THE DRAGON FROM CHICAGO

A biography of Sigrid Schultz (1893-1980), who reported from Germany from the 1920s to the end of World War II.

Toler, a translator and author of Heroines of Mercy Street, provides an adept, engaging portrait of her subject. Schultz was born in Chicago, the daughter of a Norwegian painter and his German-born wife. Brought up in a cosmopolitan community, she was fluent in French and German by the time her family moved to Europe in 1901. After a spell in Germany, where her father had several commissions, they settled in Paris. She traveled widely, attended classes at the Sorbonne, and added Norwegian and Italian to her stock of languages. In 1913, the family moved to Berlin. When World War I broke out, her father’s commissions dried up and she taught English and French to wealthy families to pay the bills. Then, in 1919, Chicago Tribune reporter Dick Little offered her a job as interpreter and cub reporter in the paper’s Berlin office. Schultz accompanied him to interviews, connecting with important people who became valuable sources when she began writing her own stories. She proved adept at dodging the gatekeepers—and later, the Nazi censors—to get the facts. In 1926, she was appointed chief of the Tribune’s Berlin office, a position from which she reported on the rise of Hitler. By 1941, the growing war forced her to return to Chicago. After D-Day, she became a war correspondent for McCall’s Magazine and was among the first reporters to see the concentration camps following liberation. After the war, she tried finding other writing work but never recovered her early success—partly because of poor health. Still, as Toler makes amply clear, she left a brilliant firsthand account of a dramatic era in 20th-century history.

A fascinating portrait of a trailblazing reporter who was an eyewitness to history.