There was something off about the front-of-the-business section profile of the Farber-Castell pencil company and its chief executive, Count Anton-Wolfgang von Faber-Castell, that ran in the Times this week.
For one thing, while the article went into the German company's history in some detail — "Faber-Castell was founded by Kasper Faber, a carpenter's apprentice. His great-grandson Lothar Faber was given noble status in 1861 by King Maximilian II of Bavaria after building the company into the world's dominant pencil maker. Later generations intermarried with the aristocratic Castell clan, creating the Faber-Castell name" — it omitted any mention of the company's history during World War II. From an article in the Telegraph earlier this year:
The Faber-Castell firm, for example, had a Nazi background all of its own. Back in the day – June 6th 1944, to be precise – the Countess Faber-Castell had played piano duets with Goebbels. (The encounter is described in his diary, still a key text for connoisseurs of unintentional comedy all over the world.) It would have been interesting to hear a brief summary of how the firm had come through the process of denazification.
The history section of the Faber-Castell web site airbrushes this story, declaring only that, "The Second World War again wrought great economic harm." Well, that is one way to look at it. If it is Count Anton-Wolfgang von Faber-Castell's mother who was the one playing piano duets with Goebbels, that might have been something that the New York Times reporter might have wanted to, you know, ask the count about during the interview that ran under the headline "Hands-On Barvarian Count Presides Over a Pencil-Making Empire."
Also omitted from the Times article on Faber-Castell was any mention of Staedtler, another large German pencil company that is six miles down the road. A BBC article in 2011 reported that the "keen rivalry" and proximity of the two companies has spurred them to innovate and export.
The reporter who wrote the Times article, Jack Ewing, is a veteran of the International Herald Tribune, which has now been merged into the newly "international" New York Times. The Times is going to have to be careful to make sure that the IHT's lower editorial standards don't bleed into the Times. Or perhaps the issue is that the IHT — and the International New York Times — are written for a global audience, whereas the New York Times at least used to be written for an American — or even a New York — audience, for whom the Faber-Castell firm's World War II history might be something to explore rather than to gloss over.