Kathrine Kressmann Taylor or Kressmann Taylor (1903 in Portland, Oregon – 14 July 1996) was an American writer, known mostly for her Address Unknown (1938), a short story 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 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 and Elliot deemed the story "too strong to appear under the name of a woman," and published the work under the name Kressmann Taylor, dropping her first name. She used this name professionally for the rest of her life. Reader's Digest soon reprinted the novel, and Simon & Schuster 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 Taylor's next book, Until That Day, published in 1942. In 1944, Columbia Pictures turned Address Unknown into a movie. The film director and production designer was William C. Menzies (Gone with the Wind), and Paul Lukas 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, Taylor taught humanities, journalism and creative writing at Gettysburg College, in Pennsylvania, and, when Elliot Taylor died in 1953, lived as a widow. Retiring in 1966, she moved to Florence, Italy and wrote Diary of Florence in Flood, inspired by the great flood of the Arno river in November of that year. In 1967, Taylor married the American sculptor John Rood. Thereafter, they lived half a year in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and half in Val di Pesa, near Florence. Taylor continued this style of living after her second husband's death in 1974.
In 1995, when Taylor was 91, Story Press reissued Address Unknown to mark the 50th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps. The story 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, January 27.
Rediscovered after Address Unknown'''s reissue, Taylor spent a happy final year signing copies and giving interviews until her death at age 93.
Works
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.
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 – she had foolishly defied the Nazis and was being pursued by SA thugs. (It is revealed earlier in the book that Martin and Griselle had had an affair before the events of the book take place.)