jewish composer and cantor, knows that it must all be more involved. When he was interrogated, Immanuel insisted that deportation to Germany would be equivalent to a death sentence. He was not a spy sent out by the Germans. He was deprived of his German citizenship and was stateless when he was released from prison. What followed was two years in a Swedish internment camp.
During interrogation by the Swedish police, Immanuel maintained that he had received the invisible ink from a man unknown to him, a representative of the correspondence bureau in Berlin to which the letter was addressed. This man asked him to use his normal news reports to pass secrets that might be of political interest to Germany, things that he learned as a journalist “behind the scenes.” Immanuel claimed under questioning that he had used the ink only once, to write the letter that had been intercepted.
But the explanation my grandfather later gave, to clear himself of the accusation he was a lackey for the National Socialists, was different. The editorial office in Berlin was actually a rallying point for opposition journalists whose chief ambition was to circumvent the Nazification of the German national press and enable neutral political reporting in German-language daily newspapers outside Germany. He hadn’t wanted to reveal their real motives to the police, for they were in greater danger than he was. Indeed, they were soon to be closed down by the Nazis. Ilse Stübe and Rudolf von Scheliha were sentenced to death in 1942 for treason. Immanuel’s brother was executed too. A curt three-line letter in the box states: “Your brother was arrested by the Gestapo in April 1942 and shot dead some weeks later.” But who was Wolfgang Horst, the man who supplied the invisible ink to my grandfather? He is mentioned in the police investigation, but otherwise left no trace whatsoever.
My grandfather was sentenced to prison as a German spy. But Bermann Fischer and several other commentators were of the opinion that he was misled and didn’t know that he was in fact leaking information to the Germans rather than to an underground resistance movement. The more I have tried to make sense of the train of events, the more unsure I am that things can be viewed in this black-and-white way. The refugee life to which Immanuel was trying to adapt was characterized by ambivalence and ambiguity. My story doesn’t try to cast blame on him or exonerate him. The same applies to all the other figures who appear in the book. Dr. B. is a novel, an invention. But it has as its starting point the story I found in the documents in the box of posthumous papers.
The last time I met my grandfather, I was still a child. Older members of my family of course knew him better and are thus better able to comprehend his inner life and his moral choices. It was never my intention to create a psychologically accurate portrait. In my account he is at the center of a labyrinth of astonishing interconnections and exposed to fiercely hostile powers. It was the complexity of these connections and the pressure that these forces must have exerted on him that fascinated me and made me write this novel, perhaps a portrait of the city of Stockholm at the beginning of World War II rather than of a journalist in exile. I have not searched international archives to gain a final understanding of all the ambiguities. But the unlikely connections and coincidences that form the basis of my story are undoubtedly real: my grandfather did interview the legendary Russian ambassador Kollontai, he did stay at the same hotel as infamous German spies, and the letter written in secret ink is as real as the innumerable articles signed “Dr. B.” in that cardboard box.
After the war my grandfather left Sweden and went first to Warsaw, then Vienna, and in the 1950s to Munich. He became one of the chief editors for Süddeutsche Zeitung. There are some in my family who looked with suspicion on those who were willing to return to Germany after the Holocaust. How could Immanuel go back to a country whose people were guilty of such a crime? But my novel is not about this other life; it is about the life that ended in Stockholm. For my grandmother Lucia it was a time of terrible ordeal. She died of a stroke at the age of only forty-four.
By the time he was twenty-five Immanuel had already converted to Protestantism. There was nothing inherently unusual about that. The Jews’ assimilation in Europe assumed many forms. By degrees they managed to win rights in society held previously only by Christians. Not all chose to convert, but many did, in order to fit in and to practice professions barred to Jews. In Immanuel’s case the decision was founded on religious conviction. As a young man he was a thinker who was searching for the right context for his faith. He admired German literature and from prison he sent long lists of the most important books he thought his sons should read. But was there also a streak of German patriotism in him? At the outbreak of World War I he volunteered for the German army. He mentioned this to his fellow student Walter Benjamin, who said that the war held no interest for him. Benjamin added that it would have been different if it had been a Jewish war.
In his autobiographical writings Immanuel never refers to his time as an editor at the publishing house in Stockholm. It is understandable that he might have preferred to forget that part of his life. In his autobiography he reviews the whole of German culture, but there is no mention of Bermann Fischer. A single frayed scrap of paper in the box is a reminder of that story. I believe it is a piece of the dust jacket from Stefan Zweig’s last and best-known book, his Schachnovelle (The Royal Game, in English), published in Stockholm after the author’s death. Zweig posted the manuscript to Bermann Fischer the day before he and his wife took their own lives in Brazil. The character in the book is imprisoned and, in his isolation, studies a book about famous chess games, thereby developing miraculous skills as a player. Bermann Fischer met Zweig in New York just before he undertook his last journey. Did the publisher tell him about the new editor, the one who ended up in prison and made sure the publisher himself was forced to experience a number of weeks locked up? The name of the chess-playing prisoner in Zweig’s novella convinces me he did: that name is Dr. B.
Who was Zweig’s Dr. B.? Some literary scholars have suggested that the author may have met someone on the boat to Brazil who inspired him to create his character. Others emphasize the autobiographical features and see Dr. B. as Zweig’s fictional alter ego. So, am I instead claiming that Zweig’s protagonist is modeled on my grandfather? No, not really. Like most fictional characters Zweig’s chess genius is a composite creature. Inspiration must have come from many sources. The experience of being locked up in a cell might have been something my grandfather contributed via Bermann Fischer. And perhaps also the name, Dr. B.: in itself a tiny piece of fiction, since my grandfather never had the title of doctor.