A Native's Return, 1945-1988 by William L. Shirer

Author:William L. Shirer [Shirer, William L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7953-3417-7
Publisher: RosettaBooks
Published: 2013-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 3

Despite the Book-of-the-Month Club’s taking the book and all the publicity from the Look piece, Simon and Schuster stuck with its print order of 12,500 copies (after selling 7,500 to Warburg) when the book finally came out on October 17, 1960. I wondered about it but I concluded that the publisher knew what he was doing. My chief concern now was how the book would be received. A good many writers claim they never read their reviews. I do read them. And in this instance I felt some trepidation. I remember hearing from the grapevine that the Sunday New York Times Book Review had given the book for review to a prestigious Oxford historian, H. R. Trevor-Roper, whom I much admired. I had freely quoted from his brilliant book The Last Days of Hitler. But I had misgivings about what kind of a piece he would write. British book reviewers had been very tough recently on American writers. Trevor-Roper’s colleague and rival at Oxford, A. J. P. Taylor, was a good example. In deploring American books and authors, especially those concerned with history, they seemed to me to be taking out their resentment at the way America, not Britain, was now the world power of the West. Also I was aware of the disdain of academic historians for former journalists like myself who tried to write history. This was particularly virulent in America. In England it was not so bad but still… was an eminent Oxford historian, himself an authority on Nazi Germany, likely to look kindly and with understanding on an American journalist daring to write the first fully documented history of the Third Reich?

I remember thinking that, well, the Times never did like me. It never forgave me writing for its rival, the Herald-Tribune. I had once exchanged some harsh words in correspondence with Arthur Hays Sulzburger, the Times publisher, whose family owned the newspaper. The Times had not even reviewed two or three of my last books. So now it had gone to an Englishman and a university professor to write about this one. That probably meant two strikes against me. And in the one publication that counted most.

H. R. Trevor-Roper’s review of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich was spread all over page one of the Sunday New York Times Book Review of October 16, 1960. It flabbergasted me. I could scarcely believe it. The editor’s caption gave the first hint.

LIGHT ON OUR CENTURY’S DARKEST NIGHT

The Awful Story of Hitler’s Germany

Is Movingly Told in a Masterly Study

How can we look objectively on the Third Reich? the Oxford historian asked.

It was the greatest, most horrible phenomenon of the twentieth century. …In ordinary circumstances it would be impossible, only half a generation after its end, in the twilight period between the passion and documentation, to write its history. But with the Third Reich nothing was ordinary, not even its end. …In that total annihilation all the secrets of [Hitler’s] rule were broken open, all the archives captured, their truth tested in court, their contents made public.

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