Hubert Renfro Knickerbocker

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Hubert Renfro Knickerbocker

Hubert Renfro Knickerbocker (born January 31, 1898 in Yoakum , Texas , † July 12, 1949 in Bombay ) was an American journalist, publicist and Pulitzer Prize winner .

Life

In 1917, after graduating from the private Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas , Knickerbocker served as a soldier on the border between the United States and Mexico . From 1919 he studied psychology at Columbia University and worked in parallel for various newspapers until 1922. From 1922 to 1923 he continued his studies at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich . Knickerbocker witnessed the Hitler-Ludendorff putsch there . After graduating, he worked again for various newspapers, including:

Knickerbocker was a close friend of Paul Scheffer , the Russia correspondent and later editor-in-chief of the Berliner Tageblatt . Knickerbocker received the Pulitzer Prize in 1931 for a series of articles in the Public Ledger about the famines and the five-year plan in the Soviet Union . In his work Der Rote Handel threatens! he describes enthusiastically and critically the development tendencies in the still young Soviet Union and the incipient personality cult around Stalin . Most of the time, however, he stayed in Berlin until 1933, from where he critically observed the development of the Weimar Republic . During the global economic crisis , the Germany connoisseur was particularly impressed by one scene that he experienced “with the poorest of the poor in the red heart of Germany's reddest city” in a Berlin pub. There he had noticed that out of 500 guests at most one in ten had a glass of beer in front of them. "If the German has become too poor to buy a beer," concluded Knickerbocker in the Evening Post , "then he has reached the point of desperation".

After Hitler came to power , the Nazi critic left Germany. In the following years he traveled through Europe and carefully commented on the development of different countries up to the Second World War . From 1935 to 1936 Knickerbocker reported on the Italian-Ethiopian War , from 1936 to 1937 on the Spanish Civil War and the Second Sino-Japanese War . About the Évian conference, which was attended by over 200 journalists, he delivered exclusive reports for the Chicago Daily News between July 6 and 15, 1938 . Further journalistic focal points for him were the annexation of Austria in 1938 , the Munich conference and in 1940 the defeat of France and the battle of England .

Knickerbocker tried in articles and lectures to convince the public in the United States that the United States would join the Second World War . From 1941 he worked for the Chicago Sun as a senior foreign correspondent in the South Pacific and North Africa . Towards the end of the war he reported again from Europe. After 1945 he worked for a radio station in New Jersey . Knickerbocker and other journalists were killed in a plane crash near Bombay in 1949 . His reports have been published in English and German.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ John Hohenberg: Foreign Correspondence: The Great Reporters and Their Times. Syracuse University Press, 1995, pp. 143-144 f.
  2. ↑ Elizabeth A Brennan, Elizabeth C. Clarage: Who's who of Pulitzer Prize winners . Greenwood Publishing Group 1999, p. 71.
  3. ^ HR Knickerbocker: The red trade threatens! The progress of the five-year plan of the Soviets Ernst Rowohlt Verlag Berlin. 1931
  4. ↑ Alexander Jung: Weimar's end. Fall into ruin . In DER SPIEGEL, January 29, 2008 , accessed April 26, 2017
personal data
SURNAME Knickerbocker, Hubert Renfro
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American journalist, publicist, and Pulitzer Prize winner
DATE OF BIRTH January 31, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Yoakum in Texas
DATE OF DEATH July 12, 1949
Place of death near Bombay (India)