Reports from a Cold Crater: On Charlotte A. Lerg’s “The Diary of Lt. Melvin J. Lasky”

WHEN THE United States Army crossed the Rhine into Germany in March 1945, few of the frontline troops had time to write down their impressions of what they saw. But they were followed by a different type of soldier whose job it was to record and report—a group that included intelligence officers, military journalists, and members of the army’s Historical Section, charged with compiling the official after-action report of the invasion.

One of the young combat historians who thus entered Germany armed with a Smith-Corona typewriter was 25-year-old Melvin J. Lasky, the son of Polish Jews and a recent graduate of City College of New York. In later years, he would become one of the preeminent participants in the so-called “cultural cold war.” After settling in West Berlin, he founded the journal Der Monat (perhaps best described as the German equivalent of Partisan Review), helped start the anti-communist advocacy group Congress for Cultural Freedom, and for many years edited the literary magazine Encounter. In 1945, however, he was just a young man with a sense that life was passing him by, eager for the chance to experience a culture he had only studied in college.

As collected in The Diary of Lt. Melvin J. Lasky: Into Germany at the End of World War II (2022), edited by Charlotte A. Lerg, Lasky’s reports of Nazi Germany on the verge of and immediately following surrender provide a record not only of that ruined place but also of their author’s ongoing personal formation. He self-consciously places himself in the tradition of prior Anglophone visitors to the European continent, such as the English travel writer Arthur Young, the historian Henry Adams, and the novelist Henry James. In bed with an Austrian woman named Lydia, he is suddenly struck by the tawdriness of it all—by the clash between the lofty expectations about Germany that he built up during his student years and the realities amidst the rubble. He quotes from Stendhal, who recorded similar feelings in the aftermath of the Napoleonic invasion: “This is the supreme triumph of your civilization. Out of love it makes ordinary affairs.”

The acerbic irony in this line is directed at modern civilization in general, not just at German culture. Lasky is fascinated by the odd ways in which remnants of American capitalism surface even in the remains of the Third Reich: a sign for Shell petrol in the Vosges Mountains, a roadside advertisement for Coca-Cola near Ulm, a Standard Oil filling station outside Munich. And he produces memorable pages, some of which anticipate the satire of Joseph Heller, as he excoriates the inefficiency of the US Army’s Historical Section. He is assigned lead authorship of the description of a minor skirmish in Alsace, France, and launches himself into the task with extraordinary zeal. The prettified version that his superiors return to him, however, is unrecognizable. Following this encounter with the army propaganda machine, Lasky suppresses most of his historiographical ambitions and finds renewed purpose in the other half of his job: the extended fact-finding missions known in army slang as “bird-dog expeditions.”

Lasky is an exceptionally alert observer of his surroundings, always eager to try out his university-learned German. After the unconditional surrender of the Wehrmacht, he ranges freely across the heart of the Reich, from Kaiserslautern to Berlin, from Innsbruck to Bremen. He rummages through the shelves of local bookstores and strikes up conversations with the owners, eager to elucidate what 12 years of Nazi culture might have done to them and to the rich intellectual tradition of which he is so enamored.

An occupation officer could get into social circles that otherwise would have been closed to a young American tourist. In what is perhaps the diary’s most touching episode, Lasky spends the last half of July and the first half of August in Heidelberg, where he becomes a regular guest in the household of Karl Jaspers. He records the bizarre sight of Max Weber’s 75-year-old widow, Marianne, puzzling her way through Van Wyck Brooks’s The Flowering of New England, 1815–1865 (1936) with the help of a dictionary, evidently struggling to comprehend the cataclysmic forces that have erupted into her life. He attends the reopening of Heidelberg University, where Jaspers gives a moving speech, and notes that the philosopher’s Jewish wife has chosen not to attend the occasion.

Lasky doesn’t confine himself to cultural and intellectual topics, however. He talks to survivors of Buchenwald, spends time in the black markets of Berlin, and gets a close-up view of Soviet soldiers at a time when the hoarfrost of the Cold War had not yet settled on American-Russian relations. In situations where his German does not get him anywhere, he just as gladly resorts to rudimentary French or Russian. And he lashes the denazification efforts of the Western Allies, which spare high-ranking party members who might still prove useful to the occupation authorities. In late November, he visits the internment facility at Oberursel, where Wehrmacht generals are striking deals with the Historical Section for reduced sentences in return for their insights into German military strategy. The heavy hand came down instead on minor loyalists who lacked useful knowledge or skills.

All these episodes are interspersed with a myriad of sexual conquests. Lasky may have been disillusioned with the general state of interpersonal affairs in postwar Germany—a frequent topic of interest is the spread of the so-called “Pro Stations,” which doled out prophylactics and treated venereal diseases amongst American soldiers—but this doesn’t prevent him from making full use of the abundant opportunities available to him under the circumstances. He finds himself in bed with a different woman almost every week, although it’s unclear how much fulfillment he derives from the encounters. The postcoital conversations seem more important to him than the sex.

Interestingly, Lasky never records how his young German conquests reacted when they realized they were about to make love to a Jew, as they presumably must have when he undressed and revealed his circumcised member. Except for a moving entry from May 10, written shortly after Lasky interviewed a group of Jewish camp survivors, the Holocaust rarely comes up. He mentions the gas chambers, crematoria, and forced marches but doesn’t dwell on them.

Prior to Lerg’s new edition, Lasky’s diaries, which were deposited in the Lasky Center for Transatlantic Studies at the University of Munich following his death in 2004, had been previously published in a German translation edited by the historian Wolfgang Schuller, a friend of the family. Comparing the two editions is highly instructive. Both versions are abridged, though the editorial choices are different. The Schuller edition excludes several entries that are of a more personal and sexual nature but includes material that Lasky wrote after he had stopped keeping a daily record in December 1945. From the restored English text, we learn, among other things, that Lasky had a girlfriend back in New York when he embarked upon his bedding spree in Germany. But some of the excisions are puzzling.

Charlotte A. Lerg and Maren Roth justify these abridgments in their introduction, noting, among other things, that “[s]ections that were clearly drafted for other texts” and “scenes that proved repetitive” were cut. But decisions that sound reasonable when formulated in the abstract prove less so in the face of the actual text. In the entry for May 6, for example, Lerg excises a single sentence in which Lasky reports on a rumor that the Gestapo might have moved high-value political prisoners Léon Blum and Kurt Schuschnigg to avoid their capture by the Allies. Surely this would have provided an interesting illustration of the confusion and excitement that characterized the last days of the war.

The editors have also elected to ditch “[l]engthy citations from literature or newspapers, copied verbatim from books.” But Lasky was a cultural historian and a future editor. He quoted from external sources not to show off his erudition but because it was an integral part of his thought process. In Darmstadt on April 27, for example, Lasky makes one of his frequent visits to a local bookstore, where he copies and compares passages by Thomas Mann and Hugo von Hofmannsthal to those of the Nazi-era writer Hans Henning von Grote. His excerpts and most of the accompanying reflections on the decline of the German spirit are missing from the new edition, as is the pointed last paragraph of the same entry, in which Lasky asks himself whether the Schlegel translation of Shakespeare, for all its fine qualities, was able to convey to its German audience the full import of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy. On another occasion, on April 22, Lasky records the interminable disputes amongst his colleagues in the Army Historical Section, dryly commenting: “We can’t, as a matter of fact, bear to hear each other talk, and what is there really to say?” He closes his entry with a quotation from Kafka, which is missing here too.

Beyond these choices, the new English edition provides a riveting window onto a society in ruins and a historical moment when the world held its breath. Seven helpful introductory essays as well as useful appendices make this a valuable addition to World War II literature. Readers interested in the full range of Lasky’s experiences, however, will have to juggle the German and English versions of the text or, better yet, pay a visit to the Lasky Center in Munich.

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Tobias Boes is professor of German and chair of the Department of German and Russian at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author, most recently, of Thomas Mann’s War: Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters (Cornell University Press, 2019), which was translated into German as Thomas Manns Krieg: Literatur und Politik im amerikanischen Exil (Wallstein, 2021).