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- [00:00]
Podcast Host
Hi everyone. I want to tell you all about another podcast I think you'll enjoy. College Matters from the Chronicle College Matters is a weekly show from the Chronicle of Higher Education, and it's a great resource for news and analysis about colleges and universities. You'll hear sharp discussions with Chronicle journalists offering fresh perspectives on the latest salvos from the Trump administration and keen insights about how faculty and students are adapting to technological changes. College Matters also features incisive interviews with newsmakers, including recent conversations with Chris Eisgruber, Princeton University's president, and Rick Singer, who is best known as the mastermind of the Varsity Blues admissions scandal. Check out College Matters wherever you get your podcasts.
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Jane Semeka
I was groomed to become one of
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Disorder Podcast Host
his wives this week on Disorder, the podcast that orders the disorder, an Epstein survivor tells me her story and what justice looks like for her.
- [00:57]
Jane Semeka
I want to see action and I am demanding action. Do not just talk the talk, you need to start walking the walk now.
- [01:05]
Disorder Podcast Host
It's one of the most powerful interviews I've ever done in over 20 years as a journalist. Search Disorder in your podcast app to listen right now.
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Therese Swoboda
Welcome to the New Books Network
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Jane Semeka
welcome to the New Books Network. Jane I'm Jane Semeka, professor of History at Brookdale Community College. Today we'll be discussing a new book by Therese Swoboda called Hitler and My Mother in Law, a memoir published by OR Books. Therese Swoboda is the author of 24 books. She's a Guggenheim Fellow and was awarded the Bob's Prize in Fiction, the Iowa Prize for Poetry is an NEH Grant for Translation, the Gray Wolf Nonfiction Prize, a Jerome Foundation Prize for Video, the O. Henry Award for the short story and a Pushcart Prize for the essay. She is a three time winner of the New York foundation for the Arts Fellowship and her opera Wet premiered at LA's Disney Hall. Well, I am really grateful that Therese is going to join us today on New Books Network. Welcome to the show. Therese.
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Therese Swoboda
Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be here.
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Jane Semeka
So this book is more than a memoir, so can you explain?
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Therese Swoboda
My brother in law wanted to write a book about his mother because of her amazing feats, but he gave up after about five years of research and when I began to prod him to find more, find out more about her, I realized I didn't know who she was. And that was very intriguing because I had known her for 20 years until she died in the early 90s and I had known her for 20 years. So the problem with the memoir is that it is A true story, that one you believe, as opposed to fiction, where you know it's all made up and you are passed into the world of someone else's truth. A memoir purports to be absolute truth from the voice of the person who witnessed it. But Pat Hartwell's achievements were so amazing that even her sons didn't believe her most of the time, which intrigued me. It seemed to me that by writing a book about her, I would have a chance to look into what truth meant. And that was particularly important at the moment, having had a political regime that was questioning truth from all different angles. And it gave me a chance to think about what truth was in the mid 20th century, even the deeper past, and what we think of it now. Having been exposed to a whole new series of propaganda via social media, some people have called the book a double biography. And that was because I include a lot of my own life to give you as truthful a lens of my own in which I am examining her life. It wasn't really that I wanted to drag myself in, but to give you an idea of, pardon me, how I viewed her, because it was my mother in law, as I had to often assert myself with regard to her sons, my mother in law, and not their mother, that I was examining.
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Jane Semeka
And, you know, I think also what you explore as well is the whole truth about being a woman.
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Therese Swoboda
Well, I don't know about the whole truth of being a woman, but certainly a woman in a man's world. And then since we're talking about my mother in law, it was primarily in the mid 20th century that she accomplished all these amazing things. And the repercussions and the meager rewards for those achievements reflect even today the feeling about a woman who tries to accomplish something in the world. Yeah.
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Jane Semeka
And so you write that quote, no one likes a successful woman even today.
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Therese Swoboda
Yes, I think that's true. Yeah.
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Jane Semeka
And also the themes of, you know, exploring motherhood and career and patriarchy and, you know, I think that a lot of that really for me was extremely powerful in the story that is woven of her life and your life and the times that we've occupied.
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Therese Swoboda
Well, and particularly motherhood, which in World War II was jettisoned and women were refashioned to be Rosie the Riveter, both Germany and here. And then they were told to discard that their newly found abilities and just become good consumers and producing more consumers. That was what was really emphasized in the early 50s. And having my husband with a mother who was clearly devoted to her career and somehow Understand how that neglect affected him and affected her as well.
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Jane Semeka
Sure. So let me go back to something you had mentioned that your brother in law had worked on this, a project for five years. How did he react to your proposal that you would like to pick it up?
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Therese Swoboda
Well, I was very tenuous about approaching him, but he was happy to hand it over, actually. And he even gave me a notebook, a somewhat illegible notebook of material that he had collected. And of course he had knowledge of the scope of the material and it was living in Hawaii where she died. And he had a lanai that was stuffed full of her correspondence. She always or very most of the time sent out six copies of each letter to all the various recipients. That way she didn't have to, she could keep the correspondence up and didn't have to personalize anything. So there was material all the way back, you know, for 70 years that he had to comb through to give me information. And so he was very generous with it until his other two brothers really thought about the seriousness of my endeavor and decided that he should stop sharing. So it was, and I believe I have the important material because he knew what it was from the very beginning.
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Jane Semeka
Right. So he. Do you think he prioritized the most important things and maybe the things that were not shared were maybe not that revelatory.
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Therese Swoboda
Yes. The things he didn't share were more personal to his brothers and they were really irrelevant to my project anyway. But I really couldn't and without seeing them, tell them that I wasn't interested, you know.
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Jane Semeka
Yeah, that's really, that's, that's interesting, I think.
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Therese Swoboda
Well, and of course it was in the middle of COVID so I wasn't going to fly to Hawaii and have a look.
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Jane Semeka
Right. So let's talk about your mother in law before we get too deep into the research process and the writing process. So can you tell us a little bit about who she was and you know, what drew you to write about her?
- [09:26]
Therese Swoboda
Good question. So I'll do it. A little pricey. So she went from being. Well, she graduated from the Columbia School of Journalism and landed a job as the first woman hired at CBS News Radio. In 1939. They had just relaunched as before that, radio basically just read the news from the newspapers. But there was this brand new concept that CBS Radio could generate their own announcers and their own news. So this was a brand new team and Edward R. Murrow was on the team. And she said when the first day she went to work, the elevator operator wouldn't let her off. On the floor that she was supposed to work on because no woman had ever gone there before. So she did that for a couple of years. And her boss, Elmer Davis, was appointed by FDR to be head of the Office of War Information. And she went with him. And the Office of War Information was information and misinformation. So she also got an interesting education in to how that particular war was being manipulated for the public. From that she had all along been writing articles for Colliers and various other magazines. And she was picked out of other reporters and elevated as our fearless reporter for a Woman's Home Companion, which was quite a deal. Apparently. She would. She would waltz in the Waldorf Astoria to a luncheon for 300 and dazzle them with the stories that she had collected. And I think she was 29 years old at that point. She was pitted against Hemingway at Collier's and was the only woman to cover both theaters of war. So she did things like she was the first woman to show up at Iwo Jima. At first woman at Guam. She climbed up to. She was the first woman to climb up the Eagle's Nest, where a lot of looting was going on because the war had just ended. And then she interviewed Goering twice, Herman Goering. And she was present at his surrender. She danced with him. I mean, you get the idea. And the fact that she climbed up through waist high snow to Eagle's Nest was colored by the fact that she apparently had polio during her childhood. And after she had sort of settled into the Bertesgaden area, she became mayor for either a day or a week, depending on what you're reading. The only non military personnel to do such a thing. And she comes out of the war with a priceless painting that was given to her, I think, by the U.S. army, which hung in Hitler's studio. So you kind of get the drift of the. I mean, there must have been thousands of people with amazing stories, but I have 66 pages of footnotes to go with these stories to try to authenticate actually what she did and what she didn't do. And sometimes that's very hard to figure out. Yeah.
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Jane Semeka
So she's also among several other famous or well known women journalists that were on site as the war was coming to a close in Europe. And like Martha Gellhorn and Lee Miller and they are all, you know, kind of these, these intrepid women journalists who are covering this. Everybody seemed to be very hyper aware that this was a big moment.
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Therese Swoboda
Well, Pat went to Gakau with Lee Miller. You May thought that Lee Miller went by herself, but she had. Lee was the photojournalist, and Pat was the reporter. And in a book by Julie Edwards called Women of the the Great Foreign Correspondence, she says Edwards says Lockridge shared with Martha Gellhorn a capacity to write with such compassion of the wounded that her readers would weep 40 years later. So she was definitely in their league.
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Jane Semeka
Yes. And the recent movie Lee does a really masterful job of placing Lee in that moment. And to reimagine now, I think back to the movie, and I think, where's Pat?
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Therese Swoboda
Yes, exactly.
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Jane Semeka
Is Pat there? Is Pat while there, you know, taking the photograph in the bathtub? Is Pat in the other room having a whiskey with the. You know, I thought that when I was reimagining that when I was reading and kind of. Kind of putting together my own remembrance of the movie, Lee and also Lee's son, who's in the film, it's. It's his kind of trying to rediscover his mother's story and your kind of being our. You know, telling us Pat's story. So that also really connected for me.
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Therese Swoboda
Well, in that particular instance, Pat Hartwell, while Lee Miller was taking photographs, she was interviewing townspeople to find out why they didn't know what was going on. And it was a very famous series of interviews, which I think they still play now at Dachau, because, of course, everyone said they knew nothing about it. And with regard to the movie and Lee's son, my husband's a member of the Director's Guild, so we went to an early screening, and the director was there, and, well, I'll ruin the movie for you. But the interviewer in the movie turns out to be Lee Miller's son, who knew nothing of Lee Miller's accomplishments until after she died. He thought she was just a drunk. And there's a moment when Lee Miller's son says, I thought it was all my fault that you were so miserable. And she takes a puff on her cigarette and says, oh, really? Or something along those lines. Right.
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Jane Semeka
Or isn't that too bad? Or doesn't she say. Say something like that? Yeah.
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Therese Swoboda
And it just broke my husband because he recognized suddenly that it really didn't have to do with him. He didn't have a mother. Right. It was a very good documentary.
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Jane Semeka
Yes. And it also, I think, in light of what we understand about ptsd.
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Therese Swoboda
Oh, yes.
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Jane Semeka
Now, yeah. You know, the. The generation that. And the people that experienced and witnessed the horror of the war were scarred. They were marked by what they experienced and they probably didn't have the vocabulary or the ability to get themselves help.
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Therese Swoboda
Well, I do remember the first time when I met Pat come on some kind of journalistic excuse to visit her in Hawaii as a potential mother in law. And she bought out her souvenirs of the experience, including a 5x7 photograph of her pointing at what appeared to be ashes on the ground. And she said, those were Hitler's ashes, or rather they were. The military told her to tell people that they were Hitler's ashes. And it seemed emblematic of she was both showing her accomplishments, that the military would trust her with such a strange fallacy to present to the public, and also that she knew that it was propaganda and she was testing us to see whether or not we knew it was propaganda. There's so many layers in that presentation that I put at the beginning of the book.
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Jane Semeka
It's a very compelling and vivid story.
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Therese Swoboda
Yes.
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Jane Semeka
To be connected with the remains of such an infamous.
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Therese Swoboda
Well, they disappeared, was never dead, and it took 70 years of determined forensics and negotiations with the Russians to even come up with his dental record. So I found that to be an interesting way to thread the most flashy part of World War II remnants throughout the book, but also to talk about what we believe is true, because the Soviets, for example, immediately decided that they were going to say that Hitler was still alive. For some reason, Stalin felt that it was important to manipulate the West's view of Nazism as being still being a threat. And to have that continue over the years in almost comedic moments was very intriguing to me. Yes.
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Jane Semeka
And so do you want to talk a little bit more about the whole idea of storytelling and memory and truth? You know, how people believe what they want to believe?
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Therese Swoboda
Well, there's no doubt that people believe what they want to believe. That's for sure. We're seeing a lot of that result right now in our politics. I mean, just the fact that no one can actually determine whether or not we're in a war or not. I was particularly interested in a quote from a book by Carolyn Eady, who has done the most research on women correspondence, and she's author of a book, the Women war Correspondent the U.S. military and the Press, 1846-1947. And she opens the essay with trust. She opens this essay with, we journalists all know too well the saying, if your mother says she loves you, check it out. But what if your mother's a journalist or even an historian? The short answer is you have to approach her statements the same way that seemed to be My credo in that regard. Families all tell stories. Obviously they have a history that they want passed down and why some of those stories are passed down. You always have to figure out who's telling the story and why they're telling the story to really understand the impact of the material. And as time passes, the impact changes. No one remembers whatever war someone was in or that Aunt Julia really didn't see elephants on Fifth Avenue that weekend. But it's inimical to the survival of our species that we have these stories. So in the world of genre, of course, that is always a little more complicated. You know, the memoir got into a lot of trouble, I don't remember how many years ago, with James Fry, who apparently gave up all of the material and had a bestseller on really what was a piece of fiction. So I'm just kind of prodding the genre.
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Jane Semeka
Yes, but based in a tremendous amount of research.
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Therese Swoboda
Yeah, well, research is wonderful fun, right? You get to bring out your old Nancy Drew. And the material is there somewhere, you're sure. And there it is. Eventually something shows up and makes sense. It's really just making sense of the world. The fiction writer puts together the pieces in order to provide the truth. And the non fiction writer takes the pieces in the same way, but the pieces are all lying around and makes another kind of truth.
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Jane Semeka
Yeah, I had a professor one time. We were. I was in a class on history, literature and feminism. It's the name of the class that's wonderful. And so half the class was history majors, half the class was English majors. And one day, I remember around the seminar table all talking about the whole idea of creating a fictionalized past. And that never left me. I always thought that was really like. There's like a fine line in a lot of ways when you're trying to write a compelling story and you're using whatever historical facts and context you can use. I mean, you write the making of a memoir is all about digging up the truth.
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Therese Swoboda
Yes, well. And you have to understand what you're looking for. You know, it's the Heisenberg principle. As soon as you touch it, you've changed it and you put it in a new contract, another context which may change its meaning from the first time it was experienced. So, you know, it's. It's not relative. It's complicated.
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Jane Semeka
Right.
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Jane Semeka
Experian. And like you say, you said it's like doing a big puzzle.
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Therese Swoboda
Yes.
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Jane Semeka
And so you become a bit of Sherlock Holmes.
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Therese Swoboda
Well, the pieces the finally fit together are appropriately appropriate to the culture because they wouldn't fit together any other way. But sometimes if the pieces are just pulled out, they don't make any sense.
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Jane Semeka
Yeah. So you have written. Yeah, so. And you know, when I just read the long, beautiful intro of your career so far, you've written opera, poetry, short story, fiction, nonfiction, memoir. You've explored all these genres. Do you have one that's a favorite?
- [25:13]
Therese Swoboda
Well, I started off as a poet, and I don't think you ever get rid of that. In fact, this book and my first memoir, Black Glasses Like Clark Kent, both of them are organized as a lyric poem. In other words, it's not necessarily chronological, although often the pieces are arranged that way. But I'm allowed the freedom of pursuing an idea both in the past and the present in discrete sections, rather than so and so was born in 1924 and proceeded to do these things. There's, of course, life. And as we experience it doesn't happen that way. It doesn't happen chronologically necessarily. It things explode at one point, time stops. Many things impinge at the same time. So, I mean, it's more poetic. Life is more poetic than it is discursive. Yes.
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Jane Semeka
So what do you think we can take away from Pat's life?
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Therese Swoboda
Well, that brings up the question of AI because AI has all of its hallucinations about the past. And as long as we stay in the grip of some kind of verifiable material, I think that we will do well. It's just that humans are very susceptible to reshaping or forgetting what has happened. And unfortunately, AI is not always dipping into the history to make a just determination. So that's a very loaded question.
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Jane Semeka
Yeah, I mean, I was very much drawn into a lot of the mysteries in the story.
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Therese Swoboda
Yes.
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Jane Semeka
The things that along the journey that you're taking, you were discovering and put adding to the puzzle.
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Therese Swoboda
Well, that's kind of. I think an interesting way to keep the book alive is to make the reader feel as if the material is coming to light at the same time as they're reading it. And certainly that's how I experienced it. I experienced the excitement of finding another puzzle piece or something that I had previously thought was irrelevant suddenly fits into place. So I'm glad you noticed that.
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Jane Semeka
Oh, absolutely. I thought I really went along with the journey and I really enjoyed floating along with all the stories and even this parallel track that was going on because Pat's in wartime experiences and you have wartime experiences. There are struggles with alcohol in Pat's story. There's struggles with alcohol in your family story that balancing being a mother and career. All those things percolate through the story that are very. It's very interesting to read.
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Therese Swoboda
Good. All of those provide backdrop to the kinds of stories you want your descendants to remember.
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Jane Semeka
Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, you've talked a little bit about the research journey. Would you like to talk a little bit more about working, you know, public, archival, public facing work documents and FBI documents, as well as the family private papers, and how you. You bring those. You know, how they both kind of come together to help you to develop a story?
- [29:18]
Therese Swoboda
Well, at the very end of the project, I had a residency at the New York Public Library, which was so wonderful because you just. Not everybody has these fantasies, but you just order a book and then it comes to you into. Into your. Carol. Oh, my God. It was so wonderful. Anyway, and that verified a lot of material in terms of my footnotes and so forth. But it took four years to get the material from the Freedom of Information act out of the FBI, which is, relatively speaking, fairly quick. And by the time I had that material, which is in the case of pat's second husband, 100 pages long, he was. He had her position at UNICEF before she did and then put forward her. He got tired of it, which was the director of development. He got tired of the position, wanted something else, and put forward her credentials to Dag Hammerskjold without saying that she was married to him and she got the job. So she too was investigated by the FBI. Her file wasn't nearly as long. And the wonderful part was, first of all, that they weren't under suspicion in the end, but also that they're meticulous in providing you with amazing details that corroborated all the work that I had done. Of course, if you could just have this at the beginning of your search, that would have been much more efficient, but I would. It's very grateful to have it. They did things. They had investigators in maybe seven major cities go through material like what his Grade average was the University of Pennsylvania. And also interviewing the bellhop in the hotel that they were having the affair with before they were married. It was really quite an eye opener and fabulous to have. The only archive that I had a chance to go to in person after Covid lifted was the FDR archive in New Hyde Park. And I had a chance to look at the usher's notes. Both Pat Hartwell and Martha Gellhorn. I don't remember Lee Miller or not, but everyone said they spent the night or several days or moved into the White House for a while. And so it was very interesting pursuit to find out or not find out. Actually, what I found out was that the usher's notes were incomplete at the end because a little note from FDR saying, my cousin's coming and he'll be here for a couple of days. And so it wasn't as specific as I'd hoped, but it was great to have that material to look at.
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Jane Semeka
Yes.
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Therese Swoboda
Yeah.
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Jane Semeka
The research gods share some things with you and not the other, not everything.
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Therese Swoboda
They would hold on to all this stuff.
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Jane Semeka
Right. So I was thinking, because the Oscars are coming up, that the movie Nuremberg has brought the story of Hermann Goering back into public attention. And a lot of, you know, there's a fair chunk of the story of Pat that intersects with Goering and a very interesting photograph of her modeling a turban that she had made out of his military sashes. And I thought that might be. And I can't help but think about this whole idea of truth and taking something and making something else out of it, almost.
- [33:30]
Therese Swoboda
Well, it's not like taking your enemy's head and putting it on a pike around the town, but it's not that much dissimilar, I don't think. I have a whole chapter about souvenirs in which it is discovered that correspondence are among the worst pack rats in the world for taking probably important pieces of evidence of their experiences in these traumatic war events. And Pat did. She said she interviewed Hermann Goering twice, and she was there when he surrendered. However, he surrendered three times, and that made it a little more complicated. And I had interviews with people who had been at a few of those surrenders to try to figure out whether or not what part she played in that. And Hermann Goering was very, very fond of his medals and sashes. So to flaunt them like that and having a Parisian milliner to. To turn them into a hat and a bag was particularly offensive. Probably
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Jane Semeka
looking back, it really.
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Therese Swoboda
Yeah, exactly. One of the last Things his daughter said to him before he died was will you wear your metals, your rubber medals in the bathtub when you get home? Because he apparently seldom took his medals off. Even so, the Nuremberg caricature of him was fairly accurate given that he had these beautifully tailored suits for his 350 pound frame that showed off his medals quite well. How she managed to get quite a few of them was related in a newspaper article in which she said that she was at some kind of victory party and everyone was very tipsy and began pinning them on her, the 20something woman that she was and that she just kind of wandered out of the party with them all on her chest. So I couldn't verify that, but it was certainly in the newspaper.
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Jane Semeka
Yes. And you know there's a really great theme and substory throughout the book about art.
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Therese Swoboda
Yes.
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Jane Semeka
And would you tell us a little bit, talk a little bit about. You've already mentioned the painting, but maybe give us a little bit more of a tease of the story about the Nazi art.
- [36:21]
Therese Swoboda
My mother in law was always interested in art from her early days. She began to collect it and so she must have been flabbergasted, like many people were, to see that the 101st Airborne, the group that she was embedded, had taken at the very end of the war, taken possession of a large amount of Hermann Goering's vast art collection and had put a sign up saying the 101st art gallery so you could go in and have a look at thousands of paintings that were hidden in the mountains and hidden all over that part of Germany. And she was perhaps given this priceless painting. And as a result, in 1962 she sold it in order to buy a newspaper in Arizona. And the gallerist, a rather shady guy, I think he paid 30 some thousand dollars to them and maybe a year later sold it to the National Gallery in London for 2 million some dollars. So you get the idea. Even in 1962 these works of art were well known and still being sold. These days you're required to have a little plaque next to the work saying that the provenance is unknown. But I have to say, very seldom do you ever see that. They don't put the little plaque out, but there is a website that shows you the art that they think is still extant. In Pat's case, I have not been able to connect with any evidence that it was owned by a Jew or someone who was forced to sell it during the war. I've kind of worked out a provenance with the material that was at hand. And there is a big gap trying to figure out who had it for a while. It is easily possible that it was a booty of some kind. But given that it's been in a major gallery and it's been known for such a long time, let's see, how long is that? 40, like 60, 70 years. And no one has ever come forward with any evidence to suggest that it was in their family that may have been purchased rightfully by Hitler with his proceeds from Mein Kampf or various budgets. So I tell the story of the, not only of the mysterious passage of that artwork, but also what's happening today with regard to these artworks in question. And there's some wonderful stories about people having them reclaimed. And Helen Mirren starred in a movie about a Klimt that was finally returned to the family. And that, of course, then led me into that amazing man who painted the fake Vermeers. And so I had a chance to discuss what was, what was fake really about a copy. So, you know, there's another little rabbit hole of truth.
- [40:18]
Jane Semeka
Yes. And you know, and you get a little art history. You get the history of the end of the war and that whole story of the Monuments Men and Woman in Gold. You know, the background of all that, it was very informative and very helpful to learn that background, that historical background and how it relates to the family and the family's now piece of looted art that they have. It kind of becomes a little bit of a tricky situation when you possess something like that.
- [40:52]
Therese Swoboda
Yes. And various people suggested that Pat was ashamed of having it, but the photographs I have of her living room and the letters and so forth, they don't indicate that. So I think in the context of the time, that wasn't relevant. And certainly in the larger context, all the galleries were showing material and paintings that were looted or otherwise ill gotten all over the world. I mean, we can just talk about the Louvre, which is furnished by Napoleon, right? Absolutely.
- [41:36]
Jane Semeka
Well, I really enjoyed this book. I think it's a memoir, but it's a mystery. It has humor, it's personal, it's intimate, it's beautifully written. And I think anybody would be well served to pick it up and to enjoy it. It's.
- [41:55]
Therese Swoboda
It has a lot of mother in law jokes.
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Jane Semeka
It has a lot of mother in law jokes. You know, if you rearrange the scrabble tiles for mother in law, you can get Woman Hitler.
- [42:07]
Therese Swoboda
That's a good one.
- [42:08]
Jane Semeka
You know, so I think that there is a lot for everybody who likes women's history or wants to read a beautiful personal memoir. I think it's, it's a terrific read. So thank you so much for joining me on New Books Network today. I want to thank Therese Swoboda for being a guest on New Books Network to discuss Hitler and My Mother in Law, a memoir published by OR Books. Until next time, this is Jane Semeka. Keep reading.