Looking for Anne & Finding Meyer
Part 2

Meyer Levin, photo courtesy of the Leo Baeck Institute.

3,969 words

Part 2 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 3 here)

In that moment I sensed the deep psychic truth that lies in folk legendry. For truly the Lorelei land was the symbol of the German soul, the depth of evil hidden under the pretty surface of sentiment.[1]

The most disgusting passages of In Search are undoubtedly Levin’s sexual fantasies about German women. I’ll quote one glaring and rather long example. I’ll try to break it down into readable pieces as much as I can, but in order to give you an impression of both Levin’s lyrical style of writing (if anyone cares to analyze its similarities with The Diary of Anne Frank) and his version of Jewish revenge porn, I need to quote him in all his despicable glory:

The great surge of population had ended as the barriers were established between the Russian and the American zones. But not far from Karlsbad I began to pass small groups of women on the road. These were German women. I thought of taking one with me.

This was the last, unfulfilled impulse of war, still active in me. For in war there is a reversal of the general code of the community of men. It is right to kill, and with this sanction comes a compulsion to reverse all the other civilized injunctions: to steal, lie, blaspheme, and rape.

In modern war an attempt is made within the armies to control and regulate the release of these impulses, to continue to observance of some of the peace-time injunctions, while others are being violated on command. This creates a conflict in the soldier — and many minor escapes are found to relieve his conflict. Thus, theft is transformed into loot; rape, in Germany, was accomplished through the medium of a bar of chocolate, and was known as fraternization.

For in a parallel way on the loser’s side, particularly with the Germans who had been bred to a code of savage morality, there was a preacceptance of the code of war that brought theft and violation with defeat. To pay, in this way, was indeed a kind of vindication of the very morality under which they had lived and fought and worshipped.

The women, then, were waiting to be taken by the victors. But this very willingness to be violated frustrated the victorious soldier’s rage for vengeful release of all his guilts, and therefore every man in the area felt within himself a kind of approbation for the tales of genuine rape. Yes, he understood, even understood the legends of Russian brutality; though he outwardly expressed abhorrence, he inwardly felt that’s right, let the Russkis give it to them! And every man wondered in himself whether he could do such a thing.

We were no different from the others. Erik had infinitely greater motivation for revenge; my own bitterness was general — a bitterness for what the Germans had done to my people; Erik’s was personal, for what they had done to himself and his family. Thus, there was a kind of game of dare that Erik and I carried on through the last weeks, wondering whether we could find ourselves in this further experience.

Like all men, we wondered about ourselves — how far could we go, in war? of what were we capable?[2]

To use one of my favorite quotes from a video game: “Lovely places you take me to, Chrissy.” There is, however, an interesting observation Meyer Levin makes:

But looting had another meaning, the ancient meaning of all war, the taking of the enemy into and upon oneself, the devouring of the enemy so that one might have his strength, and the symbolic way of devouring the enemy was through the fetish — carrying his weapons, wearing his scalp, taking his women. All this was a way of obliterating the enemy and at the same time absorbing his power, his strength.[3]

For once, I actually think Levin is on to something. But then, of course, things get predictable again:

From looting to rape is supposed to be no step at all in war, but as our army was fairly innocent in the first, it was outdone in the second by the lustful eagerness of the German girls to fulfill their roles as conquered women.[4]

After Levin goes on a bit about him and his buddy Schwab driving around and looking for a German woman to gang-rape, we finally arrive at this crowning masterpiece. I’ll save my comments for later:

As I went past the little groups of women with their baby-carriages full of belongings, their rucksacks, I slowed down, and finally I noticed one who was resting by a fence, by herself. I coasted to a stop. She was slender, lithe, with a small head and straight, light-blonde hair — quite typical of their ideal woman. I motioned to her to get in. She picked up her rucksack and hobbled toward the jeep. I noticed then that she had a bandage around her ankle.

As we drove off, I saw some women a small distance away smiling, laughing.

I asked her where she was going.

— Home, she said, “Heim [ins] Reich!” With a glance at me, at once defiant and perverse.

And where was home?

The real country — west Prussia. “We are Junkers,” she said with the same side-glance of provocative perversity. “The real article.”

Her father had been a forester in peacetime, she said; in war he had been a colonel commanding a prisoncamp [sic]. He had died recently, at the age of sixty-one. She drew out a snapshot. “Look at him! a soldier! a strong beautiful figure of a man!”

He was straight and pin-perfect in his decoration-laden dress uniform. Yes, she was of the very breed — the same breed as our captured General Roericht, of the Prussians, the source of the general staff, of the “continuity” that was still to continue, of the idea of final overall conquest.

As for herself, she had been engaged to an officer who had been killed early in the war in Norway. And her brother had been killed at the front only two months ago, leaving a wife, a three-year-old, and a new-born baby. And just after the news of her brother’s death, this girl, and her mother, and her sister-in-law with the babies had been bombed out of their home in west Prussia. In the evacuation they had all been separated; she had found herself in Karlsbad.

“First, I am going to bring the family together again,” she declared. Her widowed sister-in-law with the babies was in a town near Leipzig; she was headed there now. “It is I who will bring them all home!” Her mother would still have to be found. And then she would take them all home, heim [ins] Reich. She repeated the phrase with an inflection at once ironic and filled with longing.

“We’ll work the land, on the farms,” she said. “You’ll see, we’ll build again!” She gave me her sidelong look, teasing, hateful, daring, all in one glance. “While you’re busy fighting the Russians, we’ll build up!”

We were silent for a while. I looked at her bandaged ankle. Oh, a few weeks ago she had set off with some officers in a car, they had been from her own country — Prussians — and they had decided that everything was finished and they would head for home. But the car had overturned, and her ankle had been crushed. It was nearly mended now — she had walked eight miles on it this morning, and she would walk all the way to west Prussia if need be.

Back there in Karlsbad she had been teaching school. “I taught them well!” she declared. “The little ones — up to ten years old. Oh, they won’t forget what I taught them! That is the most important age. I taught them to be proud of their soldiers, the best soldiers in the world. Have you seen our black battalions, our SS — admit it, they are beautiful! admit it! They fought best, of all the armies, admit it!”

“They were tough soldiers,” I said.

“Oh they were beautiful!” she cried exultantly, and suddenly I knew who she was — she was the Scarlett O’Hara of this war. “We’re a fighting people!” she declared. “That you’ll have to admit. Men, straight and strong! That’s what they’re like where I come from. And our children won’t forget. Ah, you should have seen them, when the Russians marched into Karlsbad. One of my little boys, nine years old, walked right down the street beside them singing our song out loud!” She sang the words for me. “With banner carried high, I’ll follow Hitler till I die . . .”

And did she still believe in Adolph [sic] Hitler?

“I’ll always believe in Adolph [sic] Hitler!” she cried. “The others, they that surrounded him, they were traitors, they destroyed his ideal. But I will always believe in it!”

And what was Hitler’s ideal?

Why, she said, it was the ideal of the good life for all mankind. Why, Hitler had given the German workers good homes, and plenty of everything, every worker had earned a good living and been able to go to the theater, to live in real comfort in a modern house, and this ideal Hitler wanted to spread to the entire world, for everybody!

I couldn’t help myself. “For the inferior races too?” I said. “For the Jews?”

Oh, that. She shrugged. What did that matter, against the fate of Germany? . . . And then she looked at me, and realized.

There was a forest on both sides of us. A little dirt road entered and lost itself in the woods. I slowed the car. She followed my glance, and suddenly caught my arm. “No, no!” she cried.

It was her wounded ankle. I pictured myself having to lift her out of the car. That would be ridiculous. No, I couldn’t do it when she was helpless. It had to be against a violently resisting bitch . . .

I drove on. We were silent.

Towards evening we were near Leipzig. I said I would stop for the night. I picked a gasthaus and went in and requisitioned a room.

When I came out, the girl was still in the car.

The woman who kept the gasthaus reacted with irritating warmth when she saw that the girl was hobbling. I wanted to declare that I hadn’t picked up the bitch out of pity but to rape her.

There were two beds in the room, as though arranged by the Hays office. I gave the innkeeper some extra coffee, and she brought up butter and milk, bread and sausages. The girl gazed at the butter, tasted the real coffee. I saw then how thin she was. “Real butter,” she said reverently. “Milk.”

She ate, glancing at me with her earlier perversity. It said, I must prove to myself that I can do this, too. I must go through this last humiliation with one of our conquerors, even with a Jew. And I will go through with it, to prove that we are after all the stronger.

When I had opened my knapsack to get out the coffee, I had left out a souvenir SS dagger. The girl toyed with it. “Aren’t you afraid I will cut your throat in the night?” she asked.

“Aren’t you afraid I will put a bullet through your head?”

“We’ll see which one wakes up alive!” She moved her injured leg carefully, as she got ready for bed. “You know, I can tell you, if there is ever a [Widerstandsbewegung], a resistance movement — and there is sure to be one — I’ll be in it! I’ll be the first one! I promise you!” And she looked at me with her mocking, provocative defiance, waiting.[5]

You can buy Savitri Devi’s Defiance here.

Okay. Is there anyone else who has doubts about the veracity of Levin’s recollection?

Now, I don’t doubt that elements of the tale are true. Levin probably met Germans who spoke well of their military. He probably met Germans from West Prussia. And he probably bought sex from a German woman in exchange for something to eat or a packet of cigarettes. But I doubt very much that this particular woman ever existed. Where to even start? Which language did they use for their philosophical exchange? Levin did not speak German. If he had spoken Yiddish, she would have realized straight away that he was a Jew. Sure, if this woman really was of Prussian nobility, she probably would have had some knowledge of English.

But I think Levin gave himself away by his reference to Scarlett O’Hara. This woman is a fantasy. I’d be tempted to call her a specific Jewish fantasy, but that wouldn’t be quite true. If you’ve read James Wakefield Burke’s novels from post-war Germany, you’ll find that very character, particularly in The Big Rape, except that Lilo isn’t — how did Levin put it? — lustfully eager to fulfill her role as a conquered woman. Excuse me while I barf.

Scarlett O’Hara’s German cousin, as well as Wakefield Burke’s Lilo, are the “strong woman” archetype of their time. They are not walking around wielding guns or swords — only an SS dagger, which I think is kinda cool — and they are not physically kicking some guy’s ass. They are still very much using die Waffen der Frau — a woman’s weapons. In these post-war scenarios and for these American writers, that meant being tough broads while being exploited by the victors; no, even more — it meant exploiting the exploiters, “a kind of vindication of the very morality under which they had lived and fought and worshipped” and “to prove that” they were “after all the stronger.”

Nevertheless, Levin’s fictional German woman is in many ways a Jewish fantasy. E. Michael Jones devoted entire chapters to “schtupping the shiksa” in The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit.[6] The sorely missed American Krogan talked about the Jew/shiksa pairing in his BioShock video. The topic came up during the Decameron Film Festival, in their review of The Fabelmans, but unfortunately it wasn’t addressed there in its proper context. In The Fabelmans, too, the Jewish guy gets the Christian girl –she desires him precisely because he is a Jew and thus reminds her of Jesus. It is, of course, pure projection.

The Jewish fetish for despoiling Christian women was seamlessly updated and extended after the Holocaust™ with the introduction of the Jewish fetish for Nazis. That one is not a secret. I would have thought that the fetish did not come into existence after a generation or so had passed, but since Meyer Levin already wrote about it in 1950, I stand corrected. It is in essence the same thing as the fetish for Christian women, only better, because this time, the women were properly defeated and thus had to submit to their conquerors. The paprika on the meat, as Marta Hillers put it in A Woman in Berlin.

But for Levin, as he himself admitted, the women couldn’t be helpless victims, because this cheapened the experience. “It had to be against a violently resisting bitch.” Or a rabid, unrepentant Nazisse. Or, in Levin’s case, not only a rabid, unrepentant Nazisse, but a Junker as well, a representative of Prussian militarism and the old nobility — “their ideal woman” submitting lustfully to the Jewish Untermensch. It doesn’t take a genius to pick apart Levin’s fantasy here.[7]

Quite aside from the sexual angle, which German woman in her right mind would have told an American soldier in 1945 all that Levin’s fictional creature supposedly told him? “Yeah, I’m a total Nazi, and I’ll do all I can to build up a Fourth Reich and in the meantime murder you and your friends when I get the chance.” Right.

Levin’s fictional German woman is also a stand-in for a Jewish woman or even the Jewish people as a whole in the context of the founding of the state of Israel, and I’m sure he was aware of it: The death of family members; the diaspora of the rest of her family. “I am going to bring the family together again . . . It is I who will bring them all home! . . . We’ll work the land, on the farms . . . You’ll see, we’ll build again!” This is a fitting segue to the remaining 300 pages or so of Levin’s autobiography, which are devoted to the founding of the state of Israel and the filming of My Father’s House and The Illegals. Here, Levin is on firmer footing, and the story becomes much more interesting as a result.

Levin describes the various revolutionary, even terrorist, groups during the “illegal” period of post-war Palestine settlement, with their rivalries and disputes. Irgun, as the Irgun Tsvai Leumi became commonly known, was comprised of radicals who represented only a small fraction of the Jewish population in Palestine, but which was extremely good at public relations. As a result, it became the face of Jewish Palestine, especially among American Jews and liberals. Naturally, this was resented by more moderate groups such as Haganah, who achieved more results and had wider support among the Jews in Palestine than Irgun, but weren’t as visible in Western nations.

According to Levin, while both groups were fighting the British, Haganah was all about cause and effect. A ship full of illegal migrants was intercepted, and Haganah blew up a British radar station. In contrast, Irgun’s actions were simply terrorist acts for the sake of terrorism. I thought this interesting because it is exactly how the film Plan A portrays a similar conflict in post-war Germany: The Jewish Brigade only murders the “guilty” (determined without a trial and based on information gained by torture, but let’s not be pedantic), while Nakam kills indiscriminately.

Meyer Levin and his film crew were in Jerusalem when the King David Hotel was bombed; in fact, they managed to film some of the aftermath. So what was going on with those dastardly British in Palestine?

There was for instance a Mobile Police Force, used by the British in special repressive measures. Many members of this force were Mosley followers who had enlisted for Palestine duty with particular delight, as they would be paid for beating up Jews.[8]

Of course they had. Well, I can’t find any reference to Mosley followers, but Levin probably meant the Black and Tans. It’s all the same, anyway.

Human society still refused to look directly at the fact that it was capable of murdering six million people. In order to pretend to itself that it was not involved in the guilt — for within itself the whole world knew it shared in the guilt — society had to punish the remainder of the Jews.[9]

Now Levin is saying that the Jews are not part of human society. Isn’t that anti-Semitic? No, it’s the beginning of the blame game against whites — because that is what Levin is implying here, after all.

In 1950, Levin already recognized the need for a closer bond between Israeli, and in particular American, Jews whose paths had diverged. It was because Levin himself was part of both worlds that he understood the sharp difference between them — something that, I think, still exists today but is seldom talked about.

Despite all that had been written and told of the Yishuv in the past thirty years, few outside Palestine realized that the children brought up in the land had the Bible as their geography and their sociology, rather than as a religious work . . . To them the Jews of America and other lands were merely the Jews who had not returned after the captivity of Babylon . . .

“They”, in the minds of American Jews, might finally come to mean a strange, legendary people, proud and poor, a socialistic, Hebrew-talking, half-Arab kind of Jew mixed up out of European DP’s and Yemenites and Moroccans, to whom one gave a few dollars every year — money that anyway came off the income tax.

And “they,” in the minds of the Israeli Jews, would be the wastefully wealthy, oversentimental and patronizing American Jew with the cigar in his mouth, ignorant of tradition and impervious to moral value.[10]

You can buy Savitri Devi’s book, Gold in the Furnace, here.

It was therefore essential to create a common cause, a common identity that went beyond simple ethnicity. What better way to accomplish it than via a common narrative?

Suzuki has made the valid point that there might not have been enough time for Levin to write Anne Frank’s diary. “The last entry of Kibbutz Buchenwald was on 18 January 1946, as mentioned above, and the movie ‘My Father’s House’ was released in 1947. And since Anne’s diary was also published in 1947, the production period seems to overlap too much.”[11] He counters this argument by pointing out that Kibbutz Buchenwald is only 120 pages long, and he himself researched and wrote Unmasking Anne Frank (192 pages) in two months, in addition to his day job.

True; but Suzuki misses something. Levin was in Palestine for much of the period in question. That is where, according to In Search, he was given the Buchenwald diary (at the Afikim kibbutz) — of which he then only translated excerpts, possibly due to time constraints. That is not to say that he couldn’t have written the diary draft in Palestine while simultaneously translating Kibbutz Buchenwald and seeing to the production of My Father’s House.

Thomas Dalton, in his Foreword to Suzuki, puts the date of Levin’s first draft earlier, from a hypothetical meeting between Levin and Otto Frank in late 1945 to the finished draft in early 1946.  He is wrong on the timing of the publication of Kibbutz Buchenwald, but that doesn’t devaluate his overall thesis. It certainly makes more sense than the crammed scenario Suzuki proposes. Meyer Levin returned to the United States sometime in the second half of 1945. By May 1946, he was back in Palestine. So if there was a meeting between him and Otto Frank and a subsequent first draft of the diary, that’s the time bracket. In the summer of 1947, according to Levin, both his film My Father’s House and his novel by the same title were ready, and he then went on to film The Illegals.

I’d like to point out something of importance that was going on in this period that Levin completely omits in his book, however: He never tells his readers where, when, and how his relationship with Tereska Torrès began. By the time Levin’s plans for the filming of The Illegals were realized, he and Tereska were already engaged. This is potentially of some importance for the Anne Frank saga, as we will see.

Notes

[1] Meyer Levin, In Search (1950), p. 229.

[2] Ibid., pp. 275-276.

[3] Ibid., p. 277.

[4] Ibid., pp. 278-279.

[5] Ibid., pp. 280-283.

[6] For a few choice examples, read E. Michael Jones, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit, second ed. (2023), vol. II, pp. 530-531; vol. III, p. 413.

[7] The Jewish woman/Nazi man pairing fetish naturally has a different dynamic which in films and novels overtly manifests itself in the underground resistance or spy plot: the Jewish woman getting one over on the Nazi guy by tricking and exploiting him. But honestly, I don’t think that’s really the attraction. Michael J. Polignano, for example, wrote in his 2004 essay “Fantasizing Fascism”: “In the last letter Hindus received from Céline, he joked about having sex with Jewish girls at Brandeis: ‘They’d be in the clouds, those Brandeis girls, getting screwed by a Nazi, even an old one . . .’

Personally, I would like to see this letter before believing it. Was it real, or just a fantasy? I don’t doubt that Céline could write such things . . . But I would like to see the context . . . I don’t doubt that Jews fantasized about being screwed by Nazis — and not just for purposes of anti-Nazi propaganda –– and I wonder if Céline was referring to those fantasies.” — Michael J. Polignano, Taking Our Own Side (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2010), p. 165.

[8] Levin, p. 309.

[9] Ibid., p. 468.

[10] Ibid., pp. 500-501.

[11] Ikuo Suzuki, Unmasking Anne Frank (2022), p. 159.