Dorothy Thompson

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Dorothy Thompson, around 1920

Dorothy Thompson (born July 9, 1893 in Lancaster , New York , † January 30, 1961 in Lisbon , Portugal ) was an American writer and journalist and founder of"World Organization of Mothers of All Nations" ( WOMAN ).

Life

Young years

Dorothy Thompson was the daughter of the British Methodist preacher Peter Thompson and his wife Margaret. She attended the Lewis Institute in Chicago until 1911 and studied at Syracuse University in New York and Vienna . During that time, she became a passionate advocate of women's suffrage. In 1914 she obtained a Bachelor of Art degree . Thompson then worked in New York City for a few years .

Between the world wars

In the interwar period, Thompson worked as a freelance correspondent for the Philadelphia Public Ledger and The New York Evening Post, initially to Vienna , where she met John Gunther and GER Gedye , and in 1924 to Berlin , where she experienced the rise of the National Socialist German Workers' Party first hand. In a very short time she made the acquaintance of the city's most famous artists, including Ödön von Horváth , Thomas Mann , Bertolt Brecht , Stefan Zweig and Fritz Kortner . She soon became close friends with Carl Zuckmayer .

In 1928 she visited the Soviet Union and the result was a book entitled "The New Russia". In it she named the suppression of religion, censorship and the omnipotence of the OGPU secret police , which is above the law.

In the spring of 1932 she interviewed Adolf Hitler in the Hotel Kaiserhof in Berlin. The interview turned out to be difficult because Hitler kept talking as if he were at a mass meeting. She described her encounter with Hitler in newspaper articles and her book "I saw Hitler". She described him as a “prototype of the Little Man ”, he was “ startling insignificance ”, he would not come to power: “Oh, Adolf, Adolf! You will be out of luck! "( Oh Adolph, Adolph! You will be out of luck! )

In 1933 Dorothy Thompson lived with the sculptor and writer Christa Winsloe . On August 25, 1934, Dorothy Thompson had to leave Germany within 24 hours . She was the first of the foreign correspondents in Berlin who had to leave. Christa Winsloe accompanied her to the United States. Since then, she has warned about Hitler in lectures and on the radio . Friend of Eleanor Roosevelt , she used her influence in the naturalization of German emigrants such as Fritz Kortner , Thomas Mann and Carl Zuckmayer , temporarily accommodated them in her apartment and supported them with her private fortune. Carl Zuckmayer's autobiographical novel As if it were a piece by me is a detailed memorial to her never missing help.

Between 1936 and 1941 Thompson had her own column "On the Record" for the New York Herald Tribune . An article of hers, in which she expressed her disgust and her worries about National Socialist racial theories and smear campaigns against religions and democracy , went around the world in 1936. In 1938, three secretaries had to work for her in order for her to cope with her daily quota. In 1938 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters . On June 12, 1939, she was on the cover of Time magazine as "the most influential woman in the United States after Eleanor Roosevelt" .

Second World War

In August 1939 she criticized the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact , condemned the Red Army march into eastern Poland on September 17, 1939 and called on the US government to stand up for occupied Poland. However, during the Second World War , she concentrated in her comments and columns on combating the Nazi regime.

The Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels , who had met Dorothy Thompson personally during her time in Berlin, was informed about her publications. In 1939 you could still hear German shortwave broadcasts in America in which the Goebbels propaganda tried to influence the American public and incite the German-Americans against their government. Dorothy Thompson was attacked with particular violence and described as an "enemy of Germany". Carl Zuckmayer, who had recently emigrated to the USA and lived with his family in a house she had rented, experienced her dismay:

" You know that I love Germany! That I was never against the Germans, only against the Nazis!" I knew it. And I had in her, through the whole war time, an ally in the understanding of the other Germany and its misery.

Goebbels notes in his diaries on April 5, 1942: “ Dorothy Thompson is giving an absolutely crazy speech against Hitler. It is shameful and provocative that such stupid women, whose brains can only consist of straw, have the right to speak out against a historical greatness like the Führer. "

During the Second World War her articles appeared almost daily in about 150 newspapers. But she also did not spare criticism of Stalin's sympathizers in the White House . She attacked the former US ambassador in Moscow, Joseph E. Davies, for his book "Mission to Moscow", which glorified Stalin, and its film adaptation.

In the spring of 1943 she called the Katyn massacre a " German fabrication ". Since she was also known as a critic of the Soviet Union under Stalin, her assessment was particularly important.

post war period

Immediately after the war, she criticized the Nuremberg Trials : She had strong reservations about a trial in which the same side would put the judges, the prosecutors and the executors of the judgments at the same time.

In 1946, Dorothy Thompson addressed the United Nations Security Council on behalf of all women and mothers in the world. She accused Heads of State Harry S. Truman , Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin that it was a lie when they told women that their husbands and sons died for the world to find peace for ever. The speech before the UN Security Council marked the birth of the World Organization of Mothers of all Nations (abbr .: WOMAN ), which was founded in New York that same year at the suggestion of Dorothy Thompson. The members try to break down mistrust across ideological and political borders through personal encounters and conversations and to contribute to understanding between the peoples.

In 1949 she joined the American Committee for the Investigation of the Katyn Massacre , which had been founded on the initiative of the journalist Julius Epstein and had set itself the task of proving the Soviet perpetrators. In doing so, she corrected her assessment of the crime expressed in 1943. Arthur Bliss Lane , the former US Ambassador to Warsaw, was elected chairman of the committee . It also included the former head of the OSS secret service William J. Donovan and the later CIA director Allen Dulles .

Dorothy Thompson died of heart failure in Lisbon on January 30, 1961, at the age of 67 . There she had visited the family of her son Michael.

Marriages

From 1923 to 1927 Dorothy Thompson was married to the Hungarian journalist Joseph Bard (1894-1961), from 1928 to 1942 with the writer Sinclair Lewis . From this marriage the son Michael, born in 1930, emerged. In 1943 she married the Czech painter and sculptor Maxim Kopf .

Works (selection)

  • 1928 New Russia
  • 1932 I Saw Hitler!
  • 1938 Anarchy or Organization
  • 1939 Let the Record Speak
  • 1957 The Courage to Be Happy

literature

  • Martha Schad , women against Hitler . Forgotten Resistance Fighters under National Socialism , Munich 2010
  • Lynn D. Gordon: Why Dorothy Thompson Lost Her Job: Political Columnists and the Press Wars of the 1930s and 1940s , in: History of Education Quarterly , Volume 34, No. 3 (Herbst, 1994), pp. 281-303.
  • Kerstin Feller: Dorothy Thompson. A key figure in the world of exile . In: John Spalek (Ed.) (2002). German-language exile literature since 1933 . UNITED STATES. (Vol. 3) Bern / Saur.
  • Susan Hertog: Dangerous Ambition: Rebecca West and Dorothy Thompson: New Women in Search of Love and Power . Ballantine, New York 2011.
  • Peter Kurth: American Cassandra: The Life of Dorothy Thompson , Little Brown & Co (1991), ISBN 0-3165-0724-5 .
  • Marion K. Sanders: Dorothy Thompson: a Legend in Her Time . Houghton Mifflin, Boston 1973.
  • Vincent Sheean : Dorothy and Red , 1963 (Sheean through his friends Dorothy Thompson and Sinclair Lewis).
  • Thomas Reuther: Voices on the "other Germany", in: ders., The ambivalent normalization. Discourse on Germany and images of Germany in the USA, 1941–1955. Stuttgart 2000. pp. 152-155.
  • Karina von Tippelskirch: Dorothy Thompson and German writers in defense of democracy , Berlin a. a .: Peter Lang 2018 (cultural transfer and gender research; 10) ISBN 978-3-631-67527-4

Web links

Commons : Dorothy Thompson  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographical data, unless otherwise stated, according to Susan Hertog: Dangerous Ambition: Rebecca West and Dorothy Thompson: New Women in Search of Love and Power. New York 2011, pp. 50-75.
  2. ^ Dorothy Thompson: The New Russia. London 1929, pp. 85-91, 163, 189.
  3. ^ Dorothy Thompson: I saw Hitler. New York 1932, pp. 13-15.
  4. ^ "The Press: Cartwheel Girl", in: Time , June 12, 1939, p. 3.
  5. ^ Members: Dorothy Thompson. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed April 29, 2019 .
  6. ^ Dorothy Thompson | June 12, 1939
  7. ^ Peter Kurth: American Cassandra. The Life of Dorothy Thompson. Boston / Toronto / London 1990, p. 267.
  8. ↑ Carl Zuckmayer: As if it were a piece of me . Fisherman.
  9. ^ The diaries of Joseph Goebbels . Ed. E. Fröhlich. T. II, Vol. 4. Munich 1995, p. 51.
  10. ^ Moscow Film Again Attacked; Miss La Follette and Dr. Dewey Reply to Mr. Pope's Arguments, in: New York Times , May 24, 1943, p. 14.
  11. ^ Richard Harwood: Nuremberg and other War Crimes Trials. Chapel Ascot 1978, p. 60.
  12. ↑ Norbert Frei : Past Policy: The Beginnings of the Federal Republic and the Nazi Past. Munich 2001, pp. 136-137.
  13. ↑ Anna M. Cienciala / Wojciech Materski / Natalia S. Lebedeva: Katyn: A Crime Without Punishment. New Haven / London 2007, p. 236.
personal data
SURNAME Thompson, Dorothy
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH July 9, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH Lancaster , New York
DATE OF DEATH January 30, 1961
Place of death Lisbon , Portugal