Nimmerdorf
by Robert Boucheron
In the 1930s, refugees from Central Europe fled the Nazi onslaught to freedom in the West. Among them were scientists and engineers with ethnic roots and political dossiers. For these displaced intellectuals, in 1936 the United States government, under the Works Progress Administration umbrella, created the haven of Nimmerdorf. Inhabited for a decade, Nimmerdorf was a research center for high-level concepts in physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics, pure and applied, with an eye to their eventual use in military defense. Or, as often happens with new ideas, for use in mass production or as labor-saving devices or in ways unrelated to their original purpose.
The national laboratories at Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Oak Ridge, Tennessee, get all the attention in history books, because they developed the atomic bomb during World War II. Yet Nimmerdorf predated them, and it was in Nimmerdorf that the most provocative ideas were hatched. Encouraged by lavish appropriations under the line item of “discretionary spending,” and unhampered by Congressional oversight, imagination ran riot. But nothing like the bomb appeared. In hindsight, it appears the socialist origins of many Nimmerdorfers inclined them to pursue the arts of peace, not weapons of war.
Like Los Alamos and Oak Ridge, Nimmerdorf was planned as a “secret city,” a self-contained enclave for work and residence, with very limited access. A steel fence surrounded the perimeter, which was patrolled by armed guards twenty-four hours a day. One gate allowed supplies in and trash out. Visitors, who were nearly all military officers and government officials, were subject to pre-screening and a thorough search before entering. In this respect, Nimmerdorf resembled a walled city under siege or isolated by the plague, completely cut off from commerce and normal communication.
Nimmerdorf was abandoned soon after the war. Its inhabitants dispersed, and the results of its research and experimentation were buried in classified files in Washington, DC. The site quickly returned to its natural state, and the undisclosed location was kept secret. Was it on one of the Thousand Islands in the St. Lawrence River in upstate New York? Was it in the depopulated Dust Bowl of western Oklahoma and Texas? Was it in the Everglades, the endless swamp in southern Florida? When some of the classified material was declassified as “innocuous trivia,” we learned that Nimmerdorf was in Virginia, in the heart of the pastoral Shenandoah Valley, in the peculiar geological formation called Massanutten, a forked ridge that hides a small elevated valley called, appropriately enough, Fort Valley.
The Nimmerdorf files, though wildly disorganized and far from complete, afford glimpses of the place, daily life there, and what went on in the sprawling laboratory that was its reason for being. Among the projects developed, or merely mulled over and sketched, were the universal decoder ring, logarithmic accentuation, the perpetual-motion steel-ball pendulum, the invisible shield, and a medication to counteract the effects of brainwashing and cognitive decline, the so-called smart pill. Inventions that showed promise included the gamma-ray gun, antimatter pellets, a technique of massage to inhibit or eliminate cancer, and a room-cooling device small enough to fit on a desktop or a bedside night table. Ideas that later went mainstream, whether leaked or independently conceived, include white noise, cryptocurrency, reality television, aromatherapy, and the astronomical listening project later called SETI.
The most intriguing project, which never resulted in a practical application and consequently remained unknown, was called frimbles. Eleutheros Ganz used hints gathered from ancient texts and mystical traditions, including the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Pythagorean parables, and the Kabbalah—esoteric and gnostic lore which fed into alchemy, the Rosicrucians, and the tarot—to create a method of linguistic and numerological analysis, with potential applications to market manipulation, archetype identification, and dialectical synthesis. As a word, frimble derives from the ancient Greek phrymbola, a variant of thrombola, a compound of thrombos, meaning a lump or clot, and bola from the verb ballein, meaning to throw. Frimbles are briefly mentioned by the comic dramatist Aristophanes in his play The Babylonians as a children’s game, something like jacks or knucklebones, with the implied parody of adults attempting to predict the future.
Though developed as an intellectual tool along the lines of algebra, frimbles never entirely escaped the taint of divination. Ganz meant to use it as a method of sorting alternative outcomes, like probability theory. He rejected Christian and Marxist doctrines of predestination. Unrelated to his work, and liable to mislead the unwary researcher, is the English dialect phrase “to have the frimbles,” meaning to be perplexed and uncertain to the point of agitated trembling.
Ganz left a mass of notes on frimbles, with seemingly mathematical equations that include obscure symbols, and drawings of objects that resemble an abacus or a more complex calculating machine. Were frimbles a method of notation, a transformational process, an accounting device, or all of these together? Ganz himself may have lost his way in the thickets of advanced thought. With no clear path to a practical use, in the scramble for funds and laboratory space he lost out to flashy rivals. With regret, he had to drop the project when Nimmerdorf was abandoned, and like so many original ideas it slipped from view.
A city cannot spring into being overnight, even one devoted to thought and flights of fancy. At Nimmerdorf, the earliest arrivals lived in canvas tents and sheet-metal huts, a hastily thrown-together assemblage of sheds and lean-tos, with a trench latrine and a hand pump for water. Laundry and bathing facilities were simple, a bucket and a sponge. The displaced intellectuals, many of whom had narrowly escaped the clutches of the Nazis, joked about their “concentration camp.” Yet camaraderie was strong. The communal mess evoked the dining hall of an elite university, with conversations in several languages. German and French were well-represented, along with Czech, Polish, Hungarian, Yiddish, Esperanto, and a smattering of Baltic and Balkan tongues.
Despite food rationing, the cuisine was inspired by Vienna and Prague. A pastry chef, a kosher butcher, and a noted saucier were among the refugees. Allowing for a tendency to romanticize, people recalled that primitive time with a dollop of nostalgia. Compiled and copied for the residents but never published, the polyglot and multilingual Nimmerdorf Cookbook is a trove of recipes and reminiscences, as well as tribute to what you can do with a few potatoes, an onion, and a sprig of rosemary.
In addition to lab notes and recipes, the hundreds of file boxes in Washington, DC, contain documents, letters, plans, and photographs of the place. Nimmerdorf the city was as much of an experiment as the functions it served. A priority program of fast-track design and construction emphasized innovative architecture and unusual materials. In a single year, the flimsy housing and overcrowded facilities gave way to a spacious layout of villas and cottages, a progressive day school, and a multipurpose auditorium. At the center of the scheme and slightly uphill was a sprawling laboratory of stark white modules linked to an undulating spine, something like a gigantic centipede. Mainly one-story and sensitive to the natural contours of the site, flooded with sunlight and favoring pebble dash walls and low-pitched roofs, the city resembled the best of the Bauhaus, avant-garde design from France, and Italian futurism.
Modest in size, Nimmerdorf was not quite a city but more than a village. The plan as drawn could accommodate about five thousand people, and no doubt it was enlarged while the site was in use. Population figures and other statistics are hard to come by, owing to government secrecy. Also, people are often vague about numbers, even those who work with them for a living. Several residents kept diaries, but memoirs from the period were subject to wartime censorship, and interest quickly declined after the site closed. Who wanted to read about a place so off the radar and out of the loop?
Cut off from the outside world, Nimmerdorfers had to “make our own fun,” as they said. They were uniquely qualified to do so, with talented performers in music, drama, painting, and set design. They formed an orchestra and a club for amateur theatricals. A string quartet played for its own amusement. A men’s choir and a women’s chorus met on Friday and Saturday, respectively. If culture was strong, religion was not. Small minorities met in private homes to practice their faith: Jewish, Catholic, Zoroastrian, and Theosophical. The prevailing social tone was secular, devoted to science and unfettered inquiry, with some outspoken atheists.
Wartime disruption of the apparel industry and lack of access to shops and mail-order firms like Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward, in the heady atmosphere of scientific speculation, led to a blossoming of couture, a distinctive look that lasted a few seasons. Many of the wives were good at sewing, and not a few of their husbands had prior experience in tailoring. Photos show men in wool suits with wide lapels and dark neckties, with slicked-back hair and briar pipes, while women model sportswear and bright skirts and scarves, as though a band of esteemed professors intermarried with a troupe of gypsies and dance-hall girls.
The Allied victories of 1945 paradoxically rang the death knell for the city. While the more famous laboratory centers smoothly segued to the Cold War litany of intercontinental ballistic missiles, spy satellites, and nuclear payloads, the freewheeling style of Nimmerdorf was unable to adapt to the grim new reality. Congress became suspicious of left-wing longhairs, and funding evaporated. A frantic round of awkward sales calls and badly worded press releases went to corporate executives and agency heads who could not for the life of them figure out what they meant. The bold scientists and theoreticians lacked a sponsor for their peculiar brand of genius. Albert Einstein and David Sarnoff were invited to visit, but neither came. As quickly as it rose, the city fell. By the end of the following year, Nimmerdorf lay deserted, a modernist ghost town.
The federal Bureau of Redundancy cleared the site, ostensibly to prevent accidents, but really to wipe out an inconvenient fact. Experiments can fail, and memories can embarrass. After its brief flowering, Nimmerdorf faded like a rare and exotic bloom. The files were stored and soon forgotten, a bureaucratic hoard to molder unseen. On departure, residents took personal items as souvenirs of a high point in their lives. Scavengers combed the deserted site for anything of value, unconscious of the value of what once took place right under their feet.
Harold Spitzer, who had lived in Nimmerdorf as a boy, returned many years later as an adult on summer vacation. By then, Spitzer was a successful architect in New York. He snuck through the fence and took pictures that show weeds in cinder block foundations, buckled concrete slabs, and dented sheet metal lying on the ground. Mr. Spitzer wrote: “The tallest structure in town was a water tower like a tin can on stilts. It is now the only structure left standing, though it leans at a crazy angle. The hulk of the auditorium and the spine of the laboratory are visible. I think I found the school, with its playground like a futuristic sculpture garden. But where is the little white stucco house of my childhood, the Main Street shops that accepted Monopoly money as scrip, and the music studio where a lady with garlic breath taught me to play the violin?”
Robert Boucheron worked as an architect, editor, journalist, and musician in New York and Charlottesville. His stories, essays, and book reviews appear in Alabama Literary Review, Avalon Literary Review, Floyd County Moonshine, Interstice Journal, Loch Raven Review, Resonance Journal, Saturday Evening Post, Sterncastle Magazine, Superpresent, and other magazines. His one-act plays have been staged in Detroit; Concord, North Carolina; and Hagerstown, Maryland. He won a fellowship to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
