FREDERIC V. GRUNFELD

Berlin

TIME-LIFE BOOKS 1977

SON RULLAN, Fred Grunfeld’s house, was an abandoned monastery in the Majorcan countryside near Deya. The road to it petered out into an improbable dusty track through fields planted up with crops. A good place to get a lot of writing done, and Fred did a lot. Born in Berlin in 1929, he came from a family that owned one of the most elegant stores at the city center. He had experienced the stormtroopers smashing up plate-glass windows. Growing up in New York, Fred answered to Stalin’s jibe about “rootless cosmopolitans.” Prophets Without Honour (1979) is a detailed and moving account of the men and women who had given Europe the cultural life that was destroyed before Fred could take what would have been his rightful place at its forefront. Although written for the mass readership of Time-Life Books, his Berlin is a requiem for the by-gone Weimar Republic. Other subjects of his range from a social history of Hitler’s Germany, a biography of the sculptor Auguste Rodin, to travel books and studies of Kings and countries, and even games and musical instruments.

We dined in what in the days of the monks must have been the refectory, now all candlelight and shadows. Another guest was Henri-Louis de La Grange, the great authority on Gustav Mahler. When the conversation turned to Mahler’s symphonies, Fred could keep up with him. He was only fifty-eight when he had a fatal heart attack.