Frederick Augustus Voigt, who was the Manchester Guardian’s Berlin correspondent between 1920 and 1932, did not look like an intrepid reporter.
A 1935 portrait by the Bauhaus photographer Lucia Moholy makes it appear as though he wants to back away from the camera, distrustful eyes barricaded behind thick, round glasses. His physical appearance was described in his 1957 obituary as “fragile-looking and nervous in manner, shortsighted, with a trick of smiling from the mouth downwards.”
So nervy could Voigt be, he once confided to his editor that on a bad day he did not feel brave enough to cross a street during heavy traffic. “Like so many hatreds, my hatred of motorcars arises from fear.”
And yet brave is the only suitable adjective to describe Voigt’s journalism. Known as “Freddy” to colleagues in England, as “Fritz” to friends in Berlin, but only as “our own correspondent” to readers of the Manchester Guardian, Voigt always went straight to where the story was, even if the story might imperil his life.
Within months of arriving in Germany, while covering the Ruhr miners’ uprising in Essen, he was kidnapped by rogue Reichswehr officers who accused him of being a spy, stood him against a wall and peppered the space around his head with bullets. His write-up of the incident, which named the officer who maltreated him and described the squalid conditions of other prisoners, earned him an official apology from the German chancellor.
His 1926 exclusive on a covert collaboration between the Reichswehr and the Soviet Red Army brought the German government to collapse. Other journalists would have known of the secret deal, which was common knowledge among European intelligence agencies, just as they would have known that making it public risked being sent to prison for treason in Germany. They decided not to publish. Voigt did.
Most important of all, while living through and reporting on this tumultuous and disorientating decade in European history, Voigt managed to keep a steady eye on the most important story on his patch – the rise of nazism – realising soon it wasn’t one to which he could afford to give the “both sides” treatment.
One hundred years later, I have inherited Voigt’s patch in Berlin, but while we share a background in modern languages and German parentage – I moved to London as a teenager, he was born to wine-merchant German émigrés in Hampstead – the list of commonalities ends soon thereafter.
Technology has changed the possibilities – and requirements – of our jobs beyond recognition. Freddy Voigt had to wire in his copy every day by 6pm. Anything sent through after that would miss the first edition, which put the Manchester Guardian correspondent at a disadvantage to those of the London newspapers, who had until 9pm to compose their thoughts. Often the challenge of gathering information was easier than getting it to the typesetters in Manchester.
Foreign correspondents nowadays write and file their articles anywhere – in the middle of a press conference, in a cafe or on the train home. But we are also expected to do so at several points in the day, sometimes after midnight and on the weekend, or in between recording a podcast.
The range of subjects we cover, and the journalistic registers we cover them in, has broadened too: my colleague Kate Connolly and I write about the cultural and social life on our patch as much as what is happening inside the Bundestag, and in doing so we frequently switch between news stories, features, interviews and more personal columns. Voigt had an unmistakable voice, combining attention to detail with burning conviction and deep learning in philosophy and theology, but he was essentially a political correspondent. In spite of living right next door to the Nürnberger Diele bar, a hotspot of gay and artistic life in Weimar-era Berlin, the German capital’s nightlife was never the subject of his reports.
Several contemporaries claim Voigt was close friends with the artist George Grosz, the great satirical chronicler of the years between the wars. If that was the case, the journalist never converted his personal connection into an article about him or his work. Voigt’s 1928 report on Grosz being sent to prison – over a drawing depicting a parson balancing a cross on his nose – does not contain any direct quotes from the convict.
The most crucial change is in the country we write about: Germany in the 1920s was reeling from a humiliating defeat in war. Its borders were contested, its economy unstable, its democratic traditions fragile, violence in the streets running high. In a letter to Voigt, his first editor, CP Scott, once referred to the Social Democrat delegate Rudolf Breitscheid – a Guardian contributor whom the pair were trying to help emigrate to London – as “the only German liberal”.
Modern Germany has liberal politicians in the highest seats of power. It is a society with a heightened awareness for the dangers of rightwing demagoguery, and strong institutions built to defend its democratic traditions. The only shaves I’ve had with street violence in five years as the Guardian’s Berlin bureau chief was when I found myself near the Breitscheidplatz on the night of the 2016 Christmas market terror attack, or cycling through inner-city Hamburg during the G20 riots in 2017.
There are still those who yearn for the illiberal German days of old, pockets of people who dream of ways of bringing them back, and flashes of street violence by those who act on these fantasies. But to throw journalistic resources exclusively at these extreme minorities would be to paint a skewed picture and to betray the forces of civility, which Voigt fought to highlight even in Germany’s darkest period.
One of the most interesting pieces in Voigt’s correspondence is a kind of confession. The challenges of writing about Hitler’s Germany, he once told his editor in London, was that the political situation was so abnormal “that I fear the driest account of it must seem like a piece of sensationalism”. As a result, he said about a recently submitted report in 1932, “I have described him [Hitler] as mildly as possible in my article, simply because I want to avoid raising incredulity.”
One hundred years later, the act of balancing the facts on the ground with the preconceptions in the readers’ heads remains the same. With readers no longer just in Britain but around the world, arguably it has got even more complex. The challenge of cultural translation is different, however: German politics has an aversion to the hysterical style prevalent in the 1920s, and as a result it can sometimes seem so mundane as to be uninteresting. You often need to scratch away at a seemingly bland surface to detect modern Germany’s dramas, absurdities, injustices or eccentricities.
Voigt excelled at spelling out realities that other correspondents refused to see. The Manchester Guardian’s man in Berlin first reported of “Jew baiting” in 1921 and warned of the threat of a national socialist dictatorship in the autumn of 1930. He continued to report unflinchingly on what he called Hitler’s “Brown Terror” while the other British newspapers soft-focused their articles in accordance with their government’s appeasement policy. The rise of the Nazis, he warned his editor WP Crozier in March 1933, was “the biggest historical event since the Great War”.
By then Voigt was reporting on German developments from Paris via correspondence with his expansive network of contacts, having become the first international correspondent to have been expelled from the Third Reich.
Around Christmas 1933 he was informed by French officials of an imminent planned attack on his offices, to seize his papers and notes – or so he initially thought. He later learned that the Gestapo’s intention was to assassinate him. Three French intelligence officers were assigned for his protection, one sleeping in his room, with an automatic pistol “of such size that I’m sure it must come under the category of heavy armaments”.
How could a man so easily scared be so brave in his writing? During his time on the western front, Voigt had learned that fear was a physical reaction as natural as feeling cold in winter. You could, however, briefly suspend your own terror through intense intellectual exercise, as he realised during an air raid he described in his first world war memoir, Combed Out.
“I was so intent on self-analysis that I lost consciousness of everything except my mental concentration”, he wrote in the short but harrowing book crafted from his war diaries. “Even of those sensations I was trying to analyse, for the very act of analysis was destroying them.”