Harry was admitted to Harvard just as Lowell’s final solution to its Jewish problem was being effected. Two years earlier, in 1925, an alumnus wrote to Lowell to complain that Jews, “the skunks of the human race,” had taken over Harvard; Lowell politely thanked him for his observations.88 Was Harry aware that he, Joe Doob, and Ed Popper were skunks? Their common background helped sustain them in an unwelcoming atmosphere; no wonder they stuck together. A Harvard anthropology student who studied his fellow Jews in Harry’s time found that the majority had “casual non-Jewish acquaintances but were widely regarded–and treated accordingly–as Jews.”89
3
A New Young Scholar in the (Old) World
Part 1. Summer in Heidelberg, 1931
The voyage out, aboard the St. Louis, gave Harry plenty of time to study German grammar. This “beautiful tongue,” he rhapsodized, “now unravels its complexities for my straining-to-absorb wits (note the Germanic influence)”; grammatical rules were “as entrancing as ocean transportation is not.”1 Shipboard life made him acutely conscious of his social insufficiencies. In his diary he analyzed “an elemental loneliness, which comes over me at times,” becoming sometimes “morbid, but not seriously.” Even when lonely, though, he could feel uplifting emotions. A solitary walk on deck could be thrilling:
Moonlight from the fresh icy crescent [moon], and a last saffron veil in the west, and the rushing waters colored blue-black-green, hissing as they foam past. The air had flavor, it tasted of cleanness that is originally pure, not scrubbed but born clean–deep draughts you drink, and grow intoxicated…. And so this air, these waters with their wind-whipped stipplings, this moon, and the steamless steel-hearted throbbing of the ship.2
Opera performances and German literature soon afforded similar experiences of intense aesthetic joy.
From Cuxhaven, where the ship docked, Harry made his way by train to Heidelberg. Buying the Vossische Zeitung at the Cuxhaven station, he read “laboriously” about President Herbert Hoover’s proposal of “a general moratorium on both reparations paid from Germany to the Allies and war debts owed by the Allies to the US.”3 The moratorium, a response to deep German resentment of penalties imposed after the war, came too late to help forestall the bank crisis that Harry was to witness less than a month later.
One of 800 Americans studying in German universities,4 Harry spent six weeks in Heidelberg improving his knowledge of German. Knowledge of Germany came more slowly, for students in Heidelberg’s Vacation Courses for Foreigners had no contact with the heavily Nazi and anti-Semitic student body of Germany’s oldest university.5 Harry lodged with his teacher, Prof. Dr. Wilhelm Josef Dorn, “a large, friendly, middle-aged man who teaches in the [Helmholtz] Gymnasium–German literature, English, and history.”6 He took private lessons with Dorn and faithfully attended his class in intermediate German. The heterogeneous enrollment–Americans, Italians, Scandinavians, a Czech, and a Swiss–required it to be conducted entirely in German: “All except about 3 can speak much better German than I, but Dorn says I shouldn’t worry–in a week or ten days I’ll be all right.”7 A “revelatory” private lesson on the subjunctive persuaded him “that a benevolent providence guided me into his hands. He has the inestimable advantage of knowing English perfectly, knowing the difficulties which lie in German for English-speaking people, experience in teaching German, and the expository talent.”8 Prof. Dorn taught with humor, inventing the term “Gemixtes Pickles” to describe intermixed languages. A year later, arriving in Würzberg, an exhausted Harry illustrated “Gemixtes Pickles” when he asked for an “einfaches [simple] Room.”9
The Dorns introduced Harry not just to the German language but to Heidelberg. Frau Dorn–much younger than her husband, a common disparity explained by the decimation of young men during World War I–led him to the university office, enrolled him in her husband’s class, and took him to the market. He hit it off with the Dorns’ little girl, Guga, later sending her presents. Dorn showed him the famous Heidelberg Castle ruins, played the harmonium for him, and took him to a beer hall.10 A child of Prohibition, Harry thought beer “tasted like vegetables gone sour” and wondered whether “wine and strong beverages are as enchanting as beer.” A few months later, he had “drunk my first coffee.” He found it “mildly unpleasant” but less awful than beer: “I can understand that some people would like it.”11 Lemonade was his drink.
Once settled in, Harry paid attention to current events: “In Vienna, Munich, Berlin, & now Cologne, National Socialists have tried to raise hell with the universities…. Hitlerite agitators and student organizations go round demonstrating, walloping opposing students, university officials, and the police.” He had a solution for immunizing the police force against “walloping.” German policemen, “no bigger than the average small citizen,” were outfitted in fancy uniforms to impress the citizenry, but this was a mere facade. Harry advocated importing “a dozen…six-and-a-half foot red-faced Irishmen,” such as he had seen controlling the “democratic Freshman vs. Sophomore combats” at Harvard. In Germany, the combat was between Nazis and their enemies–Communists, Socialists, and Jewish student organizations.12
German social and economic problems were no laughing matter. A bank crisis came to a head in mid-July, when one bank failed and several others were temporarily shut down. In Heidelberg, violence erupted: “In my room I heard the sounds of rioting.”13 Harry read the leading liberal papers: all “three editions of the Frankfurter Allgemeiner Zeitung, and the Berliner Tageblatt & Vossische Zeitung.”14 With the university closed, he “saw in the market place a crowd of people with umbrellas” gathered around the Municipal Savings Bank in the darkening afternoon. He went to the Deutsche Bank to cash a check, found it closed, and photographed its imposing entrance. Police officers were much in evidence, and the “crowd was quiet. I was puzzled.” He kept his distance, for the Dorns had told him of a demonstration a few months earlier when the police clubbed innocent bystanders, including an American who explained that “he was only passing by, was a foreigner and had nothing to do with the demonstration.” A year earlier, Harry had seen similar crowds in New York when the Broadway Central Bank was liquidated, and he “understood those men and women in the gray rain.” Despite this “bank ‘holiday,’” daily life went on; “people who on Monday night found their purses empty and intended to draw cash from the bank this morning must either borrow from more fortunate friends” or buy on credit.15
Harry maintained a cool, ironic tone in writing of such events. When certain newspapers were banned, he observed that there was no “German Civil Liberties League”; indeed, there were “apparently no German civil liberties.” Giving a foretaste of the political tumult that dominated his last year in Germany, store windows already displayed “Swastikas and photos and sketches of Hitler,” or “pictures of the German Heroes, and placards” showing “how Germany’s…oppression has always been caused…by the Catholics, the Jews, and the Freemasons.” Alert to such documentation, he later photographed such window displays. In Heidelberg, he photographed the entrance of a brand-new building at the university that bore a statue of Pallas Athena and an inscription later effaced by the Nazis. Suggested by a Jewish professor of German studies at Heidelberg, Friedrich Gandolf (1880-1931), the inscription read, in Thomas Mann’s later translation, “To the living spirit.”16
As he was about to leave Heidelberg to join his family on their European vacation, Harry reflected on his progress to date. Not only had his German improved, but he could not “have had a finer introduction to Germany than through the Dorns.” Dorn replied warmly to his postcard, urging him to visit en route to Berlin.17 Several months later, the Dorns invited him for Christmas. Knowing that Dorn’s pay had been cut, he feared that he might “be an extra weight on them”; he declined and