Dispatches from the Ruhr
Ernest Hemingway
Read by Atul Sharma
Before finding celebrity as an author, including his 1954 Nobel Prize, Ernest M. Hemingway honed his craft as a journeyman reporter. In the spring of 1923, as a special correspondent for the Toronto Star, he travelled to the occupied Ruhr Valley where he produced a series of 10 articles, collected here as Dispatches from the Ruhr. In them, he explores the French political system and its role in the decision to occupy the Ruhr Valley militarily, in an effort to collect on unsustainable war reparations. In addition, he examines the suffering of its ordinary citizens, as conditions there led to a progressive loss of confidence in the Weimar Republic; its economic collapse under the weight of hyper-inflation; and, ultimately, to the rise of Nazism. It is worth reading as both a case study on the unintended consequences of military occupation and a master class in the development of Hemingway’s characteristic prose style. - Summary by ASharma (1 hr 36 min)
Chapters
A Victory Without Peace Forced the French To Undertake the Occupation of the Ru… | 11:05 | Read by Atul Sharma |
French Royalist Party Most Solidly Organized | 9:32 | Read by Atul Sharma |
Government Pays for News in French Papers | 11:25 | Read by Atul Sharma |
Ruhr Commercial War Question of Bankruptcy | 8:29 | Read by Atul Sharma |
A Brave Belgian Lady Shuts Up German Hater | 8:57 | Read by Atul Sharma |
Getting Into Germany Quite a Job, Nowadays | 12:53 | Read by Atul Sharma |
Quite Easy To Spend a Million, If in Marks | 9:50 | Read by Atul Sharma |
Amateur Starvers Keep Out of View in Germany | 6:42 | Read by Atul Sharma |
Hate in Occupied Zone a Real, Concrete Thing | 9:27 | Read by Atul Sharma |
French Speed with Movies on the Job | 8:35 | Read by Atul Sharma |