Athene Palace

INTRODUCTION

W

hen Countess Waldeck began her Bucharest sojourn on June 14, 1940, the day the German army entered Paris, Romania was poised at the start of the most humiliating and troublous eight-month period in that country’s tumultuous and frequently tragic history. When she left late in January, 1941, Romania had been shorn of Bessarabia, northern Bucovina and Hertza by the Soviet Union, of northwestern Transylvania by Hungary and of the southern Dobrogea by Bulgaria. Thus, in less than a year Romania was deprived of a third of her area, nearly 100,000 square kilometers, and over six million of her population – all lost without a shot fired. Only Poland had suffered more by being divided between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and thus wiped completely off the map of Europe. But the Polish army had fought gallantly in unequal battle against the two largest land armies of Europe, had retreated with the honor of the Polish nation across the frontier into Romania, and would fight on in the war as the Free Polish Forces and the Home Army. Romania, in contrast, was subsequently half-raped by a German military presence and half-seduced by gossamer promises of restitution into an alliance with Germany against Romania’s traditional western allies. Athene Palace is the colorful, sometimes impressionistic but always interesting and insightful description of that tragic devolution by an intelligent and highly literate observer. Her room on the first floor of the Athenée Palace was a front row seat for a crucial sequence in Romanian, Balkan and European history.

Countess Waldeck was born Rosa Goldschmidt on August 24, 1898, the daughter of a well-to-do German-Jewish banker in Mannheim, Baden, Germany.¹ Her only sibling was a sister, Ella, five years her junior. She recalled a somewhat confused childhood attending the local grammar school and humanistic secondary school. Visits to art museums and the theater played an important role in her education, but she felt generally shut out from the self-confident, bourgeois world which was pre-war imperial Germany. Nor was her social acceptability increased at age eight by providing a schoolmate with a letter and drawings illustrating the facts of life which, when discovered, almost got her expelled. Thus, she made an early start in the eroticism which was never far below the surface in both her writings, certainly including Athene Palace, and her life. The second such adventure focused on Michael, a schoolmaster, with whom she had a clandestine but unconsummated love affair of some seven years; this she remembered as the longest love of her life and the first of what would be a pattern of love affairs with older men.

The first World War did not bring immediate changes to her life, shielded as she was by her family’s wealth and position. In the end, however, she grew to loath the war, the air raids which terrorized her mother and the deprivations which reduced her family to the illegal hoarding typical of most Germans in this period. Her lover, Michael, was exempted from military service by lung trouble, but at age eighteen she had more friends in the Somme and Vosges cemeteries than she had alive with her in school. In 1917, she graduated, finally able to pass the mathematics in which she had required constant tutoring, but getting a prize for a composition on Schiller.

In the autumn of 1917 she left home for Munich where she vaguely studied art history by attending Woelflin’s lectures and Fritz Strich’s lectures on the German romantics. Her earlier difficulties with mathematics resurfaced in the form of overdrawn checks; her enthusiasm for the theater and older men continued unabated. Her new interests included the Bohemian students in Schwabing and the intellectual socialists and revolutionaries coming to the fore in the waning days of the Kaiser. By the early spring of 1919 and the carnival season, the charms of revolution and the new Germany had worn thin, and she departed Munich in March with an unearned reputation as a Barricade-Woman, which reputation her father felt did his bank little good. She left with few regrets or enduring friendships and seldom returned to Munich thereafter.

With a considerably different attitude and now focused ambition, Goldschmidt took up residence in Heidelberg and there enrolled in a doctoral program in sociology, determined to get her degree by July 24, 1920, at the end of her sixth term. This was Heidelberg University in its great days. The spirits of Max Weber and his brother Alfred in sociology, Karl Jaspers in philosophy, Friedrich Gundolf in literary history could be felt throughout the university, and she thrived in the humanistic atmosphere. She paused in her drive towards a degree only long enough to present a paper on Oswald Spengler’s newly published Decline of the West, one of the first such papers on a book which would become a benchmark in intellectual life between the wars. In April, 1920, she submitted her dissertation on the necessary conditions for the founding of a minority theater to Albert Weber, took her oral exams on July 22nd and emerged with her doctorate summa cum laude, the only one given that term and a rare honor any term at Heidelberg, even rarer for a woman not yet twenty-two.

She experimented with an academic career for a few months under Alfred Weber at the university, but early in 1921 she took a training position with the Berlin bank of Carsch, Simion, & Co. Berlin in the 1920s was not only the capital of Germany but one of the intellectual capitals of the world. Goldschmidt threw herself with enthusiasm into the social life of the city but was considerably more reserved about a banking career which she soon decided was much less interesting. It was also less interesting than Dr. Ernest Graefenberg, a prominent Berlin gynecologist, with whom she fell in love and married. In keeping with her predilection for older men, he was some seventeen years her senior. He kept a clinic cum apartment on the Kurfuerstendamm into which she moved determined to give the marriage three years to prove itself. As she recounts the story, Dr. Graefenberg was too involved with the commitments of his practice to indulge her love of society, and she was uncomfortable at the proximity of his clinic to their living space. She returned to complete her apprenticeship at the bank. That completed, she transferred to an industrial firm and promptly began an affair with the chief of the company. In 1925, she was divorced.

Most of the next four years were spent outside Germany, initially in Paris, and traveling. Her early months in Paris were spent enjoying the society, especially the company of other exiles like Kerensky, reading Bainville’s Histoire de France, and predictably having an affair, this time with a Frenchman. She worked briefly for the Paris correspondent of a German Catholic newspaper syndicate, thus initiating the career in journalism which would occupy her intermittently for the next thirty years. Soon, however, she founded the Paris Press Agency, in partnership with a Viennese journalist. In the spring of 1926, her beloved father died after a protracted illness. Now for the first time in her life she had to give serious thought to money management as her banker father had always generously supplemented her income. A few weeks after her return from the funeral, she went to French Morocco where the Riff Kabyles war was then ending and an old friend had just been appointed Secretary-General of the Protectorate. After seeing Rabat, Marrakesh, and Casablanca, she returned to Berlin and began an affair with an Italian nobleman, observing that to me, fidelity was at that time a matter of geography, and her French lover was safely back in Paris. She appears in this period to have traveled frequently back and forth between Paris and Berlin, frequenting salon society in both cities and widening her contacts among the wealthy, the illustrious and the powerful.

As early as 1925 she met Dr. Franz Ullstein, the third of five brothers who made up the house of Ullstein, a major Berlin publishing consortium which controlled at that time a vast array of newspapers, magazines, and books. Franz Ullstein’s abilities had made him the head of the house. Fascinated by Rosie Graefenberg, in 1927 he hired her to report on the League of Nations conference in Geneva. True to her traditions, she promptly began an affair with a German diplomat who is only identified by the dubious name Kobra in her autobiography. Whatever competition Kobra may have represented for her energies, her work for the house of Ullstein was sufficiently approved of that in 1928 she was sent to provide a woman’s perspective on the Soviet Union. Her four-month route of march took her to Moscow, Leningrad, Nijni-Novgorod, Saratov, Tiflis, Baku, Armenia, Kiev, Kharkov, and back to Moscow. She left the USSR no friend of communism but a determined defender of western liberalism, a political position she maintained throughout her life. Her reporting had been featured on the front page of the Ullstein papers and throughout their empire of magazines, and she could now look confidently forward to a future as a successful journalist.

The immediate future, two months later, meant a trip to French West Africa, starting in Dakar and touring the interior by motor car deep into the bush to Gaoua, Ouagadougou, Bobo­Dioulassor, and Segou, fending off at every stop the unwanted attention and longing looks of unmarried or unaccompanied French colonial administrators. Shortly after her return to Berlin the by-then widower Dr. Franz Ullstein proposed marriage. At the time, Rosie Graefenberg was about 31 years old, and, in keeping with her custom, Dr. Ullstein was just over twice her age at 63. If her first marriage had been a mistake, her second was a disaster. Predictably, the four other Ullstein brothers and their families, not to mention the two children by his first marriage, regarded the new Frau Doktor Ullstein as an adventuress and a gold digger. Her mother who was twelve years younger than Dr. Ullstein disapproved of the marriage, remarking that he was even too old for her. The prospects for the marriage were probably not noticeably improved by Rosie’s determination to keep Kobra as her lover, a fact well-known in the Ullstein clan. The prospects were certainly not improved when Franz Ullstein appeared the first day back from their Paris honeymoon with his face paralyzed which was immediately ascribed to a stroke induced in the hapless, elderly gentleman by his considerably younger wife.

When the Ullstein brothers were unable to quietly persuade the couple to get a divorce, they pooled their efforts with some of their editors and a Frenchman, whom Rosie identifies as a notorious blackmailer, and set loose a rumor campaign to the effect that she was an espionage agent. The details of the complicated campaign and the ensuing litigation consume the last hundred pages of her autobiography. At various points, it was alleged she was spying for Germany against France, for France against Germany, for France against Soviet Russia, or for Soviet Russia against France. In short order, the matter was leaked to the Ullstein press and beyond and was only resolved in a complicated libel suit which was finally heard at Moabit courthouse in Berlin in March, 1931. At the end of this protracted and expensive litigation, Rosie’s innocence of any espionage was established, but in the meanwhile her marriage to Franz Ullstein had ended in divorce the previous December. The libel proceedings resulted in an apology to Rosie; the divorce from Ullstein, however, in the words of her lawyer, insured her security for the rest of her life.

Shortly after the various legal proceedings were settled, apparently sometime in 1931, Rosie seems to have made her first visit to the United States, for she produced a scathing criticism of the October 17, 1931, issue of the Saturday Evening Post and specifically an article therein, entitled As Noble Lenders, by Garet Garrett. Writing as Dr. Rosie Graefenberg and identified as "a contributor to the Tage-Buch, Berlin radical weekly," a publication which had supported her and Dr. Ullstein in the recent unpleasantness over espionage, she responded with a letter to the editors of Living Age where it was published in a section called As Others See Us.² The only piece in the Saturday Evening Post of which she approved was a story by Sinclair Lewis, Dollar Chasers, described as a witty satire on the provincial Babbitts who bow down to every false Messiah from Europe, a category that she apparently believed made up a majority of the readership of the Saturday Evening Post. She objected to the political articles illustrated with photographs and the short stories illustrated with drawings that we should consider cheap. Her major venom is reserved for the Garrett article and the associated editorial, Wilson Was Wrong. Both pieces are critical of the United States for lending Europe money and otherwise getting involved in European affairs, an isolationist sentiment she dismisses as a cry from the heart of the American bourgeois. Interestingly she notes, we are always inclined to cherish false ideas and to blame everything on the French, a use of the second person plural which suggests that she had already decided to immigrate and remain in the United States. Nevertheless, she returned occasionally for visits to Germany during the 1930s; she was in Berlin, for example, in March, 1936, when the German army marched into the Rhineland, and during the following winter.³

In 1934, she published Prelude to the Past: The Autobiography of a Woman, identifying herself on the title page only by the initials R.G. The work provides a colorful, frequently amorous and witty narrative of her youth, education, career and marriages through the Ullstein affair and her departure for the United States. The book was generally received as the frank and sophisticated story its author intended. F.H. Britten, reviewing it for Books, noted her qualities of hardness and self-sufficiency which only love seems to unsettle.⁴ F.S.A. in the Boston Transcript saw the product of a strong, clear, cultivated mind.⁵ Some indication of the impact of the book can be seen in the fact that Malcolm Cowley gave it a major review in the New Republic.⁶ Not surprisingly for Malcolm Cowley and even less for the New Republic of 1934, at that point a major intellectual voice of the American left, the review did not find either the author or her society particularly attractive: the former because she got all the money she could out of Dr. Franz Ullstein without ever paying him for value received and the best one can say for her is that her morals were those of the crazy world in which she lived; the latter because it was a society wholly without standards. At the end of some 1900 words, Cowley angrily concludes: After reading this book of hers, you don’t like Hitler any better, but you can understand why so many people regarded him as a savior. There are ages so utterly sunk beneath the level of human dignity that they make even a false and vicious messiah seem, for the moment, better than none at all.

No less noteworthy was an only slightly shorter review by Dorothy Thompson in the prestigious pages of the Saturday Review of Literature.⁷ Thompson saw the book as an important record: a social document of first rate importance; someday historians recording the collapse of bourgeois civilization in the Europe of the twentieth century, will be looking for first hand sources. And then, I hope, this book will still be in existence. Rather than condemning Graefenberg, Thompson sees her as a symbol of the era and the place; Rosie is not average, she is in a profound sense representative, a sort of apotheosis of the decaying bourgeoisie, deserving praise for absence of exhibitionism when she lays her life upon the dissecting table as a man with an obscure disease might will his body to a scientific laboratory. In the course of the review Thompson gives the distinct impression of knowing Graefenberg personally as when she is described as a very vital young woman in excellent health who sought to earn a living (which she does not need) by founding an independent European news service.

With a successful, well reviewed autobiography behind her, Rosie Graefenberg returned to the world of serious journalism. In the spring of 1937, Foreign Affairs published a thoughtful piece, The Great New Migration, in which she examined the history of refugees in the world since the first World War.⁸ She recounts the plight of the Russians, Greeks, Armenians, Bulgarians, Assyrians, Germans, Saarlanders, Hungarians, and Spaniards who had become refugees in the previous nineteen years with special attention to and approval of the Nansen passport devised by Dr. Fridtjof Nansen while he was the High Commissioner for Refugees at the League of Nations from 1921 to 1930. The second part of the article is a strong but balanced and well-reasoned appeal for compassionate attention to the needs of the 115,000 Germans, of whom 100,000 were Jews who fled the Nazis in the four years since 1933. Noting that the numbers would likely increase in the future and the problem was further exacerbated by the economic depression, she suggests reestablishing the Nansen office at the League and floating a loan of some $10,000,000 to enable it to function. She makes a thinly disguised plea for increasing German immigration to the United States and concludes with a description of the benefits that such immigration offers in terms of vital, resourceful, talented immigrants firmly committed to freedom and democratic values, ready and willing to assimilate as soon as employment could be found.

For the first time on the pages of this 1937 Foreign Affairs article, Rosie Goldschmidt-Graefenberg-Ullstein signs herself Countess Waldeck, a name which she would thereafter use consistently, albeit not always with the title. Her use of this name and title is something of a mystery. It implies, of course, someone named Count Waldeck and sometime, somewhere a third marriage for the German-American author. It appears there are two European noble families in the twentieth century to which a Count Waldeck might belong. The first is that of the prince of Waldeck and Pyrmont, a small principality in imperial Germany, with its seat at Arolsen in present day Hesse, Germany. A collateral branch of this family with its seat in Bergheim carried the title Count of Waldeck and Pyrmont. A second family is that of the Count of Bentinek and Waldeck-Limburg with its seat at Middachten near Arnheim. A collateral branch of the family was settled in Great Britain.⁹ At no point in her writings, however, does Countess Waldeck mention a husband named Count Waldeck or otherwise account for her acquisition of this title. In 1942, Time magazine, in reviewing Athene Palace, observed without further detail: Still later she married the Hungarian Count Waldeck, a marriage in which friendship and German passport considerations were deftly blended.¹⁰ Until more evidence is forthcoming on this question, the present writer is inclined to side with John Gunther, who knew Waldeck personally and wrote in 1951: About Count Waldeck, her third husband, I know little , and I have a private joke with her that he never quite existed.¹¹ Thus, it appears that Countess Waldeck is a nom de plume.

In October 1939, a month after the outbreak of the second World War, R.G. Waldeck published in the American Mercury, a searing indictment of American liberals.¹² As some of the issues and attitudes described in the article would reemerge to trouble her later in Bucharest and elsewhere, they deserve some detailed attention. She begins the article by recalling a luncheon in the spring of 1933 in the dining room of a New York liberal weekly. On that occasion, she made the breath-taking observation that Hitler would likely enter history as ‘the Great’ or ‘the Good.’ It was not an opinion to garner much approval in such a circle in 1933 and still less in 1939. Noting that few had more private grievances against the Nazis than I who had lost a fortune, her professional language and many friends at their hands, she still would not let my grievances warp my intellectual discipline. Among the unwelcome truths she had for American liberals were: Hitler was not the half-wit they supposed, but a dangerously shrewd and tenacious politician. The German masses and the army were behind him, there was no widespread discontent or any significant underground. Indeed, the Germans now felt a pride of collective self-importance. By the end of the luncheon she had the sinking feeling that I was being subversive. I had violated some mysterious political etiquette of these liberal Americans.

In the course of the 1930s she began to identify an intellectual dictatorship as totalitarian, as intolerant, as illogical as any other – ‘the Dictatorship of the Good Cause’ which was as primitive and boring as the intellectual aspects of any dictatorship. Not only did the liberals associated with the ‘Dictatorship of the Good Cause’ reject the facts they did not like, they also were prepared to spread rumors and resort to character assassination to destroy the reputation of those who brought these uncomfortable facts to their attention. Thus, Waldeck complained, I was politically ‘unreliable,’ perhaps even a paid Nazi spy. She concluded the article with a statement of her personal beliefs: I am a liberal not primarily because I believe in a better world – fascists and communists often believe in that, and all utopias are curiously alike – but because I insist on watching the world intelligently, trying to understand it dispassionately, enjoying the beautiful regardless of its labels, and making fun even of this Dictatorship of the Good Cause.

That November she published her speculations on the question, Is There ‘Another Germany’? in the New Republic, one of the bright liberal weeklies that to Waldeck only a month before had seemed primitive and boring in the service of the Dictatorship of the Good Cause.¹³ She answered her rhetorical question definitively: The ‘other Germany’ is an illusion. German communists had been sold out by the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact and would probably fold in with the Nazis, German youth was enthusiastically following Hitler, German conservatives welcomed the Russian rapprochement, Allied propaganda was ineffective. In short, Germans were altogether estranged from liberalism, believed totalitarianism was the wave of the future, supported Hitler’s call to empire; and in any case Nazi repression was sufficiently pervasive to curtail any support for the other Germany. With considerable perspicacity, she concluded that the only realistic hope for a non-Nazi Germany was after the allies had won the war, the other Germany might contribute to the future peace but would do nothing to shorten the present war.

Less perspicacity pertained in March of 1940 when Waldeck wrote Extremes Meet, Against Hitler for the New York Times Magazine.¹⁴ This article speculated concerning the ideological direction and leadership the Third Reich might adopt in a post-Hitler era. She identified two possible leaders, both early supporters of Hitler but by 1940 both living in exile. First representing the conservative, industrial forces of the Rhine and Ruhr was Fritz Thyssen, who had controlled the family holdings in the Vereinigte Stahlwerke and had been a Prussian State Councilor and a member of the Reichstag before splitting with Hitler over the war. For this heresy, Hitler gave him a choice of exile or a concentration camp, and Thyssen moved to Switzerland. The other possibility was Dr. Otto Strasser, who represented the left wing, revolutionary elements in the Nazi party and had lost a beloved brother during the Night of the Long Knives. He had early gone into exile from where he was believed to be directing an anti-Nazi underground called the Black Front. Waldeck cannily avoids deciding between the two, preferring to allow future developments in the Nazi revolution to determine if the shift would go in a conservative or a radical direction.

Shortly thereafter, apparently in the spring of 1940, Waldeck departed for Europe and her new work as a stringer for Newsweek in Bucharest. She remained in Romania from the fall of France through the suppression of the Legionary Rebellion, leaving in late January, 1941. In the seven and a half months she remained in Romania it is clear she filed regularly to her home office in New York, for Romania was generating a vast amount of news and an even larger quantity of rumor as the country lunged from crisis to crisis. It is unclear in the Newsweek coverage of Romanian events during the period of her residence in the country, however, how much of her original prose escaped the copy editors and rewrite clerks in New York. Although all the news articles in Newsweek are unsigned, certain turns of phrase or metaphors occasionally strike a familiar note; and certainly, the major stories on Romania must have relied heavily on her input. Thus, the stories on the Soviet annexation of Bessarabia and northern Bucovina which extended over four pages in the issue of July 8, 1940, the long piece on Carol’s abdication with 10 pictures in the September 16 issue, the account of the reburial of Codreanu and the attendant violence in the issue of December 9, as well as the account of the Iron Guard revolt published on February 3, 1941, all must have been built up from her dispatches.¹⁵

By the end of January, 1941 in the face of random violence and increased German domination, most of the British journalists had long since departed Romania and the few Americans still remaining were packing their bags, Waldeck included. She crossed Europe via Italy and sailed for home, departing Lisbon on February 21 aboard the American Export Lines S.S. Exeter. She docked safely in Jersey City on Tuesday, March 4, and was interviewed the following Thursday by Peter Kihss of the New York World-Telegram.¹⁶ He was fascinated by a bearer of a Hungarian title who was tiny, crisp, a tale-spinner but a realist. With her usual drive and energy, on her second day back in the country not only had she the interview with Kihss but discussed with Robert M. McBride & Co. a book on her Romanian experience and departed New York on a lecture tour of the Midwest arranged by W. Colston Leigh.

The book Waldeck had discussed with Robert M. McBride & Co. was published by that firm as Athene Palace with Countess Waldeck on the title page in February, 1942, two months after America entered the war. The date was ideal for what was in a sense a last look by an American before the door closed on Nazi-dominated Europe. It proved to be something of a war­time best seller, shortly followed by a British edition published by Constable later in 1942, and it was picked by the National Travel Club as a selection for its members.¹⁷

The book received immediately excellent critical attention. The Christian Science Monitor with its usual modest restraint in such matters called it a spicy record of observations made in one of the world’s most volatile of social and diplomatic populations.¹⁸ The Atlantic described it as fast-moving and entirely readable.¹⁹ The New Republic introduced it as the thriller of anti-Nazi literature,²⁰ and Time congratulated Countess Waldeck, who takes current history out of the funeral parlor and puts in into the Grand Hotel.²¹ Rustem Vambery, writing in the Nation called Waldeck’s Bucharest the witches’ caldron of the Balkans and went on to recommend that no person who is interested in the machinations of grafty Rumanian politicians, beguiling feminine entanglements, Balkan glamour, and the underground Nazi plotting should miss this witty and fascinating book.²²

Countess Waldeck’s style and tone as well as her subject also attracted much favorable comment. Sybille Bedford was alone in observing that Athene Palace is not particularly well written, and she went on to virtually contradict herself by adding, it is well put together, always readable and often witty.²³ Rustem Vambery was impressed by Waldeck’s narrative skills and sensitive eye: Interwoven with accounts of tragic events are delightful stories which bear witness to her keen power of observation.²⁴ Some reviewers, Virgilia Sapieha in the Saturday Review of Literature among them, were made somewhat nervous by this power of observation which side­steps emotion and value judgement. Sapieha took such journalism to be symptomatic of the times and began the review with a sarcastic description of its practitioners and their readers: The professional observer, a person who sees all, misses nothing, can neatly disentangle any network of human motives no matter how complex, and who withal retains ironical objectivity, this wise guy is the model historian of our time. Heaven forbid that the chronicle should be biased by convictions. We want such historians to be sophisticated, unshockable, amused by plot and counterplot, no more than annoyed by disaster, for then we are sure that what we are being served is the truth. In a complicated and confusing metaphor, Sapieha goes on to compare Waldeck to a bird and perhaps a spider, but in any event an accomplished example of the model historian: Almost entirely without pride or prejudice, and therefore an ideal journalist, unruffled by the asps of intrigue in her luxurious nest, she collects facts, opinions, rumors, and gossip, then knits these varied skeins into the recognizable shape of inevitable doom.²⁵ The Christian Science Monitor also noticed Waldeck’s dispassionate style, viewing atrocities with journalistic detachment, tersely recording the horror of the revolt.²⁶ Richard Danielson likewise praised her cool understatement in the pursuit of accuracy and perspective: This author rarely yields to her emotions. She implies more than she says. But her analysis is keen and her critical estimate of the present is based on a sound historical appreciation which justifies her fears and hopes for the future.²⁷

The major theme of Athene Palace is precisely Countess Waldeck’s hopes for the future and her subtle insistence that her narrative is not really so much an account of the Romanians as of the Nazis in Romania, fumbling their way into war and ultimate disaster. The Christian Science Monitor saw clearly that while the Rumanian story is interesting and important, many will find even more absorbing her account of Nazi opinions and reasons for certain courses of action.²⁸ She signaled her hopes for the future in the first chapter of the book: When I came to the Athene Palace on that hot June afternoon in 1940, I was an American who had felt and still did feel against my will, that Hitler might not only win the war but could win the peace and organize Europe if he did. When I left the Athene Palace on an icy morning at the end of January 1941, I was convinced that under no circumstances could Hitler win the peace or organize Europe.²⁹ Waldeck had discovered in the context of German diplomatic fumbling on the Transylvania problem and Romanian-Hungarian relations clear evidence that the Nazis really lacked a master plan, had blundered badly and would again.³⁰

Therein lay the hopes for the future that Danielson had discovered in Athene Palace. Sybille Bedford seized on these hopes of German bungling: The chapter on German order is very well worth reading. Countess Waldeck never protests too much; sometimes one feels, she might protest a little more. But all is forgiven in the end, when her remarks are as shrewd as her conclusions are agreeable. The Nazis are not really efficient at all, she says; they may work out details, but in larger issues they muddle through like their betters. And sometimes they don’t get through at all, they just bungle.³¹ The Saturday Review of Literature arrived at the same point of guarded optimism as Waldeck, but took some pride in having done so sooner and less dispassionately: Impeccably dispassionate, she comes at the end of her tale, to the same conclusion which the rest of us, less dispassionately, have long ago attained: that the New Order cannot last. Its fallacy, the Countess claims, lies in its lack of mercy. She admits that in their daring, imaginative program, the Nazis have forgotten that the quality of mercy is a necessary fructifying element in any human scheme.³²

In July of 1942 Countess Waldeck published The Girls Did Well by Hitler, generously illustrated with seven photographs in the same Saturday Evening Post that she had only 10 years before castigated as the voice of the provincial middle class.³³ The article is a discussion of the place of women in Nazi Germany, the way Nazi propaganda had been shaped to appeal to them and the rise of Gertrud Scholtz-Klink to be leader of the Women of the Reich and, thus, what the header of the article calls, the most powerful woman in the world. Waldeck had first seen Scholtz-Klink in the lobby of the Athenée Palace where the Nazi leader was organizing the repatriation of German minorities from Russian-occupied Bessarabia and Bucovina. At the time, Waldeck was sitting talking with the unnamed, languid Austrian count, turned Nazi diplomat, who figures prominently in Athene Palace. On this occasion, he lifted himself from his chair to bow and respectfully whisper, It’s the Scholtz-Klink. Waldeck was not impressed and cattishly observed: "Had it not been for