by Guy Stern
Throughout my career, I continued to reinforce this belief in useful knowledge, even when the stakes weren’t so high. At the University of Cincinnati, we brought German culture to the campus when we invited a different guest professor from Germany each year. Our first choice was the afore-mentioned Heinz Starkulla, Sr., a specialist in communications and media. He introduced the up-to-date language into our classes and social get-togethers, bringing colloquialisms into his class on German conversation. I remember him teaching our undergraduates the phrase “das schnall ich nicht,” which translates to the English colloquialism, “I can’t wrap my head around that.” It’s an expression the students learned very quickly.
Heinz, Senior had an incredibly easy way to get to know the townspeople of Cincinnati. One of his new fans was a certain Stearns, an internationally known manufacturer of mattresses and other bedroom-related articles. Knowing of my ambition to make culture accessible to students, Heinz persuaded Mr. Foster Stearns to sponsor a huge German Fasching (carnival) on campus. We knew we had made a campuswide impression when our staid dean of Graduate Studies, John Major, and his wife, showed up in vagabond costumes.
My career as an occasional professor in Germany ran parallel to my days as an educator in America. My first stint as a guest research professor in Germany was only sporadically conducive to encounters between a German-Jewish-American professor and new generations of German students. In 1962 I was awarded a Fulbright Research Professorship at the University of Munich to complete a history of a defunct German literary magazine once published in Munich. I had no teaching obligations, but was occasionally sought out for guest lectures, since in contrast to my German colleagues, I had infused up-to-the minute texts, especially of Die Gruppe 47 (Group 47), a post–World War II writers’ coalition, into even my undergraduate courses on Modern German literature. Similar courses and seminars at the University of Munich—hard to believe—stopped with Gerhart Hauptmann and the pre-war Thomas Mann. Professor Hermann Kunisch, my Fulbright-appointed liaison colleague, was already occupied with writing and editing the first handbook to include the postwar generation of writers. In the meantime he asked me to step into the breach with his seminar schedule. He scheduled my first lecture, a survey of texts just published, at the university’s huge auditorium, where about a thousand students— more than I had ever enjoyed before—showed up. Among them were two young journalism students: Peter Glotz, in years to come a breath of heady intellectual air to waft through the Social Democratic Party; and Wolfgang Langenbucher, today the head of the Journalism Department at the University of Vienna. In later years, the two would collaborate on a pioneering study, “Versäumte Lektionen” (Missed Object Lessons).
During a subsequent chance encounter, the two young men introduced themselves to me and I listened to their polite plaudits and liberal sentiments. Then I did a double-take on the name Langenbucher. My mind had dredged up memories of a loathsome, fascistic, antiSemitic history of German literature published in 1939. I had sampled it, with growing revulsion, during my time as a graduate student at Columbia. “Are you related to Helmut Langenbucher?” I asked.
“Yes,” Wolfgang answered, “unfortunately he is my father.”
“How do you communicate? You seem to stand at completely opposite ends of the political spectrum.”
“We meet from time to time,” the son answered, “but we have nothing to say to each other.”
That same year I met Emil Preetorius—artist, stage designer, art historian, and art collector. A whole gallery in the Chinese collection of the Neue Pinakothek in the Schwabing artist district of Munich is named after him. I had sought him out because he had been a friend of Efraim Frisch, the editor of the Neue Merkur (the object of my research), and an occasional contributor to the journal. Especially after it emerged that I, like Frisch, was Jewish, my interview with him turned into a lengthy attempt at exculpation on his part. “No,” he declaimed in righteous indignation, “the photos taken of me with Hitler in front of my Bayreuth stage designs were falsely interpreted as my approval of National Socialism.” As his expiation continued, I began to realize that in his eyes I had become the alter ego of Efraim Frisch. His implied confession delivered to me might have been the words he would have spoken to his friend, if Frisch had not died in 1942, during his exile in Switzerland.
This encounter with a person with a sullied past repeated itself several more times. Following my Fulbright year, I served three successive summer lectureships at the Munich Goethe Institute. After a concurrent lecture at the America House, arranged by its then director, James Fifield Crane, I made the acquaintance of a young woman, an editor at a Munich publishing house. She and her escort invited me for dinner. During our lighthearted dinner conversation about books and music and art, I innocently asked whether her father was in the same publishing profession.
“That Nazi swine is dead to me,” she answered. Apparently he had held a high position in the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, Germany’s feared Central Security Office, headed by SS leader Heinrich Himmler.
“And your mother?” I interjected in an awkward attempt to change the subject.
“I don’t talk to her, that Nazi!”
A dramatic tale of a generational divide unfolded. Her brother, equally repulsed by his parents’ abject role during the Nazi years, had one day broken open a locked drawer in his father’s desk. He found stacks of incriminating material. Without hesitation he sent it to the head of war crimes prosecution in Israel. He received a quick answer: “We know all about your father’s activities. We do not plan to prosecute.”
Nothing approaching that level of drama happened in my Goethe-Institute seminar for in-service professionals in the Kaulbach Strasse in Munich. Rather, what stands out is the fact that I was handed a very practical lesson in reception theory. We were analyzing Heinrich Böll’s short story “Mein trauriges Gesicht” (“My Sad Face”), a tale of the protagonist’s torture by the police of an unnamed dictatorship. He displays an unhappy visage on a day when, to the contrary, he should be overjoyed, because it is the day of the week when he has the privilege of partaking in the pleasures provided by the state-administered bordello. “Böll,” I lectured, “has invented a perfect symbol to show how dictatorships control us even down to our most elemental drives.” A teacher from Taiwan raised his hand. “I disagree. That is not invention. I fled to Formosa after serving in the army of Communist mainland China. That’s exactly how the army bordellos are administered. Böll drew on reality.”
My first university guest teaching assignment took place at the University of Freiburg. The overwhelming majority of my students during that short Freiburg summer term were students from abroad. My assignment consisted of a Vorlesung (lecture class) on the reception in the US of postwar German writers. It was a time, the late seventies, when the German political cabaret had regained much of the luster it had attained in the twenties. Despite my demurrers, pointing to Tom Lehrer and Second City, the students astutely noticed that an appreciation of political satire, imported or domestic, is not our American strong suit, with some notable exceptions as of this writing.
My guest professorship at the University of Frankfurt was a semester-long love affair. Rarely have I felt the eros of teaching and learning more as a force in my career. For the most part the explanation for that intellectual bonding resided with the subject matter. Four hundred students participated in a course entitled Introduction to German Exile Literature, very rarely taught before at German universities. The students told me that they felt they had embarked on a journey of discovery. Also, about fifty students took part in a seminar on postwar German-Jewish authors; they all produced reports and seminar papers. Because of rather forbidding prerequisites, a smaller group of only about a dozen enrolled in my third course, a Thomas Mann colloquium.
A whole bevy of subsequent M.A. and Ph.D. theses emanated from those classes, with several published afterward, which also happened after my later guest stints at other German univ
ersities. I took this as an indication that Exile Studies were making their way in Germany. I can also recall two cheering incidents: As best I know, Daniel or Danny Lieberberg was the only Jewish student in my seminar, or at least the only one who openly made reference to his religion. He was both bright and voluble. Occasionally he would assume that he was privy to superior knowledge because of his background. But that did not save him from rebuttals by his fellow students. The dialogue grew into informed spontaneous debates, with my moderation almost uncalled for. I compared them with discussions that followed after those early guest lectures in 1962 in Munich. The contribution of a Jewish member of the audience had induced deference in earlier days by the non-Jewish discussants. I found the free-and-easy debate following Danny’s remarks to be a healthy step forward.
As to the second cheering episode, Nora Müller (I am using real names in these remarks) was the heroine of this extraordinary occurrence. When I gave out the assignments for oral presentations in my seminar, I suggested Rafael Seligmann’s novel Die Jiddishe Mamme (The Jewish Mom) to Nora, but I warned her that the text contained quite a few risqué passages. As an adult person, she told me emphatically, she was prepared to deal with that. A week later I asked her to come to my office. Would she be willing to postpone her presentation by one week? Rafael Seligmann, I explained, had accepted my invitation to come to our last session. She could give her paper in front of the author himself. “Please give me time to think that one over,” she answered. She returned two days later. “I will never have an opportunity like that during my entire years of study,” she enthused, “to be critiqued by the author himself. Yes, I will do that!” Nora brought her boyfriend, an economics major, along for reinforcement, but she needn’t have. Her paper was her best performance to date. And she had the gumption to say in front of Seligmann that some of his passages had veered into pornography, others into Jewish anti-Semitism.
I won’t dwell on his counter-attack on the pornography issue, but I was absolutely stunned by the give-and-take regarding anti-Semitism. Here was Israel-born, dyed-in-the wool Jew Rafael Seligmann, pitted against Nora Müller, born near Frankfurt, Germany, a Christian whose knowledge of Judaism stemmed almost exclusively from books. And she held her own. The story had several happy endings. Rafael Seligmann, usually prickly and contentious, inscribed one of his books to her, lauding her paper, and she showed it off during a sort of farewell party. Later, after receiving her degree, Nora sought and obtained a job at the Fritz Bauer Institute for Holocaust Studies and ultimately gained a position with a Frankfurt newspaper.
My Frankfurt semester also afforded me an unusual chance to apply my theory that a classroom should be a clashroom, because controversy is the lifeblood of an academic environment, as it is of a newspaper. One of my favorite paradigms of exile literature had been challenged by a fellow specialist, Helmut Müssener, of the University of Stockholm. Helmut, a good friend, was unable to accept my invitation for a debate before my class. And so I hit on a (rather ingenious I thought) substitute scenario. My greatly gifted student assistant Martin Spieles, then in his last semester at Frankfurt and shortly before joining the Fischer Publishing House, assumed the role of the absent challenger. He immersed himself in Müssener’s counterargument and we clashed point-counterpoint fashion. Soon my students entered the fray on either side, tremendously enjoying themselves by testing their own acumen against ours and exercising their cerebral matter to the fullest.
I don’t remember much about a lecture I gave that semester at the newly built Jewish Community Center in Frankfurt. But I remember with utmost clarity an absolutely brilliant presentation a few weeks later. The speaker was Dr. Salomon Korn, the Center’s architect and a member of the jury to select the best design for Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial. He spoke on that aspect of his career, about the design selection for the memorial. “Why is it so devilishly difficult, apart from the politics of the task, to come to a satisfactory resolution?” he asked. “Throughout the history of memorials, all monuments were erected in celebration of a public figure or as an expression of a group’s or nation’s exaltation or sorrow. But never before was one planned as the confession of national shame.” His remarks went to the very core of the problem of erecting a Holocaust statue in Germany. To that I can only add that I am quite unhappy with the Peter Eisenmann Memorial in Berlin. He erected rows upon rows of massive rectangular stone slabs (stolae). Their symbolism, to me, is ambiguous or elusive.
What followed in the adventures of the itinerant and peripatetic Professor Stern were two invasions of the defunct German Democratic Republic. Unlike the previous guest professorships, both were launched with the cosponsorship of Jewish organizations. The New York Leo Baeck Institute, a well-known repository of German-Jewish history and culture, received a major grant from Germany to send a Jewish-American professor to a former GDR university, in order to help such institutions during their process of transition. I was selected as the second of its emissaries and joined the German Department of the University of Leipzig in 1992. I accepted with a sense of excitement and apprehension. Excitement, because I would be one of the first Germanists to teach in the Eastern part of the newly reunited Germany, apprehension because I wasn’t sure how I would be received by the East German students. I feared that I would not be able to duplicate the rapport I had enjoyed in Frankfurt.
Neither my expectations nor my fears were entirely matched by reality. The students did not object to me at all; the eager debaters of Frankfurt had been replaced by rows upon rows of zealous notetakers. During my second lecture on exile, I decided to address the problem head-on. You are too docile [brav], I thundered. And I presented in English my favorite adage about a classroom being a clashroom. The god of teaching—I guess it is Mercury—be blessed, it worked. Then my clarion call had an echo. The next day, my call for a more rambunctious attitude appeared verbatim, amidst nice comments in a daily, the Leipziger Volkszeitung. A woman reporter had sneaked into the lecture hall, together with the students, in order to take the measure of the exotic import from America. The article by Claudia Würzburg was entitled “A Provocateur with a Sense of Humor,” and it also called me “a professor with rolled-up shirt sleeves” who “spices his lecture with jokes [and] challenges the students to ask questions and to contradict him.”
As my Leipzig semester unfolded, I learned that my guest department was deeply divided. On the one hand there were colleagues who had become willing or unwilling supporters of the Communist regime during the time of the rule of the so-called German Democratic Republic. After the reunification of Germany, they were told by the new democratic rulers that they could continue as professors for a short period (say, three years) and then would be retired. They obviously resented their pending dismissal. On the other hand, vacancies in the various departments were filled by arrivals from the former Western part of Germany, who were criticized for a lack of experience—start-ups, the Easterners called them, because of their deserting the Leipzig campus for the West even during brief national holidays. As an American I wasn’t personally involved in the enmity of the two parties. But the peacemaker in me told me I should try my skills at this seemingly unsolvable conflict. I shared my thoughts with one of my colleagues, the late Professor Eilers. She jumped at the suggestion of easing tensions in the department. “I am on board!” she exclaimed. “I’m going to give a departmental party. East and West shall meet!”
She set out a buffet, which in reality was a feast. I was charged with contributing a humorous interlude. Virtually every member of the department streamed into her apartment. They provided, in microcosm, an image of a country in transition. The situation also indicated to me how a relatively short period of dictatorial rule can leave its deleterious imprint long after its demise.
Details tell the story. When Dr. Eilers urged her guests to take second portions, the “Westerners” accepted her invitation with alacrity and gusto. The “Easterners” had to be encouraged several times. After a polite period
of hesitancy, they also succumbed. The informal dress of the “Wessies” stood out in contrast to the shirt and tie/blouse and skirt of their Eastern neighbors. About forty years of separation had allowed different manners and customs to bloom.
The contrast was emphasized again when I took on my assigned duties as entertainer and told a tall tale. I pretended that I had been at an archive in Düsseldorf devoted to the life and work of one of Germany’s immortal authors, Heinrich Heine, and asked for the last edition of his poetry under his personal control. It was delivered to me, but “the binding,” I said, “felt swollen. My curiosity was piqued,” I continued, “I took out my trusted Swiss Army knife, opened the binding, and extracted several handwritten pieces of paper. They contained further verses of Heine’s masterpiece, Journey through the Harz Mountains.” A shocked silence all around! I started to recite, apparently from the manuscript pages. In Heine’s style I produced satiric verses, each one mocking the foibles of one of my listeners.
What surprised me most about my experience in Germany at the time was the fact that the so-called Jewish question, despite my Leo Baeck sponsorship and despite the Jewish authors we were reading, rarely surfaced. I believe that in those first years after the fall of the Wall, a certain awkwardness vis-à-vis a subject so long ignored in the GDR still prevailed. My assumption was supported, certainly not entirely proven, during the one occasion when my Jewishness was catapulted into the realm of public consciousness. The university decided to designate a public address by me as its contribution to the Leipziger Jüdische Woche. My lecture on “Being Jewish in Today’s Germany” went well enough; it was subsequently printed in a university journal and the first couple of questions, less than searching or profound, passed without a ripple. But the next one was unexpected. “How do you explain Jewish self-hate?” Fortunately I had read Sander Gilman’s book on the subject, and I explained at some length that pariahs in all societies tend to absorb the calumnies of the majority and to apply them frequently to a subgroup within their own ranks. Yet the question attested to the poser’s awkwardness when dealing with the Jewish experience. My impression was reinforced afterward by two West German colleagues, recently appointed to the department. “Die Frage paßte wie die Faust aufs Auge,” one of them said. “That question was off the wall.”
