Kathrine Taylor
Encyclopedia
Kathrine Kressmann Taylor or Kressmann Taylor (b. 1903 in Portland, Oregon – July 1996) was an American author, known mostly for her Address Unknown (1938), a novel written as a series of letters between a Jewish art dealer, living in San Francisco, and his business partner, who had returned to Germany in 1932. It is credited with exposing, early on, the dangers of Nazism to the American public.

Life

Kathrine Kressmann moved to San Francisco after graduating from the University of Oregon
University of Oregon
-Colleges and schools:The University of Oregon is organized into eight schools and colleges—six professional schools and colleges, an Arts and Sciences College and an Honors College.- School of Architecture and Allied Arts :...

 in 1924 and worked as an advertising copywriter. In 1928, Kressmann married Elliott Taylor, who owned an advertising agency. Ten years later, the couple moved to New York, where Story magazine published Address Unknown. The editor Whit Burnett
Whit Burnett
Whit Burnett was a writer and writing teacher who founded and edited the literary magazine Story. In the 1940s, Story was an important magazine in that it published the first or early works of many writers who went on to become major authors...

 and Elliot deemed the story "too strong to appear under the name of a woman," and assigned Kressmann the masculine pseudonym
Pseudonym
A pseudonym is a name that a person assumes for a particular purpose and that differs from his or her original orthonym...

 of Kressmann Taylor, which she used professionally for the rest of her life. Reader's Digest
Reader's Digest
Reader's Digest is a general interest family magazine, published ten times annually. Formerly based in Chappaqua, New York, its headquarters is now in New York City. It was founded in 1922, by DeWitt Wallace and Lila Bell Wallace...

 soon reprinted the novel, and Simon & Schuster
Simon & Schuster
Simon & Schuster, Inc., a division of CBS Corporation, is a publisher founded in New York City in 1924 by Richard L. Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster. It is one of the four largest English-language publishers, alongside Random House, Penguin and HarperCollins...

 published it as a book in 1939, selling 50,000 copies. Foreign publications followed quickly, including a Dutch translation, later confiscated by Nazis, and a German one, published in Moscow. The book was banned in Germany.

An indictment of Nazism was also the theme of K. Taylor's next book, Until That Day, published in 1942. In 1944, Columbia Pictures
Columbia Pictures
Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. is an American film production and distribution company. Columbia Pictures now forms part of the Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group, owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment, a subsidiary of the Japanese conglomerate Sony. It is one of the leading film companies...

 turned Address Unknown into a movie
Address Unknown (1944 film)
Address Unknown is a drama film directed by William Cameron Menzies based on Kathrine Taylor's novel Address Unknown . The film tells the story of two families caught up in the rise of Nazism in Germany prior to the start of World War II....

. The film director and production designer was William C. Menzies
William Cameron Menzies
William Cameron Menzies was an Academy Award-winning American film production designer and art director who also worked as a director, producer, and screenwriter during a career spanning five decades...

 (Gone with the Wind
Gone with the Wind (film)
Gone with the Wind is a 1939 American historical epic film adapted from Margaret Mitchell's Pulitzer-winning 1936 novel of the same name. It was produced by David O. Selznick and directed by Victor Fleming from a screenplay by Sidney Howard...

), and Paul Lukas
Paul Lukas
Paul Lukas was an Austrian-Hungarian-born actor.-Biography:Born Pál Lukács in Budapest, he arrived in Hollywood in 1927 after a successful stage and film career in Hungary, Germany and Austria where he worked with Max Reinhardt. He made his stage debut in Budapest in 1916 and his film debut in 1917...

 starred as Martin. The screenplay, written by Herbert Dalmas, was credited also to Kressmann Taylor. In Russian, there was another screenplay by David Greener, but it was never filmed.

From 1947, Kathrine taught humanities
Humanities
The humanities are academic disciplines that study the human condition, using methods that are primarily analytical, critical, or speculative, as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural sciences....

, journalism
Journalism
Journalism is the practice of investigation and reporting of events, issues and trends to a broad audience in a timely fashion. Though there are many variations of journalism, the ideal is to inform the intended audience. Along with covering organizations and institutions such as government and...

 and creative writing
Creative writing
Creative writing is considered to be any writing, fiction, poetry, or non-fiction, that goes outside the bounds of normal professional, journalistic, academic, and technical forms of literature. Works which fall into this category include novels, epics, short stories, and poems...

 at Gettysburg College
Gettysburg College
Gettysburg College is a private four-year liberal arts college founded in 1832, in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, United States, adjacent to the famous battlefield. Its athletic teams are nicknamed the Bullets. Gettysburg College has about 2,700 students, with roughly equal numbers of men and women...

, in Pennsylvania, and, when Elliot Taylor died in 1953, lived as a widow. Retiring in 1966, she moved to Florence
Florence
Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....

, Italy and wrote Diary of Florence in Flood, inspired by the great flood of the Arno
Arno
The Arno is a river in the Tuscany region of Italy. It is the most important river of central Italy after the Tiber.- Source and route :The river originates on Mount Falterona in the Casentino area of the Apennines, and initially takes a southward curve...

 river in November of that year. In 1967, Kathrine married the American sculptor John Rood
John Rood
John C. Rood was Acting Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security. He was confirmed by the United States Senate on September 13, 2006 as Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Nonproliferation....

. Thereafter, they lived half a year in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and half in Val de Pesa, near Florence. Mrs. Rood continued this style of living after her second husband’s death in 1974.

In 1995, when Kathrine was 91, Story Press reissued Address Unknown to mark the 50th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps. The novel was subsequently translated into 20 languages, with the French version selling 600,000 copies. The book finally appeared in Germany in 2001, and was reissued in Britain in 2002. In Israel, the Hebrew edition was a best-seller and was adapted for the stage. There has already been over 100 performances of the stage show, and it was filmed for TV and broadcast on the occasion of Holocaust Memorial Day
Yom HaShoah
Yom HaZikaron laShoah ve-laG'vurah , known colloquially in Israel and abroad as Yom HaShoah and in English as Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Holocaust Day, is observed as Israel's day of commemoration for the approximately six million Jews and five million others who perished in the...

, January 27.

Rediscovered after Address Unknowns reissue, K. Taylor spent a happy final year signing copies and giving interviews until her death at age 93.

Address Unknown (1938)

Martin, a gentile, returns with his family to Germany, exhilarated by the advances in the old country since the humiliation of the Great War. His business partner, Max, a Jew, remains in the States to keep the business going. The story is told entirely in letters between them, from 1932 to 1934, the technique used in 84 Charing Cross Road
84 Charing Cross Road
84, Charing Cross Road is a 1970 book by Helene Hanff, later made into a stage play, television play and film, about the twenty-year correspondence between her and Frank Doel, chief buyer of Marks & Co, antiquarian booksellers located at the eponymous address in London, England.Hanff, in search of...

.

Martin writes about the "wonderful" Third Reich and a man named "Hitler." At first Max is covetous: "How I envy you! ... You go to a democratic Germany, a land with a deep culture and the beginnings of a fine political freedom." Max soon however has misgivings about his friend’s new enthusiasms, having heard from eyewitnesses who had gotten out of Berlin that Jews were being beaten and their businesses boycotted. Martin responds, telling Max that, while they may be good friends, everybody knows that Jews have been the universal scapegoats, and "a few must suffer for the millions to be saved."

"This Jew trouble is only an incident," Martin writes. "Something bigger is happening." Nonetheless, he asks Max to stop writing to him. If a letter were intercepted, he (Martin) would lose his official position and he and his family would be endangered.

Max continues to write regardless when his own sister, Griselle, an actress in Berlin, goes missing. He becomes frantic to learn her fate. Martin responds on bank stationery (less likely to be inspected) and tells Max his sister is dead. He admits that he turned Griselle away when she came to him, her brother’s dearest friend, for sanctuary. (It is revealed earlier in the book that Martin and Griselle had had an affair before the events of the book take place.)

After a gap of about a month, Max starts writing to Martin at home, carrying only what looks like business and remarks about the weather, but writing as though they have a hidden encoded meaning, with strange references to exact dimensions of pictures and so on. The letters refer to "our grandmother" and imply that Martin is also Jewish. The letters from Munich to San Francisco get shorter and more panicky, begging Max to stop: "My God, Max, do you know what you do? ... These letters you have sent ... are not delivered, but they bring me in and ... demand I give them the code ... I beg you, Max, no more, no more! Stop while I can be saved."

Max however continues, "Prepare these for distribution by March 24th: Rubens 12 by 77, blue; Giotto 1 by 317, green and white; Poussin 20 by 90, red and white." The letter is returned to Max, stamped: Adressat unbekannt. Addressee Unknown. (The title of the book is actually a mistranslation of Adressat unbekannt: The correct translation of "Adressat" is "addressee," not "address"; which is much more in keeping with the plot of the story.)

The book’s afterword, lovingly written by Taylor’s son, reveals that the idea for the story came from a small news article: American students in Germany wrote home with the truth about the Nazi atrocities, a truth most Americans, including Charles Lindbergh, would not accept. Fraternity brothers thought it would be funny to send them letters making fun of Hitler, and the visiting students wrote back, "Stop it. We’re in danger. These people don’t fool around. You could murder [someone] by writing letters to him." Thus emerged the idea of "letter as weapon" or "murder by mail."

Address Unknown was performed as a stage play in France, 2001, in Israel from 2002 (where it still runs) and at the Promenade Theater in New York in 2004. It has also been performed in Germany, Italy, Turkey, Argentina, South Africa and in various other US cities. Address Unknown (Cimzett Ismeretlen) premiered on the stage of Spinoza Haz in Budapest, Hungary on September 6, 2008 and was performed in the Tron Theatre Glasgow as part of the Mayfesto season from 15 to 22 May 2010. It was performed
at the Koninklijke Schouwburg in the Hague in the Netherlands in May 2011.

An adaptation for BBC Radio 4
BBC Radio 4
BBC Radio 4 is a British domestic radio station, operated and owned by the BBC, that broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes, including news, drama, comedy, science and history. It replaced the BBC Home Service in 1967. The station controller is currently Gwyneth Williams, and the...

 was broadcast in June 2008 as an Afternoon Play
Afternoon Play
The Afternoon Play is a long-running drama programming strand, broadcast every weekday at 2.15pm on BBC Radio 4. Each play lasts for 45 minutes, and roughly 190 new Afternoon Plays are broadcast each year....

. It starred Henry Goodman
Henry Goodman
Henry Goodman is a British theatre actor. He trained at RADA in London alongside Jonathan Pryce.In 1988, he played George Green's brother-in-law Cyril in London's Burning. He played character roles in episodes of the popular UK police drama The Bill...

 as Max and Patrick Malahide
Patrick Malahide
Patrick Malahide is a British actor, who has played many major film and television roles.-Personal life:Malahide, real name Patrick Gerald Duggan, was born in Reading, Berkshire, the son of Irish immigrants, a cook mother and a school secretary father...

 as Martin and was adapted and directed by Tim Dee.

Until that day (1942)

The novel recounts the story of Karl Hoffmann, a young German Christian and son of a Lutheran pastor
Pastor
The word pastor usually refers to an ordained leader of a Christian congregation. When used as an ecclesiastical styling or title, this role may be abbreviated to "Pr." or often "Ps"....

. Hoffman starts his theology studies in Berlin in the late twenties. Germany is still in a depression following its defeat in World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

, and this situation is the soil from which Nazism's influence grows. Hitler comes to power and starts persecutions against the Church, which refuses to preach the Nazi doctrine. Karl’s father resists the authorities, and this resistance becomes the cause of his death. Karl, in his turn, continues his father’s struggle and takes a stand against the Nazi takeover of the Church. He decides to become a pastor himself, but his ordination
Ordination
In general religious use, ordination is the process by which individuals are consecrated, that is, set apart as clergy to perform various religious rites and ceremonies. The process and ceremonies of ordination itself varies by religion and denomination. One who is in preparation for, or who is...

 is denied. His life becomes endangered, and he escapes to the United States.

The novel, titled Day of No Return in its recent reprints, demonstrates the slow turn of both the German elite and ordinary people to reconcile with the new power structure and then to adopt it. It further describes vividly how people compromise, day after day, in one situation after another and how the secret police gradually infiltrate all levels of society. The climate of terror which is imposed on citizens and the deportations to the concentration camps are described as well.

The novel is also based on the life of a real person, Leopold Bernhard. Kathrine Taylor met him through the mediation of the FBI, which had investigated the young German after his defection to the United States.

Selected works

Taylor's published writings encompass 21 works in 107 publications in 18 languages and 2,220 library holdings .

English

Works by Kathrine Kressmann Taylor.
Address Unknown. HarperCollins, 2002. ISBN 0-7322-7616-0
Address Unknown. Washington Square Press, 2001. ISBN 0-7434-1271-0
Address Unknown. Story Press, 1995. ISBN 1-884910-17-3
Diary of Florence in Flood. Simon & Schuster, 1967
Florence: Ordeal by Water. H. Hamilton, London, 1967. ISBN 0-241-91438-8
Day of No Return. Xlibris, 2003. ISBN 1-4134-1181-9
Until That Day. Duell, Sloan & Pierce, 1945
Until That Day. Simon & Schuster, 1942

German

Kressmann Taylor, Adressat unbekannt. Roman. Hoffmann und Campe, Hamburg, 2000. ISBN 3-455-07674-2
Kressmann Taylor, Bis zu jenem Tag. Roman. Hoffmann und Campe, Hamburg, 2003. ISBN 3-455-07675-0

French

Kressmann Taylor, Inconnu à cette adresse. Éditions Autrement, 1999
Kressmann Taylor, Ainsi mentent les hommes. Recits.
Kressmann Taylor, Jour sans retour. Éditions Autrement, 2001

Hebrew

Kressman Taylor, Ma'an Lo Yadua. Zmora Bitan Publishers, Israel, 2001, trans. by Asher Tarmon. In 2002 the Hebrew text was adapted for the stage by Avi Malka. The Kibbutz Theatre Company produced the play and actors. By the summer of 2007, the play had been performed in Israel 150 times and it was filmed by Israel Public TV Channel 1 for screening on Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2004.

External links


Movie - Columbia Pictures, 1944


Theatrical realization at the Promenade Theater, New York, 2004

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