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Notes
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For many refugees, including a number of foreign
correspondents of European background who had escaped from Austria and were looking for a safe haven, that their American friends were ready to assist them.
This was the case with Marcel Fodor, who, after his escape to the United States was able to find work thanks to Dorothy Thompson
and John Gunther, who were both indebted to his professional expertise generously given in the early 1920s and early 1930s respectively. Thompson first installed the Fodors at Twin Farms in Vermont, and then, jointly with Gunther, sponsored a lectureship for Marcel Fodor in Illinois – at the Lewis Institute, soon to be part of the Illinois Institute of Technology.
Among the numerous intellectuals of Jewish background who needed help were also the Schwarzwalds, whose plight soon became known to Dorothy Thompson, years after numerous other obligations had led to a break in their correspondence. The consequences of the catastrophe of the Anschluss for the Schwarzwalds, which Eugenia Schwarzwald observed from Denmark, where she had gone, were related to Thompson
by their common friend, the Danish writer Karin Michaelis. The ailing
Hemme Schwarzwald had to endure the ensuing misery, before being allowed to leave Austria for Switzerland, where he was united with Eugenia. The plea to Thompson for help was not ignored, and she initiated a collection for a fund for the Schwarzwalds, promising a generous sum herself.
The involvement of several friends on behalf of the Schwarzwalds on both sides of the Atlantic represents a moving document of the ties of friendship engendered in much happier times. It once again illustrates the crucial role of the transatlantic links and networks for individuals in jeopardy in Central Europe in those years.
Thompson was also ready to finance the projects of exiled writers, such as Fritz Kortner, with whom she even wrote a play and enjoyed an intimate personal relationship.
In 1943, she married her third husband, the émigré Czech
painter Maxim Kopf, who had merely eked out a living before.
Thompson at that point also extended generous hospitality to the
dramatist Carl Zuckmayer and his wife Alice, who was a former pupil of the Schwarzwald school, first in her apartment in New York and later in the neighborhood of her Twin Farms in Vermont.
Thompson, who had built three summer cottages on a nearby lake in Vermont, similarly helped indigent Princess Anna Schwarzenberg, with whom she had been in touch at least since 1928. She employed Countess Hilda von Auersperg as her secretary, who later became the wife of the exiled Baron Louis de Rothschild, following his arrival in the USA after his preliminary exile in Brazil.
Thompson’s friends such as John Gunther, who
noticed the concentration of émigrés from Central Europe in Thompson’s neighborhood, were in the habit of calling the region the “Sudeten Vermont.”
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