The Washington Post has a fascinating portrait of the accused Holocaust museum shooter, James von Brunn. Turns out, his violent anti-Semitism was hardly preordained, and as a young man he appeared to have a promising future.
He was a talented young commercial artist. Newly married to the daughter of a British novelist, he had just illustrated his father-in-law’s latest book. And that June, von Brunn and his wife had their first child, a son they named Jim.
In 1951, von Brunn’s future seemed bright. He had been a World War II PT boat skipper. He had talent and education. And he had married into a family whose pedigree went back to England and whose roots were now in the gentility of rural life by the Chesapeake Bay.
Within a few years, it all came apart. Von Brunn and his first wife, Joan, separated, then divorced. Their teenage son was sent off to boarding school, a life estranged from his father and, years later, a lonely death in a cheap motel room. And von Brunn, infected with paranoia and virulent anti-Semitism, was well on the way to his own disaster.
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