Oliver Lubrich is professor of comparative German literature at the University of Bern. He has a wide variety of published studies, ranging from William Shakespeare to Alexander von Humboldt, of which he is an expert. His interest in international testimonies about Nazi Germany led him to value the travel diaries of a young John F. Kennedy through Europe before and after World War II. The secret diary of John F. Kennedy (Vegueta) is fundamental to understanding how a president of the United States and, by extension, any leader of an advanced democracy, confronts autocracies.
What led you to study Kennedy’s travel diaries?
Several years ago I realized that there is a lack of a general study of the international writers who witnessed German totalitarianism, people, for example, like Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre, Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett, and Virginia Woolf. I thought the reason was the lack of interest among the first post-war German generation in confronting other people’s perceptions of their behavior during the war. In many cases, foreign witnesses are more objective and honest than German witnesses in acknowledging their own fascination with Nazism. Now, two or three generations later, we can use the German case as a paradigm of how people in other countries perceive a dictatorship when they see it up close.
John F. Kennedy traveled to Europe and Germany for the first time in 1937 with his friend Le Billings. Then he returned in 1939 and 1945. Weren’t these trips known?
Yes. They have been mentioned in several biographies and studies about Kennedy, but in a very tangential way. He kept a diary about those trips and the material is very interesting because it is not altered. Kennedy never edited the texts and never published them. They are the raw material of his perception of the Europe of those years. They contain many errors, but they are the starting point for the training of a student of politics who will end up being president of the United States.
On his first trip in 1937, he was attracted to fascism. He goes so far as to claim that he is good for the Italians and the Germans. He also arrives in the French Basque Country in search of news about Spain.
Look for information. He goes to the border and talks to refugees and Francoists. When you don’t have much information about what has happened, you are very impressionable. He recognizes it. He is very honest. He talks to a Francoist and he thinks he is right, but then he talks to a Republican refugee and changes his mind. It is very interesting to see how a 20-year-old young man, based on these experiences, is developing intellectually. The same thing that is repeated in Italy and Germany. At first glance, they seem like orderly and clean countries. Fascism seems to be doing well for them. But then, as he talks to more people, he develops critical thinking. The same thing happens to other witnesses of German totalitarianism, people who arrive in Germany with positive prejudices and then, seeing, for example, the persecution of the Jews, change them. It must also be taken into account that Kennedy not only travels as a tourist, but he also talks to many people and, above all, reads.
The second trip is very interesting because it coincides with the outbreak of the war. During the previous weeks, Kennedy was in favor of confronting Hitler, while his father Joseph, who was then ambassador to the United Kingdom, preferred that the United States stay out of it.
Yes, Kennedy is in Munich in 1939 and the disagreement with his father is very interesting because it puts us in the family context. Joseph Kennedy today would be very close to Trumpism, America First, anti-Semitism and isolationism. But his son distances himself from this ideology. His studies at Harvard, the trip in 1937 and the same one in 1939 lead him to get involved, to look for a solution to avoid war. Years later, when he is president, he will find himself in similar situations, with the construction of the Berlin Wall and the Cuban missile crisis. In Europe he learned what dictatorships were. It is in Germany in 1939 when Kennedy learns to confront a totalitarian regime and at the same time try to avoid a war with catastrophic consequences.
The third trip is at the end of the war, in 1945. His father arranges for him to be in Potsdam, where the victors design the new world order, and there he meets people as important as Stalin, Eisenhower and Truman.
That situation is very extraordinary. It seems almost fiction. Young Kennedy goes as a reporter, although he will not publish anything. The experience now is very different. It is no longer just about seeing how a dictatorship works, as in the 1937 trip, or how to avoid a war – 1939 trip -, but about how to manage the post-war, how to treat the defeated and organize the new order. In Potsdam he understands that there is already a new conflict between the United States and Russia.
He considers how to control Germany, especially its technology.
Yes, it talks about how to manage Germany so that it is no longer a threat. He is above all concerned about Berlin, a city completely destroyed in 1945.
It is surprising that he did not mention this experience when he was president.
I am surprised that he did not say anything when he went to Berlin in 1963 and uttered that famous phrase “I am a Berliner”. You and I would have done it. He could have said that he was there before and after the war, that he witnessed the destruction and the reconstruction.
You cannot understand Kennedy’s presidency, his strategy during the Cold War, without knowing these initiation trips.
I think so. If we know that he had an intimate relationship with Germany when he was young, we understand better that when he was president he said that he was a Berliner. These trips are illustrative of how experience leads to understanding, of how difficult it is to have an adequate perception of events when you are a direct witness of them and lack information. The mistakes and naivety he demonstrated early on are significant.
They are not very different from those that we can commit when we now visit a dictatorship and are not able to decipher it. It happened to us with Putin’s Russia in 2008 and 2014. In some way, young Kennedy’s diaries also talk about our failures.
You are absolutely right. We have had a complex with Russia. We longed for a peaceful vision of Putin that did not correspond to reality. We did not know how to see it and now we must be critical of our attitude in 2008 and 2014.
