Let's write about Adolf Hitler
“Führer”: An archived echo report published in The New Yorker magazine:
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| Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) |
Janet Flanner’s job was never easy, exactly, but for the first decade it wasn’t all that morally freighted. Beginning in October of 1925, using the pseudonym Genêt, she mailed her editors at this magazine a fizzy bimonthly column under the rubric Letter from Paris. Instead of telling readers what they needed to know—that was what newspapers were for—she focussed on what they might want to know: the new fad of backless dresses in the cabarets, the rising cost of champagne. “She thought of herself as a high-class gossip columnist,” Brenda Wineapple writes in her biography “Genêt.” Striving for an “unflappable, ever-ironic” style, “she did not predict outcomes, take sides, or search for causes. Obviously, this itself was a side, but Janet was not yet willing to admit that.”
The New Yorker was inventing its voice, and Flanner was in the clique of tinkerers. “Lunched with D. Parker,” she wrote to Harold Ross, the founding editor, from her rented fourth-floor room on Rue Bonaparte. “How dare you say Thurber uses more parenthesis than I? . . . I’ll stop, (if I can.)” When Flanner first arrived in Europe, as an expat from Indianapolis, she was still married, technically, to a man; but they soon divorced and she lived openly (in both senses) with her female partner, the poet Solita Solano. They were chummy with everyone who was anyone: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Djuna Barnes. Flanner roamed the Continent, filing occasional reports from London and Berlin. “I think a Brussels Letter a good idea,” she wrote to Ross. “I’m passing by there anyhow.” She filed pieces on Edith Wharton and Igor Stravinsky, and a subtly undermining story about her frenemy Gertrude Stein, and a write-around Profile of the Queen of England. In time, she became more than a gossip columnist; she became one of the great journalists of her generation.
In early 1936, she published her weightiest piece yet—a three-part Profile of Adolf Hitler. This one, too, was a write-around: unlike Dorothy Thompson, an American journalist who had interviewed Hitler for Cosmopolitan (and whose unflattering portrayal got her kicked out of Germany), Flanner never secured an interview with the Führer, and it’s not clear how hard she pushed for one. She was neither an antifascist, like her friend Dorothy Parker, nor a Fascist, like her friend Ezra Pound; she was against crude bigotry, but she was not the world’s greatest philo-Semite. (In a letter to her mother, she once denigrated the writer Rebecca West as “a little Jewish.”) “Dictator of a nation devoted to splendid sausages, cigars, beer, and babies, Adolf Hitler is a vegetarian, teetotaller, nonsmoker, and celibate,” the first sentence of the Profile read. She had him pegged as a strange little man, teeming with contradictions—true, but hardly the most salient of his known flaws, even then.
In the first installment of the Profile, we learn about the Führer’s taste in movies, his “second-rate tailor,” and his preferred recipe for South German porridge. Readers would have to wait until the following week for a mention of the Nazi Party’s increasingly visible repression of German Jews, which Flanner dispatched in a single paragraph (“The Jewish problem Hitler has raised is a vast one in emotional importance . . . numerically, from the German point of view, it is a small one”). A few lines later, she was on to a night-club comedian who told sly Hitler jokes. (“No one knows why he isn’t in a concentration camp.”) There were a few intimations of violence, but in the mode of pointing out Hitler’s personal inconsistencies: “He becomes sick if he sees blood, yet he is unafraid of being killed or killing.”
The piece was ambiguous, and it had a mixed reception. “I was in Hollywood yesterday and the Jewish film gentlemen candidly said they thought my Hitler article was not unfriendly enough!” Flanner wrote in a letter. “No pleasing everybody.” Still, for the rest of her life she never included the Hitler Profile among her collected pieces. For a writer who wants to seem sophisticated and all-knowing, it may feel intolerably risky to pick sides in a grubby political fight, or to make falsifiable predictions about the future. But refusing to take sides can also be a way to miss the story.
The New Yorker was inventing its voice, and Flanner was in the clique of tinkerers. “Lunched with D. Parker,” she wrote to Harold Ross, the founding editor, from her rented fourth-floor room on Rue Bonaparte. “How dare you say Thurber uses more parenthesis than I? . . . I’ll stop, (if I can.)” When Flanner first arrived in Europe, as an expat from Indianapolis, she was still married, technically, to a man; but they soon divorced and she lived openly (in both senses) with her female partner, the poet Solita Solano. They were chummy with everyone who was anyone: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Djuna Barnes. Flanner roamed the Continent, filing occasional reports from London and Berlin. “I think a Brussels Letter a good idea,” she wrote to Ross. “I’m passing by there anyhow.” She filed pieces on Edith Wharton and Igor Stravinsky, and a subtly undermining story about her frenemy Gertrude Stein, and a write-around Profile of the Queen of England. In time, she became more than a gossip columnist; she became one of the great journalists of her generation.
In early 1936, she published her weightiest piece yet—a three-part Profile of Adolf Hitler. This one, too, was a write-around: unlike Dorothy Thompson, an American journalist who had interviewed Hitler for Cosmopolitan (and whose unflattering portrayal got her kicked out of Germany), Flanner never secured an interview with the Führer, and it’s not clear how hard she pushed for one. She was neither an antifascist, like her friend Dorothy Parker, nor a Fascist, like her friend Ezra Pound; she was against crude bigotry, but she was not the world’s greatest philo-Semite. (In a letter to her mother, she once denigrated the writer Rebecca West as “a little Jewish.”) “Dictator of a nation devoted to splendid sausages, cigars, beer, and babies, Adolf Hitler is a vegetarian, teetotaller, nonsmoker, and celibate,” the first sentence of the Profile read. She had him pegged as a strange little man, teeming with contradictions—true, but hardly the most salient of his known flaws, even then.
In the first installment of the Profile, we learn about the Führer’s taste in movies, his “second-rate tailor,” and his preferred recipe for South German porridge. Readers would have to wait until the following week for a mention of the Nazi Party’s increasingly visible repression of German Jews, which Flanner dispatched in a single paragraph (“The Jewish problem Hitler has raised is a vast one in emotional importance . . . numerically, from the German point of view, it is a small one”). A few lines later, she was on to a night-club comedian who told sly Hitler jokes. (“No one knows why he isn’t in a concentration camp.”) There were a few intimations of violence, but in the mode of pointing out Hitler’s personal inconsistencies: “He becomes sick if he sees blood, yet he is unafraid of being killed or killing.”
The piece was ambiguous, and it had a mixed reception. “I was in Hollywood yesterday and the Jewish film gentlemen candidly said they thought my Hitler article was not unfriendly enough!” Flanner wrote in a letter. “No pleasing everybody.” Still, for the rest of her life she never included the Hitler Profile among her collected pieces. For a writer who wants to seem sophisticated and all-knowing, it may feel intolerably risky to pick sides in a grubby political fight, or to make falsifiable predictions about the future. But refusing to take sides can also be a way to miss the story.
As Flanner wrote in a Letter from Budapest in 1938, “History looks queer when you’re standing close to it.” ♦
posted by Juliana L'Heureux at 5:20 PM
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