Элизабет Вискман: Жизнь журналиста и историка

English journalist and historian
the billionaire

Elizabeth Meta Wiskemann (13 August 1899 – 5 July 1971) was an English journalist and historian of Anglo German ancestry. She was an intelligence officer in World War II, and the Montagu Burton Chair in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh.

Wiskemann was born in Sidcup, a suburb of London, England, on 13 August 1899. Her mother, Emily Burton, belonged to a prosperous family of local merchants, and her father, Heinrich Odomar Hugo Wiskemann, a businessman from Hesse Cassel in Germany, had emigrated to England in order to avoid being conscripted into the Prussian army. She was educated at Notting Hill High School, where she won multiple academic prizes, as well as participating in debating, sports, and drama. She received a scholarship to read History at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she obtained a first in History in 1921. During this time, her family suffered several misfortunes, with her mother dying during an influenza pandemic in 1918, and her father filing for bankruptcy in 1922. Her contemporaries and friends at Cambridge included many linked to the Bloomsbury set, including Ferenc Bekassy, Rupert Brooke, Julian Bell, Michael Redgrave, and Kathleen Raine. In 1923, her father returned to Germany, where he spent the rest of his life. Supporting herself, Elizabeth Wiskemann briefly worked as a teacher in a girls' boarding school, before beginning her doctoral dissertation, winning a research scholarship from the Gilchrist Educational Trust. She initially made good progress, but missed a research fellowship from Newnham College, receiving instead a small research grant. Her dissertation in later stages was supervised by H. W. V. Temperley, and received only a D. Litt. instead of a Ph. D. Wiskemann attributed this to Temperley's documented hostility towards female students, noting that other members of the examining committee were inclined to award the Ph. D. but could not oppose him. Her dissertation examined diplomatic relations between the Vatican, Britain, and France in 1860s, drawing extensively on archives in all three locations. Consequently, she traveled extensively in Europe during these years, taking up tutoring work to fund her travels.

In autumn of 1930, Wiskemann visited Berlin, staying for a period of nine months, to continue her historical research and improve her command over the German language. Over the next six years, she divided her time between Cambridge, where she worked as a tutor in history at Newnham College, and Germany, using the time to travel through Europe as well. She socialised there with Phyllis Dobb, Arthur Koestler, Erich Mendelsohn, and George Grosz, recounting her experiences in her memoir, The Europe I Saw, as well as in letters to friends, including Julian Bell. In Berlin, she worked as a translator and English teacher, preparing documents for the British Embassy and tutoring German diplomats in English. During this time, she closely observed political developments, witnessing in particular the rise of Nazism, and her interest was enabled by a friendship with the journalist Frederick A. Voigt, who was reporting for the Guardian. in 1932, she began writing for the New Statesman, reporting on German politics and warning about the dangers of Nazism, to which she was firmly opposed, and her writings were widely read. The book, a historical account, received praise, as "indispensable introduction to the closer study of the problem of Czechoslovakia," in International Affairs, and " an excellent account of the relations between Czechs and the Germans in Habsburg times," in the American Historical Review. The chief limitation of this work was Wiskemann's limited grasp of Czech, and the book also faced some opposition from the British Foreign Office, who saw it as espousing Czech causes. It also received substantial attention in the press, as Lord Runciman, delegated to mediate in Czechoslovakia, was photographed by media sources reading the book as he left for Prague. Following the publication of this book, Wiskemann engaged in a lecture tour, visiting the United States of America, while continuing to publish on issues of central European politics. In New York, she accepted an invitation from Oxford University Press' office to write an account of German politics after the Munich conference, publishing Undeclared War in 1939. The book focused on the impact of the Third Reich on Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria, and was written in three months. Noting the haste, the historian R. W. Seton Watson nonetheless called it a "valuable and welcome contribution to the contemporary history of south eastern Europe". Richard Coventry, writing for The New Statesman, called it "the best book of the year so far as European politics are concerned." After World War II, Wiskemann began her next project, on Italian political history. She relocated to Rome, supporting herself through journalism, and published two books on Italian political history. She first published Italy (1947) for Oxford University Press, a brief overview of the country's politics as part of a larger series for the publisher. In 1949, she published a pioneering study of the relationship between Hitler and Mussolini, titled The Rome Berlin Axis, drawing from their personal papers and letters as well as eyewitness accounts. The book received positive reviews and was widely read, becoming a standard text in reading lists on this period with historian Hugh Trevor Roper describing it as "a definitive work of contemporary history.”, although it was criticised by A. J. P Taylor for being, in his view, too sympathetic to the Italian point of view. In 1953, Wiskemann was invited by historian Hugh Seton Watson to write a volume about the population of Germans displaced from the eastern German border in 1945, and she published Germany’s Eastern Neighbours: Problems Relating to the Oder Neisse Line and the Czech Frontier Region, the first English language book to address the subject, in 1956. In this work she rejected post war German demands to its former territories now being part of Poland, and concluded that in the past territorial gains brought out the "worst elements" in Germany, she wrote that nobody wanted German minorities back in Eastern Europe, considering their record in the past. During the 1950s, she continued to publish, writing a history of the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung, a memoir titled The Europe I Saw (1968), and directing a research project on the territorial dispute in Trieste for the Carnegie Foundation. From 1958 to 1961 she was Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at University of Edinburgh, becoming the first woman to hold a chair in any field of study at the university. and was a tutor in Modern History at the University of Sussex from 1961 until 1964. During her time as an intelligence officer, Wiskemann remained closely involved with German resistance members, passing on information about the Holocaust to British intelligence officials despite receiving instructions that she was not to report on the subject, receiving a letter in 1944 instructing her that they were "not interested at this stage in the war in German atrocities in the occupied territories or in the shootings of Jews in Poland and Hungary." As public attitude changed in 1945, Wiskemann's reports of the genocide of Jewish people gained more attention. After the end of World War II, Wiskemann was invited to remain in intelligence work, primarily to stay in Germany and work in 're education' of German citizens. She refused the offer, and returned to working in academia and journalism.

Wiskemann never married, but had a wide circle of friends which at one time another included Leonard Woolf, F. A. Voigt and Guglielmo Alberti. At Cambridge, she had a brief affair with the poet William Empson, during which the discovery of contraceptives in his rooms at the university (in breach of university rules) led to his expulsion from the university. Later, travelling in Europe after completing her D. Litt, she dated the poet Julian Bell, who was then living in Paris, but the affair did not survive her return to England. While working in Switzerland as an intelligence agent, she was in a relationship with Harry Bergholz, a German scholar who had fled to Switzerland after being suspected of anti Nazi activity, and made efforts to assist him in his status as a refugee, and they maintained a close friendship long after the relationship ended. She was also romantically involved with Marchese Francesco Antinori, an Italian diplomat and official who had acted as a liaison between Hitler and Mussolini, and had provided information about them to British intelligence.

In 1955, Wiskemann began experiencing difficulties with her vision, and in 1959, underwent a cataract surgery which was unsuccessful, resulting in the loss of vision in one eye. Increasingly concerned by the loss of her vision, and with it, her independence, she wrote to friends, including Leonard Woolf, about her concerns, particularly her increasingly difficulty with reading. She died by suicide at her home in London on 5 July 1971, taking a lethal amount of barbiturates in addition to attempting to gas herself.