Gellhorn's Hope (or, Why I Wrote This Book)

From 2001-2005, I taught an undergraduate course on American war correspondence. In a unit on World War II reporting that included Ernie Pyle, A. J. Liebling, Edward R. Murrow, and John Hersey, the perennial favorite among the students, the journalist whose work they admired most, was Martha Gellhorn. Sixty years after she wrote it, her article on Dachau knocked them out.

From Caroline Moorehead’s excellent 2005 biography, I learned that seeing Dachau changed Gellhorn. She said it was like walking off a cliff, her hope and belief in humanity shattered.

I read her collected letters in 2014, and fell in love with Gellhorn’s voice: her wit and pathos. Dachau hung over her like a fog, pervasive but indistinct. I read her collected journalism and all her published novels and stories, including Point of No Return, which ends at Dachau, and The Honeyed Peace, a collection of stories on returning home after the war. What did it mean to have lost hope when you adopt a child, write another dozen books, and live another 50 years?

Meanwhile, I had been practicing yoga since 1999, and became a teacher. In 2015, I began to study the use of yoga to treat trauma survivors, and these two disparate interests began to converge.

Gellhorn’s famous anger, her drinking and drug use, incessant travel, difficult relationships, and fractured and intrusive memories were well known. I don’t know what I had been looking for as evidence of how Dachau changed her, but Martha Gellhorn suffered every major diagnostic criterion for trauma. Dachau was her tipping point, the culmination of many years of witnessing atrocity.

I began to envision a book that explored how Gellhorn came to be such a fighter for democracy, and the price she paid for it. I gained access to her unpublished work and letters, and discovered that in the last 25 years of her life, after the Vietnam War was over and the language of trauma became more accessible, she began to see the contours of her injury. She read about Vietnam veterans and researched the treatment of childhood sexual assault survivors. At nearly 80, she started a novel about a Mrs. Farnham who lives an elegant and fascinating life but has seen a lot of suffering, and sets out to explore why her memory is terrible and she’s such an addict and emotional wreck. On a beach walk early one morning just as this poignant and promising work was underway, Gellhorn was raped, and she abandoned it.

When she first left Dachau, Gellhorn felt that something had changed in the world, that the Nazis had destroyed the promise of western civilization, and that it was up to her and everyone else to adjust to this new reality. Cynical correspondent friends had long teased her for do-goodism, for her Progressive family and New Deal bona fides. Given mass genocide, she tried to set it aside, to check her compassion as vestigial or foolish, even as she continued to rail against fascism and disdained all governments as evil. It was the only work she felt suited for, or found worth doing, and she said it was better than silence. At age 85, she reported on the murder of street children in Brazil.

Dachau did terrible damage to Gellhorn’s faith and hope, but failed to extinguish her passion for justice. Her audacious voice, strong with compassion and outrage, carries the hard-earned wisdom of a survivor.