Berlin because of Dorothy Thompson, who had moved there in 1925. One of the first female foreign correspondents with celebrity status, Thompson reported for the
Knickerbocker, who would later take over her Berlin job for the Philadelphia and New York papers, conveniently introduced Thompson to Lewis at a tea given by the German foreign minister. To make things juicier, some accounts claim that Thompson and Knickerbocker were more than colleagues, briefly linking them romantically.
Thompson had just divorced Joseph Bard, a Hungarian who had a well-deserved reputation as a womanizer, and Lewis’s marriage to Grace Hegger was in a state of collapse. The acclaimed author and the pioneering woman foreign correspondent were immediately infatuated with each other. Thompson called Lilian Mowrer one evening. “Do come on up, I have a jolly crowd here,” she told her. Mowrer came to the other part of the duplex apartment they shared to find Lewis, fresh from his triumphant publication of
That kind of social scene, along with Germany’s openness to “Americanization,” meant that Americans felt very much at home in Berlin. In 1928, even Hitler—then the leader of what still looked like an inconsequential party—pointed out that “Americanization” was leaving its mark in numerous ways. “International relations between nations have become so easy and close through modern technology and the communication it makes possible, that the European, often without being conscious of it, applies American conditions as a standard for his own,” he declared. It was a rare case of Hitler acknowledging a new trend without immediately denouncing it.
The talk of Americanization was shorthand for what now is called globalization. It was a genuine opening up to the world. That, as much as any specifically American characteristics, represented the real attraction of Berlin. “These were the brilliant, feverish years when Berlin was, in a cultural sense, the capital of the world,” Thompson wrote, repeating the sentiments of the banjo virtuoso Michael Danzi and other artists. “These were the days when the German mind was open to every stream of thought from every part of the earth. Every current beat upon Berlin.”
While American reporters continued to cover the political and economic situation, the stories that stand out in this period—and thrilled readers the most—were the lighter features. And none more so than the first transatlantic passenger flight of the
One of the Hearst correspondents on board was Wiegand. The other was Lady Drummond-Hay, who was hailed as the first woman to cross the Atlantic by air. Both reporters filed extensively, and it was the pairing of their stories that added to the sense of adventure and romance about the voyage. Lady Drummond-Hay’s writing was particularly evocative:
“The Graf Zeppelin is more than just machinery, canvas and aluminum,” she filed. “It has a soul—every man who worked to build it, every man who worked to fly it, every one of us who have made this journey, has contributed to the humanization of the aerial colossus. I love the airship as if it were something alive… I have been supremely happy on the Zeppelin. The journey has contributed richly to my emotional life.”
Some readers may have guessed another source of Lady Drummond-Hay’s emotional life: the romantic attachment between her and her colleague Wiegand. In 1923 at the age of twenty-eight, the Englishwoman had married the former diplomat Sir Robert Hay Drummond-Hay, who was fifty years older than she was. Three years later, he died, leaving her a young aristocratic widow who focused on her journalistic career. Working for Hearst, she met Wiegand, and their relationship quickly became much more than professional. Wiegand was married, but, as a gallivanting foreign correspondent, he was often separated from his wife.
After the two met in 1926, they tried to cover stories together as often as they could—including the first around-the-world zeppelin voyage in 1929. When separated, the duo wrote constantly to each other. Their correspondence leaves no doubt about the nature of their relationship. “You have indeed cared for me ‘tenderly’ Ol’ Bear, and the Cubbie-wubbie is fully appreciative and will stick close beside the Old Bear for comfort and protection, and love all her life… I love you very dearly and very truly,” the Englishwoman wrote in one of her first letters in 1926, signing it “Cubbie-wubbie-Tum-Tum.”
The Hearst newspapers loved trumpeting the exploits of the “brilliant British woman” and the “internationally-known newspaper correspondent” Wiegand. And they had no hesitation about focusing on stories about air travel when the situation on the ground looked better than it had since the beginning of the previous war. As Dorothy Thompson wrote later, the period from 1924 to 1929 seemed “full of promise… In that brief five years, truly remarkable progress was made in Germany.” It seemed to make perfect sense to illustrate that progress with dramatic narratives about people soaring across oceans, invoking visions of a peaceful, more harmonious world.
Even in that era full of promise, many Americans in Germany sensed that, despite surface similarities, “the Germans” were different from them and many other Europeans. “Though externals of American life were becoming increasingly popular—quick-lunch bars, flashy slogans, sky-scrapers, even chewing-gum—the mental attitude towards them remained purely Teutonic,” Lilian Mowrer observed. Those “Teutonic” differences were sometimes odd, sometimes comic, and, occasionally, hinted at something troubling, something sinister.
The Mowrers investigated a German social phenomenon that, at first glance, looked titillating. “Where but in Germany could one find 150,000 organized nudists?” Edgar wrote. But after visiting several nudist colonies, Lilian pointed out: “They all had the same un-erotic, purposeful atmosphere.” She wrote off the more lurid stories of sexual shenanigans there as nothing more than rumors and detected something more philosophical. “These Germans were swayed by feelings half primitive, half religious, with hopes of a saner humanity in some remote future yet undreamed.”
She was troubled by “the loose emotional fervor” the nudist movement engendered and its “ardent yearning for something ‘different.’” Most of the young people she met at the nudist colonies voted Communist, thinking this represented the path to human betterment. Those feelings, she concluded, “could be just as easily canalized and turned in any other direction by an unscrupulous leader interested in using it for his own ends.”
Thompson was struck by the German public’s fascination with gruesome crimes, as evidenced by the popularity of a police exhibition chronicling a series of murders that had captured the headlines. It included a reproduction of the bedroom of a man who had trolled for his twenty-six young male victims in the toilets of the Hannover train station. “If one wants a glimpse of the miserable den in which this monster killed his victims, if one longs to see the cot where he strangled them, the table where he carved them, the buckets in which he stored them, one must stand in line for half an hour,” she observed.
Americans were equally intrigued by other forms of extreme behavior. The Mowrers were taken aback by the assistant in the
“Do you think Germans are madder than any other peoples?” Lilian asked her husband. “They seem so unbalanced… so hysterical.”
“They lack coherence,” Edgar replied. “They are so rich in intellect and poor in common sense. And there is almost nothing they can’t persuade themselves to believe.”
In an era of rampant anti-Semitism, Weimar Germany wasn’t always viewed as a special case. In fact, Hecht, who claimed to be the only Jewish correspondent in the American press corps in Berlin during his stay from
