A Journalist's Melancholy Chronicle
LEKACHMAN, ROBERT
A Journalist's Melancholy Chronicle The Nightmare Years: 1930-1940 By William L. Shirer Little, Brown. 654 pp. $22.50. Reviewed by Robert Lekachman Born in 1904, William L. Shirer was one of...
...Warned that his enemies were concocting a case against him as a spy, he left the country in 1940 with his precious journals concealed under German press releases...
...one reviewer has already challenged his impressionistic conclusion that the Germans overwhelmingly supported their leader...
...His route to fame as the future author of Berlin Diary began with a two-year stay in India in the service of the reactionary and terrible-tempered Colonel Robert McCormick, high commander of the Chicago Tribune...
...Specialists no doubt will continue to quarrel about the quality of the author' s history...
...The Nightmare Years is amply illustrated...
...His story rings true...
...Along with Edward R. Murrow, Shirer pioneered radio coverage of foreign news for William Paley at CBS...
...He also gives us Goring peeking like a delighted child at a new medal Hitler created in his honor, and half a dozen accounts of the Fuhrer's major speeches to the party faithful massed in adoration in Nuremberg, Munich or Berlin...
...But after having batted around the world, interviewing Gandhi and encountering the guitarist Andres Segovia as a neighbor in Spain, the journalist was looking for a way to make a living reporting the news...
...In this lastest volume, Shirer mines the diaries and his other work to depict the nasty characters surrounding Adolf Hitler...
...Reviewed by Robert Lekachman Born in 1904, William L. Shirer was one of those restless young men whose desire to see and interpret the world made them natural foreign correspondents for American newspapers in the 1920s and afterward...
...Staring at the many photographs of Hitler on the speaker's rostrum, I still have difficulty comprehending the devastation unleashed by this figure so close in appearance to Charlie Chaplin's Great Dictator, and I write as one who recalls and recoils from the horrible events Shirer records...
...Shirer arrived in Germany for CBS as Hitler was coming to power...
...Some of the vignettes are hard to forget, among them Hitler humiliating the vanquished French by staging surrender ceremonies at Compiegne in the same railroad car where they negotiated the 1918 armistice...
...This fascinating and melancholy chronicle should be even more valuable to the unhistorical young, for many of whom Adolf Hitler is a dim figure and fascism a vague concept...
...Shirer was a mourner at the funerals of the Spanish Republic, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and worst of all for him, his beloved France, which preferred to preserve its capital unharmed at the price of servitude to Hitler and his puppets, the senile Marshal Petain and detestable Pierre Laval...
...He has since devoted most of his career to describing the Nazi phenomenon—in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Berlin Diary, and most passionately, his radio broadcasts in 1934-40...
...His friends included such legends in their time as John Gunther, Walter Duranty, Eric Sevareid, Howard K. Smith, and Vincent Sheean...
...Shirer obviously did not take polls, but he spoke excellent German, developed numerous and varied sources, and moved around the Third Reich...
...It is a record of personal experience that will make survivors of that ghastly period remember and weep...
...Fired by the Colonel, as were many others, Shirer took his Austrian wife to Spain for an idyllic year, then, with his money running out, found a job on the International Herald Tribune copy desk and fell in love with Paris...
Vol. 67 • July 1984 • No. 13
