Ever since Donald Trump was first elected in 2016, people have been talking about the “two Americas.” Namely, the working class, poorly educated, white, xenophobic America that voted for Trump and the middle- and upper-class, highly educated, “elitist,” multi-cultural America that voted for Hillary Clinton (and, later, Kamala Harris).
This perception of two Americas—and, indeed, of a “cold” Civil War that is currently being waged between them—is warranted and realistic. America is more polarized than it has been since the 1860s, and there is a very real possibility of the country tearing itself apart (not militarily, I think, but politically, in the same way the USSR erased itself in 1990).
However, I’m not sure we are in a battle between two Americas, per se, as in one between two worldviews. In one worldview, America is under threat of racial dilution, socialist revolution, and religious transgression, all of which will create an evil, perverse America, which its adherents would rather be dead than live in. In the other world view, America is under threat of nascent Fascism, corporatism, kleptocracy, and the climate apocalypse that will inevitably result from all these things.
As usual, the Germans have a much better word for this: Weltanschauung, a term that encapsulates the philosophical and cognitive underpinnings that define a social group or generation (or both). As an English major in the 1980s, I was obliged to read Eustace M. Tillyard’s classic The Elizabethan World Picture, which explores the conscious and subconscious belief system of Britons in the time of Shakespeare. More recently, I read Robert O’Niell’s memoir The Operator, which recounts his years as a Navy Seal fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. In this book, he describes the weltanschauung of the Afghani locals whom he encountered, some of whom—quite literally—believed in dragons.
I kept thinking of this concept of Weltanschauung as I read Peter Finn’s fine book, A Guest of the Reich: The Story of American Heiress Gertrude Legendre’s Dramatic Captivity and Escape from Nazi Germany. As the title suggests, it recounts the story of Gertrude Legendre, a rich lady who got herself a job with the OSS (the precursor to the CIA) during the later years of the Second World War. It was because of this job that she, in turn, found herself in Germany in the months immediately after D-Day. But it was purely due to her reckless adventurism—some would say hubris—that led to her getting caught behind enemy lines and taken prisoner by Nazis.
Yep, she ended up being, incredibly, the first American woman-in-uniform to be captured in battle by Nazi Germany. Naturally, Legendre was herself unaware of this dubious distinction at the time, and she probably wouldn’t have cared because she was, in Finn’s recount, a profoundly arrogant and self-absorbed person. She was also intelligent, resourceful, courageous, and shrewd.
And she liked to smoke. A lot. Indeed, one of the weirdly fascinating factoids that Finn reveals in this book is how much tobacco each high-value POW in Germany was allowed. (I won’t give the exact amount here, but suffice to say that is sounded like enough to kill a horse—and this was considered a minimum ration.)
Which brings me back to my original point about contrasting worldviews. The reason A Guest of the Reich is so compelling (and the reason it would make a really good movie) is that it displays so many vivid instances of worldviews colliding—not just between Legendre’s American worldview and that of her Fascist captors, but between her own upper-class society girl worldview and that of her later impoverished, ennobled POW worldview. In the course of the narrative, she goes from being a rich bon vivant who once, on a dare, left a cocktail party to go waterskiing in her party gown (she barely got her feet damp) to being a lice-ridden prisoner to whom a bath seemed like the most unfathomably luxury.
Needless to say, Legendre learns a lot about the world—and herself—during her prolonged, surreal captivity in Germany. Legendre is able to bluff and lie her way through the series of prisons she is shuttled to, beginning with a Gestapo facility where Legendre faced genuine, mortal danger. (If her interrogators had realized her true identity as an OSS officer, she would have faced torture and execution; luckily, the unflappable Legendre proves herself a master bullshit artist.)
Eventually, she finds herself billeted with a group of other VIP prisoners, including the sister of Charles De Gaulle. But the strangest part of the story comes near the end, when she is inserted as a “guest” into the luxurious household of a senior IG Farben executive named Hans Grieme. (Farben was the German mega-corporation that, among other things, created the nerve gas that was used to mass-murder people in concentration camps.) Over dinner with the exec and his wife, Legendre is subjected to their protestations of innocence in the matter of Nazi atrocities. Clearly, they had realized the inevitability of German defeat and were already practicing their post-war PR spin.
But Legendre doesn’t buy it.
Though she found him “intelligent, worldly, open-minded,” Gertie regarded his professed antifascism as a little too expedient. She was grateful for the hospitality of the Griemes, but the evidence of their proximity to the Nazis was everywhere, from his business position and well-appointed home to the Russian girl, a forced laborer, tending the house and garden.
“I thought to myself how easy it was for him to plead his case, in the shadow of doom for the structure he had somehow fitted into by reason of force or convenience,” she recalled. The Griemes’ wealthy friends, industrialists and bankers sheltering in the countryside as well, also voiced their hostility toward the regime—“no doubt, for my special benefit,” Gertie concluded.
Legendre’s repulsion at the Griemes’ attempt to exculpate themselves from the barbarities of the Nazi regime might have been precipitated, in part, because it echoed the more subtle anti-Semitism that she had witnessed through her life in the world of upper-class American WASP privilege. And while it is tempting to hope—retroactively, as it were—that Legendre might have been so transformed by her war experience that she might have devoted the rest of her life (and fortune) to charity and worthy causes, that was not to be. After a harrowing escape into neutral Switzerland, she was soon reunited with her husband and lived the rest of her days in a slightly-less brazen version of her pre-war existence, a whorl of travel, parties, and booze. An entire worldview is not easy to change, after all. But it’s hard not to admire Legendre’s fortitude, and also her growth, such as it was, into a more sympathetic and less naïve person.
We can only hope that the millionaires (make that billionaires) of our own generation have a similar revelation.
(Author’s Note: this post originally appeared on my old blog, Bakhtin’s Cigarettes.)
Ash Clifton, Writer 