Courage Amid Complexity: Contemporary lessons from a journalist in Nazi Germany

She saw the political storm before it hit…and did what she knew best to do

She saw the political storm before it hit…and did what she knew best to do

If history repeats itself, reading Pamela Toler’s incredible biography of Sigrid Schultz (The Dragon From Chicago) invites us to explore a model of having courage when the systems around you feel like they are falling apart.

In the 1930s, while the world was still unsure what to make of Adolf Hitler, Sigrid Schultz, an American journalist, was already stationed in Berlin as the Chicago Tribune’s Berlin Bureau Chief— potentially the first woman to be foreign bureau chief of a major American newspaper.

Times had turned in Germany. The first world war, the American stock market crash, a freezing winter among other forces whittled away relative prosperity and comfort. The newly created democratic Weimar Republic had just taken over from years of monarchy in 1918. In its fledgling years it sought to address these crises. But cold, impoverished, hungry and anxious citizens wanted scapegoats and solace. Hitler responded, building a political presence that asked primarily for loyalty in return.

Most other reporters dismissed Hitler as a passing clown remaining on the political fringe. The emerging democratic German society, they assumed, would never stand for his bullish authoritarianism and overt degradation of Jews and minorities.Schultz, a petite yet formidable journalist in Berlin, instead saw the danger brewing. She followed the whispers in the cafés, tracked Nazi politics before they were headlines, and saw the potential for this fledgling democracy to be dismantled.

What’s more: she did it while being underestimated, dismissed, and surveilled.She was called into the Gestapo’s office multiple times, was followed, set-up, and berated. The Nazis called her “that dragon from Chicago.” She wore that title like armor.

What can we learn from Schultz?

Schultz knew that telling the truth could change the world, even if it cost her dearly. She followed the story and wanted to see it through to the end, even at her own peril. In her case, ‘just doing her job’ was a daily act of courage.

She knew that being a woman in a male-dominated world was both dangerous and powerful. She leaned into these complexities.

HIstorial Pam Toler spent years unpacking and understanding lessons from Schultz. I sat down with her to hear her take about Schutlz and what the lessons of history offer us today. I hope you’ll be as inspired from our interview - and from her book - as I was.

www.PamelaToler.com

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

- Philosopher George Satyana

My discussion with Pamela Toler resonated deeply with me. I hope you find as much inspiration in this discussion as I did.

What inspired you to write this book?

She stumbled into my life in April, 2019. She showed up in my newsfeed one day in a fascinating story about an architectural salvage vendor who had found a bunch of glass plate photographic negatives in a house in Edgewater, and he was curious about who she was and went to find out. In the article, there are all these pictures of a woman and a little bitty girl, and a really big dog taken around the house. Sigrid Schultz is the little girl. The article got to the punchline at the end: she grew up to be a groundbreaking foreign correspondent, and possibly the 1st woman to be the head of a foreign bureau for a major American newspaper. The news item was actually from the Chicago Tribune. So I went digging. It was really clear quickly what a modern story it was in some ways. I knew there was something interesting not only in the glass ceiling story, but also the fake news piece of it and the sense of political conspiracy. From the beginning I knew it had echoes for the modern day. I just didn't know quite how strong they would be.

The piece of the story that intrigues me most is about courage. What did it mean for Schultz to have the courage to continue to report stories out of Nazi Germany, even at great personal peril?

She is courageous. It's not the throw-yourself-on-a-grenade kind of courageous. Even the ways in which she's helping Jewish friends get out [of Nazi Germany], it's not like resistance-type of courageous. It's just standing up to it every day. She’s under constant surveillance. TheNazis are going into journalist offices and planting incriminating evidence. But mostly, she would say that she was just doing her job. She was committed to getting the story out and seeing this story through to completion. It was a dogged commitment, almost compulsive. At one point, it seemed to be that she was really just an adrenaline junkie about her job, maybe something that is shared among foreign correspondents Over and over, she would say things like ‘I don’t want to get kicked out. I want to walk this fine line because I want to tell this story to the end.’ She sees the risks. She takes some precautions; including moving out her mother [who had been living with her in Berlin]. But she is dogged about ensuring that she reported the news to the world. She reported on the Nazi concentration camps two months after Hitler takes power and at that point, nobody really knows what they are going to be yet.

The story of how she effectively reported from Nazi Germany was complex. In my own work on both/and thinking, we talk about needing to walk a tightrope sometimes, teetering amid the complexity of competing demands. We also talk about guardrails - knowing that there are boundaries that she won’t cross. How does she do this?

The most important thing to her was getting the story out. She would do what she needed in order to get that done. She figures out how to get sources and information. At various points, she used a [male] pseudonym just to get the story out. She wasn’t above batting her eyes when she needed to. But that was all in service of making sure that she got the story out.

That said, she was also a model of journalistic integrity. She insisted on accuracy. Her insistence on proof went so far that she knew that just because it's a great story, you can’t print it if you can’t support it. She knew that she could not just let someone show her something, but she had to find proof. She also knew though that she is watching something unfold and that sometimes what you see immediately is not what it will develop to be. When I first started to learn about Schultz, I read every article that she wrote in chronological order. Early on, Hitler was not the most important fascist threat. He was one of them, but not the big guy. Schultz had intuition, but also had really broad sources built from being in Berlin for many years and not just moving around from bureau to bureau. That allowed her to not only have proof for her stories, but also to have a greater intuition of the emerging story as it evolved. She sees things that others will not necessarily see.

Amid the story of courage and resistance in a crumbling democracy, is a story about being an effective woman in a male-dominated world.

Schultz claims to have been the first foreign bureau chief of any major American newspaper. Whether or not that claim is totally accurate, it was clear that this was a male-dominated world. When she first took the job, she was in a dispute for two years about pay equity. Hitler refused to have one-on-one interviews with women, and is very uncomfortable with even having her at press conferences. Even the guys at the Tribune; there are things they feel like they can’t ask her to do because she is a woman

However, when she interviews later in life, she claims not to have experienced any discrimination at all, even though her letters at the time make it absolutely clear that she did.I think that's true of a number of women who found high ranking positions of that particular age group. They might acknowledge that a man opened the door, but if they acknowledge the stuff they had to fight, then they can't just say I got it because I was damn good at it.

What do you think the lessons are here?

The sheer amazement of the story is that democracy is fragile, and it depends on people paying attention. And it depends on an engaged media.

There’s also a story that resistance is not just a loud voice, it’s also the quiet, daily ways that we stand up to power.

I also think we have to keep telling these women’s stories. The more that I read, the more I realized that there were more women around the newspaper industry. And its not necessarily that we need to just tell these stories because they are immediately inspiring or relevant, but because we just have to put women back in.

For more, check out Pamela Toler’s The Dragon from Chicago: The Untold Story of an American Reporter in Nazi Germany;

• C-Span Q&A Interview

• Biographers International podcast

• Study the Greats with Charif podcast

• What’s Her Name podcast

• Biographers in Conversation podcast

Here’s what I have coming up. Feel free to reach out if I can connect through some of my travels.

• May 12-16 - Qatar Energy/Harvard Business School Publishing

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• June 2025 - Graduation Season (in the northern hemisphere!)

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• July 2025 - EGOS (Athens) and AOM (Copenhagen)

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