The Hitler Diary Forgeries: The Bonanza Scoop and a Need to Believe?

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Creative Writing, International Relations, Literary & Linguistics, Regional History, Society & Culture

Hitler-Tagebücher, the discovery of diaries, hitherto unknown, claimed to be written by Adolf Hitler, the most talked about man of the 20th century, who wouldn’t want to find out more about a scoop with such history revising ramifications?

The news, when it surfaced in the early 1980s, certainly caused quite a sensation internationally. After eminent historian Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre) declared the diaries legit on a first sighting (though later he walked that back a bit), newspaper editors in Germany and the UK unhesitatingly bought the ruse. Rupert Murdoch, after forking out £250,000 to buy the serialisation rights from Der Stern magazine for the diaries, ordered their immediate serialisation in the Sunday Times.

Trevor-Roper: his damaged academic reputation never really recovered from the humiliating affair

With everyone so enthusiastically “gung-ho” about them, the spoiler was that the diaries were fakes, the work of one Konrad Kujau, an East German petty crim and recidivist forger. Kujau’s “Hitler Diaries” were acquired by a ‘Naziphile’ journalist with a bent for Third Reich memorabilia, Gerd Heidemann❶, who was the go-between in selling the diary rights to Stern for somewhere in the region of $2–$3 M. In the transaction Heidemann purloined something considerably north of a tidy sum for himself.

Gerd Heidemann, subsequently jailed for fraud for his part in the forgeries ▼

An incredible lack of credibility
On the face of it the Hitler forgeries had the hole-ridden texture of Swiss cheese. The German Federal Archives eventually pronounces them “clumsy fakes” after two weeks of commotion, described as a “14-day historical mystery-thriller, in which experts changed their minds, Jewish leaders were horrified at an apparent attempt to whitewash Hitler”❷ (Schwarz and van der Vat). There was a “thoroughly incomplete vetting of the diaries” (McGrane). In the flurry of activity as interested parties competed for the diaries, no one thought to test the ink, paper and string of the supposed ‘personal’ seals of the Führer (when three volumes in the form of small notebooks were eventually examined it was shown that they dated from after WWII – Kujau used modern paper which he stained with tea to give it an aged appearance!). Nor did they think to scrutinise the text of the diaries more closely – if they did they would have detected the plagiarism, Kujau copied (word for word) large chunks of a book on Hitler’s proclamations and speeches by Max Domarcus (McGrane).

▲ Some of Kujau’s handiwork (Photo: AFP/Getty Images)

Then there’s the handwriting which didn’t match, an oversight not immediately picked up on. Initially Kujau produced some 27 volumes of the ‘lost’ diaries…the sort of money these fetched was irresistibly tempting, suddenly Kujau ‘discovered’ a whole new vein of Hitler writings, a further 35 diaries and a third volume of Mein Kampf, alarm bells still didn’t ring❸.

Likewise, the simple fact that there had been absolutely no previous record of the diaries’ existence, in an area of historical research which has been so inexhaustibly and copiously trawled for decades, somehow escaped all of those with their eyes on the prize. Another clue missed was Kujau’s careless labelling of each volume ‘FH’ in Gothic letters rather than ‘AH’. The editors of Stern fatally failed to press Heidemann to divulge his source for the diaries, the employee only giving up the name of the known fraudster when the jig was virtually up. The catch-up forensics, when they came, quickly verified the bogus nature of the ‘documents’.

Konrad Kujau (got four-and-a-half years jail for his crime) ▼

Clarity comes with hindsight
Self-recrimination for such egregiously bad judgement followed. With hindsight Lord Dacre reproached himself for being seduced by the find of such a historical treasure…”I should have refused to give an opinion so soon” (Schwarz and van den Vat). 30 years on, Felix Schmidt, one of the three editors-in-chief at Stern ❹, reflected that the very thought that Hitler kept diaries triggered “a kind of collective insanity in the upper echelons Stern’s editorial offices”, adding that “delusional secrecy” and “illegitimate mystification” about the affair prevailed.

(Source: Business Insider)

There was in such an intoxicating atmosphere “simply too much money at stake for anyone to come to their senses”.(McGrane). Clearly the newspapers were blindsided by the dollar (and Deutschmark) signs dangling before their eyes, hence their inordinate haste to rush in where cooler and wiser heads would have proceeded with great caution❺.

Postwar German generation
A persuasive argument for why the participants were so easily duped comes from Die Zeit editor Giovanni di Lorenzo, who attributes their ready acceptance of the flimsy evidence for the diaries‘ authenticity to generational fixation with Hitler of those who lived through the Nazi era. This fascination, Lorenzo concludes, would have been unimaginable to later German generations (McGrane).

PostScript: Hitler Diaries on the celluloid screen
The celebrated hoax has been translated twice to the screen, the first a 1991 British mini-series based on Robert Harris’ book Selling Hitler with the same title (Alexei Sayle is a comfortable fit as the cheerful and uncomplicated ‘Conny’ Kujau). The second, a satirical German-made film, Schtonk!, released in 1992.

▲ Dictator diarists, courtesy of their ghostwriters

⌯⌯⌯ ⌯⌯⌯ ⌯⌯⌯ ⌯⌯⌯ ⌯⌯⌯ ⌯⌯⌯ ⌯⌯⌯ ⌯⌯⌯

❶ Heidemann’s devotion to Nazi memorabilia extended to purchasing the late Field Marshal Göring’s yacht

❷ in the diaries Hitler is incredulously depicted as being almost blissfully unaware of the atrocities committed against Jews

❸ Kujau sold his first faux Hitler diary to a collector in 1978

❹ all three summarily sacked for their failings

❺ the Sunday Times especially should have been treading warily given it had been scammed before in 1968 when it spent $250,000 trying to get its hands on the equally fraudulent “Mussolini Diaries”

୭ ˚ ୭ ˚ ୭ ˚

Bibliography:

‘Diary of the Hitler Diary Hoax’, Sally McGrane, The New Yorker, 25-Apr-2013, www.thenewyorker.com

‘Hitler Diaries proved to be forged — archive’, Walter Schwarz and Dan van den Vat, The Guardian, 07-May-1983, www.theguadian.com

‘The Hitler Diaries: How hoax documents became the most infamous fake news ever’, Adam Lusher, Independent, 05-May-2018, www.independent.co.uk

Being “Ern Malley”, the Avatar Bard of Croydon, NSW, 2132

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Creative Writing, Literary & Linguistics, Popular Culture

Every age produces its share of literary hoaxes, it’s a practice to deceive that has been around for ‘yonks’. A Irish hack writer back in the 18th century claimed to have discovered (and subsequently published) a ‘lost’ play purportedly penned by Shakespeare. Jonathan Swift dabbled in it in his time, and in recent times we have seen the surfacing of false claims of a ‘lost’ autobiography of Howard Hughes and the emergence of the so-called “Hitler Diaries”.

▲ Pranker J McAuley

The Antipodes’ most celebrated entrant in the canon of great literary hoaxes occurred in 1944. The perpetrators were two nondescript conservative young poets serving in the Australian army, (Lt.) James McAuley and (Cprl.) Harold Stewart (both Fort Street High old boys), who “shared an animus towards modern poetry” (Lehman). The two desk soldiers, intent on “deflat(ing) the egos of the pretentious literary avant-garde“𝟙, honed in on the most conspicuous target, Max Harris, Adelaide publisher of the modernist literary mag Angry Penguins.

▲ Pranker H Stewart

McAuley and Stewart’s prank𝟚 was to write to Harris pretending to be one “Ethel Malley” from Croydon NSW, informing him of unpublished poems written by her brother Ern, a working class soldier whose life had been cut tragically short. Harris, taken in by the fraud lock, stock and barrel, called “Ern’s poems” modernist gems and was only too eager to publish the 18 “Ern Malley” poems in a 1944 volume of Angry Penguins.   ⿻ ⿻ ⿻
▲ Cover art by Sidney Nolan

Malley’s “magnum opus“, entitled ‘The Darkening Ecliptic’, according to the hoaxers was written in a single afternoon in a random manner, a pastiche of fragments patched together from widely disparate sources of inspiration – Shakespeare, the classics, a dictionary, a book of  quotations, a tome on tropical hygiene, a US Army treatise on mosquito infestation…all mixed in together with snatches of McAuley and Stewart’s own poetry. Consisting of abstruse, flowery, high-sounding verse, to the minds of the hoaxers they were simply creating nonsensical, bad modern poetry:

❝ Though stilled to alabaster

This Ichthys shall swim

From the mind’s disaster

On the volatile hymn. ❞

𓂎𓂎𓂎

❝ The swung torch scatters seeds

In the umbelliferous dark ❞

𓂎𓂎𓂎

❝ I am still

the black swan of trespass on alien waters. ❞

𓂎𓂎𓂎

▲ Max Harris with his Heide Circle friends (Source: literaturelust.com)⿻⿻⿻

After a Sydney tabloid exposed the poems as a hoax and McAuley and Stewart fessed up to the deed, the fallout for Harris was caustic, the publisher was publicly humiliated for being duped so completely. And to add insult to injury, he was charged, tried and convicted on obscenity grounds (“indecent advertisements” the police prosecution charged). The trifecta of misfortune for wunderkind Harris was that his publication Angry Penguins folded within two years of the episode. Harris relocated to Melbourne, becoming a bookseller (fronting the Mary Martin’s chain of bookshops).

⿻⿻⿻

Afterwards Harris reproached himself for not picking up on the several clues McAuley and Stewart embedded in the text, eg, “It is necessary to understand that a poet may not exist”; (alluding to earlier incongruous stanzas) “these distractions were clues” (Parezanović). Interestingly though, Harris never backtracked from his initial evaluation that the ‘Darkening Ecliptic’ poems were works of genius𝟛. Despite being pilloried by the press he also elicited support from the literary world for his stance, most notably from influential critic Sir Herbert Read who contended that “it was possible to arrive at genuine art by spurious means – even if the motive of the writer was to perpetrate a travesty” (Lehman).

▲ No. 40 Dalmar St Croydon: the Malleys’ supposed address, actually the home of Harold Stewart⿻⿻⿻

Read’s anti-clockwise take on the controversy points to a debate that continues to this day over the merit or otherwise of the “Ern Malley” poems. Critics at home and abroad praised ‘The Darkening Ecliptic’ for its literary merit – including Robert Hughes. American poets John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch both lauded the poems’ surrealist qualities and even taught Ern’s work in their college literature classes (Wertheim). Even a poet of the highest calibre, TS Eliot, had positive words, wiring his support for the poems.

⿻⿻⿻

Ern Malley and the intentional fallacy
The Ern Malley controversy focuses attention on the issue of authorship. Sasha Grishin argues that where an author is “unknowable” and the author’s intentions irretrievable and perhaps irrelevant…once a work of art has been created…it is largely a fruitless task…to try to determine what an author may have intended by it“. Michel Foucault gives credence to this perspective: “we can imagine a culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an author” – a prime example of this is Homer, the unknowable but putative author of western literature’s ur-canon. ⿻⿻⿻
Nolan’s “Ned Kelly” series ▲

Like the poems or loathe them, the Malley hoax continues to fascinate critics and writers. US poet and critic David Lehman calls it “the greatest literary hoax of the 20th century”. Sidney Nolan (who contributed the cover artwork for the Ern Malley volume) credits the phenomenon with giving him the nerve to embark on his iconic “Ned Kelly” series of paintings. Garry Shead is another artist who produced his own idiosyncratic visual take on the Malley poems. In Peter Carey’s My Life as a Fake the Malley hoax influence—along with the influence of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein— shows itself in the novel’s character ‘Christopher Chubb’.

▲ Garry Shead’s Ern Malley ‘Petit Testament’ interpretation

A cause célèbre with staying power
Undeniably, the creation of the fictitious Ern Malley far surpassed the literary significance of his creators (Grishin). As Lehman noted, “Malley escaped the control of his creators (enjoying) an autonomous existence beyond and at odds with the critical and satirical intentions of McAuley and Stewart”.

◘◘◘◘◘◘◘◘◘◘◘◘◘◘◘◘◘◘◘◘◘◘◘◘◘◘◘

𝟙 Stewart late in life described the deception as “a wonderful jape (which would) absolutely slay Max Harris”

𝟚 some have suggested that the Australian anti-modern poet AD Hope was behind the prank to deceive Harris but Hope vigorously denied any involvement (McCulloch)

𝟛 Stephen Orr suggests that Harris’ eagerness to take the Ern Malley discovery at face value and run with it was in part due to his being on the lookout for something authentic and new to take the place of bush poetry in Angry Penguins, something “modern, anti-Adelaide, anti-Australia-as-a-talcum-scented tea shop”

°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°

Papers and published pieces consulted:

‘The Ern Malley Poetry Hoax – Introduction’, David Lehman, Jacket, 17 — June 2002, www.jacketmagazine.com

‘The Poet Who Never Was’, David Lehman, Washington Post, 06-Mar-1994, www.washingtonpost.com

‘Garry Shead and the Ern Malley series by Sasha Grishin, 2003’, Gagprojects, www.gagprojects.com

“It is Necessary to Understand That a Poet May Not Exist: The Case of Ern Malley”, Tijana Parezanović, SIC – A Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation, Dec 2012, www.sic-journal.org

‘The Fall and Rise of Ernest Lalor Malley: The Poet who wasn’t’, Christine Wertheim, Cabinet, Issue 33, Spring 2009, www.cabinetmagazine.org

‘In Dialogue with A.D. Hope – Dialogue Three Politics & Poetics of Australian Literature’, Ann McCulloch, Double Dialogues, Issue 5 2003, www.doubledialogues.com