Elizabeth Wiskemann

Abstract

Abstract This is the first biography of Elizabeth Wiskemann (1899–1971), journalist, historian, and distinguished commentator on European affairs. Based upon new archival sources, including Foreign Office and OSS files and private papers, as well as Wiskemann’s many publications, it examines her life from her youth and student years at Cambridge to her suicide. Disappointed in her hopes for an academic career, she reinvented herself as a foreign correspondent in Berlin, reporting on the final years of the Weimar Republic, Hitler’s ascent to power, and Nazism’s expansionist drive in Eastern Europe. Expelled from Germany by the Gestapo, she moved to Prague and in 1938 published a classic account of the Czech–German conflict over the Sudetenland. With the outbreak of the war that she had long foretold, Wiskemann put her investigative skills to good use as a secret agent in Switzerland, working closely with Allen Dulles, the OSS chief in Bern, and running agents into Axis-controlled Europe. She returned to journalism after the war, living for a time in Rome and focusing especially on the political birth of the Italian Republic and Adenauer’s West Germany. For Chatham House she also wrote the first (and for many years the only) English-language study of the expulsion of 12 million Germans from Eastern Europe in 1945–47. Aside from the intrinsic interest of Wiskemann’s career, the book situates her within a cohort of British women, pioneers in international affairs, whose careers were strongly influenced by Chatham House and war service in the intelligence and propaganda agencies. By the 1960s their expertise was widely recognized and some, like Wiskemann, gained positions in universities where degree programs in IR and contemporary history were slowly spreading and achieving legitimacy. Wiskemann got her first real academic job when she was fifty-nine years old as Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at Edinburgh. In her different roles she enjoyed a great deal of success but in none of the realms in which she operated—journalism, government service, and academia—did she enjoy the same opportunities as men, and she encountered barriers and sometimes outright obstruction. Blinded in one eye by a botched surgery, she became increasingly fearful of going completely blind; terrified of losing her autonomy and independence, she took her own life.