The Dragon from Chicago
The Untold Story of an American Reporter in Nazi Germany
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- $16.900
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- $16.900
Descripción editorial
For fans of unheralded women’s stories, a captivating look at Sigrid Schultz—one of the earliest reporters to warn Americans of the rising threat of the Nazi regime
“No other American correspondent in Berlin knew so much of what was going on behind the scene as did Sigrid Schultz.” — William L. Shirer, author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
We are facing an alarming upsurge in the spread of misinformation and attempts by powerful figures to discredit facts so they can seize control of narratives. These are threats American journalist Sigrid Schultz knew all too well. The Chicago Tribune's Berlin bureau chief and primary foreign correspondent for Central Europe from 1925 to January 1941, Schultz witnessed Hitler’s rise to power and was one of the first reporters—male or female—to warn American readers of the growing dangers of Nazism.
In The Dragon From Chicago, Pamela D. Toler draws on extensive archival research to unearth the largely forgotten story of Schultz’s years spent courageously reporting the news from Berlin, from the revolts of 1919 through the Nazi rise to power and Allied air raids over Berlin in 1941. At a time when women reporters rarely wrote front-page stories and her male colleagues saw a powerful unmarried woman as a “freak,” Schultz pulled back the curtain on how the Nazis misreported the news to their own people, and how they attempted to control the foreign press through bribery and threats.
Sharp and enlightening, Schultz's story provides a powerful example for how we can reclaim truth in an era marked by the spread of disinformation and claims of “fake news.”
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Foreign correspondent Sigrid Schultz (1893–1980), who reported from Berlin between 1919 and 1941, was one of the first and most vocal journalists to document the growing threat of Nazism, according to this exhilarating biography. Historian Toler (Women Warriors) shows that Schultz was the only journalist of her era to systemically analyze in her reporting (which regularly appeared in the Chicago Tribune) how the Nazis manipulated the media—both by misrepresenting facts to the German public and by bribing and threatening the foreign press. Schultz, who was born in Chicago but raised in Europe, had "a European's understanding of Europe," which she worked to her advantage, cultivating informants who faced incredible risk for communicating with her. Toler's propulsive narrative, which chronicles Schultz's investigative escapades and scoops (like a 1939 visit with Hitler's astrologers that allowed her to break the news of Germany's nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union), is a journalistic adventure story of the highest caliber (it opens with a riveting scene of Schultz grilling Hermann Göring over press freedom; "You'll never learn to show the proper respect for state authorities," he tells her. "I suppose that is one of the characteristics of people from that crime-ridden city of Chicago"). The portrait of Schultz that emerges is dazzling ("small, blond, and surprisingly formidable," she was, according to one fellow correspondent, "Hitler's greatest enemy"). This is stellar.
