Superman’s Original Publisher Had A Secret Identity: America’s Schindler

As the world of our grandparents and great grandparents fades into the mists of history, the achievements of that generation, good and bad, become the stuff of legend. This is certainly the case for Harry Donenfeld, the sharp-elbowed entrepreneur who elevated DC Comics to national prominence by publishing Superman, and who is charitably described as a “colorful character.” The American Way: A True Story of Nazi Escape, Superman, and Marilyn Monroe by New York TimesNYT
journalist Helene Stapinski and Bonnie Siegler, published today by Simon & Schuster, sheds new light on this figure by telling the fascinating story of how his life intertwined not just with pillars of mid-century Americana like Superman, Marylin Monroe, Joe DiMaggio, and filmmaker Billy Wilder, but also with hundreds of refugees desperate to escape from the Nazis during the 1930s, including Siegler’s own rather colorful grandparents.

Comic book scholars are familiar with Donenfeld for the role that he and his “fixer,” Jacob (Jack) Liebowitz, played in wrestling an early comic book publisher originally known as National Allied and then Detective Comics (“DC” for short”), away from its founder, Major Malcom Wheeler-Nicholson, just in time to publish Action Comics #1, the 1938 debut of Superman. That changed everything for the publishing business and American culture.

After a series of scandals in the 1950s, Liebowitz pushed Harry Donenfeld to the margins of the publishing business, while his son Irwin stepped in as Editor-in-Chief of DC Comics. Harry Donenfeld suffered a fall that rendered him an invalid in 1962 and died a few years later. Irwin was soon forced out when Liebowitz engineered a merger with Kinney Parking Lots in 1969, the first move in series of corporate consolidations leading to the formation of Time Warner. Donenfeld, father and son, were both largely forgotten. Liebowitz died in 2000 at the age of 100, the single largest shareholder in the company then known as AOL Time Warner.

For decades, Donenfeld’s legacy was not viewed with much affection. The foundation of his success, DC’s acquisition of the rights to Superman from original creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster for the $130 they paid for the 13 page story, is the “original sin” of the comics industry and the subject of decades of litigation that continues to this day. The optics of Donenfeld and Liebowitz living high while Siegel and Shuster sunk into poverty and near-obscurity didn’t impress anyone interested in truth or justice, though it may have been the American Way.

Moreover, anyone familiar with the early origins of the comic book business in America knows that it emerged from a miasma of shady enterprises common in the hardscrabble community of first-generation immigrants, including bootlegging, racketeering, and publication of borderline-pornographic pulp magazines. Donenfeld was deeply, flamboyantly implicated in all of that.

So it comes as a revelation that a man who was no one’s idea of a paragon turned out to have saved the lives of dozens, and perhaps hundreds, of innocent people fleeing persecution and death, most of whom were complete strangers to him.

In The American Way, co-author Bonnie Siegler tells the story of her grandparents’ dramatic flight from Nazi Germany as the curtain of hate and genocide was closing around the country. US immigration policy, then as now, viewed nonwhite, non-gentile refugees as presumptively undesirable and a potential drain on domestic resources, regardless of the circumstances which made their escape necessary. To come to the US, European Jews fleeing the Nazis required proof of financial means in the shape of a citizen sponsor to guarantee their solvency.

In the late 1930s, Harry Donenfeld was already flush with the financial windfall of Superman and DC’s expanding roster of costumed characters. Though he did not skimp on his lavish lifestyle and was a typical tight-fisted Depression-era boss, Donenfeld, himself the child of European Jewish immigrants, proved both generous and community minded when he stepped up to sponsor Jules and Edith Schulback at the behest of their cousin, his former neighbor. As a result, the Schulbacks were able to flee Berlin literally the day before Kristallnacht heralded the next, more brutal phase of Nazi racist violence.

It turns out this was just one of many similar cases where Donenfeld stepped forward to help clear bureaucratic hurdles for desperate families, even as the US government was turning away ships of refugees. Even today, the full extent of his activities remains unknown, though his grandson estimates it could have impacted as many as 1200 people. That places him in the pantheon with Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist whose work secretly shepherding Jews to safety was recounted in Schindler’s List.

Siegler and Stapinski write, “For those he saved… it was Harry who was the true Superman. His good deeds were more than the mitzvah [good deed] he believed them to be; they were tikkun olam – an attempt to repair the world.”

Donenfeld’s actions were not exactly secret, although he never talked about them and encouraged his beneficiaries to do the same. His son Irwin, who died in 2004, discussed them with comics historian Robert Beerbohm, who interviewed him extensively toward the end of his life on tape and in public at a well-attended panel at San Diego Comic-Con in 2001.

“Through the book, I fell in love with Bonnie’s grandparents and she fell in love with mine,” said Harry Donenfeld, grandson and namesake of the publisher. “It was an amazing thing she and Helene did for our families to tell this story about our grandfathers and bring their works to light.”

As Siegler and Stapinski’s book makes abundantly clear, Donenfeld’s support for refugees not only saved them from atrocities and likely death at the hands of the Nazis, but also allowed their families to take root and flower in postwar America. Edith and Jules went on to lead a remarkable life, including a memorable encounter with Marilyn Monroe as she posed for one of her most iconic images – the subject of the second half of The American Way.

Our romanticization of postwar America tends to simplify the complex world that our grandparents navigated as they tried to make better lives for their families. As much as we like a simple story with clear heroes and villains, real life is rarely a comic book. Sometimes the people who delight in showing you their worst sides stand the tallest when it really counts, and the most outlandish family legends turn out to be true. In an America that increasingly has trouble dealing with nuance and complexity, The American Way offers a necessary and beautifully told story of struggle, compassion and serendipity that reaches out to us across the generations.