Hugendubel.info - Die B2B Online-Buchhandlung 

Merkliste
Die Merkliste ist leer.
Bitte warten - die Druckansicht der Seite wird vorbereitet.
Der Druckdialog öffnet sich, sobald die Seite vollständig geladen wurde.
Sollte die Druckvorschau unvollständig sein, bitte schliessen und "Erneut drucken" wählen.

The Writers' Castle

E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
Englisch
Pushkin Presserschienen am29.08.2024
A gripping, fresh approach to the Nuremberg Trial, told through the stories of the many great writers who came to witness it 'Ranging across the (sometimes shifting) viewpoints of the different writers gathered in Nuremberg, Uwe Neumahr complicates the story in small but important ways... This readable history of the view from the castle shows the many ways in which human beings process transgression, violence and trauma' TLS __________ Nuremberg, 1946. As the trials of Nazi war criminals begin, some of the world's most famous writers and reporters gather in the ruined German city. Among them are Rebecca West, John Dos Passos, Martha Gellhorn, Erika Mann and Janet Flanner. Crammed together in the press camp at Schloss Faber-Castell, where reporters sleep ten to a room, complain about the food and argue in the lively bar, they each try to find words for the unprecedented events they are witnessing. Here, tensions simmer between Soviet and Western journalists, unlikely affairs begin, stories are falsified and fabricated - and each reporter is forever changed by what they experience. As Uwe Neumahr builds an engrossing group portrait of the luminaries at Nuremberg, we are taken to the heart of the political and cultural conflicts of the time - observing history at the very moment it was being written.

Uwe Neumahr is an author and literary agent who holds a PhD in Romance and German Studies. He has previously written biographies of historical figures from the Renaissance and Early Modern periods, including Miguel de Cervantes.mehr
Verfügbare Formate
BuchGebunden
EUR32,00
E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
EUR21,59

Produkt

KlappentextA gripping, fresh approach to the Nuremberg Trial, told through the stories of the many great writers who came to witness it 'Ranging across the (sometimes shifting) viewpoints of the different writers gathered in Nuremberg, Uwe Neumahr complicates the story in small but important ways... This readable history of the view from the castle shows the many ways in which human beings process transgression, violence and trauma' TLS __________ Nuremberg, 1946. As the trials of Nazi war criminals begin, some of the world's most famous writers and reporters gather in the ruined German city. Among them are Rebecca West, John Dos Passos, Martha Gellhorn, Erika Mann and Janet Flanner. Crammed together in the press camp at Schloss Faber-Castell, where reporters sleep ten to a room, complain about the food and argue in the lively bar, they each try to find words for the unprecedented events they are witnessing. Here, tensions simmer between Soviet and Western journalists, unlikely affairs begin, stories are falsified and fabricated - and each reporter is forever changed by what they experience. As Uwe Neumahr builds an engrossing group portrait of the luminaries at Nuremberg, we are taken to the heart of the political and cultural conflicts of the time - observing history at the very moment it was being written.

Uwe Neumahr is an author and literary agent who holds a PhD in Romance and German Studies. He has previously written biographies of historical figures from the Renaissance and Early Modern periods, including Miguel de Cervantes.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9781805330707
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format HinweisePub Wasserzeichen
FormatE101
Erscheinungsjahr2024
Erscheinungsdatum29.08.2024
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse3288 Kbytes
Artikel-Nr.15639974
Rubriken
Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe



Foreword


Xiao Qian was amazed. Walking for the first time through the ruins of Nuremberg in October 1945, it was the only European city that reminded him of Beijing, not just because of its walls around the old town, the river that snaked through its midst or its many weeping willows, but also because of the calm it emanated. Xiao (1910-99) had crossed the river with British Armed Forces earlier that year as a Chinese correspondent during the Second World War. After a stop in defeated Berlin, he reached Nuremberg in the autumn. Xiao knew that the former home of the Nazis´ annual party rallies had once been a tourist destination. But right now, the tourists aren´t here for the cultural and historical attractions, which are buried beneath rubble anyway, or Nuremberg´s famous gingerbread, he told his readers on 9th October 1945. Today, Nuremberg is the focus of the world´s attention because twenty-three of the biggest criminals of the Nazi regime are being put on trial... It is a great event. 1

The great event was the international response to an unimaginable horror, the moment when Germany´s war criminals would be held accountable for what they had done. People around the world longed for the Nazi dictatorship to be unmasked to reveal the true faces of the men behind it. Some observers saw the Nuremberg Major War Criminals Trial* as the foundation for the enforcement of modern standards for crimes against humanity. The presence of famous Nazis in the courtroom dock, the judicial novelty of a tribunal carried out by the four victors in the war, and public curiosity about a country many people regarded as a mystery in fact made the trial a spectacular event. Large numbers of journalists were dispatched to Nuremberg, including the lone reporter from China, Xiao Qian, who later become the chairman of the Chinese Writers´ Association. These journalists were to serve as a window into a sealed enclave, so that the outside world would know what transpired there.

Taking the lead, US occupation authorities set about identifying a facility capable of handling the flood of reporters, but locating a building suitable for accommodating several hundred press representatives was no mean task in a city that had been so heavily bombed. In the end, they found what they were looking for in the nearby town of Stein, to the south-west of Nuremberg proper. It was there, in a latter-day mock castle seized from the pen and pencil manufacturing dynasty Faber-Castell, that the international press camp was set up. The castle was a place to both live and work.2 Correspondents slept there in rooms with up to ten beds and dutifully recorded events from the trial a few kilometres away, as men like Göring, Ribbentrop, Streicher and Hess waited in their cells to learn the verdicts of the International Military Tribunal.

Some of the world´s most important journalists and bestknown writers were deployed to Nuremberg to report for newspapers, news agencies and radio broadcasters. The list of names reads like the crème de la crème of the journalistic and literary scene of the day-Erika Mann, Erich Kästner, John Dos Passos, Ilya Ehrenburg, Elsa Triolet, Rebecca West and Martha Gellhorn, to name a few-but it also included men and women who would only later go on to achieve literary, media or political fame. Their ranks encompassed the German novelist Wolfgang Hildesheimer, who served at the trial as a translator; Augusto Roa Bastos, widely considered Paraguay´s leading author; Austrian writer and peace campaigner Robert Jungk; legendary US television news anchorman Walter Cronkite; and Walter Lippmann, regarded as the most influential political writer in the United States. Also on hand were later German Chancellor Willy Brandt; the head of state surveillance in Communist East Germany, Markus Wolf; and a bevy of other somewhat lesser-known authors, including Joseph Kessel, Peter de Mendelssohn and Gregor von Rezzori. Never before and never since had so many famous writers from all over the world come together as during this zero hour . In Schloss Faber-Castell, world literature encountered world history. It was a meeting point for returnees from exile or inner emigration and battle-hardened officers, for Resistance fighters and Holocaust survivors, Communists and Western media conglomerates, war correspondents from the trenches and star reporters with extravagant lifestyles. All were eager to find out how such a human catastrophe could have happened, what sort of people the accused were and how they would seek to defend themselves.

Within the press corps, the body in which history was literally being written, opposites collided. Erika Mann, who was officially employed by the US Armed Forces, cohabitated with her female partner, an American journalist, even though homosexuality was prohibited by the US military. Brandt, then a correspondent for a working-class Scandinavian newspaper, came together with Wolf, the very man who would later, as the head of the Communist East German Foreign Intelligence Agency, bring him down as West German Chancellor. The legendary American military photographer Ray D´Addario, who was to remain in Nuremberg until 1949, would celebrate his wedding in the castle and have it catered by Hitler´s former head of household, Arthur Kannenberg.

Having officially undergone de-Nazification, Kannenberg ran the kitchen at Schloss Faber-Castell, but before the Second World War he had entertained the Führer with his singing and accordion-playing. He was envied for his proximity to Germany´s leader. What is granted to only a very few mortals but is the wish of millions is your great fortune, you who are in His presence every day, a friend once wrote to him in a mawkish letter.3 But Hitler´s court fool on the squeeze box , as Wolfgang Wagner once mockingly dubbed him, now served the representatives of the international press instead of the Führer and his entourage.4

The press camp, which remained open until the last of the subsequent trials in Nuremberg had concluded in 1949, was a hive not only of journalistic activity but of artistic creativity, the birthplace of drawings, cartoons, novels and short stories, along with countless articles, features and radio reports on the legal proceedings. Boris Polevoy´s novel The Story of a Real Man, upon which Prokofiev´s opera of the same name would be based, was written in the press camp-the composer called it the most intense literary experience of recent times and insisted on setting it to music. Wolfgang Hildesheimer, whose first love was the visual arts, also painted a number of abstract works in the castle.

The Schloss was essentially a multinational hostel with a variety of idiosyncratic mores and habits, as a correspondent for Pravda noted in his journal. Coexisting in such confined space generated tensions. Competition was fierce, particularly among American journalists. Reporters who had conversed pleasantly enough over breakfast could turn into fierce rivals by the afternoon. Everyone was after a scoop. Hermann Göring´s wife, Emmy, was inundated with interview requests, and aggressive press photographers also hounded the spouses of the other defendants. One famous Associated Press image showed journalist Wes Gallagher sprinting out of the court building to be the first reporter to pass on the news of the verdict via overseas telephone. Competition led some correspondents to exaggerate what they reported. False news-intended to boost circulations or serve propaganda purposes-was repeatedly reported. Even a respected author like the novelist Alfred Döblin, who covered the trial under a pseudonym for the French occupation authorities, pretended to be present in the courtroom although he wasn´t even in Nuremberg.

The international event attracted no shortage of would-be profiteers, and publishers working for large American conglomerates sensed the chance to earn small fortunes. Sometimes they met up for dinner in the press camp immediately after negotiating with the lawyers of the war criminals on trial for the rights to their memoirs.

The growing mistrust between the victorious powers amid the incipient Cold War meant that Soviet and Western correspondents weren´t supposed to get too close to one another. Moscow kept its journalists on an especially short leash. They were given strict instructions on how to behave and risked being informed on if they disobeyed. The tiniest deviation or one false word might see them immediately recalled and their careers ended, with their families punished as well.

During the day, those present in the courtroom were confronted with the incomprehensible crimes of the defendants, documented by photos of the death camps and mass executions and testimonies from eyewitnesses and victims. In the evening, many of these people numbed themselves with alcohol. Inhibitions disappeared. There was lots of dancing and drinking. The Americans drink as though they get paid for it, and it´s not uncommon for one of them to be recalled home because he (or she) is suffering from delirium tremens, noted Hildesheimer. Otherwise, they´re prudish, friendly and naive. 5
...
mehr