After Salinger was bullied at the McBurney School for being Jewish, he transferred to Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania, said to be the model for Pency Prep, Holden’s school in Catcher. (Like Holden, he served as the manager for his school’s fencing team.) Feeling highly conflicted about being Jewish, he sought religious fulfilment from sources foreign to Judaism, as he experimented with Hinduism and Kriya yoga, Zen Buddhism, Scientology, and Christian Science. However, he temporarily “rediscovered” Judaism during his nine-month relationship with author Joyce Maynard, who during a 1998 interview stated that Salinger told her that he’d been drawn to her as a “landsman” because they were both “half-Jewish.”
The connection between Salinger’s muddled Jewish background and his refusal to be characterized as an American Jewish writer writing about Jews in America (though some commentators argue that this is what he actually was) may be due to the contradictory messages he received in his early life about his Judaism. Being “half Jewish” was a source of great personal conflict for him, and his mental trauma due to inner conflict is evident throughout his writing. Two of the most important sources of his trauma, which left an indelible imprint on his psyche, were his role as one of the first American soldiers to liberate a concentration camp (at this time he was working on what would eventually become The Catcher in the Rye) and his discovery that his beloved “adopted Jewish family” in Vienna had all been murdered by the Nazis.
Called up by the army after the bombing at Pearl Harbor, Salinger landed at Normandy on D-Day and fought all the way to Paris. On April 23, 1945, he and his regiment were in Aalen and Ellwangen, villages later recognized by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as having contained a sub-camp of Dachau, and Salinger’s 4th Infantry Division was recognized by the U.S. Army as a unit that helped to liberate Dachau camps (1992).
Soon after witnessing Kaufering, a Dachau auxiliary camp, Salinger checked himself into a Nuremberg civilian hospital. In a famous letter he wrote from the hospital to his friend Ernest Hemingway, he described his “constant state of despondency” and of his need to speak with a professional counselor before things got out of hand. (At the end of Catcher, Holden, too, finds himself in a psychiatric facility.)
However, he explained to Hemingway that he feared a psychological discharge might adversely affect the reception of the novel he was writing and that he often thought about Holden Caulfield while responding to questioning by hospital staff. (As Holden’s favorite former teacher explained, “You’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior . . . many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now.”)
He also wrote of his hope of returning to Vienna to find the beloved family with whom he had lived for a time before the war.
In 1937, Salinger had spent several months with the Safirs, a Jewish family that lived in Vienna’s Jewish quarter whom he adored and idealized as the epitome of integrity (he seemed to share Holden’s unreserved disdain for “phonies”), during which time he witnessed and experienced the Nazi terror and anti-Semitic horrors of pre-Anschluss Vienna. After the war, he did return to Vienna – only to learn the family had all been murdered by the Nazis, including the daughter with whom he had his first serious romance.
After the war Salinger was sent to Germany as a counter-intelligence officer charged with locating, arresting, and interrogating Nazi war criminals. While it is unclear whether he was involved with the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, his assignment as an interrogator and translator there makes this highly probable.
