I have often said that writers, back in the old
days, engaged in the times they lived in. Unfortunately, too often this skill
is lost on younger writers. By doing so, they left a superior record of the
history they witnessed. The person I’m choosing to focus on, tonight, is Thomas
Wolfe. Wolfe did spot on depictions of New York City in the 1930s. He always
had a keen eye for detail that he would bring to Nazi Germany.
For whatever reason Wolfe’s books sold
incredibly well in Germany. According to Germany economic policy he was unable
to get his money out of the country. He often travelled to Germany, where he
lived like a king on his German royalties. Wolfe was in Germany for the 1936
Olympics. His descriptions of what he saw were first rate.
“Meanwhile, through those tremendous banner laden ways, the
crowds thronged ceaselessly all day long. The wide promenade of Unter den
Linden was solid with patient, tramping German feet. Fathers, mothers,
children, young folks, old-the whole material of the nation was there., from
every corner of the land. From morn to night they trudged, wide-eyed, full of
wonder, past the marvel of those banner laden ways. And among them one saw the
bright stabs of color of Olympic jackets and the glint of foreign faces: the dark
features of Frenchmen and Italians, the ivory grimace of the Japanese, the
straw hair, and blue eyes of the Swedes, and the big Americans, natty in straw
hats, white flannels, and blue coats crested with the Olympic seal.”
Wolfe being a product of South and of his times didn’t have
much use for African Americans. Still, he had a different opinion of Jesse
Owens. He actually took pride in his accomplishments.
“And there were great displays of marching men, sometimes
ungunned but rhythmic as regiments of brown shirts went swinging through the
streets. By noon each day all the main approaches to the games, the embannered
streets and avenues of the route that the Leader would take to the stadium,
miles away, were walled in by troops. They stood at ease, young men, laughing and
talking with each other-the Leader’s bodyguards, the Schutz Staffel units, the
Storm Troopers, all the ranks and divisions in their different uniforms-and
they stretch in two unbroken lines from Wilhelm-strasse up to the Brandenburger
Tor. Then, suddenly, the sharp command, and instantly there would be the solid
smack of ten thousand leather boots as they came together with the sound of
war.”
“It seemed as if everything had been planned for this moment,
shaped for this triumphant purpose. But the people-they had not been planned.
Day after day, behind the unbroken wall of soldiers, they stood and waited in a
dense and patient throng. These were the masses of the nation, the poor ones of
the earth, the humble ones of life, the workers and the wives, the mothers and
the children-and day after day they came and stood and waited. They were here
because they did not have money enough to buy the little cardboard squares that
would have given them places inside the magic ring. From noon until night they
waited for just two brief and golden moments of the day: the moment when the Leader
went out of the stadium, and the moment when he returned.”
When Wolfe wrote these passages, he knew that his time, in
Germany, was coming to an end as he would not be welcomed back after it was
published. There’s a wonderful scene of a Jewish person trying to get across
the border and being able to get his money out of the country.
“At last he came-like a wind across the field of grass was shaken
through that crowd, and from afar the tide rolled up with him, and in it was
the voice, the hope, the prayer of the land. The Leader came by slowly in a
shining car, a little dark man with a comic-opera mustache, erect and standing,
moveless and unsmiling, with his hand upraised, palm outward, not in a Nazi
wise salute, but straight up, in a gesture of blessing such as the Buddha and
Messiahs use.”
Wolfe did not live long enough to see if his prediction was
true, which it no doubt would have been. He died of a brain hemorrhage at 39.
He left a huge pile of papers which were put together and made into four books.
