OR Books
Review by Walter Cummins
Terese Svoboda could have begun the title of her latest book with a number of other famous or familiar names—Goebbels, Goering, Martha Gellhorn, H.V. Kaltenborn, Andy Rooney, Lee Miller, Eleanor Roosevelt, Hemingway, Patton, Nimitz, and on and on her mother-in-law—Pat Hartwell—knew, worked with, or interviewed during her long , varied, and complicated career. But Hitler on the cover is certainly an attention getter.
The book centers on Harwell but shoots off in many directions because so many topics were parts of Harwell’s life and serve in the quest to know and make sense of the woman. Svoboda includes a number of seeming digressions that are actually relevant. One that dominates is knowing the truth of what actually happened and what’s emerged from rumor, assumption, and claims by the subject. Hartwell’s active life connects with Nazis, concentration camps, Holocaust deniers, feminism, marriage and divorce, parenting, alcoholism (mainly one husband’s), child abuse (mainly the same man), kidnapping, propaganda, public relations, local newspaper ownership, UNICEF, art provenance, art collecting, art rescuing, short-term mayoralty, strokes, and dying by starvation. And that’s not all.
The book integrates episodes of Svoboda’s own life as a writer, a translator, a visitor to places like the present South Sudan, a PBS series creator, a wife and mother, a daughter, a resident on a houseboat in Vancouver, and a survivor of a capsized sailboat in the Long Island Sound. She’s not promoting a resume to compete with Harwell’s, but suggesting that her own experiences and achievements give her insights to help understand a woman like Harwell. An appropriate title could have been My Mother-in-law and Me. Svoboda does call the book a memoir.
She presents her major dilemma in writing this book:
And every time you encounter someone, the personality adjusts. It’s the Heisenberg principle of identity, shining a light on it, you change it.
So my attempts to capture my mother-in-law are doomed?
You capture your mother-in-law, probably not Steve’s mother. Probably not his brother’s wife’s mother-in-law.
No one will be satisfied with my memoir.
A reader may come away without feeling the essence of Harwell despite knowing a great deal about her experiences, triumphs, and dilemmas. A certain satisfaction might come in learning so much about the central issues and happenings of the woman’s life and events of history, especially about World War II, all she witnessed and even participated in.
Related to the war and the questions about authenticity is whether she really posed for a photograph standing above a pile of Hitler’s ashes. Since the ashes were in Berlin and she wasn’t, they couldn’t have been his. But was there an actual photograph? The family searches to find one failed. However, evidence has it that immediately after Hitler’s suicide that both Nazi survivors and Stalin’s agents wanted to convince the world that Hitler was alive, perhaps escaped to Argentina. Hartwell had been involved in creating propaganda to convince Americans to support the war effort. A ruse to convince the world of his death wouldn’t have been that much of a stretch. But did they really try that one?
Hartwell and Goebbels, Hitler’s second in command, does have more verified support. She was present when he surrendered, even attended a party at his home soon afterward. She smuggled some of his medals out of Germany, and she had a sash of his become a headwrap and a scarf. There’s a photograph of her wearing the garments. But did she dance with him at the party or elsewhere? She did interview Goering—twice—no parties involved.
She, only twenty-nine, also had a brief appointment as mayor of the town of Berchtesgaden below Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest tower with the primary assignment of retrieving the nearby store of artistic masterpieces confiscated during the war. That’s when she took a Lucas Cranach painting—”Cupid Complaining to Venus”—reportedly one of Hitler’s favorites. Another confusion of fact and fiction: “Pat told her children both that the Cranach was given to her at the warehouse and also that she took it from Carinhall, Goering’s own home.” The latter is unlikely. In the U.S. a husband sold the painting for much less than it was worth because they needed money.
This statement by Svoboda gets to the heart of the conundrum at the heart of the book: “Propaganda, for instance, is all about leveraging feelings. We find an idea nice or threatening and, on that basis alone declare it true or false, and reason comes in only later.”
