Deborah Cohen is the author of the book Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War. Her other books include Household Gods. She is the Richard W. Leopold Professor of History at Northwestern University, and she lives in Chicago.
Q: Why did you decide to write Last Call at the Hotel Imperial?
A: I’ve long been a fan of John Gunther’s work—Death Be Not Proud, Inside Europe, which was on my parents’ bookshelf. I went back to Death Be Not Proud when I was writing for The Wall Street Journal about the best books about parents and children. It was taboo-breaking at the time.
I went to the University of Chicago to look at the John Gunther papers, and I was staggered by the archive. The book took me to many archives; most journalists left substantial archives.
The Gunther papers were full of [Czech politician] Jan Masaryk making jokes about the abdication crisis in Britain. I felt as if I were in a fugue state. That’s the best thing when you’re writing a book. It starts to feel more real to you than the rest of your life.
Even as someone who’s spent decades writing and teaching about the period, there were so many things that surprised me.
Q: What are some examples?
A: The significance of Austria to the 1920s and 1930s. The Anschluss annexation is an important subject in my classes, but for really perceptive observers, the Austrian civil war and the assassination in late July 1934 of [Chancellor Engelbert] Dollfuss by a combination of Austrian Nazis and German Nazis—they were witnessing a turning point in the history of the world.
There’s simultaneity [in their reporting]. Many subjects in books are separated—there’s the literature of the rise of fascism, the literature of women’s liberation in the 1920s, the literature of anticolonialist nationalism.
Their job was to report these stories and to see how they intertwined. They were confronting all of them at once, and they started to bleed into one another.
John Gunther was also writing restaurant criticism—he was an early foodie. He wrote about where you could get the best sausages in Austria.
Q: How did you decide on the right balance between the reporters’ personal and professional lives?
A: It’s a really tough question, in part because for some readers the balance was not in correct proportion!
A couple of things guided the way I thought about it.
First, I wanted to do justice to the overwhelming meditation on their private life that occupied their time. The reader can see my own surprise. That slippage surprised me. Later on it seemed not so surprising—[this focus] was shot through the literature of the 1920s and ‘30s. I wanted the reader to see how omnipresent that slippage was in their lives.
Second, there’s the idea of what’s shameful and hidden should be discussed. That became a crusade of theirs. They produced work of intimacy. With Vincent Sheean’s book about Sinclair Lewis and Dorothy Thompson, people were saying, What right does he have to expose his dead friends’ lives? He said, Why did she leave all these diaries?
When I was writing the book, there were three categories: what their reportage was, their private lives, and the overarching things that happened.
Q: The New York Times review of the book said that it “is bringing out disturbingly prescient material at exactly the right moment.” What do you think of that description?
A: Historians rarely think the past is predictive. At the same time, because of Trumpism there were things that were viscerally true to me that wouldn’t have been the same 25 years earlier. I would have seen the analogies as hyperbolic. That’s the backdrop of the book. It changed the way I understood the material at a visceral level.
What also changed the context of the book is the news landscape and the crisis of daily papers.
Q: What do you see as these reporters’ legacies today?
A: They set the mold for the pioneering foreign correspondent as a romantic that shaped the following generations. Theirs was a golden age—there was so much going on, and they were well-resourced. They commanded vast audiences. With their reportage and commentaries, there was a sense that what they were doing was crucially important.
Today, the dangers of the job, being in these [situations] with hostile governments is infinitely greater. Knick [H.R. Knickerbocker] got out of a dungeon in a couple of days. To report from many parts of the world including U.S. states today is taking their lives into their own hands. They are unbelievably brave now.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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