Becoming a Journalist

Abstract This chapter examines Wiskemann’s early life and her years as an undergraduate and doctoral student at Newnham College, Cambridge, where her social circle was the younger generation of Bloomsbury intellectuals, including Julian Bell, William Empson, and Julian Trevelyan. Her hopes for an academic career were thwarted by the downgrading of her doctoral thesis (the result, she believed, of her supervisor’s gender prejudice) and a scandal that resulted in Empson’s dismissal from Cambridge. She began traveling to Berlin, became part of a stellar group of foreign correspondents, and reinvented herself as a journalist. Reporting on the Weimar Republic’s final years and the rise of Nazism for the New Statesman and Nation and other periodicals and newspapers, she rapidly gained a national reputation. The chapter examines German politics 1930–35 and the milieu of foreign journalists in Central Europe, and suggests that she is a likely model for Christopher Isherwood’s hard-driving reporter Helen Pratt in Mr. Norris Changes Trains (1935).