Battles of a Bystander

(no dust jacket) [moderate external soiling, a little discoloration to spine, slight bumping to top corners, a touch of fraying to cloth at base of spine, one-time agent's rubber-stamp on ffep, small bookseller's rubber stamp (Bertrand Smith "Acres of Books," Long Beach, California) on front pastedown]. Reminiscences by a former Austrian newspaperman who by the 1930s had ended up in Hollywood, where he was also known as "Franz Schulz," and compiled a modest list of credits on mostly forgettable films. The most arresting piece in the book is the short opening chapter, "Mea Culpa," in which the author admits that "I could have killed Hitler before he unleashed the brown deluge." (Seems that he and a pal were driving through Weimar one day in February 1932, and happened across Adolf out walking his dog. They debated it a bit, then took a run at him with their car, but missed -- which the author attributed later to the fact that he couldn't have run over Hitler without also killing the dog, and he just couldn't do it.) Other chapters are: "An Old Man Dies" (about the author's experiences in World War I); "A Freak is Born" (about life in Berlin immediately after the war and in the 1920s, including some very unkind comments about the sex life of German men); "A Star Vanishes" (about his experiences in Moscow, where he had to go in the late 1920s to avoid some kind of scandal; and "A Planet Shakes" (about the political turmoil of the 1930s in various locations). (Somewhat curiously -- or at least I think so -- despite the fact that the author had numerous writing credits on German films throughout the 1920s and into the early 1930s, he seems to make no reference to this aspect of his life at all.)

Product Info

Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation

Year: (c.1941)

Type: Used

Binding: Hardcover

First Edition

Seller Info

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