This foreword is about Mr. Knickerbocker himself. His flaming red hair, his flaming red personality (I mean “red” chromatically, not politically) are famous on four continents. He needs no introduction. But certain nuggets of memory stay fixed in mind. I remember the time he fed me caviar inside a baked potato, at Horcher’s in Berlin, and I remember the time I fed him a dinner in London that, deliberately, we planned so that it would cost exactly five pounds. I remember the time that he took me to hear Putzi Hanfstaengl hammer out a tornado of Wagner in the Hotel Kaiserhof, and I remember the time I took him across the freezing Danube, on the way to Sofia, in what was supposed to be a rowboat. I remember week-ends on the Semmering, bad oysters in Madrid, evenings in the Café Royal, drinks in Rome, Budapest, and points beyond.
Knick’s career has been spectacular in more than one dimension. He once set out to fly the Atlantic, as a passenger in a German plane, long before the Lindbergh flight; he was the only correspondent during the Ethiopian war to glimpse the front from the air; he has had more interviews with European heads of state, I imagine, than any other newspaper man alive.
Mr. Knickerbocker was born in Texas in 1898. He went to Europe in 1923, and, a student of psychiatry at the University of Munich, walked straight into Hitler’s Beerhall Putsch. He studied briefly in Vienna, and then got a job in Berlin on the New York Evening Post-Philadelphia Public Ledger foreign service. Since then his career has been a calendar of most of the great events of our time. He spent two years in Moscow as correspondent for the International News Service (this was in 1924-26, when Trotsky was declining and the N.E.P. expanding), and in 1928 took over Dorothy Thompson’s job as chief correspondent in Berlin for the Public Ledger. He won a Pulitzer prize for distinguished foreign correspondence—a series of articles on Russia’s Five Year Plan, but for almost ten years Berlin was the blazing focus of his life.
Meantime there were trips to take. In 1933 he travelled all over Europe for a series, “Will War Come in Europe?” for I.N.S. He saw the death of Dollfuss in Vienna, and the burial of Hindenburg in Germany. He met Mussolini, Masaryk, King Alexander, King Boris, Otto Habsburg, and hosts of others. He did one series of articles on Russia and the Baltic states, comparing living standards under communism and capitalism, and another surveying economic aspects of the Europe that was crumbling. Came the war in Ethiopia in 1935, which he covered on Haile Selassie’s side. I will never forget the agitated days in London when Knick was accumulating the vast equipment he took along. In 1936 came the Spanish civil war, and the next year the war in China. He saw bombings all the way from Toledo to Nanking. He returned to Europe to cover the Anschluss crisis and the Munich disaster; then he dipped briefly into South America, and reached Peru. Then Europe called again; he saw the beginning of World War II in London and France, and in 1940 accompanied the French armies till they collapsed, and then saw the battle of Britain at its fiercest climax, in September.
But let me go back to those days in Berlin. The main point I want to make has to do with Knickerbocker in Berlin. During the turbulent 1930’s he was much more than a journalist covering Germany; he was a definite public character in German political life. After Hindenburg and Hitler, he was practically the best known man in the country. His réclame was fabulous, personally and politically. Everyone knew the lithe, active, red-haired Herr Knickerbocker (pronounce the K, please). Once a musical comedy was named for him—supreme tribute!
Partly this was because he published half a dozen books in German, compiled from the long newspaper articles he wrote, which appeared serially in the Vossische Zeitung or the Berliner Tageblatt. The books were extraordinarily successful in Germany; they introduced German readers to a new type of American journalism. Among them were Der Rote Handel Droht!, Der Rote Handel Lockt!, Kommt Europe Wieder Hoch?, Rote Wirtschaft und Weisse Wohlstand!, England’s Wirtschaft und Schwarzhemden!, Deutschland So oder So!, and Kommt Krieg in Europa?
Knick knew practically every human being of consequence in Germany. He explored the country from top to bottom. He talked to Hitler, Spengler, Brüning, Goering, Goebbels. Then Hitler came to power. At the time Knickerbocker was in the middle of a German lecture tour that had begun in the Lessing Hochschule in Berlin. Knick watched the Nazi revolution crushingly obliterate all opposition. He wrote a series exposing the Brown Terror that caused violent comment in New York as well as Berlin. Presently he was excluded from the country. There are hate affairs as well as love affairs. The hate affair between Hitler and Knickerbocker is one of the most torrid in political history.
But this should not detract from the main point, which is that Knick knows the real Germany, loves it, and respects it. He is a Nazi-hater, but not a German-hater. His authority on the subject is authentic and complete.
John Gunther