Moreover Salinger uses the term nervous breakdown and not combat fatigue in his story about his alter ego Sergeant X.Ĭombat fatigue was fairly common among the soldiers of Salinger’s Twelfth Infantry Regiment. Also, he did not suffer his breakdown immediately after a life-threatening event but after the end of the war. It is widely assumed that Salinger’s nervous breakdown was a case of combat fatigue or shell shock.
He mentions his nervous breakdown in a letter he wrote to Ernest Hemingway from that hospital, and in “For Esmé-With Love and Squalor” he describes the symptoms of the nervous breakdown that the CIC agent Sergeant X suffers. But it took him two months, until July 1945, to seek help in the psychiatric ward of a civilian hospital. In short, Salinger all but ignored the Holocaust.Ī week after the end of the war, J.D. How else to explain that he saw nothing wrong with bringing home a German war bride to live with him in the home of his Jewish parents? The most telling sign of his conflicted attitude toward the Nazis is the fact that there is only a one-sentence reference to a concentration camp in his fiction. Army as being “edgy with treason” and calling the war “a tricky, dreary farce.” His breakdown also seems to have caused a change in his personality. Ernest Hemingway wrote that Salinger told him, “he hated the Army and the war.”Ī week after the end of the war in Europe in 1945, Salinger had a nervous breakdown and wrote an unhinged letter describing his attitude toward the U.S. Eventually Salinger started to be less critical toward the Nazis than toward the U.S. The first signs of that non-judgmental attitude begin to appear in his fiction shortly after D-Day. That attitude changed from initial unconcern about the Nazis, toward a gung-ho “Kill the Nazis” attitude, and from there to a final non-judgmental stance.
Salinger and the Nazis deals with Salinger’s changing attitude toward the Nazis as expressed in his fiction, letters, and conversations between his first story (1940) and The Catcher in the Rye (1951).
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