Bella Fromm’s Berlin Social Diary
Over the last four years, I’ve read a lot of memoirs and diaries written by people who lived in Berlin in the period between the two world wars. They are a wonderful source to use to enrich a story. They not only allow you to look at incidents from different perspectives but, depending on the author, they can give you details that it is impossible to get any other way. *
Most of the memoirs I used were written by American foreign correspondents stationed in Berlin. One memoir stands out because it was written from a different perspective: Bella Fromm’s Blood and Banquets: A Berlin Social Diary, published in 1942 once she was safely in the United States.
Bella Fromm (1890-1972) was a member of a family of wealthy Jewish wine merchants with long standing roots in Germany and connections with highest ranks of German society, including the Bavaria royal family. The inflation that wracked Germany’s economy in 1923 destroyed the family fortune. Forced to look for work, she used her family social contacts to get a job as a reporter with the Jewish-owned Ullstein conglomerate, one of the largest publishing companies in Europe.
At first, like most women reporters of the period, she worked primarily as a social reporter, aided by her contacts throughout Germany society. But she was talented and ambitious, and those same contacts that got her into the big social events also gave her access to government and diplomatic circles. She soon began writing about politics in addition to parties.
Within months of Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, Germany no longer had a free press. The Nazis shut down hundreds of opposition newspapers. They seized papers owned by the communist and Social Democratic parties as well as Jewish-owned publishing companies, including Ullstein. The few “independent“ papers that survived were effectively under the control of the Propaganda Ministry.**
Fromm’s position as a journalist was increasingly precarious, though she was protected to some extent by her friendships with foreign diplomats and conservative members of the Nazi government. After 1934, when the Nazis seized the Ullstein companies, she was no longer able to publish under her own name, though she continued to publish some articles without a byline.
Unable to support herself entirely by journalism, she returned to her family business as a wine merchant. She sent her daughter to the United States in 1933, but stayed in Germany as long as she felt she could use her contacts to help other German Jews get visas. She finally left in September 1938, after Jews were excluded from the wine trade, leaving her without an income.
At the time of its publication, Blood and Banquets was promoted as a secret diary smuggled out of Germany under the Nazis noses. Some scholars now believe it was written in the United States after she left Germany.*** Nonetheless, it remains a useful picture of life in Berlin from the perspective of a German-Jewish journalist.
*I wrote about this at some length in my newsletter back in May, 2021, if you want to know more.
**There’s a reason freedom of speech is the first amendment in the United States Bill of rights. A free press is a cornerstone of democracy.
***One of the arguments they use to suggest that she was not particularly important is that she does not appear in William Shirer’s Berlin Diaries, which was a huge success when it was published in 1941 and continues to be widely read, unlike the memoirs of many of his contemporaries. By that standard, many people would be erroneously dismissed as unimportant. What’s more, Shirer does not appear in Fromm’s book. They ran in different circles.****
****Sigrid Schultz, who appears to have known everyone, appears in both books.
Beatrice Warde: “First Lady of Typography”
Those of you who read my previous post on Books Across the Sea have already been introduced (very briefly) to American writer and typographer Beatrice Warde (1900-1969).
Like many writers, I have opinions about type fonts,* and I was fascinated to learn about the changing world of typography in the first half of the twentieth century and a woman who made a name for herself in what I am sure you will not be surprised to learned was then a male-dominated field.
Warde began researching typefaces and printing history as an assistant librarian for the American Type Founders company, where she worked from 1921 to 1925, when she married a typographer and moved to London. She entered the professional world of typography under a male pseudonym in 1926, with an article titled “The Garamond Types, Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Sources Considered”** written under the name Paul Beaujon. The article appeared in The Fleuron, a magazine devoted to typography, and earned “Paul Beaujon” a reputation as a scholar of typography. It also earned “him” a job offer as the editor of The Monotype Recorder, published by the Lanston Monotype Corporation.
Monotype did not revoke the offer after Warde revealed that she was a woman–which could well have happened. She worked for Monotype first as editor of the magazine and later as the publicity manager until her retirement in 1960, making her one of the few women working in typography at the time. In her years at Monotype, she championed both the intelligent revival of historic typefaces and the work of contemporary typeface designers. In the process, she helped shape the face of modern printing. She believed that type should not call attention to itself : “Type well used is invisible as type.” But that didn’t mean that typographic decisions weren’t important: “Type, the voice of the printed page, can be legible and dull, or legible and fascinating, according to its design and treatment.”
One of her longest lasting contributions to the world of printing was a broadside, printed in 1932 to showcase one of Monotype’s new fonts:
This is a
Printing Office
Crossroads of Civilization
Refuge of all the arts
against the ravages of time
Armoury of fearless truth
against whispering rumour
Incessant trumpet of trade
From this place words may fly abroad
Not to perish on waves of sound
Not to vary with the writer’s hand
But fixed in time having been verified in proof
Friend, you stand on sacred ground
This is a Printing Office
Her words were cast in bronze and stand at the entrance to the United States Government Printing Office, a tangible reminder of the power of the printed word.
*So many ways to be a nerd.
**For those of you who are not font nerds, Garamond is a group of serif-style typefaces based on the work of a sixteenth-century Parisian engraver named Claude Garamond.
*** This blog post led me down a lot of rabbit holes that I ultimately cut, but I couldn’t resist sharing this one: A fleuron, literal a leaf, is a typographic element used to divide paragraphs, differentiate items on a list, or as ornament. (A much nicer term than a bullet list. Also known as a printers’ flower, or “horticultural dingbats.” If I can figure out how to do it, horticultural dingbats may replace asterisks on occasion in this blog.****
****So far, I have failed in this attempt.
Books Across The Seas
Rationing, food shortages, and the clever ways people got around them are major themes in books about the British home front in World War II, fiction and non-fiction alike. Packages from friends in the United States made life easier for a lucky few. (C.A.R.E. packages came after the war.) I recently learned that books from the United States were another response to war time shortages.
Early in the war, Britain banned the import and export of non-essential goods to free up shipping space for necessities. Printed books were on the non-essential list.
Beatrice Warde was an American writer and typographer who lived and worked in London. Even the quickest dip in the research rabbit hole makes it clear that she deserves a blog post of her own, but for now it is enough to say that she was deeply involved in London’s printing world and was no doubt aware of the ban on the transatlantic book trade earlier than most readers.
In 1940, with the help of her mother, May Lamberton Becker,* the literary editor of the New York Herald Tribune, Warde arranged for friends and acquaintances who had reason to travel to Britain to carry single copies of important new American books to London in their hand luggage—where they competed for space with other scarce items such as coffee, sugar, or stockings. A similar selection of books published in Britain were sent to the United States in the same way. It was the beginning of a cultural and literary movement known as Books Across the Sea.
The original set of books that Ward had smuggled, seventy in all, in were displayed in the office of the Americans in Britain Outpost of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, also known as the White Committee after its leader, newspaper editor William Allen White.** Books were soon seen to be goodwill ambassadors,*** and a formal organization was created to carry on Warde’s work with poet T.S. Eliot as its president. By 1944, the organization had send some 2,000 books to London and 1,600 books to New York.
The organization continued to operate under the aegis of the English-Speaking Union until 1984.
*Another possible blog post subject. If there is one thing I’ve learned in the last four years, it is that lots of women were doing interesting things in the first half of the twentieth century. More than I ever imagined.
**The White Committee was devoted to supporting pro-British policies in the United States that would help Britain in its war against Nazi Germany, essentially the polar opposite of organizations founded by Elizabeth Dilling. But that’s another story.
*** Duh.