Dorothy Thompson and German Writers in Defense of Democracy by Karina von Tippelskirch (review)

Paul Michael Lützeler

German Studies Review, Volume 43, Number 1, February 2020, pp. 187-189 (Review)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/gsr.2020.0020

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/749907

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] Reviews 187 to German studies scholars, his subject also has broad appeal to social and cultural historians of modern Europe. Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Simon Fraser University

Dorothy Thompson and German Writers in Defense of Democracy. By Karina von Tippelskirch. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2018. Pp. 299. Paper $50.95. ISBN 978-3631707036.

This book, including its brief but instructive introduction by Sigrid Bauschinger, deals with Dorothy Thompson’s (1893–1961) journalistic publications, as well as her correspondence and fragmentary autobiographical writing. She was the most famous and most influential US female journalist of the 1930s and 1940s, and her impressive knowledge of the German language and German and Austrian literature and culture foregrounded the success of her work in Europe. While most newspaper and radio reports are quickly forgotten, Dorothy Thompson’s contributions are still studied by historians, literary scholars, and media specialists. Karina von Tippelskirch’s book is not simply another biography on Thompson, but a study demonstrating Thompson’s impact on US policies regarding refugees from Nazi Germany. In particular, von Tippelskirch elucidates how Thompson found ways to initiate or support nongov- ernmental agencies to help persecuted writers and intellectuals reach the United States as a safe haven, how she personally contributed to the survival of friends like Lion Feuchtwanger, Carl Zuckmayer, and Fritz Kortner, and how she was able to give Thomas Mann a voice in the American media, both as the spokesperson of the “other Germany” as well as through his “Joseph”-tetralogy that was translated into English in 1934. Her circle of like-minded friends in Austria and Germany was large. In Vienna, she attended Genia Schwarzwald’s “Salon” on a regular basis, and it was there that she met Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, who later fell victim to Hitler’s vengeance against all resistance groups. As a foreign correspondent she started to write for leading US journals in the 1920s in Paris and Vienna and in the 1930s in Berlin. Early on she became a representative of the “New Woman” during that time period: In her youth, she had successfully worked in a campaign for women’s vot- ing rights, and she saw herself (and was seen) as a person redefining in theory and practice female ambitions and goals regarding professional work and their friendships and liaisons with both men and women. Between 1928 and 1942 she was married to Sinclair Lewis, one of the most famous writers at the time who received (as the first American author) the Nobel Prize in literature in 1930. The couple did everything they could to help exiled writers and invited many of them to stay on their legendary “Twin Farms” in Vermont. Thompson’s intelligence as well as her enlightened ethics 188 German Studies Review 43 /1 • 2020 made her one of the strongest opponents of the Nazi regime in general and of Hitler in particular. Her loathing of and aversion to the NSDAP leader was obvious when, shortly before Hitler became chancellor, she got a chance to interview him. The publication of this article was not forgotten by the new government, and in 1934 she was expelled from Germany. Thompson made the best of things once she was back in the United States. Her former support of the Republican Party notwithstanding, she became one of Roosevelt’s strongest supporters in his plans to fight against the German dictatorship not only on the ideological but also on the military level. In the beginning, she focused on the horrible treatment of the Jewish citizens in Germany, on the attacks on their businesses, on the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, and on the Kristallnacht events of 1938. Her articles were always farsighted since she knew the Nazi genocidal goals and their tactics. In 1939, shortly before Hitler started the war against Poland, New York City hosted the World’s Fair, and Thompson was able to invite leading anti-Nazi writers and the best-known exiled authors to a P.E.N. Club meeting connected to the exhibition. After convincing Eleanor Roosevelt of the political importance of this event, the whole group of exiled authors was invited to the White House, and President Roosevelt shook hands with each of the authors. An enormous number of American newspapers published Dorothy Thompson’s articles about Germany’s negative role in Europe. Like many of her exiled friends, she was interested in a reeducation project for Germany’s and Austria’s youth in the immediate postwar years. Following the war, she went back to Europe to see its aftermath for herself and attempted to identify members of the resistance to help them get back into German politics. This undertaking was more difficult than she had envisioned. First of all, most of the leading members of the resistance had been killed during the last ten months of the Nazi regime and, furthermore, she was confronted with the realities of a destroyed country where former resistance organizations and networks no longer existed (very different from the situation in France and other formerly occupied countries), and where many of Hitler’s enemies had left politics altogether. Then, of course, the Cold War began and, with it, new priorities were imposed by US foreign policy. This book by Karina von Tippelskirch should certainly be on the reading list of any course on exile literature during the years 1933–1945. It is very well researched and wonderfully written and gives due credit to previous research and to the exile literature scholars she consulted. Her interdisciplinary approach combines literary studies with history, politics, and media, and this approach offers much insight into her topic. Von Tippelskirch’s treatment of Dorothy Thompson’s journalistic work substantially enriches the understanding of the fight between isolationism and inter- nationalism during the 1930s and 1940s in the United States and illuminates the impact the press had on the fate of exiled writers. There are, however, a few errors that should be corrected in a second edition: Gustav Stresemann was not a Social Reviews 189

Democrat (108); Carl von Ossietzky was murdered by the Nazis in 1938, not in 1934 (187); Kurt Schuschnigg was sent to several concentration camps over time and did not remain imprisoned in Dachau from 1938 until 1945 (218); the assassination attempt on Hitler was not on June 20 but on July 20, 1944 (248). Paul Michael Lützeler, Washington University in St. Louis

Culture in Nazi Germany. By Michael H. Kater. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019. Pp. vii + 453. Cloth $35.00. ISBN 978-0300211412.

What is the relationship between tyranny and culture? For the Third Reich, a rich historiography has developed around this question, shaped by outstanding contributors in the various cultural fields: Alan E. Steinweis and Jonathan Petropoulos for the visual arts; Michael Kater and Pamela Potter for music; David Welch and Eric Rentschler for film; Frank Trommler and Ralf Schnell for literature, to name just a few. Yet our view of art’s role in the Third Reich has remained fragmented, fractured along the fault lines of the arts. With Culture in Nazi Germany, Michael Kater combines his own expertise with that of other scholars to offer a comprehensive account of artistic media in the Third Reich. He skillfully examines the visual arts, architecture, music, literature, theater, and film as well as the press and radio, each in equal measure. Yet Kater does more than illustrate how the Nazis reshaped the arts and media. He offers a history of the Nazi regime told from the vantage point of culture and extend- ing beyond the Third Reich. Kater begins by detailing the Nazis’ effort to eliminate the styles and artists asso- ciated with the Weimar Republic, a necessary precondition for the establishment of a new National Socialist culture. Kater traces the Nazis’ assault against cultural modernism from the Combat League for German Culture’s actions in 1929 through the exhibition of degenerate music in 1938. In this way, he treats the Nazis’ cleansing campaign as a protracted culture war that enabled the Third Reich to establish its control over the arts. The longer view also underscores the contentious nature of the battle, especially with regard to Expressionism’s place in the regime. Kater does at times tread familiar ground here, yet his consideration of all artistic media highlights the remarkable speed and scope of the cleansing campaign. Kater divides his examination of Nazi culture into the pre- and postwar eras. Throughout, he argues that culture, politics, and propaganda comprised an integral part of the fabric of totalitarian rule. Particularly in the fields of art, architecture, film, and music, artists and cultural authorities worked toward the Führer, seeking to discern from his preferences the path to uniquely National Socialist forms. However, because he possessed no artistic genius, only parochial tastes that favored well-worn styles and genres, Hitler himself prevented a cultural revolution. The Propaganda