CHAPTER SEVEN
one night in Vienna in the early 1930s, John lit into Knick. Knick was by then working for William Randolph Hearst’s International News Service, lured by a big raise after he’d won the Pulitzer. No amount of money, John and Dorothy objected, was enough to sell your soul to the increasingly reactionary Hearst, but Knick had just laughed off their concerns and taken the job. Now he was back from Bulgaria, where he’d bagged an interview with King Boris. The monarch was notoriously reclusive and Knick was the first correspondent to get him to talk on the record. The previous month, Knick had interviewed Mussolini, too—his second interview with the Duce. Those were interviews that John had badly wanted, and after too many drinks, he assailed Knick as a “journalistic whore,” who wrote flatteringly of people whom he otherwise loathed if they gave him an interview. The two men nearly came to blows.
Knick wasn’t the only opportunist. For the reporters who gathered at the Hotel Imperial or the bar at Berlin’s Hotel Adlon, the personages you’d landed—how many, how important—functioned as a proxy for status. “Has interviewed Lloyd George, President Masaryk of Czechoslovakia, King Carol of Rumania…” read the entry John submitted to Who’s Who. The more important the reporter, the bigger the interviews as a rule, unless (like Jimmy with Abd el-Krim), you were prepared to traverse the desert barefoot, planes bombing overhead, to nab your prize. Who you got to see also depended on your paper. Some publications were willing to pay for interviews, some not. Politics entered into the matter, too. If you worked for Hearst, you had a better chance of meeting Mussolini or Hitler, whom the press baron—completing his conversion to right-wing causes—hired to write the occasional syndicated article. But by the same token, you’d be hard pressed to get an interview with the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky; he refused on principle to speak to Hearst reporters.
Reporters had long sought interviews with the great and the good in politics, figuring out how to get the story from the headline-hogging big-city boss or the charismatic senator without getting played in the process. But reckoning with Hitler or Stalin or Mussolini—or, for that matter, Abd el-Krim or the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem—was different. These figures had managed to redirect the stream of history, forcing the tide of events into different channels. How else could you explain their uncanny ability to bend events to their own will? What was their appeal and why were millions of people following them to the future they’d dreamed up?
Marxists had always claimed that individuals didn’t matter; history was determined by impersonal economic and social forces that carried humanity onward, no matter the leaders bobbing along at the helm. Nor had liberals or conservatives devoted much attention to the transformative power of the individual leader. No matter how powerful politicians such as David Lloyd George or Raymond Poincaré were, they represented the distillation of the energies of their parties and their people. In that sense, they were interchangeable with another statesman.
But by the early 1930s, when Knick and John feuded in a Vienna café, it was clear that the “authority of personality,” as Hitler put it, mattered more than it ever had in their lifetimes. One couldn’t account for what was happening otherwise. The individual leader, as Knick wrote, now counted for “nearly everything.” They were the ones fomenting the world crisis: it was happening within them and through them. When the fate of the world hinged upon a handful of men, personal pathologies became the stuff of geopolitics. The correspondents needed a new way of thinking about the role of the individual.
—
the dictators rising across Europe were changing how politics, in its entirety, was done. They proclaimed their will as law, abolishing parliamentary governance, the legislature, and the independent civil service. They dispensed, too, with the normal mechanisms for securing the consent of the governed. They didn’t need elections, they insisted, because they personally embodied the people. Bitter party conflicts are a thing of the past! We will punish the bloodsuckers who have drained our people dry! they roared to stadiums filled with their cheering throngs.
The very scripted nature of the dictators’ personae made an in-person audience seem all the more valuable. What lay behind the military uniforms and spit-polished shoes, the jutting jaws displayed in the posters on every corner, the salutes on the newsreels, and the throaty radio addresses? A meeting with the man was a chance for the reporter to try to take his measure: to assess the subtle changes in the Führer’s voice as he spoke of his subordinates; to joust with Mussolini, asking when he thought war would come.
In fact, what you learned if you met Hitler in person was that he was almost exactly the same in private as in public. He disliked interviews: he gave only a dozen or so to the foreign press between 1923 and 1933, including one to Dorothy and one to Knick. He recognized that he was much more persuasive to a stadium full of thousands than he was one-on-one. An interview with Hitler began normally enough, but after a few sentences, his eyes fixed on the ceiling, and he ranted through his usual litany. The German army had been stabbed in the back by profiteers on the home front. The iniquities of the Treaty of Versailles and the Allies’ outrageous reparations payments. It was impossible for reporters to get a direct answer to any of the questions they posed: the man just repeated his speeches.
The fact that Hitler wouldn’t carry on a conversation didn’t stop the correspondents from clamoring to see him. Dorothy had been petitioning Hitler’s foreign press chief, the half-American, Harvard-educated Putzi Hanfstaengl, for an interview since the Beer Hall Putsch. After marrying Sinclair Lewis in 1928, Dorothy had returned to America. She’d overseen the renovation of Twin Farms, the property Lewis bought in Vermont; planted thousands of flower bulbs in the gardens; gone on an unsatisfying lecture tour through the Midwest; and, in 1930, had a baby. But Red was drunk all the time. Like “a vampire,” Dorothy wrote, “he absorbs all my vitality, all my energy, all my beauty—I get incredibly dull.” In the pages of the Pictorial Review, they’d conducted a very public round of fisticuffs on the subject “Is America a Paradise for Women,” with Red arguing “Yes,” citing women’s opportunities in American public life (including as “Lady Mussolini of the local study club”), and Dorothy “No,” bemoaning the lack of sympathy and companionship in American marriage. After Red won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930, Dorothy returned to Germany for a stint of reporting, leaving their infant son Michael with her friend Rose Wilder Lane, a fellow journalist and the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder. She secured a contract with the Saturday Evening Post, the most prominent and widely circulated of American weekly magazines, for a series of articles.
In December 1931, when Dorothy finally met Hitler, he was fresh off the Nazi Party’s surprise show of strength in the elections the previous year, and willing to offer an audience to a select few foreign reporters. In the 1930 election, all of Weimar’s moderate and liberal parties had lost ground to the extremes, but the Nazis had scored the biggest gains of all. They stood on the brink of an electoral breakthrough that could mean real power in the government. Both the political and the economic situation in Germany, Dorothy recognized, were dire. Many of the people she met talked of the country’s “ruin,” a consequence of reparations she herself described as vindictive and damaging. She was all prepared, she would write, to be bowled over by Hitler. But less than a minute in his presence, and what struck her was his “startling insignificance.”
“I Saw Hitler!” was the headline, and Dorothy’s verdict was scathing. “He is the very prototype of the Little Man,” she began, noting the dictator’s boneless face, his awkward gestures, his shyness. She’d wondered if she would require smelling salts to face him down, but quite to the contrary. Hitler’s manner was soft, “almost feminine.” Given the Nazis’ virile posturing, that was telling; she proceeded to let the air out of the inflated Hitler balloon. With a wink to the rumors about his homosexuality, she noted: “I bet he crooks his little finger when he drinks a cup of tea.” She’d been informed that she could pose three questions, which had to be submitted twenty-four hours in advance of the interview. But that was all for show: Hitler didn’t even pretend to reply. When she interrupted him in mid-rant, repeating her first question—“What will you do for the working masses of Germany?”—he told her he didn’t intend to let his enemies in on the details of his program.
Could such a man rule Germany? He was an “agitator of genius,” Thompson judged. Of course his theories made no sense, but she well knew, too, that “reason never yet swept a world off its feet.” Millions of Germans had been taken in. They were little people, like Hitler himself, aggrieved and resentful, intent on revenge for the miseries that had been heaped upon them. “Listening to him they feel themselves exalted.” No, Dorothy decided. Even if Hitler came to power, the Nazis would govern in coalition with the realists of the Catholic Center Party. “I predict that Hitler will be extinguished between two prelates.” And: “If Hitler comes into power, he will smite only the weakest of his enemies.”
It was, as John put it to Jimmy decades later, “her comico-terrible gaffe.” As the chief of the Public Ledger’s bureau in Berlin, Dorothy had been well ensconced in German intellectual and political circles, which she rated as superior to those in the United States. Germany was the land of Einstein and Thomas Mann. How could a third-rate type like Hitler come to power in a country like that? To many other observers before 1933, the idea of a civilized people commanded by a little Austrian corporal turned house painter seemed just as farcical as it did to Dorothy.
Not to Knick, though. Knick interviewed Hitler a few months after Dorothy did. He’d been traveling around Germany to assess the situation, dressing up as a homeless tramp to stand in soup lines; putting on a freshly pressed suit to eavesdrop on the fat cats guzzling champagne in the nightclubs; talking to local Nazi leaders, industrialists like the steel tycoon Gustav Krupp, hungry schoolchildren. The debauchery amid want, the resentments, the inability of successive governments to manage the economy: every sign pointed to the fact that the German crisis was sharpening. The unemployment rate had soared to nearly 25 percent and at night, Nazis brawled with anti-fascists, mostly Communists, for control of the streets.
Courtesy of Putzi Hanfstaengl, whom he’d known since the Beer Hall Putsch, Knick arranged to see Hitler in Munich at the Nazi Party’s “Brown House” headquarters. Hitler was courteous, insisting that Knick take a seat first. The Führer was dressed not in a uniform, but in a black suit, with a white shirt and a black tie. He looked, or so Knick observed, like a “rising young district attorney in a second class county in Texas.” An ambitious mediocrity, in other words.
“What will happen to American property and investments when you come to power?” Knick began. (Not “if” but “when.”)
As soon as Hitler began to talk, the mask of ordinariness fell away. Far from an idiot, the man was a talented, dangerous demagogue. It was just a matter of time before he came to power, Knick thought. Hitler’s success in the July 1932 elections vindicated Knick’s assessment. The Nazi Party won 37 percent of the vote, still a minority in the Reichstag, but now they had overtaken the Socialists to become the country’s largest party. Still, there were plenty of observers who assumed that the Nazi danger would pass, especially after the National Socialists shed voters that fall in the November elections. Knick’s critics accused him of undue alarmism, of whipping up a tabloid-style frenzy: “Mr. Knickerbocker is perhaps a little too susceptible to the magic of Hitler: it is part of his emphasis on the sensational.”
In the years that followed, Dorothy was annoyed to be reminded of her error of judgment about Hitler. The fact that she wasn’t alone in underestimating the Führer was hardly a consolation. She’d pay for the mistake in more ways than one. Her erroneous prediction jeopardized her ability to report from Germany. So livid was the Nazi leader about Dorothy’s article that he refused to meet foreign reporters for an entire year. If Hitler ever did come to power, commented one Brooklyn paper, Mrs. Lewis had better steer clear of Germany.
—
cultivating fascists required a certain measure of flattery. But how much was too much? What made someone a “journalistic whore”? More than any other figure, it was Mussolini, a onetime political journalist and editor himself, who precipitated that question. The Italian dictator liked bantering with reporters, especially pretty lady reporters. He made a point of seeing the foreign press at regular intervals, both to burnish his own image and to gather up crumbs of information about what was happening in other chancelleries. Knick would meet him four times, once in 1932, twice in 1934, and once in 1936. On the first occasion, the interview came as part of Knick’s reporting on European responses to the Great Depression. “Your statements on my general thesis, ‘Can Europe Recover Economically?’ would be of more interest and value to me and my readers than those of any other statesman in Europe,” Knick entreated.
At the gate of the Palazzo Venezia, the Renaissance mansion that Mussolini had taken for his office, Knick submitted his credentials at a guard station, walked up three flights of stairs, followed a corridor past more blue-liveried guards standing at attention, passed through a Renaissance door, traversing two more chambers before finding himself before an imposing door. The room on the other side was immense, and at a carved desk eighty feet away, virtually the only piece of furniture in the room, Mussolini was sitting, waiting for him.
The Duce wasn’t at all what Knick was expecting. He was prepared for a “snooty, Prussian-officer dictator.” Mussolini, by contrast, was a charmer, who rose from his desk and walked across the room, extending his hand. “Benevolent, agreeable, polite, intelligent, etc.,” Knick wrote a colleague. Conversant with the reporter’s trade, the Duce didn’t permit anything he said to be quoted verbatim and if you ever hoped to interview him again, it was a rule to be followed to the letter. He preferred to answer, in writing, questions put to him in advance. That lent the conversation itself a gossipy, almost intimate flavor. His Excellency pumped the reporters he met for information, asking nearly as many questions as he answered.
“And what do you think of Hitler?” Mussolini asked Knick the year after the Nazis came to power. Did he still have the support of the Germans?
The Germans, Knick told Mussolini, wouldn’t abandon Hitler, not even if thousands of them starved to death.
Knick could tell that Mussolini was thinking the same was true of his own fascist state in Italy. “Yes, I think you’re right. They could even starve and it would make no difference. Nothing but death or a lost war would make the difference.” However similar their grip over their respective populaces, it was also plain from his tone that the Duce regarded Hitler as a less imposing strongman than himself.
None of this made it into the articles that Knick wrote in the early 1930s. If Dorothy demolished Hitler’s public presentation, Knick portrayed Mussolini much as he wanted to be seen. The Duce was knowledgeable, canny, and decisive. He was combatting the Depression with large-scale public works programs and an aggressive form of corporatism. He was rearming Italy but not looking for war. As Knick wrote, “No man has a better grasp of the menaces that threaten Europe.” It was a description often used to praise Knick himself. In depicting the success of Italian fascism, Knick worried that he had overdone it. “I hope nobody interprets my report as a plea for Fascism or a defense of it in any country but Italy,” he wrote his editor. “There is only one Italy and only one Mussolini.”
—
the year after knick first interviewed Mussolini, John got Trotsky. It had taken months of wheedling and letters full of promises (and probably an envelope full of cash), but on a dazzlingly bright day in April 1932, John stepped off the paddleboat on the island of Prinkipo in the Marmara Sea, off the coast of Constantinople. Expelled by Stalin from the Soviet Union, Trotsky had lived in exile since 1928, plotting a global revolution. Stalin might be willing to content himself with building socialism in one country but Trotsky continued to insist that Marxism would succeed only if it ushered in the permanent revolution—in every country.
At the Prinkipo pier, John was met by Trotsky’s secretary, a slight young man in surprisingly bourgeois attire: gray striped trousers and a gray felt fedora. Before John could see Trotsky, said his secretary, they’d first of all sort out the translation of the interview. John had submitted his questions in advance, and these Trotsky had answered. But Trotsky, who’d worked as a journalist and a war correspondent before the Russian Revolution, was very particular about how he was quoted. Together, John and the secretary (who spoke no English) were to translate Trotsky’s answers (which were in Russian) into English for Trotsky (who himself spoke little English) to approve. They’d have to make do with French. John and the secretary settled into a pier-side café. The hours crept by.
By the time Trotsky’s secretary declared himself satisfied, it was midday, and they ambled slowly up the hill. The villa where Trotsky was staying was a secluded palazzo of rosy red plaster on the northern coast of the island, its rectangular garden surrounded by high stone walls and overgrown with bougainvillea and mimosa. Just past the iron gates, on the right, was a hut where a few Turkish policemen, equipped with dogs and pistols, stood guard. Trotsky’s study occupied a large room on the second floor. When John entered, Trotsky was at work, behind a huge desk made of bricks and planks and loaded with stacks of paper.
“I am astounded at his face,” John noted. It wasn’t the way that he (or, he presumed, his readers) thought that the man who invented the modern coup d’état would look: “the thing that made an overwhelming first impression on me was Trotsky’s lightness and cleanness.” The revolutionary was scrubbed fresh, bright as a bubble, his manner gracious and precise. Surely it had taken a more menacing character to recognize that you could overthrow a state by taking control of technology, seizing the telephone and telegraph exchanges and the electrical plants. As John read the translated interview aloud, here and there Trotsky interjected a correction, plucking dictionaries off his shelves to get a word right. With a child’s chuckle, he showed John the hiding places—books with their pages scooped out—where he kept his valuable documents.
“Will the capitalist system survive the present crisis?” John asked. Yes, Trotsky judged, the current crisis but not those that would follow. Trotsky brought up the World Disarmament Conference, which had opened in Geneva to great fanfare a couple of months earlier. The purpose of the Geneva Conference was to promote world peace by eliminating offensive weapons. Such efforts Trotsky deemed hopeless: the question was not whether war would come, but when.
“Is there any possibility of your returning to Russia?” If danger threatened the country, Trotsky pronounced, he’d be prepared to serve. But by sidestepping the question, he allowed it to hang there in the air: yet another shot aimed at Stalin. Trotsky left no doubt as to his contempt for the Soviet leader. Back in the old days in Moscow, as Stalin launched into one of his Politburo speeches, Trotsky used to pick up a book and start reading.
Incredible, really, how the hatred between the two men—visceral, profound—had shaped the course of Russia, John observed. And not just Russia. In the countries where John traveled, in Spain and Germany, he met fervent Trotskyites, pledged to the Fourth International, who took their orders from Prinkipo. Small wonder that the capitalist countries still shuddered when Trotsky—“a packet of dynamite, wrapped in asbestos,” as John put it in Harper’s—crossed their borders: “gingerly he was forked across frontiers as if the very elements of his person might spontaneously explode.”
Stalin had kicked Trotsky out of the Soviet Union rather than having him shot, and given how many followers Trotsky had, perhaps that was shrewd. But it was only a matter of time before Trotsky’s agitations, his Bulletin of the Opposition, became intolerable. When Trotsky came downstairs for meals, the members of the Prinkipo household barred the dining room’s windows and doors with iron shutters. When he slept, they took turns standing guard armed with semiautomatic German Parabellums, the dapper secretary included, all night long.
Was Trotsky finished or was he just getting started? On that question, John rendered no judgment. There was no doubt in his mind, though, that the man was a genius: “A genius in the sense that Michelangelo was a genius.” It wasn’t just that Trotsky was a masterful tactician and a brilliant theorist. His career, as John put it, “couldn’t be explained by any rationalization of the historical process.” Contrary to Marx’s vision of history, in which feudalism gave ineluctably onto capitalism and then, after the revolution, to communism, it seemed to John there wasn’t anything inevitable about Trotsky’s rise. And yet, the Russian Revolution was unthinkable without him.
The fact that Trotsky, Mussolini—and Goebbels, too—had all started as journalists created its own sort of dynamic with the correspondents. The politicians liked turning the tables, deploying the reporter’s bag of tricks to their own advantage: turning on the charm, trading information without giving too much away, polishing the quotations attributed to them. For their part, the reporters put themselves, at least imaginatively, in the politicians’ shoes. I want power, John had confessed to Frances from Moscow in 1928, and in that, he was hardly alone. Most newspapermen, John had noticed, quickly grew tired of witnessing events; they longed to play a part. Stories of reporters secretly brokering peace treaties made the rounds.
To interview a man like Trotsky was to ask oneself—could I have been him? After all, as John wrote, Trotsky had vaulted himself from journalistic oblivion to control of one-seventh of the world’s land surface. What was that genius? John was grappling with what Jimmy called the fit between the man and history but unusually for him, ever a clear writer, he left the idea a stub in his article, elliptical and unexplored.
—
frances was a marxist but she was also a Freudian, which meant that she thought that an investigation of personality in light of the formative experiences of childhood was imperative. But she thought John and his friends were going about it the wrong way. For one thing, they were far too cautious about what they put in print. Why wouldn’t they just write the truth—that Poland’s Marshal Piłsudski was subject to psychopathic temper tantrums and Turkey’s Kemal Atatürk was a mother-fixated drunk? Tear the veil off the dictators, she urged her husband.
At the same time, Frances urged John to pay more attention to the powers behind the throne. The capitalists who were using the Nazis to prop up their own class interests. The industrialists filling up Nazi coffers. The arms dealers supplying the fascists with munitions. “Why should these powerful people, whose behavior can influence millions of lives, live behind a smoke-screen, while poor politicians like Hitler have their balls discussed in public?” she demanded. They ought to be unmasked, too. The better article, said Frances, wasn’t “I Saw Hitler!” but “I Saw the Guy Who Pays for Hitler’s Pants.”
Frances had no shortage of ideas for John, but when she sat down to do her own work, she made little progress. She’d been working on a play entitled “Mothers and Lovers” when Johnny was a baby, but she couldn’t figure out how it should end and spent fruitless days fretting over it. She helped John with his work, subbing for him when he was away, filing articles under his name, which was the common practice when an assistant filled in. The London News Chronicle, a liberal paper, hired her to report from Vienna, but the work was occasional, only when there was a big story afoot. She ought to have had plenty of time to write.
Of course, there was Johnny to worry about. From the moment that he was born, weeks earlier than expected, nose first and jaundiced, Frances kept a journal about him. On gridded pages, she charted his progress: Weight, Travel, Thumb-Sucking, Food, Social Behavior, Nurses. She was fastidious and watchful, recording a test done when he was two weeks old for the enlarged thymus blamed for Judy’s death. At first, she wrote tersely, as if to ward off disaster, a checklist of attainments (standing up in playpen, ten months), but later on, the entries came more easily. It was important to manage his childhood correctly, she knew: as the years progressed, she looked for signs of an Oedipus complex, arranged for him to spend time alone with John, kept him in bed when he had colds, and instructed Milla, the Austrian nursemaid she hired, not to scold him for masturbating. She answered forthrightly when he asked about body parts and had informed him—it was crucial to do it early—about how babies were made. “But Mama,” he replied, “that’s not true at all.”
What a darling child, people said to her: a blond cap of hair, his father’s blue eyes, a tall boy with rounded, sturdy limbs. Mild-mannered and gentle, he could play for hours, sitting in one place, with his toys. Every morning he drew in his notebooks after completing his exercises. He danced to the Victrola, whether or not there was music playing. He was fond of the moon. At the age of three he showed his first sign of jealousy when Dorothy Thompson’s son tried to take Milla’s hand. He spoke always in German though she and John supposed that he understood a little English. I love you as much as Milla, he told Frances. I love you as much as Mama, he told John that same week. Perched up on John’s shoulder, he said proudly that he’d be as tall as his papa one day. At night, she and John and Johnny kissed good night, which they called Alle drei lieb haben. All three of us loving.
“My Experiment in Johnny,” she noted atop a sheet of blue paper: to create in him “a cooperative—not a competitive person.”
Johnny is fine, said John. The apartment is fine. I am fine. Please do your work. Finish your play, write more for the News Chronicle. “I am a Penelope writer,” she replied. By night she unpicked all that she’d done in the morning. She found news reporting straightforward enough: journalism was “premature emission” in her opinion. The problem came when she tried to write something more substantial. Stop making excuses, John reproached her. “I loathe it unendurably, much more than I’ve even told you, that you waste your talent so unendingly.” No more lists of household chores, put away the cookbooks. Just wake up in the morning and start writing. I’ll help you, he promised. “Talent is so damned rare, & so precious it seems to me nothing short of criminality to fritter it away.”
—
while frances struggled with her work, Dorothy was writing more and better than ever before. The year after she interviewed Hitler, Dorothy put aside her essay, entitled “The End of Bourgeois Morality,” and began a novel about her first marriage to Joseph Bard. In addition, she was turning out long, deeply researched pieces for the Saturday Evening Post. At the root of the trouble in Central Europe, Dorothy judged, was the settlement at Versailles that followed the 1914–1918 war. She briskly dissected its errors. It wasn’t just the vindictive reparations payments. Peace treaties had often enough taken Carthaginian form. Far more destabilizing, she wrote, was its misplaced idealism. The most dangerous person at the Paris Peace Conference had been Woodrow Wilson, “the college professor with the not quite good enough intellect.” Wilson’s nineteenth-century liberal nationalism—his confidence in the principle of the self-determination of peoples—ignored both the economic interdependence of twentieth-century Europe and the impossibility of creating ethnically pure states where populations were “so hopelessly intermingled.” Wilson’s belief that democracy could be imposed upon a people had led, in short order, to the military dictatorships and corrupt cabals of the successor states; small states, it turned out, could be just as oppressive as large empires.
Dorothy’s pieces were expansive, analytical, richly descriptive about daily life in Depression-era Europe but always rounding on a relevant point for Americans. She recognized she had to cultivate her audience, demonstrating why they should care about developments thousands of miles away. There was a wholesale retreat from internationalism now under way in Europe, she warned her readers. Xenophobia was ascendant. The British yammered on about buying British, extolling the virtues of local limestone over Italian marble for tombstones. The Germans, meanwhile, laid plans for autarchy and the French cried about the need for national defense. “The only international which seems to be winning these days is the international of the anti-internationalists,” Dorothy observed. “So, if you are planning to go abroad in the next few months equip yourself with a thorough knowledge of the leading national anthems.”
She was unsparing in her judgments, often sardonic. To point up the idiocy of trade barriers dividing up the old Habsburg lands, she envisioned the Austrians (left only with luxury industries) boiling their snakeskin handbags for soup while the Hungarians across the border (with their rich agricultural lands but little manufacturing) stuffed themselves with food but were reduced to wearing rags. Her articles put the reader there, with her, on the spot. Discussing the Depression, Germany’s ex-chancellor Heinrich Brüning diagnosed an economic crisis “complicated by profound psychological disturbances.” At the League of Nations’s headquarters in Geneva, Dorothy cornered an English delegate to talk about the subject of national minorities. How do you determine which peoples count as a national minority? she asked him. Did the ethnic Ruthenians in the new state of Poland count? “Any group of more than six malcontents,” he replied, not bothering, as Dorothy noted, to hide his boredom.
Crisscrossing Europe, she gathered up budget forecasts, personal stories, details of daily life. She extracted information from her colleagues. “She always was a diligent gold digger in a journalistic way but the Saturday Evening Post technic has got it down to a clinic basis where the patients are lined up and the old surgeon just passes along and whittles what he wants out of each one without wasting anytime,” one of them complained to John. For his part, John felt only a dejected sort of admiration, comparing his own work—“all the smut and slime”—with Dorothy’s dignified, serious articles that made Europe so relevant for Americans.
The Saturday Evening Post articles were turning Dorothy into a household name in America. She and Red had arranged to spend Christmas in the mountains of the Semmering, a two-hour train journey from Vienna. They were renting the Villa Sauerbrunn, comfortable like the Ritz but “a cuckoo clock in aspect.” Promising tobogganing and skiing and tea dances, Dorothy invited a slew of their friends, old and new, for that Christmas week, 1932, among them Knick (who couldn’t come), the Gunthers, and the Fodors; Edgar Mowrer, the Daily News’s man in Berlin, and his wife, Lilian; and Nicholas Roosevelt, the American ambassador to Hungary. At the Villa Sauerbrunn, they’d put on lunches and dinners. And at the house next door, an annex to a big hotel, they’d reserved rooms for their friends to stay.
The party on the Semmering was to become one of those occasions that people argued over, correcting each other’s memories decades later as to what exactly had taken place. Had the lawyer Helmuth James von Moltke been present? Was there enough snow for skiing or was the weather, cold and rainy, a bust? What was beyond dispute was that John ended up confined to bed for practically the entirety of the week with a severe case of asthma; he thought he might die. Red was on the wagon and in a lethal temper. And Dorothy, who’d taken other lovers during her marriage to Red, fell in love with one of her guests, the writer Christa Winsloe, the former Baroness Hatvany, author of (among other books) Das Mädchen Manuela, now heralded as a classic lesbian novel.
Somewhere around this time, Frances and Dorothy compared their marriages. Frances was taking notes; she wanted to write a profile of Dorothy for the New Yorker. By that point, there were as many rumors about Dorothy and Red divorcing as there were about Nazi putsches in Austria. The truth was Dorothy wasn’t sure how much more she could stand. “This year, sometimes I’ve thought I couldn’t hold out any longer & I’d have to give up our marriage,” she said to Frances. Red kept vowing to stay off the booze but couldn’t. When he wasn’t drinking, he was cold and resentful. When he was, he turned mean and violent, deriding Dorothy, tearing up furniture, smashing the crockery. He’d even hit her. That was the most awful moment, the time when she knew “I must save myself; I must really, now, save myself.” But there had been other breaking points, before. When she was pregnant, she’d called Jimmy Sheean late one night to ask him to drive her to the Roosevelt Hotel; she had been making plans then to separate from Red.
At the root of the problem, as Dorothy explained to Frances, was jealousy. “A woman is proud of her man’s achievement—she expands with it. But no man can bear to have his wife achieve anything apart from him.” Red was the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature and his books had sold millions of copies. Yet he ran around lamenting: “I’ll be known as Dorothy Thompson’s Husband.” Dorothy had enough of it. “Did you ever hear anything so ridiculous?” she asked Frances.
Feminism hadn’t functioned as Frances had once imagined it would: there was no sign that men had taken competition from women as an incentive to better themselves. Instead, as Dorothy put it, women were improving but men were getting worse. Modern women, Dorothy observed a few years earlier, “will not let men swallow them up, because the swallowers aren’t good enough.” Maybe they’d willingly surrender to a bona fide genius, but to a man whose aspiration was to make a better toothpaste or move his money from one stock to another? They weren’t going to snuff out their own flame for that.
She recognized that Red was a bona fide genius. But he also wanted her to be his mother, Dorothy told Frances. She wouldn’t do it. She’d be his wife, or nothing. “Cock-Vanity—they’re too proud of their cocks. I never wanted one. Do you know what I want? To live on a big estate and have lots & lots & lots of children.” Having once disdained the suffragettes’ notion of “sex antagonism”—of a war between the sexes—as antiquated, Dorothy and Frances now found themselves fighting its battles as individuals, within their own marriages.
“But do you feel stifled?” Dorothy asked Frances.
How else could Frances explain her inability to make progress in her work? When John wrote articles that grappled seriously with the paradoxes of Soviet modernization or, following her suggestion, investigated the links between the international arms firms (“as incestuous as white mice”), she was proud. But a vicarious pride in John’s accomplishments wasn’t the same thing as having the satisfaction of writing well herself. Had her ambition on John’s behalf suppressed her own? Did you see John’s pieces in Foreign Affairs and everywhere else? she asked their friend Jerry Frank. “Aren’t you impressed. Haven’t I done well by him?” Doing well by John meant helping to make him into the writer he could be. Whether she could have written the articles better herself, though, was another question.
—
a month after dorothy’s party on the Semmering, Adolf Hitler, whose Nazi Party had scored electoral victories in the July and November 1932 elections, came to power in Germany. Following a succession of backstage intrigues presided over by the wily aristocrat, Franz von Papen, and the doddering hero of the First World War, General Field Marshal von Hindenburg, Hitler was named chancellor in January 1933. Arriving in a rush from Austria, still in his ski clothes, John met Knick and Edgar Mowrer, who were drinking with the other newspapermen at the bar in the Hotel Adlon in Berlin. Later that night, hundreds of thousands of men dressed in brown shirts and holding aloft torches and Nazi flags promenaded past the hotel and down the neoclassical boulevard, Unter den Linden.
The conservative grandees who smoothed Hitler’s path to the Chancellery imagined they could contain him, divert the Nazi energies to their own nationalist and anti-Socialist cause. But that was folly, the reporters at the Adlon wagered, like “trying to tag on to a comet,” according to John. “It is a shocking catastrophe for Germany, I do think, and for the world,” he observed. “Those bloody people are likely to cause a war, deliberately, and then we all will be dished.”
Within a few weeks, the purge of officials loyal to the old Weimar Republic had begun, a housecleaning of the police and the civil service. Enemies of the regime were refused passports for foreign travel. John attended a Hitler rally at the Sportpalast in Berlin, the immense arena seating eighteen thousand, with another sixty thousand huddled outdoors in front of loudspeakers despite the freezing February weather. The Führer shot out words “as if they were bolts of lightning”—he would not abandon Germany to ruin, he vowed. Though Hitler said nothing new, he burned up the crowd with the “absolute magic of his own person,” John reported in the paper. The Nazis are “childish, hysterical, bumptious and dangerous,” he wrote Frances. “Hitler very flabby and feminine, talks with his arms wound round his bosom husky throaty voice, great sex appeal.”
See von Papen, she urged him. Get an interview with General Schleicher, ousted from the chancellery in von Papen’s machinations. “See all the outs, quick, while they’re easy to see.” She pronounced Hitler’s speeches “Sublime-Perfect Text Book Examples of What a Classical Demagogue Speech Should Be.” The whole sequence of events fit together so perfectly it seemed to her nearly theatrical in form. A series of chancellors, striding onto the stage, each demanding a further concession from the victorious powers—the end to reparations, the expansion of the German military. Each, individually, had gotten more than any one of them could have on their own. It all fit together so perfectly, Frances quipped, mocking the Nazi propensity for finding Jewish villains in all circumstances. A “Jewish playwright must have had a hand in it.”
John never saw von Schleicher but he met von Papen, who invited the press over for a Bierabend: a “charming fellow, rippling with suave, light laughter, whom I would not trust with a nickel five feet away.” More useful were the meetings he and Knick had with Putzi Hanfstaengl. Sure, Knick said, Putzi was a revolting person, a court jester and an official bootlicker, but he knew who among the Nazis were fairies, which was useful coin to trade in. He might even be able to arrange an interview for the two of them with Hitler.
John and Knick took Putzi to dinner, buying bottles of wine at 20 marks apiece to soften him up. Even in a Savile Row suit Putzi looked like a boxer. His features were coarse and swollen; he had a permanent stoop. When the Führer had trouble sleeping, he summoned Putzi to play the piano for him. My piano-playing is Hitler’s sole relaxation, Putzi told them.
But, Putzi, you play like an elephant, Knick needled. You knock the hell out of the piano. Does that soothe Adolf’s Wagnerian soul?
At this mention of Hitler’s Christian name, Putzi became flustered. “Putzi, what do you call Hitler to his face?” Knick inquired. “Herr Hitler, of course.” He wouldn’t dare call him anything else. They didn’t get an interview with Hitler. And if the Führer was a “fairy,” Putzi wasn’t telling.
John left Berlin just before the Reichstag was gutted by a fire in late February 1933, the week before Germany went to the polls. He returned that fall to cover the trial of the supposed arsonist, the “half-wit” Dutchman Marinus van der Lubbe and a clutch of Communists. By the time that the German Supreme Court reviewed the Reichstag arson case, democracy had been extinguished. Hitler’s government had shut down the socialist and communist newspapers, jailing their editors or driving them into hiding or out of the country. The Nazis outlawed parties other than National Socialists; restricted jobs in the civil service to “Aryans,” firing Jewish teachers; and rounded up political opponents in a “Brown terror” that involved raiding their homes, then dragging them off to “Brown bases,” where they were beaten, dosed with castor oil, urinated on, and had their teeth knocked out with the end of a revolver. “It is a glorious victory, indeed,” Knick said sardonically, “of 65,000,000 more or less Aryans against 500,000 Jews, professors, and school-children.”
If she hadn’t seen the consequences of the Brown terror with her own eyes, Dorothy wrote a friend, she wouldn’t have believed it, either. She’d been on her way to rendezvous with Christa Winsloe on the Italian Riviera when she made a detour to Germany. Dorothy was in Berlin when the Reichstag burned, and stayed on to gather evidence about the violence. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency commissioned her eyewitness reports. Working from tips, she and her colleagues in the foreign press—Americans, Danes, Swedes, French, English, Dutch, and Czech—divided the city into districts, fanning out to visit hospitals where casualties might have come in. They interviewed doctors (who often wouldn’t talk) and interns and nurses (who sometimes did). They visited the homes of Communists and Jews who’d been beaten up, their families cowering in the corner. Then they met every night, pooling their information.
Make no mistake about it, Dorothy told the readers of the Jewish Daily Bulletin in May 1933, the aim of the Nazis was “utterly to destroy German Jewry.” The Nazis were conducting an organized campaign of economic and social “strangulation,” of legal and professional annihilation. The purpose of the violence, she argued, was to “break civil courage in Germany,” to terrorize those who might resist to prepare the ground for the Nazi revolution of daily life. And look at how few Germans had openly protested the treatment of the Jews. That was proof the Nazi strategy was working. “Most discouraging of all is not only the defenselessness of the liberals but their incredible (to me) docility,” she wrote Red. “There are no martyrs for the cause of democracy.”
Hitler’s government issued formal denials that there had been any violence. They summoned the leaders of the Socialist and Jewish organizations to make the victims themselves refute the charges. Repudiate the foreign correspondents’ reports of atrocities, the Nazis demanded, or we won’t answer for what the storm troopers might do to your people. The browbeaten organizations produced those statements, dismissing the articles as “pure inventions” and “irresponsible distortions.” The foreign correspondents, they said, had greatly exaggerated their accounts of the Brown terror. (Understandable, but nonetheless disappointing, judged Dorothy.)
Pressing the point, the Nazi government told the Association of Foreign Correspondents to remove Mowrer as their president. By a vote of 60 to 7, the reporters refused. “There remains, therefore, a single agency in Germany, which has so far not been intimidated in telling the truth, and that is the corps of foreign correspondents,” Dorothy noted.
The Nazi government alternated between outright intimidation and efforts to drum up favorable press coverage. After Knick’s blistering series of articles on the Nazi revolution, including reporting on the effort to “destroy” the Jews, he received an invitation from Hermann Göring’s press chief to visit the camp at Sonnenburg where political prisoners were held. The purpose was to demonstrate the regime’s benevolence toward its enemies—a line that Knick wasn’t buying. Soon after, Nazi propagandists began denouncing him as a secret Jew, a Meyer or a Levitsky hell-bent on destroying the Third Reich. In Memphis, Knick’s father, pastor of the First Methodist Church, was besieged by wires requesting that he attest to the family’s Aryan purity.
“The Nazi press yells for the blood of all who criticize their chief,” Knick explained to his editor. The Nazis expelled Soviet reporters, as well as a British correspondent for the Daily Telegraph who dared to report that the storm troopers were carrying arms in a military parade. After Edgar Mowrer reported that Nazi thugs were attacking Jews in the street with steel rods, Putzi telephoned him: “Ah, and how are you today, my dear little Black Sheep,” he breathed menacingly down the wire. The Mowrers woke up every morning to the sight of SS men posted outside their door.
What chance, then, did the accused in the Reichstag trial have of getting a fair hearing? Like many others in Germany, John observed, the Supreme Court’s seven judges (some committed Nazis, others just sympathetic) were already convinced of the guilt of the Communists. While van der Lubbe had confessed to the crime, it was obvious that a partially blind Dutch drifter couldn’t have simultaneously set twenty or thirty fires. He must have had accomplices. Because van der Lubbe was a Red, the Nazis had announced the night of the fire, the arson must have been a Communist plot. Immediately they had jailed a hundred Communist deputies, their fiercest political opponents, and seized, too, the Comintern official Georgi Dimitrov, whom they claimed was the ringleader of a larger Bolshevik plot. So confident were the government’s prosecutors that they barely put together a case. Surely, it would be a quick proceeding.
As persuaded as the judges were of the guilt of the Communists, they nonetheless recognized the need for a trial that comported with international standards. They were playing to the foreign correspondents sitting in the press box. Very quickly the state’s case against the purported arsonists began to unravel. Dimitrov, it turned out, had been in Munich, not Berlin, on the night of the fire. As each witness took the stand, the prosecution dug a deeper hole for itself, calling outright con men whom the judges dismissed. “With dreadful pertinacity, with true Teutonic thoroughness, the court plodded on,” John wrote, “deeper every day in a morass of evidence that ineluctably proved just what it didn’t want proved—the innocence of the accused.”
The star of the trial was Dimitrov himself, who single-handedly, audaciously, prosecuted the prosecutors. Asking about a witness who couldn’t be located, he inquired: “Have you looked for him in a concentration camp?” His exchange with Göring, during which he accused the Nazis of setting the fire themselves, “contributed deeply to the pure joy of living,” John wrote. In his closing statement, facing execution by decapitation, Dimitrov demanded that the German government give him “compensation for his wasted time!” What had started as a frame-up was turning into a circus. After sitting for fifty-seven days, the Supreme Court called a halt to the proceedings, acquitting Dimitrov and sentencing van der Lubbe to death.
The rule of law in Germany was hanging by a thread. John tried to take the measure of the place. He counted how many times the movie crowd applauded when newsreels featuring Hitler were shown (sometimes clamorous applause and sometimes absolute silence, a mild clapping most frequent of all). He relayed what a hotel waiter had said to a friend: “Tell them in America that we’re not ALL crazy.” Militarism, he could see, was ramping up: the steady diet of war films in the theater; a showroom of weaponry entitled “The Front” on Unter den Linden, outfitted with a romanticized model trench from the last war. The opposition forces, mostly Socialists and Communists, were scattered, fragmented. Unable to muster an armed challenge to the Nazis, left-wing provocateurs shouted “Death to fascism!” on a crowded street or painted the red front lives in huge red letters on a bridge. Worst of all was the situation of the Jews, subjected to a vicious program of terror, the only campaign pledge the Nazis could fulfill.
From Chicago, John’s editor sent a request for “more diversified” articles: “The whole paper has been loaded with anti-Hitler copy for two weeks.” The time had come, his editor insisted, “to write about something else besides the infringement of personal liberty.” The Daily News was laying itself open to the charge of bias; the news columns shouldn’t be used “for the advocacy of a cause.” He regretted holding up one of John’s Berlin stories but reiterated that the paper couldn’t continue to fill its pages solely with articles criticizing the Nazis. He chastised the reporters in Berlin for having “lost sight of our major purpose as a newspaper which is to publish a well rounded account of events without trying to advise foreign governments how to act or how to operate.”
To report the persecution of the Jews, as John’s editor understood the matter, was to risk the Daily News’s neutrality; he feared the charge of “distortion and overemphasis.” His reluctance was typical enough. It’s become commonplace that the American and British press downplayed the subject of the Holocaust, either neglecting it entirely or burying vague, sometimes skeptically written articles deep inside their pages. Having fallen for the propaganda of the First World War about Germans bayoneting babies, reporters and their editors had learned the wrong lesson—that reports of atrocities were often exaggerated for effect. In the face of hot Nazi denials, they tended to throw up their hands and assume that Jews were stretching the truth. The New York Times, historians have argued, was particularly remiss, as its Jewish owners, the Sulzbergers, fearing the accusation of special pleading on behalf of their co-religionists, went to great lengths to minimize the fact that Jews—as Jews—were particular targets of Nazi oppression.
Yet to follow the articles of Thompson, Knickerbocker, Gunther, Mowrer, Shirer, and many other reporters as they were printed and reprinted in papers across the nation is to see how much—and how early—Americans were in fact being informed about the Nazi crusade against the Jews. Although Dorothy’s “Hitler the Menace” series was first published in the Jewish Daily Herald, her findings, like Knick’s series for the Public Ledger, circulated widely, cited in the Buffalo Evening News, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the St. Cloud Times, and the Honolulu Advertiser, among hundreds of other papers and magazines. To be sure, these accounts generated their own pushback. Both reporters would be accused of bias in reporting, of contravening the standards of objectivity. According to a columnist for the Montclair Times, Knickerbocker had gotten himself “quite excited” about Jews and failed to depict the German perspective. His reports were “hearsay,” they were exaggerated, they could scarcely be believed. “There must be two sides to the question.”
What was happening in Germany was indeed hard to comprehend and would only become more so. But in 1933, Dorothy, John, Knick, and Jimmy had no trouble tracing the main line: Jews were facing economic and social annihilation as well as a systematic campaign of physical violence. The reporters’ dilemma, rather, was how to get the news out without jeopardizing their sources, opening them to further retaliation. Beg your journalist friends to report that “all is quiet and orderly in Germany,” Christa Winsloe’s comrades wrote her. Dorothy retorted: “Sure, I say, so it is in a cemetery.” She refused to stop writing about what was happening inside the country. Were it not for the Nazis, she would have been “entirely happy,” she wrote Red from Italy, where she and Christa were working in their rooms in the morning, lunching lightly, and drinking wine late into the evening in front of a fire. “I lie awake nights thinking what one could do,” she said.
No, she and Red weren’t divorcing, Dorothy told the reporters yet again when she and Christa returned to New York from Portofino. Just as her notebooks alternated between interviews with Nazi Gauleiters and musings about the place of sex in love, so, too, did Dorothy construe her relationship with Christa as part of her fight against fascism. The Baroness Hatvany, she told the waiting reporters, was a leader of the anti-Nazi cause. They’d join forces to combat the National Socialists from America.
—
after the reichstag trial, it was a relief, John said, to get back to Vienna. But how long would it be before Austria, too, went Nazi? In 1933, there were tens of thousands of homegrown Nazis stirring up trouble across the country, obeying Hitler’s call—proclaimed in the very first paragraph of Mein Kampf—for the country’s annexation to Germany. They’d bombed train lines and railway bridges, cut the telegraph wires, killed a Jewish jeweler and his customer with a bomb wrapped in a silk stocking, and hurled through a shop window in Vienna. At the frontier, Nazi cars were waiting to smuggle the plotters to safety in Germany. These days one could hardly sit in a café in Vienna without worrying whether that small paper sack on the next table was full of explosives.
Engelbert Dollfuss, Austria’s chancellor, was defiant. His country would remain independent. Dollfuss’s government was a coalition of parties (Catholics, right-wing agrarians, and the Heimwehr) united chiefly by their hatred of the Socialists. To fend off Hitler, the diminutive Dollfuss, four feet, eleven inches in his stockings, was courting Mussolini. The Duce abhorred the idea of a Greater Germany on Italy’s border.
Jokes about Dollfuss and Mussolini made the rounds in Vienna: “Did you hear the new one about Dollfuss? No need for him to take a train to visit Mussolini. He was airmailed to Rome!”
From Munich, Nazi propagandists used the radio to broadcast attacks on Dollfuss across the Austrian border. Slave of the Jews, slave of the Catholic Church, slave of foreign capitalists! they raged.
Just a few weeks after the Reichstag fire in Berlin, on a March morning in 1933, Dollfuss had dissolved the Austrian Parliament, declaring an end to democracy. Henceforth, he would rule as a dictator by emergency decree. The Ringstrasse was blocked by barbed wire and punctuated by rifle rests. The grounds of the Hofburg, the seat of the old Habsburg court, swarmed with mounted police and steel-helmeted Austrian soldiers. Machine guns in the streets, “howling mobs” of Nazis gathered on the Ringstrasse, and “so many rumors of Putsches that even Fodor is satisfied,” John wrote mordantly to Bill and Tess Shirer.
Dorothy’s old friend Marcel Fodor was glum but not hopeless. “One must not have any illusions,” he reported to his editor. “Dollfuss’s regime is also Fascism. But it has one thing: it is Austrian Fascism.” This was autocracy tempered by Schlamperei, by laziness and inefficiency. Dollfuss was at heart a reactionary, Fodor thought: he intended to take the country right back to 1914 when the Habsburgs reigned.
Vienna wasn’t as bad as Berlin, Fodor reassured himself. There weren’t storm troopers here to haul innocent people off to prison. And hadn’t Dollfuss pointedly said that Austria could absorb other cultures besides the German one? Of the two million inhabitants of Vienna, more than two-thirds weren’t even of German origin: there were two hundred thousand Jews, nearly as many Hungarians, a hundred thousand Czechs. Surely Hitler’s fanatical racial theory couldn’t work here.
Nevertheless, Fodor had to admit that the spying was getting to him. The police tracked his every movement, his telephone had been tapped, and they were opening his mail. The Central Telegraph & Telephone Office, where the correspondents sent their dispatches, was infested with Nazi spies.
Several months after Dollfuss abolished the Parliament, John and Fodor set off for one of their regular reporting trips to Prague. John was driving. He was annoyed when Fodor insisted on a detour. At Fodor’s direction, they drove nearly all the way to the Czech border, bumping along rutted country roads in the Austrian hinterland. John looked over at Fodor with an expression he hoped would convey exasperation. No such luck. The man just sat there, placidly, giving nothing way.
But what could Fodor possibly want in this godforsaken place? The village, called Spital, was twenty or so whitewashed huts strung out on a muddy hill, two hundred souls living with their animals, front courtyards given over to dung heaps. A church with a squat tower. Finally, in front of a single-story, brown plaster cottage right in the middle of the village, Fodor gestured for John to stop the car. In this village here, said Fodor, among the lowest kind of peasants, he had found the kinfolk of Herr Hitler. No reporter had ever interviewed them.
Fodor knocked on the door of the cottage. The man who answered was bent almost in half, young still, but deformed. Hitler’s first cousin, Eduard Schmidt, was a hunchback. A body encased in iron braces, and an intelligent face atop it, reminiscent of the star of a thousand newsreels. The same brown eyes tucked under the same shallow forehead. There was no art in getting Eduard to answer their questions: he was difficult to understand because of a speech impediment, but he talked on and on. He was a convinced Nazi, naturally, a true believer in his cousin’s ideal of a Teutonic master race.
“No, we don’t hear from him. Ah, but he is far too busy. He is the greatest man in the world and what are we but poor peasants!”
John and Fodor entered the house through the courtyard where the animals were quartered, beyond which was a single room for living and sleeping. The day was warm and the room, painted a pale light blue and pin-neat, with prints of the Madonna and saints on the wall, smelled of coal smoke from the tiled oven. The only furniture was two beds, a table, and a couple of rough chairs. Alerted to the visitors by the commotion of villagers, Eduard’s mother came into the cottage with her husband, Herr Anton Schmidt, a toothless and sturdily built peasant.
Hitler’s aunt, Frau Schmidt, was a mountain of a woman, draped in a black shawl. Her gray hair was covered by a kerchief. From a wrinkled face her blue eyes, alert, surveyed the situation. She had a vigorous, confident manner of speaking. She would require more managing than her son. “You look tremendously like Adolf,” John began.
“Oh go on…!” the old woman demurred.
John’s German wasn’t good enough to follow Fodor’s careful inquiries. Who her parents were and where they had lived and the same about Hitler’s father’s people, reaching back deep into the dim mists of time. Where they had come from before Spital. Her answers were a blur of Schicklgrubers and Hiedlers and Hüttlers and words to do with relatives and ancestors and forefathers and foremothers that left him stupefied. John did understand that Frau Schmidt wouldn’t say one way or another whether Hitler’s father had been illegitimate (there were a lot of rumors). She would take them to see the registers in the village church, and they could see for themselves.
When it was his turn, John asked Frau Schmidt in faltering German about her elder sister, Hitler’s mother. Klara was Alois Hitler’s third wife, twenty-three years younger than her husband. Klara had left home when she was just ten, Frau Schmidt said, first to a neighboring town, where she’d worked as a housemaid for Alois’s first wife. Then to Vienna, a city that Frau Schmidt herself had never visited. When Klara returned to Spital a decade later, in 1884, she was nervous, not a word to say about her Vienna adventures. After old Alois Hitler buried his second wife that year, he came to Spital and proposed to Klara.
Why had her gentle, fine sister married a lump like Alois? He was a tyrant and a brute, dead drunk most nights in the tavern. Klara’s salvation was Adolf. From the time he was six, she was sick with cancer, but Klara kept living for her son. “She told Adolf he must be ambitious, he must lift himself from his surroundings, he must be a great man so that she, in her old age, would be proud of him.” They made an alliance of two against Alois’s cruelties. “Adolf was the light of Clara’s soul. She worshipped him and he worshipped her. Then just as his career might have begun…she died.”
By the time that they had landed on the Pölzls, the Schicklgrubers, and the Hiedlers in the moldy church registers, dusk was settling over the village and they had to get on their way. They arrived in Prague long after dinner.
For Fodor, the trip was a disappointment: he’d wire some copy about Frau Schmidt’s reminiscences of the Hitler family to the New York Evening Post, but it was far from the story he’d hoped for. In Vienna there’d long been a lot of gossip about Hitler’s family tree and, quite apart from all that, he had his own suspicions. To be precise, the surname is a common one among Polish Jews in Galicia and, as for Adolf’s mother, Klara—that’s a typical Jewish name in Austria though the gentiles use it freely in Germany and in Western Europe. It would have been interesting to prove this, would it not? Imagine: little Adolf, raving about the Jews, with a Jewish “parasite” in his own lineage!
It was not true—“unfortunately,” Fodor went on. What they had seen and heard proved that our Adolf was as much an Aryan as he needs to be. The Austrian and Czech gutter press could keep digging. But he was now convinced there was nothing there and he wouldn’t touch the story. At least their beds were waiting for them in Prague, feather pillows and a good golden beer, and their phones wouldn’t be tapped there.
But was the trip so useless? John wondered. After all, they’d got something the reporters in Berlin had hankered after—good stories about Hitler. With Putzi, Knick and John had been pecking for crumbs, but in Spital he and Fodor had the cake to themselves. They had seen pictures of Hitler as a baby and a photo of his mother when she was sick, blond braids fading to gray, cheeks sunken. They’d heard his aunt’s bile about Alois, Hitler’s father.
“All this proves what?” John asked.
“I tell you the truth on it—nothing,” admitted Fodor.
To John it all seemed important. But why, exactly, he didn’t know. In the hotel in Prague, he started writing his articles about Spital but the point of the family stories kept eluding him. “There are many extraordinary things about Adolf Hitler,” he began, “but surely the most amazing is that his mother was a servant girl in the household of his father’s preceding wife!”
—
the visit to spital emboldened John to try again to finagle a meeting with Sigmund Freud. To ask the great man for an interview was hopeless: Freud had declined his first entreaty on the ground that he refused to see reporters. This time, John requested that Herr Dr. Freud spare him just a few minutes of his time.
“It is simply that I have admired you and your work so profoundly that it seems cruel to live in the same city and never have seen you.” He and Frances had met Freud’s wife, an unexpected honor, when they visited the villa that the Freuds were occupying in Pötzleinsdorf. They’d been looking for a house to rent, only the villa was too far from town to be practical.
He mentioned that they shared H. G. Wells as a friend in common. He didn’t say that he’d written a newspaper article about their chance encounter with Frau Dr. Freud, dressed all in lavender, who had conducted them around the house, discussing utility bills, careful not to disturb her husband at work behind the closed study door. “His wife spoke of him as if he were scarcely mortal, scarcely alive,” he informed the readers of the Daily News. Who would have thought that the greatest living expert on sex would have such a tidy, capable housewife?
“Perhaps you are interested in the appalling things that are happening in Germany?” John continued. “I have recently returned from Berlin, and have some gossip.”
Saving the best for last, John set his bait. “A few weeks ago I visited Hitler’s surviving cousins, aunts, and so on in Upper Austria; we learned some interesting things about the psychological background of Hitler’s childhood.”
Freud wasn’t interested. He had to stick to his rules and limit visitors only to those with truly urgent business, he replied. But by now John had a hunch there was a story to be told.