Three-and-a-half miles south-west of Nuremberg in the small town of Stein stands the Schloss Faber-Castell, a 19th-century neo-Renaissance castle built for a dynasty of pencil manufacturers. In October 1945 it became home to hundreds of reporters who were covering the trial of 21 high-ranking Nazis, including Hermann Göring, Rudolph Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Alfred Rosenberg, Julius Streicher and Albert Speer, with Martin Bormann being tried in absentia.
Alfred Döblin offered a first-
hand account of the courtroom in which he never set foot
Prominent among the reporters were internationally celebrated writers such as John Dos Passos, Rebecca West, Elsa Triolet, Erika Mann and Erich Kästner, as well as the future German chancellor Willy Brandt, who returned from a 12-year exile in Norway as a correspondent for Oslo’s daily newspaper, Arbeiderbladet. As Uwe Neumahr remarks in the foreword to this fascinating account of the ‘press camp’: ‘Never before and never since had so many famous writers from all over the world come together as during this “zero hour”.’
Unlike such books as Richard Davenport-Hines’s A Night at the Majestic,about the 1922 dinner attended by Proust, Joyce, Stravinsky, Diaghilev and Picasso, or Sherill Tippins’s February House, about the Brooklyn home shared by Auden, Britten, Carson McCullers, Paul and Jane Bowles and Gypsy Rose Lee, this is not an account of the interrelationships of the various luminaries. Indeed, with rare exceptions such as Martha Gellhorn’s wariness of West (understandable, given her affair with West’s former lover, H.G. Wells), Neumahr eschews their encounters, to focus on their individual lives, past histories and attitudes to Germany, Nazism and the trial.
The occupation forces were determined that the trial, the first of its kind to indict the leaders of a criminal regime, should be an act of justice, not vengeance.
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