The Writers' Castle
Reporting History at Nuremberg
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- $279.00
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- $279.00
Descripción editorial
A gripping new approach to the Nuremberg Trial, told through the stories of the many great writers who came to witness it
“A riveting group portrait that puts these celebrity reporters in the spotlight... An engaging blend of gossipy anecdote and precise, thought-provoking analysis” — Financial Times
Nuremberg, 1945. 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 and 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 literary luminaries at Nuremberg, readers are taken to the heart of the political and cultural conflicts of the time—observing history at the very moment it was being written.
Providing fascinating accounts of his subjects’ experiences at Nuremberg, Neumahr shows how those experiences marked their future lives, as well as their approaches to writing. What emerges is both a multi-faceted depiction of the trials as a unique mass-media event, but also as a public reckoning with evil that had untold private reverberations for all who witnessed it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Biographer Neumahr makes his English-language debut with an immersive account of the 1945 Nuremberg trial focused on those who covered it: a throng of reporters from as far away as China, chosen by their countries to "serve as a window into a sealed enclave." Those sent included famous figures like John Dos Passos and Rebecca West; they were fittingly housed in a castle built by the pen and pencil dynasty Faber-Castell. During the day, they took stabs at describing the nature of the evil before them (was Luftwaffe commander Hermann Göring pathetic, sadistic, charismatic?) and struggled with the unspeakable horror of what they saw (groundbreakingly, much of the evidence was given on film; one American writer sent a telegram home that read, "I can't take it. I have no words any more"). At night, they carried on illicit affairs—Rebecca West with a judge!—and drank heavily. Because all the written evidence was read aloud, the trial ended up being extremely tedious, which led some writers to make embellishments in their reporting. Others, Neumahr perceptively notes, were pushed to turn their sights outward, toward the everyday Germans around them, and to ask probing questions about the general population's complicity. It adds up to a fresh, at times dishy, behind-the-scenes look at the landmark trial.
