In the aftermath of Peter Magyar’s victory in Hungary, while I watch people dancing in the streets as they celebrate Viktor Orban’s dramatic ousting, I think of my Hungarian grandparents. As Holocaust survivors, they were the lucky ones, and they remained proud Hungarians to the end. They would have greeted this election with characteristic realism: Minden csoda harom napig tart, as the saying goes. Every miracle lasts three days.
Hungary is a country still feeling the long aftershocks of the second world war and the Holocaust. Those shocks seem clearer than ever after the years I have spent researching The Nuremberg Women, my new book on the trials. We all have an image of those trials in our head: the famous men judging and being judged in the courtroom, immortalised in photographs, or in Laura Knight’s painting, which is on permanent display at the Imperial War Museum. Women are pushed to the margins. But so many intriguing women played their part, from Knight herself to Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, the French Resistance hero who gave the most devastating testimony of the trial.
Anyone who launches a new book is hoping desperately that no other big cultural event will come along and eclipse it. So imagine my horror when I check the publication date of The Nuremberg Women – 23 April – and realise I’m going head-to-head with the premiere of The Devil Wears Prada 2. A film about Vogue may not appear to overlap with a book about the first trial for international war crimes, but I have my fears. Both follow the antics of characterful women at the heart of big events. And Nuremberg was a surprising centre of fashion. In April 1946, midway through the trials, the leading US judge, Justice Francis Biddle, held a 60th birthday party at his villa. While his wife, Katherine, a poet, recited verses about abiding love, members of the French delegation slipped into racy two-piece swimming costumes to celebrate. They were the first recorded adopters of what soon became known as the ‘bikini’.
The women of the Nuremberg press corps were housed in an old dower house on the estate of the pencil-making Faber-Castell family, while the men lived in the main castle. Memoirs recall the estate as a grim residence, with bad food and crowded rooms full of mismatched beds, but the Faber-Castell archivist tells me that the loudest complaints came from the Americans, who had experienced only modest wartime shortages at home, unlike the far more appreciative French. The homesick Soviet delegates requested relief parcels of garlic and dried fish from home but eventually embraced a single American condiment: tomato ketchup.
There were all sorts of antics behind the scenes. Despite his wife’s verses, Justice Biddle embarked on a torrid affair with the journalist Rebecca West: during breaks in the court proceedings, he wrote her love notes from the bench. West had arrived in Nuremberg in such a hurry that she forgot to pack underwear, but she would become the voice of the trials in the press. She did better than Betty Knox, a former chorus girl from Kansas who reinvented herself as a foreign correspondent. She missed the scoop of the century when a GI guard sought her out at the castle to pass on the news that Goering had committed suicide. Betty decided it was just a rumour and went back to bed.
When I visit Nuremberg, I follow in the footsteps of Laura Knight and stay at the Grand Hotel, opposite the train station. Its marble floors and gilded columns greet guests with considerable belle époque swagger. But the époque in question turns out to be the 1980s, when the hotel was renovated to resemble its 1896 self. The Palace of Justice, on the other hand, I expect to be roped off and sepulchral, but it is a working courthouse, with a working prison attached, CCTV, razor wire and staff smoking in the car park. Courtroom 600, where Goering, Hess and the other indicted Nazis sat in the dock, remained in routine use until 2020. Only recently has it started inching its way towards heritage status. Nuremberg is full of such tricks: real Nazi ruins crumble unnoticed, while pre-Nazi histories are conjured in an array of illusions and reconstructions. Though the city is a byword for historical reckoning, visiting it never fails to put me in mind of the myriad ways people have found to avoid the truth.
I am just back from another illusory place: Palm Beach, Florida, which is like Disneyland for adults. Everything is pink, the pools, the hotels, the cocktails. The dress code is enforced with more rigour than most European borders: for the women, Judith Leiber clutch bags with Swarovski crystals configured into ‘45/47’ (a tribute to Donald Trump’s presidencies); high-waisted chinos and a red baseball cap for the men. Over lunch at Sant Ambroeus, a native Palm Beacher assured me that the secret to a long marriage was ‘separate golf carts’. And as the home of Mar-a-Lago, Palm Beach is a political epicentre now too – though in a rather different way to Nuremberg.
From Palm Beach to Paris. Writing is a solitary pursuit, punctuated by a flurry of memorable encounters. In a café on the Place Marie-Claude, named after the concentration camp survivor and first woman to testify at Nuremberg, I met her grandson Vincent, a card-carrying communist who believes the French do not strike enough. We agreed to disagree.
Natalie Livingstone’s The Nuremberg Women is out now.
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