In late 1945 and 1946 reporters from around the globe had been accommodated at a peculiar-looking fort within the Franconian city of Stein. It was an acceptable setting. The fort belonged to a dynasty of pencil makers, the Faber-Castells. Their pencil units are nonetheless made at present. On the fort, the assembled journalists penned studies ranging in type from matter-of-fact and coldly goal to opinionated and infuriated as they adopted the trial of Hermann Göring and different surviving Nazi grandees on the Worldwide Navy Tribunal held in Nuremberg’s Palace of Justice, some six kilometres away.
The checklist of journalists who stayed on the fort reads like a roster of literary luminaries and Uwe Neumahr’s e book focuses chapter by chapter on a few of them (in the beginning of the trial, round 300 reporters had been lodged on the fort). There was the American novelist John Dos Passos, as an illustration, who wrote on the trial for Life journal, together with an account of it within the assortment of warfare studies that make up his Tour of Responsibility (1946). Erich Kästner, German writer of Emil and the Detectives (1929), was additionally current, his musings on the proceedings in Nuremberg revealed within the newly licensed Neue Zeitung. Erika Mann, daughter of novelist Thomas and erstwhile star of the political cabaret ‘The Pepper Mill’, offered studies for the American weekly Liberty and London’s Night Normal. The checklist goes on: William L. Shirer, who would later write the bestseller The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960); American journalist Janet Flanner; Rebecca West, who changed Flanner as The New Yorker’s Nuremberg correspondent in July 1946; Martha Gellhorn, already well-known because the writer of the hit quick story assortment The Hassle I’ve Seen (1936); and Willy Brandt, future chancellor of West Germany. The inclusion of Wolfgang Hildesheimer, who would later turn into a number one determine in West Germany’s postwar literary scene, is an outlier. Hildesheimer acted as an interpreter, relatively than a reporter, at Nuremberg, and never on the 1946 trial however on the follow-up trial of Otto Ohlendorf, commander of the Nazi loss of life unit Einsatzgruppe D, in 1947.
Neumahr’s strategy is biographical and kaleidoscopic. Usually, he’s as a lot, if no more, preoccupied with the lives of his chosen protagonists earlier than, throughout and after their time on the Faber-Castell fort than he’s with their precise journalistic response to the army tribunal. Neumahr is very taken with all of the social goings-on on the fort, whose company – regardless of the separation of female and male quarters, and, finally, of Soviet reporters from all others – loved a excessive degree of fraternisation. Neumahr follows the assorted relationships of his protagonists. Erika Mann moved into the fort along with her accomplice and fellow-reporter Betty Knox (whom she known as her ‘beloved lunatic’) regardless of the press camp being run by the American army for whom homosexuality was a punishable crime. Rebecca West and Francis Biddle, a US decide at Nuremberg, had an affair. As Neumahr tells it, this was one thing of a aid for each events: ‘Like Biddle, the fifty-three-year-old West was sexually annoyed’, he writes, as a result of ‘she hadn’t had intercourse along with her husband in years.’ In his chapter on Gellhorn, we study her tempestuous relationship with Ernest Hemingway, whereas the chapter on the Prix Goncourt-winning Russian-French author Elsa Triolet – who really stayed in Nuremberg’s Grand Lodge and never the fort – focuses closely on her relationship with the poet Louis Aragon.
The Writers’ Citadel explores different kinds of relationships, too: not least that between fiction and journalism, as new and experimental strategies corresponding to collage and different modernisms fed into information reportage. As a result of so most of the reporters had been, or turned, novelists, their impressions of the trial discovered their manner into their later literary works. Politics and journalism intersected. Triolet’s communist leanings led her to inveigh in opposition to the Anglo-American judges, whom she thought of to be as anti-democratic because the Nazis within the dock, whereas Brandt’s sympathies with the Soviets (regardless of his avowed pro-Western stance) seemingly induced him to utterly ignore Stalin’s bloodbath at Katyn of some 22,000 Polish army officers in 1940, even though it was explicitly talked about on the trial. Neumahr raises the difficulty of how morally compromised by political bias or different prejudices among the reporters may need been. Kästner had arguably made a profession for himself beneath the Nazis, despite the fact that his books had been burned in 1933 (Emil and the Detectives escaped that destiny as a innocent youngsters’s e book). A few of the momentary residents on the fort had been dismissive to the purpose of Vansittartism of the German inhabitants and its capability for ethical reorientation. West wrote off the Germans as a ‘nice galumphing idiot of a folks’.
In the long run, we don’t be taught that a lot concerning the trial itself from The Writers’ Citadel, though the sparring match between American chief counsel Robert H. Jackson (whom Dos Passos admired enormously, and Flanner by no means) and Göring is a recurring topos. Flanner in contrast Göring to a ‘gladiator who has simply gained his battle’, praising him for his ‘phenomenal reminiscence and a exceptional present for casuistic maneuver’. Göring fascinated the journalists, who fell over themselves looking for probably the most spectacular, demeaning or outrageous methods of describing him. Whereas Shirer likened him to a ‘maritime radio operator’, West discovered that his ‘look made a robust however obscure allusion to intercourse … Typically, when his humour was good, he recalled the madam of a brothel’.
This can be a very entertaining e book, primarily as a result of it permits us to observe occasions via the experiences of a bunch of proficient, usually egotistical and generally scandalous writers whose lives had been really extra fascinating than these of the Nazis on trial. Credit score should go, too, to the translator, Jefferson Chase. The e book has been so effectively translated from the (at occasions) relatively dry German that it’s a higher learn in English.
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The Writers’ Citadel: Reporting Historical past at Nuremberg
Uwe Neumahr, translated by Jefferson Chase
Pushkin Press, 352pp, £25
Purchase from bookshop.org (affiliate hyperlink)
Invoice Niven is Emeritus Professor in Modern German Historical past at Nottingham Trent College.
