I Saw Hitler

"This is yet another exemplar of an aspect for foreign correspondence. Dorothy Thompson was a passionate, bigger-than-life journalist, married for a while to Sinclair Lewis. In a very brash way – you had to be brash to be a woman working abroad in those days – she relentlessly hounded the head of the Philadelphia Public Ledger’s foreign service – he was based in France – to hire her. He finally sent her to Vienna on a part-time basis, agreeing to pay her only for what she wrote. In the end she wrote so damn much they put her on staff, as it was cheaper. She later went to Berlin for the paper and then went back to the US, where she initially wrote mostly for magazines like Saturday Evening Post, a magazine with a huge reach that paid very well – if you wanted to talk to Americans the Post was the way to do it. She often went back to Europe for reporting trips, paying special attention to Germany. In the early 1930s – when Hitler was driving for power but it was not clear he could make it – Thompson wrote this very condescending piece based on an interview with him. It belittled him. She went out of her way to prick the tenderest spots of Hitler’s psyche. She said he didn’t really look like a German leader and how could someone like this ever really succeed. It appeared originally in the Ladies’ Home Journal and then became a book. Of course, she was wrong. He did become the head of state. But it didn’t ruin her career and in a way it helped it – she carved out a role for herself as someone who would say exactly what she thought. She had fearlessly attacked Hitler. She later became a columnist, which was what she was meant to do. She was meant to be a conscience for people. Twice she was fired by newspaper owners for writing columns disagreeing with the management. She was fired from the New York Post in the late 1940s for not fully supporting Israel. She had been pro-Zionist years before, but did not like everything the Israelis were doing. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Anyway, after the Hitler book came out in the early 1930s, Thompson went back to Germany and was expelled by the Nazis. Her expulsion was the beginning of the systematic expulsion of foreign correspondents by governments. Today this is a serious occupational hazard, but this is where it can be said to have begun. Soon it was a regular occurrence in Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union. Of course, in Africa and the Middle East it’s a big problem now. Yes, you do. I think the thing that comes across is what a stem-winder he was, going on and on, being demagogic and posing. All of that comes through. April 27, 2010. Updated: May 17, 2021 Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected]"