Books: Berlin Diary

I’ve recently been trying to read more. Conveniently, for Christmas I received a copy of Berlin Diary by William L. Shirer, so I dug in during the holidays.

The period around WWII fascinates me: the speed of change, the brutality of the fighting, and the seeming inevitability of the coming carnage. For some things, you can only get so far with top-down histories written with hindsight; I believe contemporary perspectives are incredibly useful for understanding what options people thought they had at the time, and the “fog of war” they were working with. That’s why I enjoyed Orwell’s wartime essays (by my account some of his best work), and it’s why I’d recommend Shirer’s book.

Shirer was a U.S. foreign correspondent based in Berlin from 1934 to 1941. His diary begins shortly after Hitler’s rise to power and follows events through the remilitarization of the Rhineland, the Anschluss, the Sudetenland crisis, and the opening phase of WWII up to the Battle of Britain. Alongside the major political developments, he provides observations about everyday life in Germany and the atmosphere in which decisions were made, as well as numerous observations about the top Nazi brass, which he got to see out on the streets of Berlin, including Hitler himself.

It’s worth reading with a grain of salt – published diaries can be revised – but it’s still gripping to move through the decade with him, one step at a time. Seeing events unfold chronologically clarifies that what feels inevitable in retrospect was not at all a given from the perspective of the people at the time. It gives one a sense of the uncertainty, which I find really useful in the wild times we live in.

Some highlights

1. Broadcast logistics were surprisingly fragile back then. In some cities there wasn’t a suitable transmitter, so audio was sent by telephone lines to a transmitter elsewhere and then relayed overseas. Coordinating simultaneous broadcasts from multiple European cities sounded challenging.
2. Borders in the late 1930s seemed relatively open, at least from Shirer’s perspective – he traveled to places like Prague and Warsaw right before the war, and went to and from Switzerland multiple times.
3. U.S. reporters were treated well in Germany (which Shirer reflects on multiple times in the book!), at least before war on the US was declared. In retrospect it makes sense – Germany had an incentive to shape American public opinion – but it still surprised me given how early I thought the regime had radicalized.
4. Shirer knew a certain Edward R. Murrow! (Murrow later delivered the famous 1954 broadcast on McCarthy.)
5. Shirer doesn’t depict the wartime German public as uniformly fanatical; he often describes a subdued population doing what it’s told with little joy. I found that portrayal interesting—and unsettling.
6. Comparing current regimes to Nazi Germany is often a stretch, but the surrounding cast of Hitler and Trump seem fascinatingly similar, at least to some extent.