The Typewriter and the Guillotine : An American Journalist, a German Serial Killer, and Paris on the Eve of WWII

Paris between the World Wars was a glittering, dazzling world, and no one knew it better than pioneering American journalist Janet Flanner, the Paris correspondent for The New Yorker. But Jazz Age Paris was also a dark and dangerous world, with a weakened economy, terrifying political violence and rising crime lurking behind its sophisticated facade. Mark Braude’s The Typewriter and the Guillotine: An American Journalist, a German Serial Killer, and Paris on the Eve of WWII examines how this duality reflected French society before WWII by intertwining Flanner’s story with the life and crimes of Eugen Weidmann, a serial killer living in the most glamorous city in the world. If Flanner represents Parisian sophistication, Weidmann symbolizes France’s growing fascism and corruption. Braude examines in great detail not only Flanner’s many adventures and love affairs, but also how her early reporting focused on high society, art, food and wine—pretty much everything except the volatile and violent situation in France. Against this backdrop, Braude artfully weaves in increasingly detailed episodes from Weidmann’s life, from his withdrawn and emotionally isolated childhood in Germany to his ignominious death as the last person in France publicly executed by guillotine. Weidmann’s violence, racism and sociopathy reflect the growing threat of Nazism and totalitarianism, which seeps into Flanner’s increasingly politicized reporting even while she strives to cover his 1939 trial objectively. The Typewriter and the Guillotine is successful on many levels, including reintroducing Janet Flanner to new readers. Through her work for The New Yorker, Flanner was arguably one of the 20th century’s most influential writers, but she is not as well known as she deserves to be. The true crime elements of the book are extremely effective. Braude uses Weidmann’s point of view, making the crimes seem not only inevitable but necessary, resulting in a deliciously uncomfortable moral experience for the reader. Most especially, The Typewriter and the Guillotine does an excellent job of using compelling individual stories to explain seminal historical events. France fell in large part because it had been weakened and corrupted by the same forces that made Weidmann a serial killer. By the time Flanner fully recognizes those dangers, it is too late. And the war that follows is not only inevitable, but necessary.