parts of the world as well as history from the other side of the battlefield, the gender line, or the color bar. Her work has appeared in American Scholar, Aramco World, MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, Ms., and Time.com. Her books of popular history for adults and children include Heroines of Mercy Street: The Real Nurses of the Civil War (a nonfiction companion to the PBS historical drama Mercy Street), Through the Minefields, and Women Warriors: An Unexpected History.
Toler applied the "Page 99 Test" to her latest book, The Dragon from Chicago: The Untold Story of an American Reporter in Nazi Germany, and reported the following:
Page 99 of The Dragon From Chicago begins with the opening of the German Reichstag in October, 1930. The Nazi Party now held the second largest number of seats in the Reichstag and their entrance into the chamber was accompanied by riots on the streets and the threat of battle within the Reichstag building.Visit Pamela D. Toler's website.
A significant part of the page describes the broader context of those riots, how Sigrid Schultz reported on political riots in Berlin, and the way those reports were received by the Tribune’s editorial desk in Chicago. Here is what the reader would find:The violence that accompanied the opening of the Reichstag set the tone for the months to come. Riots on the streets were so routine and yet so bloody, that political parties often arranged for the presence of a Red Cross unit when organizing a demonstration. According to an official report that Schultz shared with her readers, in Prussia alone the police were called out to quell riots 2,494 times in the twelve-month period from March 1930 to March 1931.The passage is a critical one in the book and would give the reader a good sense of what the book is about. Together, the rise of the Nazis and the fall of Weimar were the big story of Sigrid Schultz’s career, and much of the book deals with her experiences dealing with and reporting on the Nazis. It was dangerous and challenging work. She had to sift through lies and propaganda to find the truth of a story. She devised ways to get her stories out of Germany despite increasingly stringent controls on foreign correspondents. More than once she was called into Gestapo headquarters because of a story she had written.
Given the wealth of material, Schultz chose which riots she re- ported on with care. She often used them to explain the larger political and social context of Depression-era Germany. Using this technique, she described heckling on the floor of the Reichstag, explained Chancellor Brüning’s coercive and ineffective measures for reducing the costs of living and production, and introduced Tribune readers to the six million men who belonged to paramilitary organizations controlled by political parties, including the Reichsbanner, made up of members of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), Hitler’s Brownshirts, and the Steel Helmet, an organization of World War I veterans that began as monarchists and nationalists but became aligned with the Nazis over time. (The regular army was limited to one hundred thousand men by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.) She gave equal consideration to violence at the hands of Reds and Fascists. She also gave her readers glimpses of the National Socialist Party’s growth as a political force.
Despite the restraint Schultz showed in choosing which riots to report on, the Tribune’s editorial desk feared Chicago readers had a limited appetite for such stories. In December 1930, George Scharschug, who had replaced Joseph Pierson as cable editor, followed a compliment on her story on riots related to the Berlin showing of All Quiet on the Western Front with the statement: “Berlin riots are becoming almost a joke. They happen so frequently.”
Once her stories reached the Tribune’s offices in Chicago, Schultz faced a different type of challenge: no matter how important events were in Berlin they weren’t necessarily the most important news from the perspective of Chicago. Page 99 deals with a moment when the Chicago editorial desk directly questioned whether their readers would care.
The Page 99 Test: Women Warriors: An Unexpected History.
--Marshal Zeringue
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