Journalism must sometimes be about telling us very nasty facts about what is happening now as well as what motivates nasty people. But it’s main insight is how little we wanted to know about evil at the time and how quickly we want to forget. It has great lessons for anyone interested in the future of our continent and the nature of Western civilisation. I am currently reading Keith Lowe’s Savage Continent, the deeply disturbing account of the appalling and very widespread atrocities and suffering in Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War. ![]() It may reaffirm our values as well as challenge them. They may be exceptional but we can learn both about what conditions those individuals as well as society as a whole. I have always been sure that we need journalism like Sereny’s that forces us to look in detail at the people who transgress our social norms in the most disturbing ways. She has written extensively for London’s Daily Telegraph magazine, the Sunday Times, and the Independent, as well as for Die Zeit and Le Nouvel Observateur. Yet look at the problems faced by journalists trying to understand ‘terrorists’, for example. The biography of Franz Stangl, commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp - a classic and utterly compelling study of evil. Gitta Sereny was one of Europe’s foremost journalists with a special interest and expertise in the Third Reich. Gitta attributed her fascination with evil to her own experiences of Nazism as a child of central Europe in the early 20th century. She passed away in England aged 91, following a long illness. I wonder if we would still find this kind of journalism shocking? It seems that nothing is taboo. Gitta Sereny was an Austrian born journalist, biographer and historian. Likewise, her book on child killer Mary Bell in the 1970s shocked a British public who still want murdering youths to be punished for their whole lives. Gitta Sereny Into that darkness : From mercy killing to mass murder Hardcover Januby Gitta Sereny (Author) 208 ratings See all formats and editions Hardcover 19.65 11 Used from 15.58 2 New from 241.05 Paperback 16.79 1 Used from 16. ![]() Her interview and biography of a Nazi concentration camp commandant Franz Stangl and leading Nazi Albert Speer were particularly challenging because those events were still part of people’s lives, as they were of hers, growing up in Nazi Germany before fleeing to America before the Second World War. I say ‘extraordinary’ because during her working life it was unusual for people to write about ‘evil’ people in a way that sought to understand rather than simply condemn. ![]() Gitta Sereny who died this week, was an extraordinary journalist who wrote books about horrid people.
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