Interview in Berlin

Berlin in the 1920s as seen by painter Leo Lesser Ury

“In the pre-Hitler time, this section of Berlin, Kochstrasse, used to be the Fleet Street of Berlin,” Stefan Gänsicke told me in a 1990 interview. “During the Weimer Republic, something like 140 dailies poured forth from two blocks around here, and were sold all over Germany.”

Gänsicke, an executive editor with Germany’s Springer publishing empire, continued, “And most of those papers were anti-Hitler, liberal, democrat. And yet these newspapers, in the pre-Hitler time, did not make cohesive or deliberate or conscientious efforts to build a dam against the brown tide, against the Nazis coming to power. They did not alert the Germans and the European neighbors to what all of us, Germans and Europeans, were in for once Hitler came to power. 

“(Publisher Axel) Springer thought this was something like a negative entry in history for the media not to have obstructed, or tried to obstruct, Hitler’s way to power.”

I’ve thought of that interview often in the decades since. It haunted me as I watched with increasing alarm and disbelief while American journalism failed to fight the rise of fascism in just the way that the German editor described.