Curiosity: A Guest Post by Mark Braude

Gripping history that reads like fiction, this is the unbelievable true story of an indomitable journalist. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Mark Braude on writing The Typewriter and the Guillotine.

Sometimes a new book idea comes because you can’t get someone from your last book out of your bones. For me, that was Janet Flanner, who’d threatened to take over my most recent book, Kiki Man Ray, set in the art world of 1920s Paris. Flanner seemed to be everywhere in Paris at once. And she was just so magnetic, funny, sometimes downright rude, always insightful. I wanted to keep reading her work.

As I explored her half-century of writing from Paris, one moment jumped out at me. In the 1930s she was forced to reinvent herself. She went from writing mainly about art and culture to having to confront the dark realities of authoritarianism, street violence, and economic crisis. I wanted to see how she navigated that reinvention, writing her way through the overlapping crises of her age.

And then, by chance, came a second figure, whose life intersected with Flanner’s and whose own path to Paris in some strange ways echoed hers. I already knew about the German con man and killer Eugen Weidmann, but only that he’d been the last person to be publicly executed in France, for killing six people. It turned out that one of the last pieces Flanner wrote before fleeing France for America in 1939 concerned Weidmann’s execution that June.

I discovered that she’d written several times about Weidmann’s crimes and capture, and about his wild trial. She saw that his story, which connected to many other stories, from that of his first victim, a young Jewish woman from Brooklyn, to the colorful anti-fascist Corsican lawyer who tried, brilliantly, to save him from the scaffold, provided her a path through which to try to grapple with this unfathomable evil she was seeing rising up all around her in Europe.

When the Nazis occupied Paris they’d tried to destroy all official record of Weidmann. But a lawyer hid them throughout the war, and so there I was, eight decades later, looking at thousands of pages of police reports, witness statements, trial transcripts. Weidmann’s case turned out to be even more twisted—and politically and historically significant—than I’d thought. I’ve never had a research process as rewarding as this one.

For Flanner, by reading through her correspondence with The New Yorker, I had the great delight of being a witness to all the small victories and office dramas of a now-iconic magazine in its infancy—a time when Flanner would crow to her editor about seeing a whopping five copies selling out at her local kiosk. “Ah, fame, fame!,” she joked then.

The most joyful and challenging work came through exploring Flanner’s and her partner Solita Solano’s papers at the Library of Congress. One piece of archival material stopped me in my tracks: Flanner’s Press Pass to the 1935 Nuremberg Rally, which she attended as a guest of the Nazi Party. On the back of this terrifying document, with its eagles and swastikas, I found Flanner’s gently sloping cursive, listing the names of various flowers. What must have been going through her mind at that moment? Perhaps she was planning what to plant at her friend’s farm that coming spring.  This is the kind of puzzling evidence that can only come to light through human hands and eyes engaging with a physical object – the reason I so love archival research.

The problem now is that Flanner remains locked up in my bones. I can’t shake that voice of hers, that curiosity, that wit, that high style. So the next book will have to wait until someone else pushes their way in.