The Writers' Castle, page 14
Like many other observers of the trial, Shirer was struck by the impression Lahousen made, which he considered utterly unlike that of the defendants: “He was a curious figure under the glaring Klieg lights, which made the top of his shiny head look as though it were a part of his shiny perspiring face. And yet there was something sensitive in it, a quality of honesty, of integrity, of just plain human decency that attracted your attention, I suppose, because you suddenly realized that these very things, so common in more normal lands that you scarcely noticed them, were totally absent from the faces of those who had ruled the Third Reich and who now sat uneasily in the dock… Göring, Ribbentrop, and Keitel glared angrily at the witness as he took the stand, and there were moments when you felt that if they could be granted one wish before they died it would be to wring the neck of this courageous Austrian until he was dead. However, their bearing did not intimidate him. He quickly showed that his contempt for them knew no bounds.”19
Shirer admired the Wehrmacht general’s courage in getting up in front of the world to point the finger at the Nazi leaders for the horror they had visited upon others. In his earlier days as a correspondent Shirer had gone to Nuremberg to report on Nazi Party events, and he saw the city as a particularly pregnant symbol of German militarism. He wrote in his autobiography about one such event, a mass march full of military ritual: “It occurred to me that German militarism, of which we in the outside world had heard so much, was not just a product of spartan Prussia and the Hohenzollerns… It was something deeply ingrained in these people, and, obviously, it had not died with the lost war 1914–1918.”20 But in Nuremberg, a Wehrmacht general showed him that one man could in fact preserve his sense of decency and moral responsibility in Hitler’s Germany.
Shirer as Cassandra
On 10th December 1945, Shirer left Nuremberg. Later he would remark that, above all, he owed his knowledge of Hitler’s diabolic “final solution to the Jewish question” to the Nuremberg Trial. He also self-critically admitted that he had never imagined the extent of the genocide in his time as a correspondent.21 In 1945 he wrote in his journal that there had to be less ugly, brutal and awful things he could concentrate on during his remaining years. It was bitterly ironic that he owed his fame and wealth to his expertise in Germany and Germans.
Shortly after his return to the USA, personal conflicts and political differences led to him being fired from CBS. Stereotyped as a Communist sympathizer, he withdrew to his farm in Connecticut to devote himself to his books. Politically, his development was the opposite of that of Dos Passos, his former fellow resident in Schloss Faber-Castell. Whereas the latter became a proponent of McCarthyism, Shirer felt he had fallen victim to that ideology. He never forgave Dos Passos for his anti-Communism and support for McCarthy.22 Shirer never viewed the Soviets as enemies.23 In the press camp he quickly discovered that he had a lot in common with his Russian colleagues, whom he characterized as cultivated, intelligent, well informed and likeable.
Shirer’s main subject matter would remain the country in which he had lived for those pivotal years as a reporter. His novel The Traitor was semi-autobiographical, featuring an American correspondent in Berlin as a protagonist. His roman-à-clef Stranger Come Home went even further in this direction and had the hero battle against McCarthyism. Shirer’s fiction was a failure—his success, financial and otherwise, would only come when he transformed himself from a journalist to a popular historian. He wrote a series of non-fictional works, including books about the sinking of the warship Bismarck, Gandhi and Leo and Sofia Tolstoy, as well as three volumes of memoirs. But his biggest triumph was the 1,000-plus-page The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, published in 1960, which sold more copies than any work of history ever in the USA. It won the National Book Award, topped bestseller lists for months, was translated into scores of languages and afforded Shirer, who was in debt after being fired from CBS, a comfortable life.
The book was not without its critics. Academic historians complained that Shirer had neglected major studies on the topic, largely ignored the political opposition to Hitler within Germany and depicted the connections between German philosophical and historical tradition and National Socialism as greater, more direct and simpler than they had been in reality.24 The book’s reception in Germany was especially problematic. When the German translation appeared in 1961, promptly achieving huge sales, the German press tar-brushed it as anti-German. There were even reported attempts to ban its publication by court injunction,25 and none other than West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was said to have lashed out against it in interviews and conversations with influential Americans. According to Shirer, on a visit to New York Adenauer invited the publisher of Look magazine, Mike Cowles, to his hotel and railed against him for printing excerpts from Rise and Fall as well as Shirer’s article “If Hitler Had Won World War II”. When Cowles said that he was prepared to run a rebuttal if Adenauer could prove to him that Shirer’s claims were untrue, Adenauer allegedly responded: “Mr. Cowles, you do not get the point. The point is not whether it’s truthful or not. The point is that it is turning out to be extremely harmful to German–American relations. It is stirring up in America hatred of the Germans. Mr. Shirer is a German-hater, a Deutschhasser! You must not publish any more of his trash.”26
Shirer recounted this scene with obvious pride in his autobiography, and his agenda was obvious. Ahead of the publication of Rise and Fall he had sought to ratchet up American anxiety about a revived, aggressive Germany, which, of course, also helped him market his book. To the end of his days Shirer cultivated his image as a Cassandra warning against the German peril. In his later works he relegated positive counter-examples like General Lahousen in Berliner Tagebuch (Berlin Journal) to the absolute margins. But on the other hand, there is no denying that the West German government in Bonn did indeed launch a press campaign against Rise and Fall and had a twenty-four-page compendium of negative reviews drawn up.27
Shirer continued to write with a sharp, hostile analytical eye about Germany until he died in 1993. In 1985 he travelled back to the west of the country in which he had resided for so long to cover a state visit by Ronald Reagan. Shirer was scandalized at the US President laying a wreath in the veterans’ section of a cemetery in Bitburg, where SS men as well as regular soldiers were buried. He interpreted the gesture as the result of a German campaign to rehabilitate the Nazi organization. “I left Berlin that bright spring of 1985 in a state of deep depression,” Shirer wrote in his autobiography. “I felt worse, I believe, than that snowy December day in 1940, forty-five years before when I departed from Nazi Germany for the last time… It was not as individuals but as a people that I had my doubts and fears about them. Goethe, a great German and a great poet, had this feeling too. As my plane for Paris took off and we flew over the divided city with the abominable wall separating East and West and as I glanced down for what I was sure was the last time at Berlin, Goethe’s words came back to me and seemed near to my own thoughts: I have often felt a bitter sorrow at the thought of the German people, which is so estimable in the individual and so wretched in the generality.”28
Three years later, a rhetorically unfortunate speech by the President of the German Bundestag, Philipp Jenninger, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Night of Broken Glass pogroms gave Shirer yet another example of why all other people should remain extremely critical of Germans.29
Notes
1 T. Taylor, Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials, p. 220.
2 X. Qian in S. Radlmaier (ed.), Der Nürnberger Lernprozess, p. 20.
3 B. Polewoi, Nürnberger Tagebuch, p. 76. When the US Executive Trial Counsellor was invited to dinner at the castle in September 1945 he found the food “wonderful”. T.J. Dodd, Letters from Nuremberg, p. 132.
4 Deane to his wife, 6th December 1945.
5 K. Cuthbertson, A Complex Fate, p. 127.
6 W.L. Shirer, End of a Berlin Diary, p. 269.
7 M. Strobl, “Hitler will Frieden”, Die Zeit, 2nd August 2012.
8 K. Cuthbertson, A Complex Fate, p. 312.
9 Ibid., p. 294 ff., 313.
10 See Jürgen Schebera’s Afterword in W.L. Shirer, End of a Berlin Diary, p. 456.
11 R.G. Vansittart, Lessons of My Life.
12 W. Brandt, Links und frei, p. 353.
13 In 1950 Erika Mann asked her friend Bill, as she called Shirer, to write an essay on her by then deceased brother Klaus. Shirer obliged, composing among other things the Afterword for Klaus Mann’s autobiography.
14 W.L. Shirer, End of a Berlin Diary, p. 329.
15 Ibid., p. 267.
16 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b4153667&seq=23
17 W.L. Shirer, Rise and Fall, p. 99.
18 C. Kohl, Das Zeugenhaus, p. 59.
19 W.L. Shirer, End of a Berlin Diary, pp. 322–23.
20 W.L. Shirer, Twentieth Century Journey: The Start, p. 176.
21 W.L. Shirer, Twentieth Century Journey: A Native’s Return, p. 26.
22 Ibid., p. 203.
23 See W.E. Süskind, “Die tänzerische Generation”, p. 591. He added: “No one should see dancing girls as artists, and it is equally unjust to jazz if someone tries to make an art form of it.”
24 For critical discussions of Shirer’s analysis of the origins of Nazism see Golo Mann’s Introduction in W.L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and K. Epstein, “Shirer’s History of Nazi Germany”.
25 M. Fisher, “William Shirer at ‘Journey’s End’,” The Washington Post, 10th August 1989.
26 W.L. Shirer, Twentieth Century Journey: A Native’s Return, p. 260.
27 G.D. Rosenfeld, “The Reception of William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in the United States and West Germany, 1960–62”, p. 118.
28 W.L. Shirer, Twentieth Century Journey: A Native’s Return, p. 450.
29 Ibid., p. 453 ff.
VII
Alfred Döblin’s Didactic Deception: The Phantom Resident of Schloss Faber-Castell
“The newspapers go completely crazy sometimes.”
ERNEST CECIL DEANE, LETTER TO HIS WIFE, LOIS, ON 9TH APRIL 1946
A mong other things, the Nuremberg Trial saw a proliferation of what we would today call fake news. In April 1946, Stars and Stripes published an article whose headline falsely suggested that Soviet prosecutor Roman Rudenko had shot Hermann Göring in the courtroom. It was based on a rumour that Göring had insulted Stalin in front of the court, whereupon Rudenko became so incensed he killed him. This “news” was passed on by several press agencies. And that was only one extreme example of the false, often purposely misleading information given to the reading public. Some misinformation was spread at the behest of the political leadership. The Soviet media, for instance, reported that the Germans had been guilty of the Katyn massacre. Meanwhile, journalists sometimes unwittingly passed on untruths, and mistakes were adopted, amplified and embellished. The American tabloid press had particularly few scruples, often simply making things up. “Americans and British troops battle Germans” read one headline, which was as sensationalist as it was false. Another newspaper wrongly reported that Göring had died of a heart attack in an American military hospital. Some journalists invented stories to bolster their reputation. As we have seen, one US reporter claimed to have run into Hemingway, Steinbeck and Dos Passos in the press-camp bathroom. This was a relatively harmless bit of deception. But others told lies to discredit political opponents. The French Stalinist Elsa Triolet, for instance, once completely fabricated witness testimony in a piece for her Communist audience.
In the case of Alfred Döblin, deception was used to a specific end. A doctor of psychiatry, Döblin didn’t produce an article, a report or a monograph, but rather a thirty-three-page didactic pamphlet called Der Nürnberger Lehrprozess (The Educational Nuremberg Trial). Written in German and aimed specifically at a German audience, it came replete with ten full-page photos of the trial’s famous defendants and was published in February 1946 with an initial run of 200,000 copies.1 This was a text explicitly conceived to reach and re-educate the masses, and Döblin was willing to play a bit fast and loose with the truth in the interest of augmenting his narrative’s effect. Indeed, he considered an act of deception crucial to achieving his goal.
At the time of the Nuremberg Trial, Döblin was an officer in the French Ministry of Education working for the French occupation authorities in Baden-Baden. A Jew and a socialist who had suffered greatly under the Nazis and lost family members in Auschwitz, he was one of the first German authors to come back from exile to Germany. After his return he was made responsible for censoring manuscripts submitted for publication. He also worked for the monthly literary magazine Das goldene Tor (The Golden Gate) and wrote for the Neue Zeitung and the Südwestrundfunk radio station, where he enjoyed considerable artistic and moral authority. Naturally, he took a keen interest in the Nuremberg Trial, the biggest media event of the day. “I saw, heard and read a lot,” he recalled. “I was often repulsed and disgusted. But I felt worse when I saw the poverty and hunger. You had to gather well-meaning people around you. For starters, I decided to write a short, readable pamphlet I called ‘The Educational Nuremberg Trial’. Yes, the idea was that the Nuremberg trial, which was publicly going on at the time, would teach those people something.”2
The pamphlet took in both the general lessons of the Nuremberg Trial and the lessons Döblin himself wished to impart. In reporting on the trial he hoped to kick-start a process of re-education, and the project was designed to push its readers in that direction. The pamphlet was published under a good old-fashioned German-sounding name, “Hans Fiedeler”, that gave no hint of being a pseudonym. Indeed, it would take until 1968 for the text to be attributed to Döblin. And it was written to give the impression that the author had personally attended the trial.3 “As sombre and grey as judges appear,” Döblin, for instance, wrote, “just as business-like are the proceedings, and just as quietly and unemotionally do the judges speak.”4 In fact Döblin wasn’t even present in Nuremberg during the trial. We don’t know why he chose not to travel there as other reporters did. Perhaps he considered it his duty to write the pamphlet but shied away from seeing the defendants directly. In any case, he didn’t hold what he had written in very high regard, noting in his diary on 13th December 1945 that he had “fumbled his way to the end” of the text.
Döblin sometimes took a likewise freewheeling approach in quoting others. The pamphlet opens by citing Tacitus—“Voluntary slaves make more tyrants than tyrants make slaves”—but those words aren’t to be found in any of the Roman historian’s works. Döblin may well have intentionally put them in Tacitus’ mouth because the latter was held in such high regard under National Socialism, which often cited his Germania to support the Nazi cult of the Germanic tribes. Indeed, for some Nazi readers Germania had been a kind of racist Bible. Yet Tacitus, who praised the Germanic tribes—in contrast to the decadent Romans—for their courage, honesty and simplicity, also identified a latent Germanic tendency towards servility. This could be how Döblin wanted people to read his false quotation about slaves creating tyrants. Perhaps it was his attempt to discredit racist Nazi propaganda using its own logic—and the very man German racial supremacists invoked to support their dreams of superiority. In fact, the quotation was not from Tacitus but from one of the fathers of the French Revolution, Count Honoré Gabriel Riqueti de Mirabeau.
Döblin may have had good reasons for his minor deception with Tacitus, but why did he feel it necessary to publish the pamphlet under an assumed name? The author of the Weimar Republic novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, with its innovative, Dos Passos-like montage technique, Döblin had been forced to flee Germany with his family for Switzerland in 1933. He later went to France and, when Germany invaded that country, to the USA. His pseudonym was unmistakably German, and the pamphlet was written from the ostensible point of view of someone who, unlike himself, had remained in Germany during the Third Reich. Döblin probably felt that his real name would have elicited hostility in some readers, and he was determined not to be seen as a know-it-all passing judgment on those who had stayed in their home country. At the very start of the pamphlet he addressed “those who have spent the last decade in Germany” and who were confronting the extraordinary spectacle of “what used to be most powerful names” in the country sitting like common criminals in the court dock. Döblin was careful not to cast his readers themselves in the role of defendants. Instead, at the end of the pamphlet, he has an emblematic figurehead, an anonymous “remorseful man”, say: “They subjugated us and drove us to do horrific things so that shame will rest upon us for a long time to come.” Such well-meaning people of conscience were the target audience Döblin wished to address.
Educational Theatre Versus Nazi Theatre
The use of the word “we” in Döblin’s pamphlet refers to “Hans Fiedeler” as a member of the German people, and both are put in the role of spectators at the “grand theatre” of the Nuremberg courtroom. The first part of the “drama”, a kind of exposition, sets the scene and introduces the accusers—not the Allied prosecutors, but the millions of dead killed because of the Nazis. The criminals in the dock had never imagined that there would be a second half of the play, one that would be about sin, punishment and the “restoration of humanity”. And the significance of the theatre metaphor goes beyond the audience’s perspective in the courtroom. The theatre is also a stand-in for the Third Reich, in which the Nazi “actors” deceived and bewitched the German people with proclamations that they were a master race. “Their trick succeeded,” Döblin noted succinctly, drawing a contrast to Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, in which a drunken peasant is convinced that he is a wealthy, majestic lord. Nazi rule didn’t produce a comedy, Döblin pointed out, but rather a “barbaric orgy of murder and destruction”.
