ABSTRACT

Many of the men who would become Michael Josselson’s CIA colleagues came of age in the infancy of the “American century,” their patriotism reinforced by family traditions of government service, boarding schools, and overlapping social circles.1 Josselson was instead born in 1908 in Tartu, Estonia. “The simple mention of being born in Estonia,” Josselson reflected, “inevitably produces an embarrassed ‘Oh, yes?’ or, what is infinitely worse, the quasi-knowledgeable ‘You mean you are from Riga?’ ”2 He was nine when his family fled the Bolshevik Revolution, which reached Estonia in 1917. His father, a Jewish lumber merchant, moved the family to Berlin; they arrived the year before Germany’s disastrous defeat in the First World War.3 Josselson came of age in the short-lived golden days of the Weimar Republic, a country plagued by hyperinflation, crippled by the Versailles Treaty, and battered by political crises. Yet it briefly supplanted Paris as a beacon of culture. Historian Peter Gay wrote:

When we think of Weimar we think of modernity in art, literature, and thought; we think of the rebellion of sons against fathers, Dadaists against art, Berliners against beefy philistinism, libertines against old-fashioned moralists; we think of The Threepenny Opera, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the Bauhaus, Marlene Dietrich.4