Bernd Sösemann's engaging account of the life and times of one of modern Germany's outstanding newspaper editors, Theodor Wolff, simultaneously provides a fascinating insight into the culture and politics of his homeland. Wolff enjoyed some success as a playwright, poet, and novelist, and never abandoned his literary ambitions, but his journalistic work outshone these accomplishments. He cut his teeth in Imperial Germany, eventually becoming the Paris correspondent of a highly respected and influential liberal newspaper, the Berliner Tageblatt (BT). His reports on the Dreyfus Affair were extremely well received in Germany and did much to enhance the BT's place as a journal of record. German diplomatic missions across the globe had the newspaper on show as an authentic voice of the empire—its uncomfortable commitment to liberalism offset by the positive impact it made on foreign readers.
The paper was owned by the Mosse Verlag, whose Jewish owner, Rudolf Mosse, asked his cousin Wolff to take over as editor-in-chief in 1906. Wolff agreed reluctantly, for he felt tied to Paris, the capital of a country he had come to admire as he strove for Franco-German rapprochement. He remained in charge at the BT for twenty-six years, during which time his personal life became inextricably bound with the newspaper he edited, and both became enmeshed in the tumultuous history of early twentieth-century Germany itself. In 1933, Wolff fled Germany because his trenchant advocacy of liberal democracy, as well as his Jewish faith, had left him a marked man after the Nazi takeover. He settled in Nice on the French Riviera before, in late 1942, the German and Italian armies occupied Vichy France and Jewish refugees were hunted down for deportation to the death camps. Wolff had been offered asylum in the United States, but prevaricated too long. Ill and frail, he was deported to Germany but spared the death camps. The Nazi regime regarded him as a potential bargaining chip in a war that was going the Allies' way and placed him in police custody, before he died of heart failure in September 1944.
Sösemann's account succeeds on several levels: on the personal and the institutional, and, ultimately, as a sad contribution to the history of modern Germany. Drawing heavily on Wolff's editorials and personal diaries, the author lets his source material do much of the talking. We are left, even invited, to draw sometimes contradictory conclusions from this richly textured account, for this is anything but a straightforward story. Wolff himself upheld his Jewish faith, but regarded it as secondary to his identity as a “good German.” His was the story of a man who moved in the highest circles of German social and political life, whose wife was Protestant, and whose children were baptized. Such tolerance and integration were typical enough among Germany's relatively small Jewish minority, and, for Wolff, the Zionist dream was entirely superfluous. Not that he could wish away the antisemitic sentiment that infested the nationalist right, or the seemingly inevitable rise of Adolf Hitler. The Nazis subsequently displayed enormous conviction as they invented a “problem” that did not exist, stripping Germany of citizens whose many and diverse contributions to the country had been remarkable.
Similar paradoxes dominated Wolff's encounters with the Germany of his time. In late 1914, after interviewing key public figures, he declared that Germany bore a particularly heavy responsibility for the outbreak of World War I. His conclusions, which were published in the BT, resembled those reached some fifty years later by the West German historian Fritz Fischer; during the late 1920s, however, Wolff changed his mind. This seemingly damning wartime testimony had been, he now believed, little more than bluster and post hoc rationalization as German leaders struggled to explain their inability to master the 1914 crisis and avoid conflict. It is remarkable that he had been able to conduct such sensitive interviews and even publish the results during wartime. Germany's army chiefs certainly became increasingly exasperated as the BT went on to press for a compromise peace and political democratization at home, but they failed to muzzle the newspaper. An abortive publication ban in 1916 lasted just three days, indicating that even during wartime, a militarized, Imperial Germany nonetheless respected certain liberal values. Indeed, the BT itself arguably remained an integral part of that same Germany, expounding an ethos after Germany's defeat that helped smooth the revolutionary transition from empire to republic.
Wolff was a participant as well as an observer of that revolution. On his wife Aenne's insistence, he took her and his children to “watch the revolution” (143), kept by soldiers a safe distance from the random shootouts on the Potsdamer Platz. Even more significant was his key role as a founding member of the leftist Liberal German Democratic Party (DDP), which promised briefly to mobilize the mass of the Protestant middle-class electorate—until the harsh peace treaty eroded support for the Republican parties that had been forced to sign it. Wolff may have regretted that, during the initial months of revolutionary optimism, his voice had been influential among those who had vetoed the inclusion in the DDP of key figures from the old right-leaning National Liberals. Their number included Gustav Stresemann, the future statesmanlike foreign minister of Weimar Germany, who quickly came around to regarding the Republican settlement as the best deal on offer, but was forced to create a separate party, the German People's Party (DVP), thereby splitting the Liberal vote.
Sösemann concludes his account with a fascinating selection of Wolff's original writings and an engaging selection of photographs. This book will appeal widely to scholars and students of modern Germany still struggling to square the paradox of a country and society that had promised so much, yet succumbed to the abysmal appeal of Nazism.
