A pioneering female journalist reporting on a German serial killer in 1930s Paris? Sounds like the makings of a great novel, but this story is all true. As The New Yorker’s longtime correspondent in Europe, Janet Flanner was a close witness to the roiling decades leading up to World War II. In The Typewriter and the Guillotine, author Mark Braude shows how Flanner’s exquisite reporting wrestled that tumultuous era into coherence for her readers—including her coverage of the trial and execution of serial killer Eugen Weidmann.
This is a true crime story, yes, but more than that, it’s a story for anyone who’s ever struggled to understand dark times. And it’s the story of a woman who was brave enough to pursue an unconventional life—as an ex-pat, a writer, and a queer woman—in an era that so often coerced people into conventionality. I talked to Mark Braude about Flanner’s extraordinary achievements and what we can learn from her experience.
Phoebe Neidl: How much did you know about Janet Flanner going into this, and what inspired you to write a book about her?
Mark Braude: I really got to know Flanner’s work while writing my last book, Kiki Man Ray, focused on the art world of 1920s Paris. Wherever I turned, there was Flanner, with some hilarious, cutting, totally unpredictable thing to say about whatever was going on, either in her biweekly reports in The New Yorker or in letters to friends. After finishing that book, I wanted to keep hanging out with Flanner, keep reading her. She is, I think, a major and wrongly overlooked figure in the cultural history of the modern era. As The New Yorker’s first foreign correspondent, she was a force in transforming what was once an American-centric, self-regarding humor magazine into an icon of quality reportage on issues of global concern.
But what turned her from someone I wanted to read into someone I wanted to write about was learning that as she was transforming The New Yorker she was also undergoing her own equally dramatic personal transformation. And by following her transformation—going from this somewhat naïve aspiring novelist and fledgling arts writer in 1920s Paris to one of the finest journalists of her era by the 1930s—I was able to grapple with questions that feel even more timely now than when I first started this project years ago: How do you maintain your values as people lose faith in democracy, in international cooperation, in the concept of truth itself? How do you make a meaningful career when your job no longer feels in step with your chaotic times? Flanner had to confront those questions nearly a century ago, and there’s a lot to learn from the way she tried to answer them.
What made you decide to pair these two stories, that of Janet Flanner’s career in Paris and the serial killer Eugen Weidmann?
These are two characters who embody so much of what was and remains fascinating about the years leading up to WWII: Weidmann embodying the era’s unfathomable evil, and Flanner embodying the strength and determination that people had to summon to get through it. I’d learned about Weidmann maybe a decade ago, but only about the very end of his life. I knew he was the last person to be publicly executed in France, in June 1939, and that he was German. Those facts alone made me want to know more. Cut to me deep into reading everything that Flanner wrote, and discovering that not only did she cover Weidmann’s sensational crimes, capture, and trial with her usual style and insight, but that her piece on his execution was among the last she filed before fleeing France. I came to see that Weidmann’s story, as a foreigner making his way in France, fluent in several languages, able to seduce with ease, was in some ways a twisted version of Flanner’s own story, and that when seen together their lives could reveal a bigger and unexpected story about that incredibly charged time, about Paris, about good and evil, violence and justice, about storytelling itself.
What did you learn about the ideological conflicts of the early and mid-20th century through Flanner’s published and private writing, particularly her writing about the Weidmann trial?
By being on the ground and very well-connected in Paris, watching the city become increasingly polarized, seeing outbursts of street violence stoked by hateful rhetoric, Flanner had a special window into the wider divisions that would dominate her era. And she was instrumental in waking Americans up to those divisions. Very early in the 1930s she noticed that people were no longer listening to each other, that they were growing suspicious of their fellow citizens, that they were led by fear, above all. She knew this wasn’t going to lead anywhere good. Then with Weidmann, Flanner understood that she was dealing with something more than just another crime story, that his trial could serve as a guiding metaphor through which to try to understand and hopefully explain this insane world that she was living in.
So, for me, by watching Flanner as she watched people around her changing into these highly antagonistic, fearful beings, and then as she confronted this ultimate will to power and violence as represented by one murderous German, I was reminded that big ideological shifts, as they play out in the global arena, are always playing out on a human level at the same time: as families argue around dinner tables, as strangers avoid one another on a bus, as people worry about prices at the grocery store. I also saw that rare and great are those individuals who can somehow avoid being sucked into playing the adversarial roles their leaders have plotted out for them in advance. Flanner was one such individual.
"Her solution to the ugliness and hatefulness of her era was simply to work harder at promoting the values of intelligence, humor, and an appreciation of beauty"
What do you think her greatest strengths were as a writer and journalist?
First of all, she’s really funny, and for journalism written 100 years ago to still be funny is pretty exceptional. Second, she could almost always find a way into a story that no one else covering the same events could see. Without revealing too much, listeners will experience those two strengths really coming together as they follow Flanner reporting and writing a serialized profile of Hitler, published when he was still somewhat of an unknown quantity in America, and where she delivers writing that absolutely no one else could have produced, pushing the magazine into a whole new realm and turning her into a celebrity.
What I love most about Flanner’s work is the way it evolves, sharply and drastically, and yet remains totally and undeniably hers. When after years of writing about art and culture she felt forced by the weight of history into writing about politics, she had to reject the formula that had provided her life with direction and start all over again. But she didn’t want to let go of what made her herself on the page: her style, her sense of the absurd. And that ended up being her great innovation. She kept the sly and subversive tone she’d used to write about ballet, nightclubs, and fashion shows in the 1920s, now in reporting on everything from refugees fleeing Franco’s bombs, to the failures of the Munich Agreement, to the evacuation of Paris in the face of the advancing Wehrmacht. She turned her humor from a shield into a sword, and that produced totally unprecedented writing. Following her career, it's heartening to discover that out of a wider political crisis that led to her own personal crisis, someone could be pushed toward their greatest and most enduring work.
While Weidmann’s story was of course very chilling, I thought Flanner’s life was really inspiring in terms of having the courage to live the life you want and being true to who you are. Is there anything in particular you hope the listener takes away from The Typewriter and the Guillotine?
I’m so happy to hear you found her life inspiring. Seen from one angle, Flanner’s story might be even more terrifying than Weidmann’s killing of six people, because she’s being forced to confront what will prove to be an exponentially wider and deadlier evil. But I agree with you that in the end hers is a story of optimism, even heroism. I hope that along with being entertained, listeners might find it inspiring, maybe even reassuring, to follow Flanner as she discovers her own way to survive her dark times while trying to make them better. Instead of turning away from life, she ran toward the danger, divineness, and political bluster she saw all around her. Her solution to the ugliness and hatefulness of her era was simply to work harder at promoting the values of intelligence, humor, and an appreciation of beauty, while living as freely and authentically as she could, trying to love and be loved in return.
