‘The Writers’ Castle’ by Uwe Neumahr review

In late 1945 and 1946 reporters from around the world were accommodated at a peculiar-looking castle in the Franconian town of Stein. It was an appropriate setting. The castle belonged to a dynasty of pencil makers, the Faber-Castells. Their pencil sets are still made today. At the castle, the assembled journalists penned reports ranging in style from matter-of-fact and coldly objective to opinionated and infuriated as they followed the trial of Hermann Göring and other surviving Nazi grandees at the International Military Tribunal held in Nuremberg’s Palace of Justice, some six kilometres away.

The list of journalists who stayed at the castle reads like a roster of literary luminaries and Uwe Neumahr’s book focuses chapter by chapter on some of them (at the beginning of the trial, around 300 reporters were lodged at the castle). There was the American novelist John Dos Passos, for instance, who wrote on the trial for Life magazine, including an account of it in the collection of war reports that make up his Tour of Duty (1946). Erich Kästner, German author of Emil and the Detectives (1929), was also present, his musings on the proceedings in Nuremberg published in the newly licensed Neue Zeitung. Erika Mann, daughter of novelist Thomas and erstwhile star of the political cabaret ‘The Pepper Mill’, provided reports for the American weekly Liberty and London’s Evening Standard. The list goes on: William L. Shirer, who would later write the bestseller The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960); American journalist Janet Flanner; Rebecca West, who replaced Flanner as The New Yorker’s Nuremberg correspondent in July 1946; Martha Gellhorn, already famous as the author of the hit short story collection The Trouble I’ve Seen (1936); and Willy Brandt, future chancellor of West Germany. The inclusion of Wolfgang Hildesheimer, who would later become a leading figure in West Germany’s postwar literary scene, is an outlier. Hildesheimer acted as an interpreter, rather than a reporter, at Nuremberg, and not at the 1946 trial but at the follow-up trial of Otto Ohlendorf, commander of the Nazi death unit Einsatzgruppe D, in 1947.

Neumahr’s approach is biographical and kaleidoscopic. In most cases, he is as much, if not more, preoccupied with the lives of his chosen protagonists before, during and after their time at the Faber-Castell castle than he is with their actual journalistic response to the military tribunal. Neumahr is especially interested in all the social goings-on at the castle, whose guests – despite the separation of male and female quarters, and, eventually, of Soviet reporters from all others – enjoyed a high level of fraternisation. Neumahr follows the various relationships of his protagonists. Erika Mann moved into the castle with her partner and fellow-reporter Betty Knox (whom she referred to as her ‘beloved lunatic’) despite the press camp being run by the American military for whom homosexuality was a punishable crime. Rebecca West and Francis Biddle, a US judge at Nuremberg, had an affair. As Neumahr tells it, this was something of a relief for both parties: ‘Like Biddle, the fifty-three-year-old West was sexually frustrated’, he writes, because ‘she hadn’t had sex with her husband in years.’ In his chapter on Gellhorn, we learn about her tempestuous relationship with Ernest Hemingway, while the chapter on the Prix Goncourt-winning Russian-French writer Elsa Triolet – who actually stayed in Nuremberg’s Grand Hotel and not the castle – focuses heavily on her relationship with the poet Louis Aragon.

The Writers’ Castle explores other kinds of relationships, too: not least that between fiction and journalism, as new and experimental techniques such as collage and other modernisms fed into news reportage. Because so many of the reporters were, or became, novelists, their impressions of the trial found their way into their later literary works. Politics and journalism intersected. Triolet’s communist leanings led her to inveigh against the Anglo-American judges, whom she considered to be as anti-democratic as the Nazis in the dock, while Brandt’s sympathies with the Soviets (despite his avowed pro-Western stance) seemingly induced him to completely ignore Stalin’s massacre at Katyn of some 22,000 Polish military officers in 1940, despite the fact that it was explicitly mentioned at the trial. Neumahr raises the issue of how morally compromised by political bias or other prejudices some of the reporters might have been. Kästner had arguably made a career for himself under the Nazis, even though his books had been burned in 1933 (Emil and the Detectives escaped that fate as a harmless children’s book). Some of the temporary residents at the castle were dismissive to the point of Vansittartism of the German population and its capacity for moral reorientation. West wrote off the Germans as a ‘great galumphing fool of a people’.

In the end, we don’t learn that much about the trial itself from The Writers’ Castle, although the sparring match between American chief counsel Robert H. Jackson (whom Dos Passos admired greatly, and Flanner not at all) and Göring is a recurring topos. Flanner compared Göring to a ‘gladiator who has just won his fight’, praising him for his ‘phenomenal memory and a remarkable gift for casuistic maneuver’. Göring fascinated the journalists, who fell over themselves trying to find the most spectacular, demeaning or outrageous ways of describing him. While Shirer likened him to a ‘maritime radio operator’, West found that his ‘appearance made a strong but obscure allusion to sex … Sometimes, when his humour was good, he recalled the madam of a brothel’.

This is a very entertaining book, mainly because it allows us to follow events through the experiences of a group of talented, often egotistical and sometimes scandalous writers whose lives were actually more interesting than those of the Nazis on trial. Credit must go, too, to the translator, Jefferson Chase. The book has been so well translated from the (at times) rather dry German that it is a better read in English.

• The Writers’ Castle: Reporting History at Nuremberg
  Uwe Neumahr, translated by Jefferson Chase
  Pushkin Press, 352pp, £25
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)
   

Bill Niven is Emeritus Professor in Contemporary German History at Nottingham Trent University.