Dorothy Thompson: Fearless Friend of Free Germany

Earlier I wrote about Martha Dodd, an American woman who saw with her own eyes what was happening in Germany after 1933 and forcefully warned a disbelieving American public.  But before Martha, there was Dorothy Thompson, the first American journalist to be kicked out of Germany by Goebbels. Dorothy made her way as a freelance journalist to Germany in the 1920s; by 1925 she was heading up the Berlin bureau of the New York Post, writing biting commentary which made her so famous that she attracted the attention of Sinclair Lewis, who married her.  Thompson became completely fluent in German. In 1931 she was invited to sit down for an interview with Hitler, whom she found comically preposterous. After this "Little Man" (Thompson) seized power in 1933, she wrote about her impressions in a book, I saw Hitler, introducing Hitler to American audiences for the first time. It was this book which so infuriated Goebbels and resulted in her expulsion.

Back in the States, Dorothy Thompson went on the lecture circuit warning a skeptical American audience about the dangers of Nazi Germany; she reached an even wider audience through her regular radio broadcasts. But because she knew the true nature of the Nazi regime, she understood the perils for anti-fascist Germans - particularly writers.  It is not an exaggeration to say that Dorothy Thompson is a savior of 20th century German letters. She used her celebrity, her considerable organizational talents, and even her own money to bring as many writers to America as possible.

It was extremely difficult for any European to get into isolationist America in the 1930's: for one thing, emigrants needed an affidavit from an American "sponsor". These were extremely hard to come by, and not a few refugees from the Nazi terror perished in Europe for lack of a sponsor.  Dorothy Thompson personally knew many of the key writers in Berlin and Vienna; she sponsored the expressionist playwright Ernst Toller and the Austrian literary salonist Eugenie Schwarzwald (who never made it).  In one of the ironies of history, the lifelong Republican Thompson sponsored the Marxist Bertolt Brecht.  In the case of Carl Zuckmayer, Thompson flew to Washington DC and stormed into the Oval Office unannounced (impossible today) to have President Roosevelt personally sign an affidavit.  Zuckmayer and his family spent their first weeks in New York at Thompson's apartment on Central Park.  When she couldn't help personally, she enlisted the aid of others.  Peter Kurth, Thompson's biographer, wrote me this: " What she did was make sure that every damn person she knew in the United States sponsored at least one or two people while there was still time, her efforts to bring in hordes of refugees solely on the grounds of "racial persecution" having failed before Congress."

Those writers she couldn't help, such as the great Austrian writers Joseph Roth and Robert Musil, she introduced to American readers with her own translations.  Thompson translated and secured American publication of Roth's The Radetzky March and Musil's notoriously difficult The Man without Qualities.

Thompson used her platform to heap scorn on the American admirers of Nazi Germany - of which there were many until America was brought into the war.  In 1939 she attended a huge rally of the pro-Nazi German-American Bund at Madison Square Garden, and had to be rescued by police after she stood up and laughed at one of Bund leader Frtiz Kuhn's anti-semitic tirades. Dorothy was not afraid to call Charles Lindbergh - America's darling - a "somber cretin" because of his pro-Nazi sympathies.  By 1940, Dorothy Thompson was, next to Eleanor Roosevelt, the most influential woman in America, and she used this influence to keep the Geist of a free Germany alive though the darkest days of the war.  Thanks to her, the German exiles suffered only minor consequences during this period : for the most part they were not viewed as "enemy aliens".

After the war she once again came to the defense of her German exile friends, as they were hounded by the FBI during the anti-communist hysteria of the McCarthy period. It would take a book to recount everything that Dorothy Thompson did for Free (anti-fascist) Germany; the literary landscape of postwar Germany would look very bleak indeed had it not been for the intervention of this brave champion of freedom:

"Political freedom is the condition of all freedom, as the people of Russia have learned, as the people of Italy have learned, and as the people of Germany have learned. They gave up political freedom to get something else which they thought at the moment was very much more important, and then they found out that there is not anything more important. And the first condition of political freedom is that we should stick to a regime of law, and not move off the path toward a regime of men.”

-Dorothy Thompson

Submitted to Carnival of German-American Relations

Comments

[my name]

Probably one of the only and last times that the political process in the USA worked as intended. This Johanna could have almost used the "Freiheit der Andersdenkenden" phrase, right?

Too bad it all went downhill with McCarthy, the Cold War and all that. The rule of law in the USA proabably ended sometime around the JFK and MLK assassinations. Nowadays their dreams are rotting corpses, eaten by fascism amd militarism.

[2020]

Political freedom is like a communications network: When it works you might not even feel it exists at all. You only realize it's there when something goes wrong.

[David]

@2020

Yes, and I can feel we are increasingly becoming less free.

We need people like Dorothy Thompson now more than ever.