The news, in June 1941, that Wodehouse was to broadcast from Germany led to outraged correspondence in the press. The letters page of the Daily Telegraph included attacks on Wodehouse from fellow writers such as A. A. Milne and Storm Jameson.1 Comments were biting and personal, and parallels with Charles Lindbergh and William Joyce were drawn. Even friends and colleagues, such as his long-time collaborator Ian Hay, turned on him. ‘We are’, Hay wrote, ‘horrified’:
No broadcast from Berlin by a world-famous Englishman, however ‘neutral’ in tone, can serve as anything but an advertisement for Hitler […] an ingenious dose […] of soothing syrup for America, designed to divert American thoughts from the horrors which are being perpetrated in German prison camps today.2
Other correspondents were more measured, arguing that Wodehouse might have been put under considerable pressure by the Germans (‘the Hun has means of persuasion’, one noted).3 Wodehouse’s friend, the novelist Dorothy L. Sayers, perceptively pointed out that Wodehouse might well have had ‘not the slightest realization’ of current events:
At the time of the Battle of France, when he fell into enemy hands, English people had scarcely begun to realize the military and political importance of the German propaganda weapon. Since then we have learned much. We know something of why and how France fell; we have seen disintegration at work in the Balkans; we have watched the slow recovery of American opinion from the influence of the Nazi hypnotic.
But how much of all this can possibly be known or appreciated from inside a German concentration camp – or even from the Adlon Hotel?4
Following Wodehouse’s broadcasts, the journalist William N. Connor – known as ‘Cassandra’ – was encouraged by the Cabinet Minister, Duff Cooper, to make an ‘indictment’ of Wodehouse on the BBC airwaves. Further letters followed. This time, a number of correspondents were outraged at the seemingly partisan ‘invective’ and ‘personal abuse’ that Cassandra had seen fit to broadcast, especially as he had no knowledge of the background to Wodehouse’s talks. Nevertheless, anti-Wodehouse feeling ran high throughout the country, with the writer becoming labelled as a ‘Nazi stooge’. His novels were banned in Northern Ireland, and removed from the shelves of some British libraries and pulped.
Those closest to Wodehouse – Leonora, Reynolds, Thelma Cazalet-Keir and William Townend – were desperately trying to find a way to prevent him causing further damage to himself, and were only able to glean his activities from unreliable newspaper reports. All William Townend’s letters to Wodehouse were, at this point, returned to him marked ‘undelivered’. For them, there was no question about Wodehouse’s motives. As Leonora wrote, ‘I am completely and utterly certain that he is completely unconscious of any wrongdoing. However it isn’t exactly helping our war effort so he is very naturally judged accordingly.’5 Reynolds noted that ‘I am perfectly certain that your father is just as anti-Nazi as any of us are but he is about the world’s worst person with newspaper reporters. He also seems to have very little idea of the feeling or point of view of this country or of England due to the fact that things have changed so and he’s been out of touch with newspapers. He could ruin himself for years in this country in half an hour’s interview with newspaper reporters […]. He wouldn’t mean to but he is too honest and too naïve.’6 Leonora, as she wrote to Mackail, felt ‘a bit like a mother with an idiot child that she anyway loves better than all the rest’.7
Wodehouse was protected from the worst of the press coverage, especially at Degenershausen, deep in the German countryside. But, in November 1941, the Baroness von Bodenhausen closed her house for the winter, and the Wodehouses moved back to Berlin, taking up residence, once again, in the Adlon Hotel. Wodehouse was familiar with the Adlon from his previous stay in June, and as an English-speaker in Berlin he had plenty of company. A number of American journalists also took refuge there; in the bitter Berlin winter, the Adlon was the only place where one could guarantee a supply of hot water. The Wodehouses may have enjoyed this aspect of relative luxury, but in truth they were ‘not allowed to stay anywhere else’, and would much rather have been elsewhere. ‘We made several attempts to move to less conspicuous hotels and we also tried a number of pensions, but without success. At our first visit to these hotels and pensions we were always informed that we could have accommodation, at our second, that they were full up.’8
Staying at the prestigious Adlon only compounded the abuse levelled against Wodehouse. This grand building, within walking distance of the German Foreign Office and the Reich Chancellery, was the favoured hotel of the Nazis. This was a place where Hitler’s speeches were broadcast nightly to the entire dining-room and, unbeknownst to the Wodehouses, where German spies haunted the public rooms, and telegrams concerning the Final Solution were received.
Berlin in 1941 was gripped with tension. By October, the Chief of Police signed the order to begin the deportation of the city’s Jews. Over a thousand citizens were loaded onto the first train, which left Berlin for Lódź, in eastern Poland. Later, they would be moved on to Auschwitz, Treblinka and other concentration camps. Thousands more were to follow. Rumours of mass killings echoed round Berlin, though few knew the truth. It is likely that little or nothing of this reached the Wodehouses in their protected Adlon world.
The visible signs of war were, however, impossible to miss. Hulking flak towers loomed over the city to counter the Allied air-raids which were increasing in frequency and ferocity. Citizens were demoralised by the poor food and shortage of coal. Even the Adlon was forced to observe a weekly ‘Eintopf Day’, when vegetable stew was the only dish on the menu – an idea enforced by government edict to promote solidarity and austerity. Neverthless, luxuries were still available for those who could afford them. Restaurants, bars and cafés continued to trade – although the price of a meal out would cost the average Berliner their weekly wage. Champagne and lobster remained unrationed, and the few racy cabaret sites and jazz clubs to survive the Nazi clampdown gave an atmosphere of frenzied cheerfulness to night-time Berlin.
Wodehouse was retrospectively guarded about his time in Berlin. ‘[T]here is’, he wrote ‘so little to tell’:
Naturally everyone would suppose that an Englishman in Germany in war time would have a thrilling tale to relate, but I am a creature of habit and as the result of forty years of incessant literary composition have become a mere writing machine. Wherever I am, I sit down and write, or, if I have nothing to write about, I walk up and down and think out plots.
When I was in Berlin at the Adlon, this was my life day after day. Get up, do my Daily Dozen, bathe, shave, breakfast, take dog for saunter, start work. Work till lunch. After lunch the exercise walk, resuming work at five. Work from five till eight. Go down to dinner and from dinner back to my room to read or else walk round and round the corridors of my floor, thinking. Except when we went to lunch with an English or American friend, this programme never varied. I seldom spoke to a German. Occasionally one would come up to our table and say he had liked my books and I would be civil, but that was all.9
Many of Wodehouse’s Berlin letters dwell on practicalities of daily life in wartime Berlin: the exercising of his Peke, Wonder, in the Tiergarten; the difficulties of finding enough food; and, of course, his main preoccupation – his work. It seems extraordinary that, during this time in Tost, Berlin and Paris, Wodehouse managed to complete four novels. Money in the Bank – a tale of gangsters and jewel-pilfering in a large country house – was written during his time in internment; Joy in the Morning, the story of Bertie’s entanglement with the fearsome Florence Craye, featuring the wrathful constable Stilton Cheesewright, had been plotted and partly written before his capture. He completed it in his first winter in Berlin. Full Moon, his sixth Blandings novel, had also been left behind, in manuscript, when the Germans invaded Le Touquet. This most English of novels was completed in the leafy peace of Degenershausen. Uncle Dynamite, the return of the incorrigible and chaotic Frederick Altamont Cornwallis Twistleton, fifth Earl of Ickenham, was written, in part, in a Paris maternity home, under detention by the French police.10
Wodehouse’s claim that he ‘seldom spoke to a German’ is, however, not entirely true. From the first, the Wodehouses had frequent contact with their friend Werner Plack, whom they had met in Hollywood. A flamboyant former actor and wine merchant turned civil servant, he was suspected of working as a German spy in America in the 1930s. His work for the German Foreign Office was punctuated by travel, partygoing in Berlin and illicit entanglements with women. Plack was, as McCrum describes, ‘the self-styled English-speaking go-between with foreigners the Nazis hoped to exploit for propaganda purposes’, and frequently found time to visit the Wodehouses at the Adlon, visiting their rooms to collect letters to deliver abroad.11 Subsequent events indicate that Plack also did his best to support the Wodehouses, making concerted, though unsuccessful, attempts for the couple to be released to some neutral country.
At this time, the Wodehouses were also worried about their finances. A prolonged stay in an expensive hotel meant that additional sources of income had to be found. They relied, in part, on such royalties as could be collected from neutral countries. Wodehouse also negotiated a contract with a German film company, to augment their income. Ethel attempted to help, socialising with Germany’s top directors and actors in the Adlon bar and dining-room, and speculating on future film contracts.12
Wodehouse and Ethel were also ‘great friends’ with Johann ‘Jonny’ Jebsen [see plate 31]. Jebsen was part of the German Military Intelligence organisation, the Abwehr, but he openly despised the Nazi regime. He cut a rather sinister figure: blond, with a monocle, ‘very bad black teeth’ and an occasional limp – but he was a loyal, humorous and daring man, who helped the Wodehouses financially ‘from time to time’. By 1943, Jebsen had become a double agent, joining MI5 under the code-name ‘Artist’. As part of his mission, he reported to the Home Office that the Wodehouses were in ‘close touch’ with Paul Schmidt, Hitler’s interpreter, who had often spoken to Ethel about conversations he had interpreted for Hitler. Despite these German friendships, Jebsen recorded that Ethel was ‘very pro-British’ and was ‘inclined to be rude to anyone who dares to address her in German. She has on occasion said loudly in public places “If you cannot address me in English, don’t speak at all: you had better learn it as you will have to speak it after the war, anyway.”’ Wodehouse, Jebsen noted, ‘was entirely childlike and pacifist’.13
Initially, the German authorities would not allow the Wodehouses to leave, despite Wodehouse’s attempts to return to England, with the aim of ‘reaffirming his loyalty’.14 Under such circumstances, Ethel contented herself with enjoying what social life there was in Berlin. Wodehouse much preferred the peace of Degenershausen, and returned there in the summer of 1942, to be with Anga and Reinhild. By the autumn, Allied raids on Berlin had intensified. Life was becoming increasingly dangerous, with night after night spent in the Adlon’s air-raid shelter. In 1943, after some difficulty, the Wodehouses were finally granted permission to leave Berlin for the relative safety of occupied Paris, where they were to remain ‘under supervision’.15
1 Daily Telegraph, 1–13 July 1941.
2 Repr. in Sproat, p. 16.
3 Ibid., p. 21.
4 Ibid., p. 23.
5 Leonora Cazalet to Paul Reynolds, 16 July 1941 (Columbia).
6 Paul Reynolds to Leonora Cazalet, 27 August 1942 (Columbia).
7 Leonora Cazalet to Denis Mackail, 21 July 1941 (Wodehouse Archive).
8 Major Cussen’s ‘Report on the Case of P. G. Wodehouse’, 3 October 1940, HO 45/22385–66279, pp. 8–9 (PRO).
9 PGW to H. D. Ziman, 26 September 1945 (private archive).
10 Money in the Bank (US 1942; UK 1946); Joy in the Morning (US 1946; UK 1947); Full Moon (US 1947; UK 1947); Uncle Dynamite (UK and US 1948).
11 McCrum, p. 298.
12 See Ethel Wodehouse to PGW, 8 August 1942. ‘A film actor […] insisted on my sitting at his table […]. He had with him a Director, I think quite a famous one […]. Very interested in your work, wanted to get hold of you’ (Wodehouse Archive).
13 Included in a report about the wartime activities of the double agent Dusko Popov (‘Agent Tricycle’), KV 2/856 (PRO).
14 Sproat, p. 84.
15 Ibid.