Hitler’s home in Homes & Gardens

There’s an article in today’s New York Times, an article about another article, in Homes & Gardens. But follow that Homes & Gardens link and you won’t find any mention of this article, because it was published in 1938 and was about Adolf Hitler’s “Bavarian retreat”.

The predominant color scheme of Hitler’s “bright, airy chalet” was “a light jade green.” Chairs and tables of braided cane graced the sun parlor, and the Führer, “a droll raconteur,” decorated his entrance hall with “cactus plants in majolica pots.”

Such are the precious and chilling observations in an irony-free 1938 article in Homes & Gardens, a British magazine, on Hitler’s mountain retreat in the Bavarian Alps. A bit of arcana, to be sure, but one that has dropped squarely into the current debate over the Internet and intellectual property. This file, too, is being shared.

The resurrection of the article can be traced to Simon Waldman, the director of digital publishing at Guardian Newspapers in Britain, who says he was given a vintage issue of the magazine by his father-in-law. Noticing the Hitler spread, which doted on the compound’s high-mountain beauty (“the fairest view in all Europe”) at a time when the Nazis had already gobbled up Austria, Mr. Waldman scanned the three pages and posted them on his personal Web site last May. They sat largely unnoticed until about three weeks ago, when Mr. Waldman made them more prominent on his site and sent an e-mail message to the current editor of Homes & Gardens, Isobel McKenzie-Price, pointing up the article as a historical curiosity.

Ms. McKenzie-Price, citing copyright rules, politely requested that he remove the pages. Mr. Waldman did so, but not before other Web users had turned the pages into communal property, like so many songs and photographs and movies and words that have been illegally traded for more than a decade in the Internet’s back alleys.

Still, there was a question of whether the magazine’s position was a stance against property theft or a bit of red-faced persnicketiness.

Now this episode could be turned into yet another intellectual property comment fest, and if that’s what people want, fine, go ahead. But what interests me is the ineptness of the commercial Homes & Gardens response, their woeful neglect of a major business opportunity. An honest response from them about their reluctance to get involved in political judgements of the many and varied political people whose houses they have featured in their pages over the decades, and about all the other famous (and infamous) people whose homes they’ve written about over the years, together with a website pointing us all to their archives, might surely have served their commercial purposes far better, I would have thought.

This might have morphed into a discussion of the comparably fabulous pads occupied by other famous monster-criminal-dictators (including some featured in Homes & Gardens, of the exact degree of opulence/disgustingness of the homes of the Russian and Chinese Communist apparatchiks, but of their far greater reluctance (when compared to openly inegalitarian despots like Hitler) to reveal their living arrangements to the world, in the pages of such publications as Homes & Gardens. There might also have been some quite admiring further thoughts on the nice way that Hitler had arranged matters for himself, from the domestic point of view, the way the design of the house made maximum use of the view of the mountains, etc., etc. It does sound like a really nice place.

Such a discussion could surely have been combined with a robust defence by Homes & Gardens of their intellectual property rights under existing law, and in a way that might have been to their further commercial advantage. They might have simply reprinted the entire piece in a current issue, together with their current comments about it.

But no. Down go the shutters. And an opportunity to bring Homes & Gardens to the non-contemptuous attention of a whole new generation of readers, instead of to its contemptuous attention, is missed. Or is about to be missed. This posting of mine may now seem like a typical example of the media, in this case a blog, telling some wretched victim of a media frenzy (such as this story now surely is) that they “now have the opportunity to tell their side of the story”, to yet another bit of the same damned media, who will then slant that new bit of the story as cruelly as they have slanted every other bit of it. But that isn’t how this part of the media works. If you take the minimum bit of trouble you need to take (e.g. by setting up your own blog), you really can, these days, “tell your side of the story” in a manner over which you can have editorial control. Be interesting. Be honest. Don’t be boring. Follow rules like that, and you can influence all stories about you in a very big way, because any decent journalist will want to refer to anything you have to say, simply to prove that he is on top of the story.

The same new media world which makes it impossible for you to snuff out the original article (still less the media frenzy about the original article), no matter how much the law may be on your side, also makes it impossible for you to be silenced, unless you silence yourself.

As the New York Times piece concludes:

For all of that, though, IPC Media’s unwillingness to discuss even the content of the Hitler article is puzzling to Mr. Waldman. This skeleton was abruptly yanked from the Homes & Gardens closet, yes, but the article reflects more about the mind of aristocratic Britain in 1938 – well known to have given Hitler the benefit of the doubt – than it does about the magazine itself. Even the American press noted the beauty of Hitler’s compound, including The New York Times, which on Sept. 18, 1938, wrote that the chalet was “simple in its appointments” and that it commanded “a magnificent highland panorama.”

Posting these pages online “doesn’t damage Homes & Garden’s reputation,” Mr. Waldman said. “In fact, putting them up, along with a letter from the editor explaining a bit about them, could be a very positive thing for them to do.”

I do admit that, done wrongly, such a letter might only fan the flames of the story, but what are the alternatives? Either you feed your genuine opinion of what is being said about you into the frenzy, or you don’t. The frenzy still happens. The situation is either: definitely bad – or: it could vary anywhere from bad through okay considering and we held up our end, and onwards and upwards to downright excellent and we made a stack more money this year than we ever expected to, and all because of something rather stupid we said about Hitler in 1938.

Maybe in the next few days Homes & Gardens will, under the pressure of events, change their tune, and end up singing the one I here recommend for them. But my guess is they’ll say to themselves, better play it safe.

But my point is: safe isn’t safe these days. There’s only truthful and positive and risky, and evasive and negative and risky. The biggest risk being that you turn your back on all the gains you might have won if you’d played your hand right.