Guest blog: A Complex Fate by Ken Cuthbertson

Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial, directed by Joe Berlinger, explores the rise and fall of Hitler, and features eyewitness testimony of American journalist William L. Shirer.  Ken Cuthbertson, author of A Complex Fate: William L. Shirer and the American Century, which is the only full biography of Shirer, was interviewed for the six-part documentary series and reflects on the experience in the blog post below.

Ken Cuthbertson’s A Complex Fate is a thought-provoking, richly detailed biography of William Shirer, the influential American journalist who reported from inside Nazi Germany and eventually published The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Written with the full cooperation of Shirer’s family, and generously illustrated with photographs, it introduces a new generation of readers to a supremely talented, complex writer, while placing into historical context some of the pivotal media developments of our time.

“Cuthbertson recounts the improvised thrill of the first-ever roundup from correspondents dotted all across Europe beaming the voices back to the United States, a model for network television broadcasts to this day but an outright marvel at the time.” The New York Times

Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial is out now.

Everything old is new again?

Sixty years ago, the folksinger Bob Dylan sang about how the times were “a-changin’.” That laconic observation, so true in 1964, is even more so today.

I recently was reminded of that when I received an out-of-the-blue email from a New York-based film producer who’d discovered my book A Complex Fate: William L. Shirer and the American Century (which McGill-Queen’s University Press published in 2015). Because I’m Shirer’s biographer, the producer was keen to know if I’d be willing to do an interview for a planned Netflix documentary series in which I’d recount his experiences in Nazi Germany.

In case you don’t know, the Chicago-born journalist-turned-broadcaster was one of the most famous and influential American media figures of his time. From mid-1933 until late 1940, Shirer reported from Berlin, first as a print journalist and then as a correspondent for CBS radio. During these “nightmare years” – as he so eloquently described them – Shirer observed the rise of Adolf Hitler from a front-row seat and came to know many of the leaders of the Nazi party.

Shirer wrote about all this in his 1960 book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and in other more personally focused books and commentaries. That weighty volume was one of the most widely read and influential non-fiction books of the twentieth century. Shirer’s magnum opus has sold millions of copies worldwide; it remains in print, and still is widely regarded as one of the “go-to” sources for anyone seeking to understand the evils of the Nazi era.

It’s been almost a decade since I wrote A Complex Fate. When it was published, the book garnered favourable reviews and attracted the eyeballs of readers who had an interest in the Nazi era or in the history of journalism. However, as they say, that was then; this is now. The times still are a-changin’. Only now it’s at warp speed.

Just nine years have passed, but the world is a very different place than it was in 2015. Justin Trudeau hadn’t yet brought his “sunny ways” to Ottawa. Donald Trump was still a brash blowhard who was known mainly as a real-estate developer and the host of a cheesy “reality” television show. And the global Covid pandemic was still almost five years in the future. A Complex Fate, like other non-fiction books about the WWII era that were published back in 2015 was just another interesting historical narrative. Too many people nowadays have scant interest in – and ignorance of – history. Or at least they do so until the past suddenly rears up and threatens to repeat itself, as it’s now doing when rising tides of intolerance, authoritarianism, and antisemitism threaten to wash over our world.

A rising Greek chorus that includes the makers of the Netflix filmmakers who’ve chronicled anew the evils of Hitler and the Nazis, is sounding the alarm and pointing out the terrifying parallels between events of today and those that roiled the 1930s and pushed the world over the precipice and into the madness of the bloodiest war in history.

In retrospect, it occurs to me that A Complex Fate was a book written a decade ahead of its time. That the dark themes I explore in my Shirer biography are resonating anew is something about which I have mixed emotions.

Ken Cuthbertson is the author of seven books. His biography of the American journalist John Gunther, Inside, was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award. He lives in Kingston, Ontario.