Last Call at the Hotel Imperial

Prologue

September 1939

The Nazi spies were watching from the shore as the passengers boarded the Dutch liner in Southampton, England, bound for New York. The war was a few weeks old, and every transatlantic ship was full. England would be bombed from the air that was a certainty. Prepare for poison gas attacks, the British government had instructed its populace. To accommodate the crowds scrambling for berths, the ship s crew had set up cots in the gymnasium and filled the Delft-tiled swimming pool with makeshift bunks.
 
At the harbor, newly minted security officials, zealous in their duties, were screening every traveler. Overzealous, judged some of the passengers, especially the well-heeled ones, as the guards picked through their valises and badgered them with questions about their plans abroad and their acquaintances in America. The security officials had been warned about smugglers and saboteurs trying to get on board. At this rate, it would be hours before all the passengers had made their way through the long lines onto the ship.
 
The name of the boat, the Nieuw Amsterdam, was painted on the side of the hull in huge white letters. The Dutch, for now, were still a neutral power. Would it be enough to dissuade a trigger-happy German U-boat commander? That was the subject to be joked or fretted about, according to one s disposition as the first-class passengers settled into the smoking room to calm their nerves.
 
On its maiden transatlantic crossing the previous year, the Holland-America Line had boasted that its new flagship was a Ship of Peace, built with luxury not conversion to military use in mind. The irony was already apparent well before the Nieuw Amsterdam left Rotterdam. In March 1938, the Third Reich s soldiers had marched over the Austrian border. In Munich six months later, the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, sacrificed the Czechs to Hitler in the name of peace for our time. When it came to wishful

Deborah Cohen

As effervescent, for more than four hundred pages, as its winsome and hyperactive characters, and it blends scholarly attention to ideas like psychoanalysis and Wilsonian liberal internationalism with novelistic renderings of these writers dizzying trajectories abroad. The New Yorker
 
As they follow Vladimir Putin s invasion of Ukraine, Americans are getting an inkling of what it felt like eight decades ago when fascist dictators were on the brink of plunging Europe into war. . . . Back then the best source of news was an intrepid band of young American newspaper correspondents whose exclusive dispatches brought home word of the coming cataclysm. . . . The book is a model of its kind. The Wall Street Journal
 
Deborah Cohen has done a remarkably powerful, enlightening and entertaining job of bringing back to life a quartet of long gone reporters. . . . Cohen writes with easy authority and a powerful narrative drive. This is a great book about great and flawed people caught up in a world going mad. Chicago Tribune

Riveting . . . With the breezy scene-setting of a party reporter, the rigor of a scholar, and deep empathy for the humans behind these historic bylines, Cohen makes the correspondents come alive. Air Mail News

Ambitious . . . a distressing, immersive recounting of how denial, passivity and pacification aided the rise of authoritarian regimes. New York Times Book Review

As intimate and gripping as a novel, this brilliant book vividly conveys what it felt like to live through the shocking crises of the thirties and forties as they were occurring, when nearly anything could happen next. Larissa MacFarquhar, author of Strangers Drowning 

In this sterling book, Deborah Cohen follows a remarkable group of now mostly forgotten reporters as they try to make sense of a world turned upside down. The result is a shrewd and vivid work of history.