On Dec. 14, Peter Olson, Random House Inc.’s mild-mannered chairman
and chief executive, issued a memo addressed to “everyone” at the
company, having to do with Random House’s corporate parent, German
media giant Bertelsmann A.G.
“Over the weekend,” Mr. Olson began, “published reports
raised questions about Bertelsmann’s publishing program in the
30’s and 40’s and the alleged affiliation of one of its former
senior executives with German political organizations during the Nazi
era.” He was referring to information contained in two articles, one
that appeared in October in the Swiss weekly magazine Die Weltwoche
and one that ran in December in The Nation . The accusations had been
tough: Contrary to Bertelsmann’s assertions on its Web site that
during the 1930’s and 1940’s the company had been “a
constant embarrassment to the ruling NSDAP” (Nazi Party) because it
had refused “to toe the party line,” Düsseldorf-based
journalist Hersch Fischler, author of the piece in Die Weltwoche and
co-author of article in The Nation , wrote that Bertelsmann had
published “a wide range of Hitlerian propaganda,” including
titles such as People Without Space , which whipped up
enthusiasm for Hitler’s attacks on Germany’s neighbors,
and Between the Vistula and the Volga , which claimed
Jewish people had murdered scores of Ukrainian women and children.
After Mr. Fischler published his findings, a follow-up report on
European TV station 3sat included the news that Bertelsmann, which had
begun in 1835 as a publisher of prayer books and hymnals, had published a
book called Sterilization and Euthanasia: A Contribution to Applied
Christian Ethics in 1933.
Mr. Olson was clearly concerned that Random House employees might be a
bit queasy about the unsavory facts about their new owners. (Bertelsmann
bought Random House last March for an estimated $1.4 billion.) So after
quoting a statement from Bertelsmann’s 45-year-old chairman and chief
executive Thomas Middelhoff, in which Mr. Middelhoff promised “an
independent critical review” and conceded, “During the Nazi era
there were clearly some titles published by Bertelsmann which were not
consistent with our values,” Mr. Olson listed his office phone number
and invited any Random House employee to call him personally and he would
“address any concerns” and “answer any of your
questions.”
But since then, no one has called. Random House spokesman Stuart
Applebaum told The Observer , “Neither he nor I got a single
call from authors, agents, special-interest groups–not an e-mail, not
a letter to this day.” What was Mr. Olson’s reaction? “He
said he didn’t know what to make of it,” said Mr. Applebaum.
There was also not a peep from any of the Authors Guild’s more than
7,500 members. Guild president Letty Cottin Pogrebin said she is keeping
her eye on the situation. “From what we gather, it’s absolutely
appalling that they’d choose to cover up their Nazi history, but it
isn’t so surprising given what we know about corporate interests and
the Nazi regime,” she said. “We don’t want to trust
secondhand reports–we’re waiting to see original
documentation.… Authorsdoing deals with Bertelsmann are going to have to make their own decisions.
This is 50-year-old history, but some writers have 50-year-old
memories.”
In Germany, Bertelsmann’s home turf, the reaction has also been
muted. “It was very strange to have so reputable a newspaper publish
it, and then not have it show up in our own newspapers,” said Stephan
Russ-Mohl, a professor of journalism and media management at Freie
Universität Berlin. “It’s funny how it worked so slowly,
compared to how it usually works. That wouldn’t have happened if it
were Daimler-Benz.” Asked why he thought the story took so long to
catch on in the German press, Mr. Russ-Mohl said there were a few reasons,
but he thought that “the most important is that Bertelsmann is the
most powerful media company in Germany, and the most attractive media
company, where most journalists would like to work.”
He was speaking of the fact that Bertelsmann owns six of Germany’s
newspapers, as well as one of its most popular newsmagazines, Stern .
“You think twice about saying something critical about your potential
future employer,” said Mr. Russ-Mohl.
Bertelsmann has long proclaimed itself in the pink of moral health. Its
company history, penned for its 150th anniversary in 1985, says that
Bertelsmann was forced to close in 1944 and that some senior employees were
jailed. Mr. Fischler countered that the company continued to publish, and
the arrested employees, who had been accused of black-market paper trading,
were freed after Joseph Goebbels intervened. And while the corporate
history mentions entertaining pocket editions for the armed forces such as
Memoirs of a Good-for-Nothing and The Foolhardy Mouse ,
Mr. Fischler reported that among these rousing war tales were some with
less folksy titles ( With Bombs and Machine Guns Over Poland ;
German Tanks Enter Hell ) and that Bertelsmann was the largest
supplier of books to the German army, and also supplied the SS. And where
Mr. Fischler reports that Bertelsmann founding family member Heinrich Mohn
was a “passive” member of the SS and a supporter of Hitler Youth,
the company history asserts that Mr. Mohn “concentrated mainly on the
Christian education of the young, not publishing any proponents of
‘German’ Christianity while Adolf Hitler was in power.” His
son Reinhard Mohn, a Luftwaffe soldier who was an American P.O.W. from 1943
to 1946, retains control of the company at age 77.
While Mr. Middelhoff’s statement quoted in Mr. Olson’s memo
did promise accountability, he reasserted the company line that
“Bertelsmann was not in any way an active supporter of the Nazi regime
and, in fact, for a time during World War II, the Nazi party closed down
the Bertelsmann publishing operations and jailed three of its senior
executives.”
In any case, the independent commission promised by Mr. Middelhoff is
under way. Prominent Israeli historian Saul Friedländer, author of
1997’s Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution,
1933-1939 (Volume 1) , told The Observer he has chosen his team:
Norbert Frei, a historian at Ruhr University in Bochum, a historian
specializing in the Nazi period; Reinhard Wittmann, a professor at the
University of Munich whose expertise is in German literature and the
history of publishing; and Trutz Rendtorff, a professor of theology at the
University of Munich. Mr. Friedländer said that Bertelsmann has
promised him full access to the company archives and complete control over
the final product and how it is publicized and published. “We are not
submitting it for their O.K.,” he said, adding, “Mr. Middelhoff
has been extraordinarily supportive.”
Farrar, Straus & Giroux is another publisher whose parent company,
the Stuttgart-based von Holtzbrinck Group, has a Nazi past. According a
June 1998 Vanity Fair article by David Margolick, company founder Georg von Holtzbrinck was a member of the Nazi Party who published
Nazi-sanctioned magazines and produced books for German soldiers. However,
the von Holtzbrinck heirs have not tried to do damage control.
Farrar publisher Roger Straus said the issue of publishers with Nazi
pasts was not a simple one. “When you’re manufacturing
propaganda, you could do considerable harm. When you’re manufacturing
airplane engines, you do a different kind of harm,” said Mr. Straus.
“There seems to be some conversation about who lied when and about
what. In all fairness, the [Bertelsmann] managers are very concerned. At
least they’re making the right noises. The interesting thing to find
out is, Is there any publisher in Germany that went through the Hitler
period and survived and came out clean?”
New Press director André Schiffrin asked the same question.
“Company histories are company histories,” he said.
“What’s needed is an objective look at German publishing, like
they have in France.” (France has a comprehensive overview titled
French Publishing During the Occupation .)
Andrea Heyde, project director at the German Book Office on Fifth
Avenue, whose mission is to get more German authors read stateside, said,
“German publishers should face their past, and not just when
they’re forced to. If it’s a factory, it’s one thing. But
these are people who work with the written word.”
The U.S. publishing community’s reaction to the Bertelsmann
findings may simply be a case of sanguine acceptance that corporations are
hardly receptacles of virtue. “If you and I had a nickel for every
company that’s spun the truth, we’d have a home in every
fashionable resort town in the universe and a Gulfstream V to get us from
one to the other,” said a von Holtzbrinck Group employee. “How
could this possibly come as a surprise? Any company that came through the
war would have to have had some dealing with the Nazis. Georg von
Holtzbrinck was a really smart businessman who knew he had to get in bed
with the Nazis to stay in business. He practiced Realpolitik .”
Since World War II, Bertelsmann has been an assiduous supporter of
humanitarian organizations and causes. The company recently received the
International Humanitarian Award from the World Union for Progressive
Judaism for promoting understanding between Jews and non-Jews. Several
weeks ago, Bertelsmann announced a major donation–500,000 Deutsche
marks–to help Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual
History Foundation establish a presence in Berlin.
As for the people who ostensibly matter most in
publishing–authors–there has been no outcry as yet. Farrar author
Grace Paley said, “I feel very far from Holtzbrinck, I have no
feelings about my relation to them at all. It was what was happening in
Germany, and everyone with money thought they could get away with it.”
Ms. Paley was speaking from her home in Thetford, Vt. “Everything I
see in this house is made by an innocent person that’s owned by some
bad person, or by some greedy corporation or some corporation that tries to
sell us the idea that it’s innocent.”
Gore Vidal, a Random House and Modern Library author, hadn’t heard
anything about the dust-up at his home in Ravello, Italy. “The only
thing that disturbs me is that they were publishing Christian
hymnals,” he quipped. “I’m anti-Christian.”
The silence comes with its own irony. “I’m kind of surprised
there hasn’t been a reaction,” said one New York-based scout.
“What’s funny about it is that books on the Holocaust continue to
do so well.” She mentioned three books that sold in December alone:
A Life in Pieces , by Blake Eskin, sold to W.W. Norton; The
Borders of Time , by Leslie Maitland, which sold to Houghton Mifflin;
and Witness: Voices From the Holocaust , edited by Joshua Greene and Shiva Kumar, sold to the Free Press. And last
spring, William Morrow’s Rob Weisbach Books paid about $500,000 for
The Nazi Officer’s Wife , by Edith Hahn.
Mr. Schiffrin thought that when it comes to Bertelsmann, it’s a
size thing. “Does a 1,000-pound gorilla have more trouble sitting down
because it was a Nazi?” he said. “They’re very big.
They’re very powerful. People are careful about criticizing what is by
now the biggest firm in American publishing.”
“What’s most dismaying is that [Bertelsmann] now owns so much
of American publishing. I think it’s bad for American publishers to be
in the hands of foreign conglomerates in any case, but in this case
it’s particularly lamentable,” said Jonathan Brent, editorial
director of Yale University Press. He mentioned Random House Inc. imprint
Schocken Books, founded in Berlin in 1933 and shut down in November 1938 in
the wake of Kristallnacht. “Schocken is a publisher that truly was
persecuted by the Nazis, and now to be owned by a publishing company that
collaborated with the Nazis is rather a horrible thing to
contemplate.”
Schocken publisher Arthur Samuelson said of the independent commission,
“I think Bertelsmann is going about this the right way.”
Mr. Brent remained skeptical. “I would hate to know what would
happen if one of these conglomerates became part of a tyrannical foreign
power,” he said. “What if 40 percent of the American publishing
had been owned by German firms in 1932? Things like this happen and happen
and happen and happen. We can’t somehow be free of the past. We think
it’s over and then it’s not over.”
You can reach the Publishing column at
emanus@observer.com.
