by Guy Stern
To give him his due, Heuser saw to it that the hand library was well stacked. Both graduates and undergraduates could use it as a study hall and the department’s ancillary organizations could hold their meetings there as well. I spent many hours in its comfortable setting. And Heuser had the good sense of hiring the wife of one of our instructors, Mrs. Scott, who made us forget that the “master of the house” harbored a pent-up anti-Semitic feelings.
On that first day, Henry Hatfield exuded friendliness and steered me to Carl F. Bayerschmidt, the head of the department. He told me that I had been accepted into the graduate program; a clerical mistake had delayed my letter of acceptance. Only one more perfunctory hurdle had to be passed: a sort of qualifying exam in which the entering student was to record his past knowledge of German literature. Henry Hatfield graded these bits of expository writing. He thought well of my essay. That summer in 1948 two graduate courses were being offered. Professor Bayerschmidt introduced us to the mysteries of the history of the German language, and Professor Puckett, borrowed from Barnard College, gave one of the most up-to-date courses on German literature—one that stopped midway in the years of the Weimar Republic. He stressed Frank Wedekind but mentioned Kurt Tucholsky only en passant, though both had been pioneers of German modernism. He dwelled on Carl Spitteler, “the only Swiss to gain a Nobel Prize for literature,” but had scant words for the poet Rilke and none for Kafka. During my years at Columbia, the slow department transition meant a Thomas Mann Seminar taught by André von Gronicka, one on the nineteenth- and twentieth-century lyrics by Jack Stein, and then, by Henry Hatfield himself, a survey of modern literature. Except for those breakthroughs, tradition prevailed. We students had hoped for an advance into internationalism through the department’s invitations to guest professors from abroad. But those “imports” tended to reflect the dialectic between a largely still prevalent tradition and innovation or, worse, their need to hide their past sympathy for the Third Reich. For example Emil Staiger, the renowned Swiss scholar, confined himself to the classics for his seminars and never let his past admiration for Germany’s Nazi past slip out. Curiously enough, despite his politics, I became (or so I believe) one of Staiger’s favorite students.
But one guest professor became the harbinger of change. Mostly at the urging of Hatfield, Professor Barker Fairley was imported from Canada and held a riveting class on Heinrich Heine, with pointed references to his posthumous treatment in Nazi Germany. We graduate students admired Fairley, especially when he, in the era of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, went to a left-leaning meeting of writers and intellectuals at the Waldorf Astoria, where reputedly Thomas Mann and Reinhold Niebuhr were among the speakers. Only the active intercession of Henry Hatfield prevented Fairley’s mid-semester expulsion back to Canada.
The winds of tradition also coursed through the reading lists, although the storm left some vestiges of the past untouched. There was, for example, the incredible retention, post-Holocaust, of some of the most egregiously anti-Semitic German literary works. Alongside new histories of literature, we were asked to read the prejudiced Emil Ermatinger, who applied Goethe’s term “forcierte talente” (labored talents) with palsied erudition to Heinrich Heine. Even more remarkable, there was scarcely an exile who made it into our classes or our reading lists, with the exception of Thomas Mann. I learned of celebrated exiles such as Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs, and the philosopher Walter Benjamin after graduate school, or as they entered via a back door, the Society of Graduate Students. The exiled literary scholar Kurt Pinthus, who had landed a job in the Theater Department but not the German Department, was invited by Walter Sokel to one of our meetings. I invited the poets Walter Mehring and Hertha Pauli. My collaborator Gustave Mathieu brought in Rudolf Hirsch, a former assistant of the world-famous theater director Max Reinhardt. A fellow graduate student, Joan Merrick, became a friend and then the wife of the Kafka scholar Charles Neider and infused us with her and his enthusiasm for the German-Czech writer. I gloried in meeting my cultural heroes and, in later years, would become a champion of their lives and works by teaching about them in my classes and by taking on the role of cofounder of the Society for German Exile Studies.
At times the readings in the advanced undergraduate classes were more progressive than those in some graduate courses. Jack Stein, my mentor and model, selected textbooks featuring short stories by the anti-Nazi Wolfgang Borchert, by members of the newly founded authors’ association, Gruppe 47, and by Bertolt Brecht. At the undergraduate club, Gus Mathieu, as a self-appointed disc jockey played Weill-Brecht’s Threepenny Opera.
Yet I cannot recall a single mention of Holocaust literature at either level of instruction. But in this and in all the other curricular practices, we were probably no different than the other Ivy League universities. I don’t think a course on the Holocaust, per se, was introduced at Columbia prior to the late fifties.
Perhaps one incident will illustrate the sense of unreality that suffused our instructors about the unredeemed past. A representative of the German government named Gerhard Seeger, sponsored, I believe, by the Goethe House in New York, gave a public address on the New Germany, focusing on the postwar Adenauer era. He mentioned the West German policy of paying reparations to Holocaust victims. I walked out of the lecture with Jack Stein and had one of my few disagreements with him. I termed the restitution for the horror inadequate. Jack, not yet cognizant of the full extent of the Holocaust, thought it was, by its voluntary nature, a generous act.
At Columbia College, this all-male undergraduate school, the fair-mindedness of Jack Madison Stein, a non-Jew who earlier in his career had doubled as a church organist, but was perceived by many as Jewish (perhaps because of his name) did much to counteract resentments against anything German. For example, he introduced a textbook edition of The Diary of Anne Frank, published under his general editorship at W. W. Norton, into upper-division classes. Also, the pervasive presence of German-American Jewish graduate assistants attenuated the widespread (and understandable) Germanophobia of our Jewish undergraduates.
Returning to a more general analysis of the department: What marked departmental policies? Carl Bayerschmidt, a decent, rather conservative person—he supported me warmly, even enthusiastically for several positions, in fact making personal contacts on my behalf—was in favor of innovation, but he had no intention of offending the old guard. Two examples of antediluvian attitudes come to mind: Professor Emeritus Alfred Remy frequently extolled Richard Wagner, but termed both Weimar art and music aberrations. Professor Henry Schulze, the past departmental undergraduate representative, occasionally offered graduate courses that I avoided. They culminated in four questions on the final: Write down (that is, regurgitate) one poem by Theodor Storm and one by Gottfried Keller, two nineteenth-century writers, then narrate their biographies. At one time Schulze turned down a master’s essay on Kafka: too trivial an author, he found, if compared with Storm.
Hence, Bayerschmidt had to maneuver between such fixtures and his department’s need of Columbia-level graduate students. He realized that the department was all of a sudden blessed by an influx of second-generation exiles from Germany and Nazi-dominated countries. In later days many of them would enrich the profession: Peter Heller and Walter Sokel (both two years ahead of me), Gustave Mathieu, Inge Halpert, Ursula Jarvis (later, Ursula Colby), and Peter Demetz (who in midstream transferred to Yale). Two others would also distinguish themselves: Dr. Kurt Lubinski, contributing reporter of the exile newspaper Aufbau, and Fred Wolinsky, working later in counterintelligence in Paris. Fred, one of the most gifted explication-de-texte experts among us students, could have been a great Germanist. He foundered on his perfectionism; he never finished a seminar paper. His story is worth telling because it illustrates the humanity of some of our faculty members. One day André von Gronicka called him in: “I know that you have mastered this subject backward and forward. Just tell me about your findings and insights and I will jot them down and con
sider that your paper.” Wolinsky, true to his character, answered that he couldn’t accept that offer.
A different type of encouragement emanated from Henry Hatfield. During a stay in the hospital, he entrusted me (I had just garnered my MA) with the conduct of his Lessing pro-seminar. I was intensely proud. It was seminal for my enthusiasm for Lessing, which in later years would inspire me toward founding the Lessing Society and the Lessing Yearbook at the University of Cincinnati. Lessing represented to me the breakthrough of tolerance and an appreciation of Jewish intellectuals during the eighteenth century.
But the influx of incipient scholars from abroad didn’t sit well with the conservatives. Years after the days at Columbia when Henry Hatfield and I had become friends and colleagues, he confided to me that our resident Deutsch-Nationaler, Professor Heuser, would periodically lambaste Bayerschmidt with the warning: “Too many Jews are getting in!” Bayerschmidt listened, kept on admitting them, and added some Jewish women to his staff as well. But we knew of Heuser’s predilections and prejudices even while we were at Columbia. I found, in his beloved German House, an early exposé of I. G. Farben, the world’s largest chemical concern, or cartel, and its iniquitous complicity in the “Final Solution.” Lo and behold, the author quoted a letter of Heuser’s from the early years of the Third Reich. He was soliciting funds for the German House. The contribution, he argued, would help to dispel the “distortions” about the New Germany by means of a more positive image. And yet when I, one of only two students, enrolled in his last Hauptmann seminar, he showed no bias. He lauded my seminar paper on Hauptmann’s philosophy of history, and made me the generous offer to accept it, with just two chapters added, as my dissertation. I refused, giving some plausible or implausible rationalizations for my refusal. Had the winds of change surging around the department touched even Frederick W. J. Heuser? Of course I knew that, when it came to dissertation writing, I wanted to work with Professor Hatfield.
As I was beginning my dissertation, Henry Hatfield did me the courtesy of telling me confidentially, that he would be leaving for Harvard at the end of the year and that he could only be my principal advisor if I finished within that time span. In retrospect I still don’t know how I did it. Well, yes I do. I lived a cloistered existence that year, leaving the typewriter only on the first day of Hanukah and on New Year’s Eve. My subject, suggested to me by Hatfield, involved exploring the impact that the innovative novels of Henry Fielding had on his German contemporaries and successors. It was a fascinating investigation how the flowering of the eighteenth-century novel in England brought forth an equally impressive creativity in Germany. My dissertation committee, beyond its chairman, included representatives from the English, French, and Spanish departments. I successfully defended my thesis just a month before Hatfield’s departure for Harvard. At the time Columbia didn’t require that we pursue publication in book form, and I was content to cannibalize my thesis for articles.
Much later, in 2003, a colleague of mine, Leo Fiedler, told one of his publishers behind my back, that my dissertation had never been published. Surprise! The publisher offered me a contract. That same year my scribblings saw the light of day. I went to my friend and department head, Donald Haase, and told him the good news. “Congratulations, Guy,” he answered. And then he added, as he would to any young graduate student: “Good luck in your search for a job!”
My years at Columbia reaffirmed and justified the decision I had arrived at early in my studies. I had decided to accept and build on my patrimony by entering the field of German Studies and staying with it. To do otherwise, because of the Third Reich, I felt would have come close to performing an act of self-amputation or cooperating with the enemy. I also determined (though this came later, after I had joined the Leo Baeck Institute, with its mission of preserving the German-Jewish heritage) that I would promulgate and teach the works of German-Jewish writers of the past, and particularly those of contemporary authors killed or driven out of Germany during its darkest hours. Exile and Holocaust literature would become part of my repertoire. Several of my professors had told me that I would make a place for myself within the profession; Carl Bayerschmidt even predicted that I had the qualifications of a department head.
In short, my professional life seemed to be built on a sound foundation. But my personal life didn’t match that promise, as the mistake of my marriage became ever more evident. Margith’s unenviable flaw, whispered about by her acquaintances, and even by her closest relatives, was that she had the ability “to lose friends and alienate people,” to quote a satire of the famous Dale Carnegie book. Margith accompanied me through my years as a graduate student at Columbia, when she met with my professors and fellow students, merrily making enemies and scattering faux pas. Margith insisted that her opinions of whatever were the only ones that were correct and she would persist until her self-righteous behavior had silenced all opposition. In time I would find a modus vivendi: “You may have a point there,” I would respond, even if she were to say that the globe was square and made of blue cheese.
I also hadn’t realized, until enlightened by her sister a few years into our marriage, that Margith preferred spreading a favorable image of herself, even if that presentation veered widely from the truth. For example, she gave a grandly exaggerated picture of her past college studies until the official transcript from her college, which a dean from CCNY shared with me, shrunk her alleged credits into insignificance.
As our marriage went on, we failed to start a family. Margith had a series of miscarriages and carried one almost to term, only to end up losing the child. This last one ended traumatically for both of us.
To tell that tragic story, early in 1960 Margith got pregnant again. This time we did not entrust her care to our general practitioner in Granville. We sought out the leading gynecologist in Ohio. Dr. Ullery, renowned far beyond the Midwest, practiced at Ohio State University Hospital in Columbus. He rarely accepted new patients, but made an exception when he heard Margith’s dolorous case history. He dispensed advice, foremost forbidding her to smoke. When I caught her disobeying the rule, she rationalized that she always used the latest model of a cigarette holder, guaranteed to filter out all the nicotine.
She carried longer this time. We became hopeful. But again, the baby was born premature. “We will do the best we can,” Dr. Ullery promised. And he and his team must have. The child lived for three days. I intuited the worst, when he entered Margith’s recovery room the following day. “I am so sorry,” he said softly, “your baby died.”
He had scarcely left the room, when Margith broke out in screams. Time and again she shouted, “Heidi, Heidi” the name she had picked for the baby. With great determination she walked to the large windows. “There is nothing left,” she said to me. “Let’s end it!” I took her away from the windows, then pushed the emergency button. The nurses sedated her.
She came to in the evening. She was calmer—but set on suicide as determinably as before. I had to act. In our luckless years we had occasionally discussed adoption. In fact I had once inquired about that feasibility. “The chances are slim,” a representative of the State Adoption Agency had told me. Another failure, this time a thwarted adoption, would provide Margith with another motive for self-destruction. I was desperate. Did I have any influence in Ohio beyond the official channels? I called the office of our Congressman Robert W. Levering. I had vigorously campaigned for him. I got him personally; I stammered out our crisis. “I think I can help,” he said without further explanation. We signed the papers for a month-old Mark and he filled the cradle intended for Heidi. Within a short time Margith spread the legend that her child had made it and coerced me to join her deception. I have reason to believe that our closest friends, Janie and Jim Gordon, never believed her story.
Margith showed little aptitude as a mother. Her behavior grated on both Mark and me. Throughout his life, he could cope even less than I with his mother’s eccentricities. Mark was an average kid in the class
room. He loved and extended his wingspan in the out of doors and eventually decided to learn about the construction trade. But Margith wanted to make an intellectual genius of him. She would insist on his reciting poetry with a highly stylized interpretation of her choosing.
One example of my exasperation during his childhood has especially stayed with me. Mark and his babysitter Nancy (a student of mine), Margith, and I were on a trip through Scandinavia, where I was interviewing surviving contributors to a literary and political journal that had flourished during the twenties, in the process of writing its history. Coming back from one of the interviews, I found my wife standing in front of the hotel entrance, her temper barely under control. I asked her what was wrong. “Our hotel has overcharged us. I ordered a pot of coffee and I was charged more than yesterday. I just called the police for foreign visitors and they should be here any minute.”
“Well,” I said, soothingly. “How much was it?” The sum seemed trivial to me, but that didn’t appease her. In fact, my point of view further enraged her.
“I will stay here until the police arrive!” she declared.
As I had expected, the gendarmes never turned up. She returned to our room and instructed Nancy to pack our suitcases for the next morning’s departure. There were further instructions. “Pack up the silver coffee pitcher, the tray, and the spoons to make up for that unconscionable overcharge!”
My attempted persuasion to let the whole thing rest—I reiterated my point that the so-called overcharge was trivial—availed me nothing. I foresaw horrible consequences. “American Fulbright professor arrested for larceny” was a headline I anticipated. What was I to do? I mulled it over during sleepless hours. Finally I grabbed a German book that I had just acquired: Alexander Spoerl’s Recollections of a Mediocre Student. His infectious humor diverted me for part of the night.
