Part 2. Harry’s social environment in Berlin
Starting in Berlin
Harry had a room of his own in the apartment of Grete and Ernst Meyer in a handsome building at Mommsenstrasse 57, in the comfortably bourgeois Charlottenburg district.21 Striding through the vast park of the Tiergarten, a young man with good shoes and energy could walk between the university on Unter den Linden to Mommsenstrasse; if tired or pressed for time, he could take the Stadtbahn, the municipal railway. A “suitable address for a would-be historian,” the street commemorated Theodor Mommsen (1817-1903), a historian in the liberal tradition that the Nazis would soon crush. When Harry next went to Europe, in 1976, he was pleased to find Mommsenstrasse 57 “still standing–though all the other side of the street had been bombed out and was rebuilt with characterless modern housing warrens.”22
In his first few months, Harry’s still imperfect German, as well as his social insecurities, made adjustment difficult. The Meyers expected him talk during dinner, but his German was “wretched and always getting balled up.”23 This deficiency was soon remedied. A year after his arrival, his linguistic proficiency yielded the peculiar pleasure of being mistaken for a variety of foreigners (never for an American), and twice for a German. Traveling in Switzerland, he “talked a bit with a professor of geography–who asked me if I weren’t a Russian. Delavaud [in Paris] first asked me if I were Italian. The Americans I translated to…in Nuremberg were surprised to learn I was an American. What can a poor Harvard man do?” In Italy, a “stout German woman” took him for a Scandinavian. In Germany, his dentist’s nurse took him for Swiss. The most pleasing mistakes of all occurred in Italy: “Have finally been mistaken for a German by the Münchner landlady of this Pension” in Mirano, a supposition shared by his Italian hosts in Rome.24 In the summer of 1932 his Harvard mentor, Frederick B. Artz, living in Heidelberg, seemed to think “that my preference for German conversation was vanity or something of the sort–in truth I couldn’t get into the feel of English until we talked in a Konditorei a couple of hours after supper.”25
In Berlin, Harry was fortunate to step into a ready-made social circle revolving around the Meyers and a genial rare-book dealer, Paul Gottschalk. Grete Meyer and Paul Gottschalk served in loco parentis. Paul was Harry’s relative by marriage: Paul’s cousin Rose had married Martin Hirschbach, Uncle Alfred Hirschbach’s brother. No doubt either Paul or Martin arranged for Harry to board with their friends the Meyers. Paul’s brother and sister Julia were doctors who shared a waiting room at 5 Neuekantstrasse in Charlottenburg. Julia Gottschalk appears rarely in Harry’s diary or letters, but Ernst Gottschalk and his family were prominent in Harry’s Berlin life: his wife, Laura, a rabbi’s daughter; his sons, Heinz and Ludwig (known as Lutz); and his daughter, Betty, who was married to Walter Elberfeld, a surgeon (and a Gentile). Harry already knew Paul, for he always visited the Markses and Hirschbachs during his annual business trips to America.26 He humorously accused the Markses of “feed[ing] him past endurance,” a charge that Heinz supported “with tales of endless potatoes…, so that an evening at your mercy sounds here as if it were a gourmand’s orgy.” Harry suggested serving Paul “oatmeal and graham crackers just once”– but, he warned, “Don’t put onions in the oatmeal.” Years later, my mother, doubting the reality of Paul’s famed antipathy to onions, secretly included some in a dish. He never knew.
The Meyers were sociable. Their four children’s friends dropped by, as did various relatives–Grete’s mother, Frau Juda; her brother, who lived in Paris; her nephew, who worked in the economics section of the Berliner Tageblatt;27 friends visiting from out of town. Every two or three weeks Rudy Meyer, a medical student, or Heinz Gottschalk would accompany Harry on a Sunday excursion. Of Harry’s age mates in Berlin, Heinz–who had lived in Cambridge when Harry was at Harvard–was the most insistently friendly; he was someone with whom, in the early days, Harry could talk English.28 Once, after a big Sunday dinner at Paul’s home that was followed all too soon by tea, “Heinz & I fled (before they called another meal) to Neubabelsberg, where we tramped through pine or fir woods and the well-known Markisch Sand until it was dark and murky.”29 Otherwise, his social life was limited to occasional refreshments with a classmate or invitations from a professor. He had nothing to do with a foreign-students society at the university, through which another American graduate student just a year older, Shepard Stone, met Raymond Aron. Harry himself met Aron at the home of Gustav Mayer, one of his professors and Paul Gottschalk’s cousin.30 Mayer and his wife, Flora, came occasionally to Paul’s parties.
The other central members of the group were the Hirschbachs and the Freyhans, both families being related to Paul. Rose Hirschbach, as just mentioned, was Paul’s cousin, and Clara Freyhan was his sister. Martin and Rose Hirschbach, their oldest son (Ernst), and Martin’s sister (Hedwig) attended Paul Gottschalk’s parties; Hedwig in profile looked strikingly like her brother Alfred, and “when Martin talked I thought I might have been hearing Alf himself.”31 The Freyhans were also regulars at Paul’s: Clara; her husband, Max, a lawyer and notary; their sons, Fritz (a medical student) and Hans (studying music); and their daughter, Eva (a high school student).32 Harry often argued with Max, who had published several books on modern German drama. When Harry became heated, Dr. Freyhan remained “quiet and patient, and in general unvehement,” pitching his ideas in language “suitable to a poor foreigner, and remarkably quick to grasp the ideas which I stumblingly try to express.”33
“Everyone tries to make me sociable,” Harry complained: “Mr. G. tried, Heinz tried, now Professor Mayer tries.” Mayer’s weapon was his son Ulrich, “a good egg,” who became a friend. Mayer’s kindness released in him a capacity for social pleasure that he rarely felt. After a Sunday afternoon at Mayer’s home, he wrote: “It is strange that a visit almost invariably stimulates me, and yet I enjoy thinking of myself as unsocial, if not antisocial.”34 Two days later, he added: “I’ve been in a state of exultant turmoil since Sunday.”
Frau Meyer was in cahoots with Paul Gottschalk. One evening, “for my delectation, partly,” she invited a number of people to supper. Harry’s report illustrates both the social dynamics of the group and his own mixture of self-satisfaction, contempt, and regret at his own discomfort. Among the guests were Heinz Gottschalk and Raymond Goldschmidt,35 the latter having recently returned from a year’s study in the United States. Harry ungratefully complained that he had never “heard so many unfounded confident generalizations in one evening before, probably because Heinz can talk faster in German, besides having support from the others in the exceptional moments between brilliant ideas.”36 It was just as well that Harry, who struggled to keep up with the intense conversation, “simply sat there and listened.” It was a typical gathering of the Meyer/Gottschalk circle, which valued above all else an engaged intellect. Her mother’s most notable quality, Grete Meyer wrote after her death, was “her vigorous, expansive mind.”37
Within this circle, generational differences chiefly concerned women’s higher education, which was taken for granted by the younger women but was unusual among their elders. Clara Freyhan was a highly cultivated woman without a profession, as was Grete Meyer. Clara’s sister Julia Gottschalk, however, belonged to the pioneering generation of university-educated women. Freiburg, where Julia took her first medical examination (in 1913), had been among the first German universities to permit women to matriculate; the University of Berlin, where she passed the last examination (in 1916), granted women that right only in 1909.38 In one respect, though, Julia was not unusual: a disproportionate number of the relatively few women doctors of her generation were Jewish.39 This trend continued in the next generation, represented