Rude Awakenings: An American Historian's Encounter With Nazism, Communism and McCarthyism. Carol Jr. Sicherman
In Rembrandt, he saw an image of the man he hoped to become: faithful to his ideals and “independent…of his Mitmenschen,” his fellow human beings.106
Extracurricular activities
Aside from colleagues in seminars, Harry had no direct contact with garden-variety students at the university–65% of whom, in his first semester, expressed support of the National Socialist German Student League.107 He took part in no organized extracurricular activities, instead making up his own. The lack of specific requirements at the university made it easy for him to indulge his intellectual curiosity–occasionally, as with Kauffmann’s lectures, at the university but more often outside of academia. As the next section will show, his travels during academic vacations were almost entirely educational in intent. He wanted to be able to read major European sources, and by the time he returned to America, he had six languages at his disposal: English, German, French, Italian, Dutch, and Spanish. Besides going to France and Italy to improve his knowledge of French and Italian, he found he could read Dutch and Spanish with the help of a dictionary. Armed with a Spanish dictionary, he read José Ortega y Gasset’s Revolt of the Masses in the original: “I tried the first few paragraphs and found it easy.”108 Selfstudy included reading books by such authors as Karl Jaspers, to whom he had been too shy to talk in Heidelberg. Together with the Nazis, but for different reasons, he admired a new book by Jaspers, The Spiritual Situation of the Age. Harry liked Jaspers’s concise exposition; the Nazis admired its apparent exaltation of emotion over reason.109 The reviewer in Goebbel’s paper Der Angriff (The Attack) would have been surprised to learn that Jaspers’s wife, Gertrud, was Jewish–Gustav Mayer’s sister.
Harry devoted important time to his long-standing interest in literature. The book that made the deepest impression on him was not a historical treatise but a novel, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, which his parents had brought to him from Europe in 1928. Having read it off and on for years, in 1932 he “read thru the remainder in spurts that were at times feverish”: “The last hundred pages I read with rising anguish mixed with impatient drive, troubled at the realization that it would last only a few more hours and anxious to know how it would end.” It was “no ordinary story where everything is neatly tied up and labeled at the end…yet there is a fine sense of form, [it is] musically built, it has symphonic proportions, resonances, depths, colorings, melodies, counterpoint, it flows directly into your consciousness without the intermediary hindrance of words.”110 Mann’s other great novel, Buddenbrooks, was “not a book but an experience.”111 Harry speculated that its great success among German-speakers–“more than 900,000 copies…sold”–would not extend in translation, because it was “too localized.” Immediately upon Hitler’s seizure of power, Mann became an exile, a “notorious liberalistic author” whose name was verboten in the press.112
Mann’s novels spoke to Harry as Goethe’s Faust did not. With The Magic Mountain he had felt “an imperious not-to-be-postponed urge to force my way thru,” but not with Faust.113 Still, when both parts of Faust were performed at the Berlin State Theater, he went. Part II, which he saw first, was “in spots very fine, in general minced into pieces, a collection of scenes without unity. Not much better in this respect than reading the text.” Part I, though, was “a great event…. Towering. Miles above II.” The theater, he realized, can make you “forget the proscenium and the footlights. You can be swung away.”114
This repressed young man sought to “be swung away” by film, theater, opera, books, paintings, and even people. It happened occasionally. One evening in Munich, he was “doubly brightened.” by the simple sight of “the glow on a woman’s face that came when she saw her husband” and by an essay in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung about Mont St. Michel. The article gave him a “feeling of being brought out of [him]self, brought into the ideas of the words printed there, brought into a dreamy harmony.” The final sentence– “Thrust in your sword, Michael, thrust it in”–made him dream that night that he was “swinging buoyantly one of those great shining two-handed swords” that he had seen recently in Nuremberg and Munich, and he felt “insuperable and gay.”115 He had similar experiences from time to time at the opera, rejoicing in the “marvelous voice” of Gertrud Bindernagel, “the moving mountain,” and “the heavenly” Sigrid Onegin, who were “pretty nearly the only people who could sing in Götterdämmerung.” Listening ecstatically to Onegin, he felt (echoing Hamlet) that he “could shuffle off this mortal coil painlessly.” He imagined that “opium eaters faintly sense the same sort of exultation” as he felt listening to Onegin sing Schubert lieder and an aria from Glück’s Orfeo.116
What good was all this pleasure, though? Was he any more than a dilettante? Exaggerating his lack of “patience and persistence,” he bemoaned the “wide divergence between [his] ambitions and accomplishments.” His indolence, he speculated, came from his Levison ancestors; he wished that “the Marks characteristics–except surliness, of which I already have an abundance–would come out more decisively.” “Presently I’ll be 23, and no wiser,” he complained, his self-indictment echoing John Milton’s sonnet:
How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,
Stol’n on his wing my three and twentieth year!
My hasting days fly on with full career,
But my late spring no bud or blossom shew’th.
In his own “late spring,” Harry, resolutely areligious, could not follow Milton’s example and resolve his doubts by submitting to “the will of Heav’n.” He could only indict himself for laziness. When he listed the books in English, French, and German that he had read in the year since he sailed from New York, the tally‒by no means negligible‒did not still his self-recrimination. A kinder judge would have said that he had studied reasonably hard.117
Travels in Europe
Earlier in 1932, Harry’s undergraduate mentor Frederick Artz had weighed in with some unsolicited advice. Harry’s “wideranging”– his extracurricular activities–“will unfit you for doing a thesis and getting your degree” at Harvard; if he wanted that degree, Artz advised, he should return immediately, even though his chances of an academic job would be “infinitesimal.” Harry wondered how he could “collect the material for a thesis without being here,” and he doubted that “getting my eyes opened” would “unfit” him for Harvard.118 Indeed, a major part of Harry’s education took place during vacations. In 1932 he traveled for language study to Paris in the spring, and to Rome in the summer for Italian (with stops en route in Germany, Switzerland, other Italian cities, Vienna, and Prague). In spring 1933, he roamed around Germany to find out how Hitler was received outside of the capital (see Chapter 4).
Five weeks in Paris, lodging with a family and working with a tutor, sufficed to improve Harry’s French. He took no interest in Paris: “I live in a dream, I walk the streets of this city and am not there, I think of Germany, of Berlin, as from the distance of years, and calmly inquire how much tickets are to Mainz, steamers to Cologne, trains to Berlin.” By the time he left, he understood spoken French (when “the daughter of the house told me her troubles with the Serb who has proposed marriage to her”); he owned seventy French books; and he could translate an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeiner Zeitung into French. As usual, he read the newspapers, an activity that gave rise to a “horrific sensation…of living in a twilight, and in the half dusk I make out huge forms writhing and wrestling in the mist, but what they are exactly is not clear to the excited crowd of commentators who write us dispatches.” He thought of the comment attributed to Edward Gray, the British Foreign Secretary: “‘The lamps are going out all over Europe,’ said Gray one late afternoon toward the end of July 1914, “‘we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’” If the period 1904-1914 was “the era of the armed peace,” Harry wondered, “what will they call 1919-? It is armed but is it peace?” The nightmare he imagined would not “be dispersed by daylight,” which only showed it “growing heavier, more frightful.” What was happening? What was a “fact”? To judge “a new fact or pretended fact,” a historian had to see how “it fits into the rest