Salinger Read online

  Vincent doesn’t want Kenneth, who has a heart condition, to go swimming, but he does, saying the ocean looks like it’s full of bowling balls. As Kenneth walks out of the ocean, a swell hits him, and he collapses. Vincent rushes him home and calls a doctor, but Kenneth dies.

  Survivor’s guilt. Many of the stories Salinger was writing in 1944 and ’45—“Last Day of the Last Furlough,” “A Boy in France,” “This Sandwich Has No Mayonnaise,” “The Stranger,” and “An Ocean Full of Bowling Balls”—feature members of the Caulfield family or their friends. Phoebe appears again in “Ocean.” Kenneth becomes Allie in Catcher. Vincent becomes D.B. All of these characters are vectors on a fictional grid of the Caulfield family, which then became the Glass family, alternative populations to counteract the horror show.

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  SHANE SALERNO: Salinger was honorably discharged on November 22, 1945, in Frankfurt but signed a civilian contract with the Defense Department as an intelligence agent stationed at Gunzenhausen. It took significant effort to obtain Salinger’s military records; for several years we were told they had been destroyed in a fire and then in a flood.

  FIRST LIEUTENANT A. RAYMOND BOUDREAU:

  To Whom it May Concern:

  Jerome D. Salinger has been an agent in the Counterintelligence corps since 1943, serving both in the Zone of the Interior, the United States, and overseas. As a member of the Fourth Infantry Division CIC Detachment, Salinger came to Normandy as part of the first waves of troops to invade France on June 6, 1944. Later he was transferred to CIC Detachment 970/63 commanded by Lt. Robert Williams under whose supervision he worked until the undersigned assumed command of the detachment in August 1945. Since that time he has performed his duties continuously under my personal direct supervision.

  The duties performed by Salinger have varied but always have required a high degree of skill, judgment and honesty. He has conducted investigations, both alone and in connections with others, detailing with de-Nazification, sabotage, espionage, security to American troops and installations as well as intelligence.

  At all times he has conducted himself and dispatched his tasks with a brand of performance that has reflected nothing but honor on himself and the Counterintelligence Corps. Both his character and living habits are exemplary, and the pleasantness of his personality has contributed substantially to an efficient, good relationship with all persons with whom he has come in contact.

  The writer has been at a loss to replace Salinger’s services and recommends him unqualifiedly as one who has contributed much in loyal and devoted services to the armed Forces of the Nation.

  EBERHARD ALSEN: After his honorable discharge, Salinger signed up for a new tour of duty in order to be part of the de-Nazification program.

  Salinger’s Enlisted Record and Report of Separation, Honorable Discharge.

  COUNTER INTELLIGENCE CORPS HISTORY AND MISSION IN WORLD WAR II: By 10 May 1945, the 12th Army Group Counter Intelligence Corps Detachment was activated by orders from Theater Headquarters, and the new phase of operations was launched. The personnel of this detachment were prepared for their assignment, both by experience and instruction.

  After the unconditional surrender of the enemy to the Allied Forces, greater emphasis was placed on the de-Nazification of Germany. Divisional areas were divided into sectors with a Counter Intelligence Corps team for each, and those party offices and buildings which were sealed during the advance were reopened and thoroughly examined. Informants in each area were developed and leads were secured which led to the arrest of many persons of high rank and position in the Nazi regime.

  Largely through the efforts of informants, many former Gestapo agents were apprehended, who otherwise might have escaped the notice of the Counter Intelligence Corps. In the crowded cities of Germany, it was almost impossible to ferret these people out without the aid of the native informant who worked undercover.

  In general, the mission of the Counter Intelligence Corps was to secure our forces from espionage, sabotage, and subversion and to destroy all enemy intelligence services.

  Generally, it had been found that of all the persons included in the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force directives as automatic arrestees, only the lower echelon remained in place, while the higher Nazi Party members moved on. Many of those remaining, often older men, appeared to be shoved into office with the expectation that they would be arrested instead of the more fanatical officials.

  The Counter Intelligence Corps in France and Germany did its job well. The security which the Corps afforded to the armed forces was one contributing factor toward the eventual victory of the Allies.

  ALEX KERSHAW: Salinger got to be a detective. A detective in uniform. His basic job was to chase down the bad guys, whether they be Nazis that were pretending to be civilians, collaborators, or black-market operators. He actually got to look into the dark heart of Nazi Germany and interrogate the people who committed the greatest crimes in human history. And bring them to justice.

  EBERHARD ALSEN: There has been a rumor for many years that one of the people Salinger interviewed and arrested was a woman by the name of Sylvia.

  Sylvia’s father was Ernst Friedrich Welter. He was born in Paris on March 31, 1890. He had a dual citizenship, French and German, and was a prosperous merchant. Sylvia’s mother, born on November 18, 1890, was Luise Berta Depireux. Despite her French surname, she was a German citizen. Sylvia was born in Frankfurt on April 19, 1919, and when her parents registered her birth, the Frankfurt Einwohnermeldeamt (the resident registration office) listed her as a citizen of Germany.

  Two months after her birth, the Welter family moved to Lugano in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland. Sylvia’s sister, Alice, was born there in 1921. Later that year the family moved back to Germany. They first lived in the Alpine resort of Garmisch and later moved to Nuremberg, where Sylvia received her secondary education. After graduating in 1938, Sylvia briefly attended several European universities, in Erlangen, Munich, Prague, and Königsberg, before enrolling in medical school at the University of Innsbruck in Austria on November 24, 1941. She received her doctorate in medicine in February 1945. On March 10, 1945, she moved to Weissenburg, Bavaria. On her Weissenburg resident registration form, her nationality is listed as “D.R.,” which stands for “Deutsches Reich” (German Empire). Her address in Weissenburg was an apartment in the Kehler Weg 10a (now Schillerstrasse 1). She was employed as an intern at the Weissenburg city hospital from March 12 to June 30, 1945. That hospital was on the Krankenhausstrasse 2, now Dr. Dörfler Strasse 2.

  Salinger came to Weissenburg on May 13, 1945, when the CIC established a field office there. It was located in a mansion at Nürnbergerstrasse. Salinger and his CIC buddies were quartered in a house on what is now Dr. Dörfler Strasse. In a letter written on May 13, 1945, Salinger says that he doesn’t know how long he’ll have to stay with his buddies and that he can’t wait to get a room of his own.

  Salinger first met Sylvia near the end of May 1945, after he met her sister, Alice, who worked at the Nuremberg military hospital on Rothenburger Strasse. Salinger gave Alice a ride to Weissenburg to visit her mother and her sister, who lived right around the corner from Salinger’s quarters. That’s how Salinger met Sylvia.

  In a letter to Elizabeth Murray in late September 1945, he says that he’s going to stay in Germany for another year because he’s about to get married to Sylvia. In a letter to a friend, he calls Sylvia a “French girl. Very fine, very sensitive.”

  MARGARET SALINGER: My Aunt [Doris] described Sylvia to me as a tall, thin woman with dark hair, pale skin, and blood-red lips and nails. She had a sharp, incisive way of speaking and was some sort of a doctor. My aunt said, “She was very German.”

  One of many never-before-seen photographs of Sylvia and J. D. Salinger on their wedding day, October 18, 1945.

  SHANE SALERNO: We hired the literary scholar, Salinger expert, and German native Eberhard Alsen to travel to Germany to conduct an extensive
investigation into Salinger’s year in the European Theater and postwar experience in Germany.

  EBERHARD ALSEN: In the May 1945 operations report of the 4th Infantry Division, there is a directive from its commander, General Harold W. Blakely, saying that violations of the nonfraternization law would be severely punished. American soldiers caught with German women could be jailed for six months and lose two-thirds of their pay. Salinger’s reluctance to tell his friends and family in the United States that his bride was a native of Germany is understandable. Not just because of the nonfraternization law, but because the Nuremberg war crimes trials were still going on, and the horrific images of the concentration camps were fresh in everyone’s mind.

  Salinger and Sylvia were married in the small town of Pappenheim, ten miles south of Weissenburg, on October 18, 1945. Salinger gave his address as Dr. Dörfler Strasse 20 in Weissenburg and Sylvia’s as Friedrich Strasse 57 in Nuremberg (her parents’ house). The witnesses were two CIC buddies, Paul Fitzgerald and John Prinz. The Standesamt (birth and marriage registry) of Pappenheim listed Sylvia’s nationality as French. Utilizing his counterintelligence skills, Salinger forged French identification papers for Sylvia in order to circumvent the nonfraternization law.

  While Salinger worked for the CIC as a special agent—from November 22, 1945, to April 30, 1946—his job was to hunt down Nazis who were in hiding. During much of that time, he and Sylvia lived in Gunzenhausen, ten miles northeast of Weissenburg, in a mansion called the Villa Schmidt. The address was Wiesen Strasse 12 (now Rot-Kreuz Strasse 12). They employed a cook and a woman to do their laundry.

  J. D. and Sylvia Salinger’s wedding day, October 18, 1945, Weissenburg, Germany; center: Sylvia; to her left, Salinger, with his arm around his best man, Paul Fitzgerald.

  J. D. and Sylvia Salinger, October 1945.

  Sometime in February 1946, Salinger and Sylvia moved into two rooms at the back of her parents’ large apartment on Friedrich Strasse in Nuremberg. When Sylvia’s cousin, Bernhard Horn, visited her in March, her sister, Alice, warned him that the young couple had been fighting a lot.

  According to the Berlin Bundesarchiv, Sylvia was not a member of the Nazi Party, the Reichsärztekammer, the Nazi-controlled National Physicians Chamber, or even the Bund Deutscher Mädels, the Nazi-controlled Federation of German Girls, to which most German girls belonged.

  However, there are a number of strange facts about Sylvia’s life that suggest she might have been a Gestapo informant. First, when she was in Switzerland in 1939, she lost her passport and had the German consulate in Geneva issue her a new one. This information comes from the Gestapo files in the Nuremberg city archive. Why would the Gestapo have a file on a twenty-year-old student?

  J. D. and Sylvia Salinger on their wedding day, October 18, 1945, with her sister and her parents.

  Second, between 1939 and 1942, Sylvia was enrolled at six different universities: Erlangen, Munich, Prague, Königsberg, Freiburg, and Innsbruck. Before World War II, most German students typically switched universities at least once in their career, but it is highly unusual—really unheard of—for anyone to attend six different ones. This is consistent with Gestapo practices of hiring individuals (particularly attractive young women) who were not “officially” aligned with the party to spy on fellow students and possibly even faculty members. The Gestapo was not a well-staffed organization and relied heavily on paid informants. For instance, the six Gestapo officers of the Nuremberg office were responsible for all of northern Bavaria and employed between eighty and one hundred informants. It is possible that the Gestapo used Sylvia as an informant to gather material on the anti-Nazi student movement. Between 1942 and 1943 the Gestapo arrested and executed many of the leaders of this movement. Among them were Hans and Sophie Scholl, who headed the Munich student resistance group called the White Rose.

  J. D. and Sylvia Salinger, with her family, after the wedding.

  Salinger has more to say about Sylvia in a letter to Elizabeth Murray that he wrote on December 30, 1945. The dateline of this letter is the small town of Gunzenhausen, forty miles southwest of Nuremberg, where he and Sylvia were living by that time. They were living in the Villa Schmidt—which had been requisitioned by the CIC—had purchased a new automobile, a Škoda; and had adopted a black schnauzer named “Benny,” who rides “on the running board, pointing out Nazis for me to arrest.” Salinger signed a six-month civilian contract with the War Department, and he expects to go to America after this contract ended.

  Salinger and his mother-in-law and his beloved schnauzer, Benny (the black dog).

  Later in the letter, he says that he and Sylvia are very happy, although his comments about her are barbed. He says that at Christmastime they had a big turkey, courtesy of the U.S. Army, and on the stroke of midnight they threw rotten eggs at each other. This, he jokes, is a custom of the people in the area.

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  SHANE SALERNO: His de-Nazification job complete, Salinger was in love with a German woman who was the punctuation to a bout of post-traumatic stress. He brought all this baggage home to New York and his family.

  EBERHARD ALSEN: I looked at the [Immigration and Naturalization Service] passenger arrival forms for American ships that arrived in America in May and June 1946. The Salingers arrived in New York City on May 10, 1946, on board the ship Ethan Allen, which was sailing under the War Shipping Administration. The U.S. Army had leased a large number of vessels to transport GIs back to the United States. Sylvia Salinger gave her middle name as Louise, her age as twenty-seven years, and her nationality as French but her birthplace as Frankfurt am Main in Germany. One question on the form asked for the name of a friend or relative who would vouch for her while she was in the United States. Sylvia wrote, “Husband, J. D. Salinger, 1133 Park Avenue, New York.” Salinger and Sylvia decided to withold the information that Sylvia was a doctor. Under profession, she wrote “housewife.”

  Passenger manifest of Sylvia Salinger’s arrival in New York Harbor.

  J. D. SALINGER, excerpt from letter to Paul Fitzgerald, May 24, 1946:

  The trip over was hell, in a small way. Liberty Ship. Twelve passengers. No ballast in the hold. Rough weather all the way. Sylvia was sick the whole way, but Benny and I were old salts. My mother, father and sister were all at the docks.

  EBERHARD ALSEN: On May 10, Sylvia and her husband took up residence in the home of Salinger’s parents at 1133 Park Avenue. Sylvia didn’t get along with his family. Salinger’s daughter, Margaret, claims that Sylvia hated Jews and Salinger hated Germans.

  Margaret Salinger reports that her father’s family didn’t make Sylvia feel welcome when he brought her home to New York. His parents didn’t like Sylvia, even though she was apparently a brilliant person, “some sort of doctor.” Salinger’s sister, Doris, later described Sylvia as looking like Morticia from the TV show The Addams Family. Apparently, Sylvia had an abrasive personality to go along with her witchlike appearance. To explain why Salinger had married an anti-Semite in the first place, Margaret quotes her mother, Claire, as saying that Sylvia had “bewitched” him.

  ALEX KERSHAW: After the war, Salinger suffered from a classic veteran’s syndrome: you come back from a war to the country that you saw so many people give their lives to protect, and all around you people don’t have a clue what you did when you were over there.

  DEBORAH DASH MOORE: Salinger would’ve come out of the war with nightmares that would not go away and which he would have been told insistently by society to put behind him. That was the message Americans gave to returning soldiers: “All right, you did a great job. Now put the war behind you and move on.” That would’ve been a very difficult thing to do. Even his family wouldn’t necessarily have understood.

  STAFF SERGEANT DAVID RODERICK: You think about it daily. You have flashbacks. There was the daily expectation—probability—that you weren’t going to make it because you’d be killed or wounded. It kind of wears on you after a period of time, makes it possible for people to snap
after a while. There are times now when I’m sitting in my living room and have artillery land in my yard or in my living room. There’s a flash, boom, you know it’s artillery, and then it passes. I had a lot of times when I was under artillery fire. So you get those kinds of flashbacks. I’ve never told my wife that. I’ve never talked to other veterans about that, so I don’t know if they’re having those kinds of flashbacks or not. Salinger saw the horror I did. I imagine he had the same nightmares.

  JOHN C. UNRUE: Sylvia was unhappy in New York. Salinger was unhappy, too, apparently. It was not a good marriage.

  EBERHARD ALSEN: Sylvia later told her school friend Hildegard Meyer that her in-laws were very unkind to her and that she never cried as much in her whole life as during her brief stay in America. She was therefore appalled when, one morning, she found an airline ticket to Germany on her breakfast plate. She returned to Europe sometime in June 1946, only a few weeks after she arrived in New York. Salinger wrote a letter to Elizabeth Murray from Daytona Beach, Florida, on June 13, 1946. He reports that he and Sylvia have separated and that his marriage was a failure, or rather the participants were, because they caused each other “the most violent kind of unhappiness.”

  SHANE SALERNO: Previous biographers have stated that it was Sylvia who filed for divorce, or that she simply left New York to return to Europe. However, we obtained in Germany the official annulment decree, which establishes that Salinger, who hired his father’s attorney, Martin A. Fromer, was the plaintiff. The decree states, “Whereas the above lawsuit was initiated by the plaintiff against the defendant in order to obtain an annulment of the marriage between the parties, the reasons being bad intentions and false representation on the part of the defendant.” A plausible interpretation of the annulment decree confirms what Miriam and Doris Salinger believed, namely, that Sylvia had some involvement with the Gestapo, that Salinger discovered this, and that this was the primary reason he sought to annul the marriage.