Rude Awakenings: An American Historian's Encounter With Nazism, Communism and McCarthyism. Carol Jr. Sicherman
photograph shows him looking incongruously plebeian in his uniform as a Schipper–a man who uses a shovel.68 The authorities soon made better use of his gifts, which included facility in languages; he liked to say that he spoke five languages “fliessend und falsch” (fluently and incorrectly). His military supervisor had him censor correspondence and foreign-language printed matter and later assigned him to appraise an Air Force library.69 Reading German newspapers aloud to his fellow shovelers “gave me an excellent opportunity of becoming acquainted with the psychology of classes with which I had rarely come into contact.” As Harry was later to do, he learned from the foreign newspapers what was being suppressed in the German press.
After World War I, P.G.’s astute decision to conduct business only in dollars shielded him from the economic afflictions of the 1920s, including the disastrous German crash in 1923, and enabled him to buy important collections from destitute collectors. Obtaining a visa to the United States right after World War I was extremely difficult, but not for him: a friend in Washington helped. Because the two countries were still technically at war, American reporters sought him for interviews that, when published, contained “almost nothing I had said!” His business was not seriously depleted by the Depression; friends and relatives continued to invest in it, confident that his reliance on dollars would be protective.70 World War II badly affected his pocketbook, but not his spirit (see Chapter 5).
The idea of “Germany”
For Harry, who never set foot in Berlin’s renowned cabarets and bars, the city was another kind of paradise–a paradise of book shops, opera houses, and newspapers. The bookstores, with their enormous stocks, carried the “danger…that I can buy them faster than I can read them.”71 In the periodical room of the Staatsbibliothek (state library), which also served the university, he felt “the pulse of the world” stirring in the “thousands on thousands of periodicals on all subjects.”72 In Berlin, the center of a “Germany” that felt like an idealized home, he became an adult. Traveling in Europe as well as elsewhere in Germany tested and affirmed his self-sufficiency and, for a while, his love of Germany. If homesick while in other countries, he longed not for America but for Germany. In Rome, the sight of the imperial eagle at the Germany railway office and “the brass plaque on the gatepost” of the German Embassy cheered him up, as did any opportunity to speak German. Living in Germany meant “living in the present instead of scuttling around ruins,” as he did dutifully in Rome.73 It meant “the Reformation and the beginning of living mentally in this world, the antithesis to this church-infested capital of superstition.” It meant moving briskly in “a cold northern exposure where the light is sharp and clear…instead of a hazy swaying in sultry day dreams.” When his parents reproved him for his hostility to Rome, he expressed his disgust with the omnipresent Church. He admitted that “however regrettable in an aspirant historian, the sight of hoodoo in actual practice fills me with loathing and contempt.”74 Yet his “sharp and clear” Germanic intellect was at odds with the dreamy emotions that he confided in his diary. By the time he returned to America, in September 1933, he had begun to reconcile his intellect and his emotions.
Part 3. Harry’s intellectual environment
The University of Berlin
The History Seminar (Department) of the University of Berlin, the epicenter of modern historical scholarship in Germany, was at a significant moment in its own history, for most of the older generation had either retired or were on the verge of retirement, and bright young recruits were emerging on a scene that was about to change dramatically. In his first semester Harry heard “the last series of public lecturers by Friedrich Meinecke, the dean of German historians.”75 His recollection fifty years later of Meinecke’s “sensitive and carefully nuanced refined mind” belies the sharper impression in his diary of the great man’s final lecture, attended not only by students but by colleagues distinguished by their “bald heads, beards, and a professional gravity.” As he was about to begin, Meinecke was presented with “yellow tulips and a red rose bush–it looked like a wedding.” Meinecke “was surprised and touched.” The lecture displeased Harry, who thought Meinecke “mishandled the American revolution in an obsolete manner.”76 Another oldtimer, Werner Sombart, “a celebrated economic and social historian, proved to be over the hill and on the way to foolishness.”77 The most important of the middle generation for Harry was Gustav Mayer, but the young fellows were more exciting. Because Harry’s academic experiences in 1932-33 were of a piece with those in 1931-32, I discuss here Harry’s second as well as his first year.
Assessing the instructors
German historians had a “patriotic duty” to devote themselves to studying the fatherland: so said Hermann Oncken, one of Harry’s teachers, in the year that Hitler took power.78 Harry deplored their “very unpleasant habit of writing Weltgeschichte [world history] which turns out to be the history of Germany with a few comments on the rest of the world.”79 From this nationalist focus it was a short step to Nazi history glorifying the Fatherland. In the meantime, though, there was plenty to learn. In his first semester, Harry “tasted” ten lecture courses, mainly in history, and attended six of them sometimes. In addition, he signed up for two seminars, the signature pedagogical innovation of German universities–one on the modern period, and the other on the Middle Ages.80 Most of the lecturers were “the competent, conscientious, unassuming members which are the uninspiring core of every profession.”81 One lecturer he found easy to understand–a benefit while he was perfecting his German–but the lecture was
Grade 7B stuff, which most of the class faithfully copied, word for word. At home only the girls are this way. Meinecke I cannot judge because I couldn’t understand him. Sometimes he stutters over a word, all the time he speaks into the desk, and I could only catch the higher parts of the waves of his ascending intonation.82
Attendance requirements were minimal. In order to obtain the instructor’s signature in their Studienbuch (study book), students had to attend a class once at the beginning and once at the end of the semester; the rest didn’t matter. They paid a fee for each course, the source of income for most teachers, including the Privatdozenten (lecturers), who formed the majority of the teaching staff.83 In Harry’s first semester, he brought his Studienbuch to the medievalist Martin Weinbaum, who provided some adventitious amusement. They spoke German until Weinbaum, noting some hesitancy or a slight accent, asked whether he was German. Harry answered:
Ich [I]. Ich bin Amerikaner.
Er [He]. Well, why don’t you speak English?
Ich. !84
Weinbaum continued in unaccented English, and Harry attended most of his lectures. The “singsong” of another medievalist, Erich Caspar, nearly put him to sleep. He dragged himself to the final lecture to get Caspar’s signature, but he “scuttled out of the room like a rabbit and walloped down the hall so that I will have to waste another hour on Saturday. A shameless ingrate, when I’d paid him $1.50 just to sign my book” at the beginning of the semester.”85 Harry’s Studienbuch, signed by eminences like Sombart, would “serve as window dressing back at Cambridge [Harvard] where they probably don’t know what a completely unendurable person Sombart is.” “I’ve never heard such a big fraud,” Harry told his parents (in German, to show off his skills): he was full of gas, just like Harvard professors, and he “looks like a billy goat but speaks like a donkey.”86
Harry gave no quarter to anyone, no matter how distinguished. In one class Oncken, a leading light of German historiography, disputed the view of two Marxist students that “economic forces were the leading cause of the American revolution.” Deducing that “Oncken’s knowledge of the Am. Rev. did not form the basis of his professorship,” Harry advised the Marxists to bolster their position by “read[ing] Beard & Schlesinger,” and he resolved to “read a few books myself and see what we can do to overcome Oncken’s insufferable complacency.”87 Only the prospect of disproving Oncken spurred him to continue in the seminar, which he scorned as “a high school class in history”–an echo of the opinion of his Harvard mentor, William L. Langer, that German seminars were