Once a prominent journalist and scholar of European history, Elizabeth Wiskemann and her prolific body of work have, for the last several decades, remained largely off the radar for academics and students of international relations and twentieth-century European History. Geoffrey Field's new book recovers the remarkable life and career of this brilliant scholar and commentator on international relations.
Throughout her lifetime, Wiskemann authored ten books and hundreds of articles on interwar, wartime, and post-war Europe that helped shape the thinking of her generation. Yet as a woman, she remained on the margins of both the field of journalism—never securing a position as a permanent correspondent—and academics. She did not obtain a full-time position at a university until 1958 at the age of 59.
Through the genre of biography, Field expertly illuminates not only the contributions of Wiskemann to the field of international affairs but also the experiences and challenges of a cohort of women who, like her, pursued their interests in international politics outside of traditional positions within universities or via the Foreign Service.
As the first chapter illustrates, Wiskemann trained as a historian at Cambridge University in the early 1920s and subsequently pursued a doctoral degree, although her thesis was only awarded an M.Litt. rather than a PhD. With few positions open to women in academics in the 1920s and with a personal interest in Germany, Wiskemann moved to Berlin in 1930 and by 1932 had refashioned herself into a freelance foreign correspondent reporting regularly for The New Statesman.
The most interesting chapters, and arguably the heart of Field's book, are chapters 2, 3, and 4 which cover Wiskemann's career as a journalist in interwar Europe and her role as an agent of the British Secret Service during the Second World War. Throughout the 1930s, Wiskemann wrote articles on the crisis of Weimar democracy and the rise of Nazism. Thanks to her talent and tenacity, she landed interviews with prominent Weimar politicians including, among others, Kurt von Schleicher, Heinrich Brüning, and Franz von Papen. Despite her freelance status, Wiskemann soon became The New Statesman's lead correspondent in Germany and began to write for other such publications as Contemporary Review and the Scotsman.
Vexed by the British public's seeming naivete about Hitler's expansionist agenda, like many of her colleagues, Wiskemann viewed her journalism as a form of activism and a way to enlighten her readers about the threat of Nazism and influence British foreign policy. Field's discussion of journalists as activists is critical to understanding how certain representatives of the English-speaking press in interwar Europe viewed themselves and their work. This perspective on the role of journalism is one of the larger contributions the book makes that extend beyond the study of a particular figure.
Wiskemann reported on Nazi violence toward its perceived enemies, most notably communists, socialists, and Jewish Germans, and was arrested and briefly detained by the Gestapo as a result of her writing. After her expulsion from Germany, she traveled throughout central and eastern Europe and took a particular interest in contested borderlands such as the Sudetenland.
Wiskemann moved to Prague in 1937 to work on a book commissioned by the Director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) about the historical and contemporary relationship between Germans and Czechs in Bohemia and Moravia. Her training as a historian influenced her writing as she sought to emphasize the historical roots of the contemporary crisis. Czechs and Germans was published in 1938 and cemented Wiskemann's reputation as a talented foreign correspondent and expert in Europe.
After the outbreak of the Second World War, Wiskemann became a British intelligence officer working for Electra House (department EH) in Bern, Switzerland. There, she was responsible for gathering intelligence to be used for anti-German propaganda. Wiskemann's role was critical and dangerous since Switzerland was an important location for espionage operations for both the Allies and Axis countries. For over five years, Wiskemann provided London with information about social and economic conditions in Axis Europe, political developments, gossip about high-ranking Nazis, German morale, forced labor, the Nazi T4 program, mass killing of Jews, and anti-Nazi resistance. In Bern, she met with prominent figures in German resistance movements, including Count Albrecht von Bernstorff and Adam von Trott zu Solz, and ran several important informants.
Wiskemann excelled at her position despite the resistance she faced from male colleagues who resented a woman working in what was largely perceived as a male field. She later wrote, “It did become clear to me that, certainly in my own Legation, I was … up against serious resentment of the independent female” (87). Indeed in Bern, Wiskemann formed a closer working relationship with Allen Dulles who worked with the US Office of Strategic Service (OSS) than she did with her own colleagues.
After the war, Wiskemann continued her journalism writing for prominent publications including The Economist. In 1947, she published her first of two books in Italy. Her second book, The Rome-Berlin Axis, appeared in 1949 and provided a groundbreaking look at the relationship between Mussolini and Hitler. In 1956, she published Germany's Eastern Neighbours: Problems Relating to the Oder-Neisse Line and the Czech Frontier Region, the first English-language study on the topic. In 1958, she was offered the Montague Burton Chair of International Relations at the University of Edinburgh. Wiskemann left Edinburgh for the newly established University of Sussex in 1961, where she remained until her retirement in 1964. She continued to publish prolifically until her death in 1971.
This first biography of Wiskemann is based on a range of archival sources—several untapped—in the United Kingdom, Europe, and the United States. Field's study not only recovers the career of a once-influential female journalist, historian, and secret agent, but it also provides insight into the history of foreign correspondents in interwar Europe, the rise of Nazism, wartime espionage, and the gendered obstacles women faced when they sought to establish themselves in male-dominated fields. This book is an example of the genre of biography at its best.
