The Overlook
By Tom Clavin
“The Overlook” appears every Thursday at tomclavin.substack.com. An overlook is a place from which one can see in several if not all directions, including where one has been and where one is going. If you enjoy the column, please "like" it and let me know what you think by commenting (check out previous ones while you're at it). Likes, comments, and shares help with author “discoverability” on Substack.com, and all support is appreciated. Don't forget to hit the ‘Subscribe’ button – it’s free!
Before December ends, I want to write about an event – though it mostly involved just two people – that didn’t quite change world history . . . but could have. Is that cryptic enough for you? This month is the 80th anniversary, and here is what happened:
One morning in December 1931, the journalist Dorothy Thompson was in the Kaiserhof Hotel in Berlin ready to conduct what she believed could be the most important interview of her already distinguished career. She was waiting for Adolf Hitler. The questions she had prepared had in the last few days been whittled down to the three queries the 42-year-old leader of the Nazi Party had deigned to answer.
“There was a lot of fussiness connected to the preparations,” Thompson would later report. The interview details had been finalized, yet here she was cooling her heels and wondering if Hitler would even show. Finally, an hour after their appointment, as Thompson waited in the upstairs foyer of the hotel, “I saw him shoot by, on the way to his rooms, accompanied by a bodyguard who looked rather like Al Capone.”
Once Hitler had settled himself, he signaled for the journalist to enter. Thompson knew how important this moment was: “When finally I walked into Adolf Hitler’s salon, I was convinced that I was meeting the future dictator of Germany.”
Hitler’s rapid rise to power in the early 1930s was a turning point for the world . . . and this interview was a turning point for Thompson. Her sit-down with Hitler and her reporting on it burnished her already formidable byline. Even so, once back in the United States and churning out articles about the dizzying and increasingly ominous events in Germany, and then with the publication of her book I Saw Hitler, Thompson was viewed as more of a voice crying in the wilderness than an oracle. Is it possible her being one of the very few females in a male-dominated occupation resulted in her warnings about Hitler and his Nazi followers were dismissed until it was too late? Or was it that the United States especially had more pressing concerns, like a collapsed economy? Either way, did the world miss an opportunity to fully comprehend the evil of the Nazis?
At the time of the 1931 interview, Dorothy Thompson was nearing the pinnacle of a trailblazing career that included being the only woman to head a major European news bureau, in Berlin. She also happened to be married to one of the most famous and successful writers in the world, and they recently had a son. By many standards, and decades before the phrase was used, Thompson would seem to have it all.
She was 38 years old and hailed from Lancaster, a town in upstate New York. When she was seven her widower father, a Methodist preacher, was left to raise his three children alone – until he remarried, and the teenaged Thompson moved out. Blessed with intelligence as well as ambition, she studied economics and politics at Syracuse University, graduating in 1914. She moved to Buffalo to devote herself to advancing women’s suffrage. But in 1920, as she was turning 27, she had a new calling: journalism. And working for the local weekly would not suffice – Thompson embarked for Europe.
She had good writing skills, and even more helpful, good luck. In Ireland, Thompson secured an interview with Terence MacSwiney, the Lord Mayor of Cork and a leader of the Sinn Fein movement. This turned out to be the last interview he gave before being thrown into Brixton Prison, where he died after a 74-day hunger strike. The Philadelphia Public Ledger made Thompson’s tenure on the Continent more official when it appointed her as its Vienna-based correspondent. She learned German and a smattering of other languages and developed sharp elbows to hold her own in the all-male U.S. foreign press corps, which included boldface bylines like John Gunther and E.R. Gedye. After many incisive articles and a couple of promotions, Thompson left the Philadelphia paper to head the New York Post’s Berlin bureau.
She relished not only the competition with her colleagues but the political, social, and literary circles she thrived in. Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht were among her writer friends. She conducted affairs with both women and men. Yet when there was news to be gathered, Thompson was all business. Her biographer, Peter Kurth, reports that her “spunkiness, energy, and tenacity won her sobriquets like ‘an amiable blue-eyed tornado.’” One night, she left a Vienna opera performance dressed in an evening gown, borrowed money from Sigmund Freud, whom she had interviewed, and traveled by train and car and ultimately by foot to Warsaw to cover a coup d’etat.
There was a marriage that did not last long. She was in her mid-30s and Dorothy Thompson and domestic life did not seem fated for each other. Then along came Sinclair Lewis.
According to the biographer Richard Lingeman, Lewis, known to friends as “Red,” was in Berlin and was set to return to the U.S. in July 1927 but “he had met the woman who was to radically change his life and dominate it for the next decade.” Lewis and Thompson were introduced during a tea given for journalists by the German foreign minister. The following evening, he was one of her guests at a dinner party. At 3 a.m., after everyone else had left, he asked her to marry him.
Understandably, Thompson hesitated. She wrote her ex-husband that Lewis was “a very curious demonic person, hard-drinking, blasphemous, possessed, I often think, of the devil.” Yet she soon wrote to her close friend Rose Wilder Lane, daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, “He amuses me: the first requirement of a husband, he heightens my sense of life, he opens a future for me.” They were married the following May.
This second marriage required Thompson to make – and tolerate – some adjustments. For one, she became more often known as Mrs. Sinclair Lewis, the wife of the author of such bestsellers as Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, and he was in the midst of writing Dodsworth. Another was returning to America to live. The couple resided in New York and on a rustic, farm-like property in Vermont. A third was becoming a mother, in 1930, when she gave birth to their son, Michael.
According to Kurth, “Life was cheerful that autumn, life was fun, and the world, to Dorothy, was still ‘entrancing.’ To prove it, she only needed to open her windows and look out at the hills of Vermont, ‘impossibly beautiful’ in the October sunlight.” Thompson would write a friend, “It’s the only place that reconciles me to being in America.” She considered her native country “crass” compared to Europe and “fundamentally hostile to women.”
Thompson may have managed all of these changes – and her husband’s alcohol binges -- but also in 1930 the couple was startled to learn that Red Lewis had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first American writer to be so honored. Thompson told her friend the actress Lillian Gish, “This is the end of me. This is fatal. I cannot live up to it.”
And she had begun to miss the excitement and opportunities of Europe. An advantage to the Nobel Prize was it would be bestowed in Stockholm in December. Leaving their son behind, the couple set sail for the Continent. Once arrived, she and Lewis went separate ways – he to Sweden, she to Germany. Finally, on December 21, Thompson was back in Berlin . . . where she suffered a ruptured appendix.
She survived, recuperated in the Thuringian Forest, then returned to the city. Friends had warned her that the Germany of 1931 was not the Germany she had reveled in three years before. “All the same,” Kurth writes, “it was a shock and a bewilderment for Dorothy to discover just how great the transformation had been.”
The firebrand Adolf Hitler, viewed by many older German officials as an annoyance, had been busy attaining political credibility. The struggling Nazis of the mid-1920s were now gaining traction. In elections the previous September the Nazi Party had collected six million votes and won 107 seats in the Reichstag. Its popularity had continued to surge during the intervening months. As Thompson made the rounds in Berlin she saw banners of swastikas and huge photos of Hitler, and she attended a speech given by Joseph Goebbels that she termed a “peculiar mixture” of anti-Semitism as well as “desperado nationalism and moronized socialism.”
The enthusiasm for the Nazis went beyond Berlin: All over Germany, hundreds of thousands of people were meeting in “monster demonstrations.” Two hundred thousand young men – who Thompson described as “gymnasium trained bruisers in brown shirts” -- had already been organized into Hitler’s private militia and were battling it out with Communist and leftist factions for control of the streets in Germany’s largest cities. Hitler and his associates, especially Goebbels, had constructed an effective propaganda machine and Nazi Party fundraising had reached an all-time high.
Thompson felt shocked and galvanized. She began writing long articles about the fall of the Weimer Republic, which were published in U.S. newspapers and magazines. After she reunited with Lewis and the couple returned to America and their son, she gave lectures on the transformation in Germany. While Thompson appreciated that she was becoming famous on her own in her homeland, she chomped at the bit to return to where the real action was. Finally, leaving her husband and Michael in New York, in November 1931 she was on her way back to Europe. Thompson was determined to interview the man most responsible for all the transformation there. As she acknowledged, by now “it is impossible any longer to laugh off Hitler.”
Thompson already had a loose connection to the imposing political star. When Hitler was on the lam after the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, he had hidden out with people Thompson knew in the mountains of Germany. Curious about the young agitator, she had traveled there to interview him. But she arrived too late, he had moved on, and he would soon be arrested and sent to prison.
As Thompson tried to explain to readers back home, things had changed drastically for Hitler and for Germany in the eight years since. “Unless things change radically, there will be war in Europe within the decade,” she forecast, “before the 1930s are out. And I’ve been where it will start.”
She knew it would be a coup to sit down and question the man she believed would start it. Hitler had remained aloof from foreign journalists and previous interview requests by them had been spurned. The route Thompson tried was through Ernst Hanfstaengel, who had been close to Hitler since 1923. Known as “Putzi,” he was a six-foot-four-inch-tall, cultured part-American – his mother, a Sedgwick-Heine, was a descendant of two generals who had fought in the Civil War – from an upper-middle class art-dealer family, a Harvard graduate, and a partner in an art-print publishing firm.
According to the Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw, Hanfstaengel “was greatly impressed by Hitler’s power to sway the masses.” Over the years Hitler had been a regular guest at the home of Putzi and his wife, Helena. “He plainly liked Hansfstaengl – his wife even more so. But the criterion, as always, was usefulness. And above all Hanfstaengel was useful. He became a type of ‘social secretary,’ providing openings to circles far different from the petty-bourgeois roughnecks in Hitler’s entourage.”
To Thompson, Putzi was “an immense, high-strung, incoherent clown” and the “oddest imaginable press chief for a dictator.” But he was useful to her too. For his part, Hanfstaengel saw doing an interview with Thompson as a step up for Hitler -- partly because of her status as a journalist but especially because she was the wife of a Nobel laureate. To Putzi’s surprise, Hitler agreed.
When all the arrangements were made, Hitler would condescend to meet with Thompson at the Kaiserhof Hotel, sort of home turf for him now, and answer three questions. She would later comment wryly, “So I went to see not a little political leader, but a probable dictator. I was a little nervous. I considered taking smelling salts.”
More next week . . .
Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 18 books, including Tombstone, Blood and Treasure (the latest with Bob Drury), and Lightning Down: A World War II Story of Survival, just published by St. Martin’s Press. To purchase any of these titles, please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, or BN.com.
Tom,
I was riveted!
Can't wait to the next installment.
And how fucking timely is this? Hope you're writing a book on Ms. Thompson.
Cheers, Allen