by Guy Stern
One more experience during that Leipzig week appeared to reify my impression of the East’s slow learning process about Jewish matters. As its contribution to the Jewish week, the Gewandhaus (Orchestra Hall) featured a concert by the synagogal choir of Leipzig. The Hebrew melodies were flawlessly, even inspiringly sung and the house was filled to capacity, but I found out afterward that the synagogal choir did not number a single Jewish member among its singers. In all probability, Leipzig no longer numbered Jewish singers among its current inhabitants.
Concurrently with me, but exceeding my stay, the University of Leipzig invited the Austrian writer Joseph Haslinger as guest professor, arguably the most eloquent anti-Fascist in Austria and beyond. Hence the invitation carried with it a liberal commitment; his 1995 novel Opernball, as you will know, is a merciless dissection of Austrian flirtations with right-wingers. I first met with Joseph Haslinger in Chicago during an AATG meeting; the Austrian consul walked out on his lecture. We renewed acquaintances in Leipzig. “Here it is easy,” he told me, “to rally students to squelch rightist demonstrations.” Obviously neither he nor I was an infallible prophet.
The year following found me at the University of Potsdam. The Moses Mendelssohn Institute, one of the university’s subsidiaries, was my sponsor—and Professor Julius Schoeps, the director of the program, became my boss. But our connection became much stronger through our lunchroom discussions. We felt at times like the successors to the age of Lessing and Mendelssohn. I wish I had a transcript of our lunch time talks. His forefathers, one of them, a battle-scarred and starred, medic during WWI had been rewarded by having a garrison in my hometown of Hildesheim become the bearer of his name. Of course, that name plaque was forcibly removed during WWII.
The same could be said of my association with the “second in command” of the Institute. Professor Wolfgang Hempel kept my senses ever active. Our discussions had mostly to do with the future of a new Germany. But he played a far more important and personal role in my life—as he did for so many others. At least half of the new acquaintances and friendships I struck up in Germany were of his making! I joined a team determined to devote a Festschrift (a commemorative publication) to him subtitled “A Weaver of Nets.” He had brought many people together. He even played a vital role in the introduction to my wife.
From my base in Potsdam I was occasionally removed upon instructions from the head of the Kurt Weill Foundation, Kim Kowalke. I made frequent side trips to Chemnitz as a consultant to that city’s opera company. I was lending a hand, as I have detailed elsewhere, to the revival and German premier of Weill/Werfel’s biblical drama Der Weg der Verheissung (The Road of Promise).
Also, I was invited, as a sort of an appendix to my guest professorship, to give one of the dedicatory speeches for the new synagogue in Dresden on November 9, 2001. The community leaders and the city fathers had scheduled an open house after the official opening. My wife and I could not believe what we saw. Propelled by curiosity, civic pride, and—as newspapers reported—the desire to counter recurring signs of prejudice, the line on that cold November day stretched from the synagogue and community-house complex to the River Elbe. The average wait, it was estimated, was two hours. And I lectured to a full house at a nearby art gallery.
In many respects my semester at the University of Potsdam replicated my Leipzig experience. Yet it produced one of the most emotional moments of my teaching career. I had arranged for our seminar on postwar German-Jewish writers to visit a dramatization of the memoirs of Inge Deutschkron, entitled I Wore the Yellow Star. By way of preparation, I had asked Mrs. Deutschkron to guest lecture to our students. In an hour-and-a-half she won our hearts with the recollection of her flight with her mother from one hiding place in Berlin to another to escape deportation to the Nazi death camps. Shortly afterward, we went to the Grips Theater, the most prestigious youth theater in Germany, where a superb actress played the adolescent Inge. The students saw an individual fate, a mother and daughter belabored and persecuted right within their own neighborhoods. After the play, as arranged, we stayed in the theater to meet Volker Ludwig, the play’s director. He did all the talking. The students and I were too busy using Kleenexes and handkerchiefs.
I should like to conclude with a report on my hitherto last guest professorship, years ago at the University of Munich. It constitutes a kind of musical coda, in which, fleetingly, the old themes reemerge. Two departments, Germanistics and Communications, had joined forces to get a grant from DAAD [Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst], roughly comparable to an NEH grant for my services. When a prestigious Mercador fellowship came through, both departments claimed their hold on me. Not to dwell too much on that toilsome semester, let me just mention that I taught a full program for both of them with huge enrollments: before being split up with my colleague and (occasionally combative) friend Heinz Starkulla Jr., one seminar numbered ninety students. Again, a plethora of master’s and doctoral theses grew out of those courses. Again, one of the authors under discussion, Arno Reinfrank this time, attended a seminar. My seminars usually concluded amidst wine and pizza at an outdoor restaurant. At the end of the semester, Dean Hans Wagner asked me to hold a student-faculty colloquium and, as a final gesture, issued an invitation to do all that over again in the following year. I was asked to give the major address at the Colloquium of the Social Studies Division of the University at the end of the semester. As my subject I chose “Nichjüdische Deutsche von heute im Dienste jüdischer Anliegen” (Non-Jewish Germans of Today in the Service of Jewish Causes.) I ended my speech with a lyrical commendation of all men and women of good will, words borrowed from a poem by Hilde Domin.
Wer den Hund zuriückbeißt
Wer auf den Kopf der Schlange tritt
Wer den Kaiman die Augen zuhält
Der ist in Ordnung.
Whoever rebuffs a biting dog
Whoever crushes the head of a snake
Whoever blindfolds an alligator
Those are people as they should be.
With Mom (Hedwig), 1922
With Grandfather, 1926
With Werner (younger brother), 1927
With Werner, 1928
My parents (Julius and Hedwig), Werner, and Eleonore (younger sister), 1937
Cousin Marianne and Grandmother Rebecca Silverberg, around 1936
At far left wearing a vest, with my fellow members of the youth group of the Hildesheim Jewish community in 1936 on a bicycle tour
Far right with my fellow members of the youth group on a hike, including Cantor Cysner (third from left under the tree) and Gerda Schoenenberg (standing on the left), early 1937
Oskar Stern, teacher at Jewish Elementary School in Hildesheim and Werner Stern (top row, second from right)
On the far right, at the Picadilly Room at the Melbourne Hotel, 1939
My naturalization document (back and front)
Entering the Army at Fort Leavenworth, KS, Fall 1942
Camp Ritchie entrance, 1944
Interrogation in Belgium, Winter, 1944
1st Army Headquarters Interrogation Teams, 1944
As an accordion player, 1945
The Ritchie Boys: Guy Stern (left), Lt. Walter Sears (middle), Fred Howard (right), Victory Europe Day, 1945
After homecoming in St. Louis, 1946
On the day of my wedding to Margith (1949), with Uncle Benno and Aunt Ethyl
University of Cincinnati, 1981 costume ball. Second from the left is Heinz Starkulla, Sr. I am third from the left.
German Embassy, Washington D.C., when I was awarded the Knight’s Cross, The Grand Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, 1987
2nd Festschrift in Munich, 2005, with Barbara Malmann-Bauer and Professor Konrad Feilehenfeld, Germanists and editors
WSU members of German Slavic Department. Alfred Cobbs, me, Marvin and Roz Schindler, Mark Ferguson, (back row) Donald Haase
At the Aspen Institute as a participant
At the Chemnitz Opera House (
Germany), 1999
Growing the WSU Academy of Scholars, 2010
My son, Mark, around three years old
My wedding to Judy, July 19, 1979, with Rabbi Dannel Schwartz and Judge Damon Keith
Mark and I at my wedding to Judy
With Judy in Italy, 1990s
With Judy at the premiere of The Eternal Road, 1999
In Hildesheim celebrating the Annual Festival of Eintracht (and my honorary Eintracht membership)
With prominent German authors Günter Grass and Uwe Johnson at the University of Cincinnati, May 1965
With Christian Bauer, Toronto Documentary Film Festival opening of The Ritchie Boys, 2005
Fred Howard, fellow Ritchie Boy; Christian Bauer; and me at the opening of the film, 2005
With past director Stephen Goldman during the Ritchie Boys Exhibit at the Holocaust Memorial Center, 2011. Photo credit: Holocaust Memorial Center
With Susanna on our first vacation together. Recloses, France, August 5, 2004
Attending a wedding with Susanna, July 25, 2009
With Susanna in a typical “winter picture,” January 2016
At the Eisenhower Library, Abilene, KS, for Victory Europe Day, 2014
With French Legion of Honor Medal, 2017
In Germany with high school students, 2018
With Poet Laureate Rita Dove and her husband, German author Fred Viebahn, at the Holocaust Memorial Center, no date
University of Michigan Homecoming Game, Veteran of the Week, October 2018
Visiting Normandy, May 25, 2016
CHAPTER EIGHT
Research and Scholarship
As I was climbing the rungs of academia, moving from undergraduate instruction to a combination of graduate and upper-level undergraduate teaching, I had a chance to carry my insights gained from scholarship into the classroom. To me that is one of the main reasons for staying active as a scholar. It is fair to demand of a professor that he/she be a competent teacher, a role model and mentor, and a publishing scholar. The adage “Publish or Perish” is often shamefacedly owned up to as an incentive to activate pen, typewriter, or computer. I gladly confess that though I have been mostly self-propelled, the “P or P” warnings of my professors also reverberated in my mind upon occasion.
I need no epiphany to realize why I am a self-motivated workaholic in my research. There, as in so many other activities, I have the survivor syndrome. As I have defined that characteristic elsewhere, it means that the survivor of a catastrophe feels the need to justify his or her continued existence. In my research I have been allowed to pursue two specialties in my field that combine my intellectual, professional, and personal interests, and in part they define who I am. I think of myself as a “descendant” of the Age of Enlightenment. In the eighteenth century, European thinkers, writers, and artists were convinced that rational thinking could advance human progress. By virtue of reasoning and “humanitas,” we could walk from darkness and delusion to humane morality and behavior and intellectual insights. Among many others Voltaire in France, Hume and Locke in England, and Lessing and Mendelssohn in Germany were the initiators and promulgators of that philosophy. In graduate school I read their works, enrolled in seminars on the Enlightenment, and started explicating their theories and creative works. Several chapters in my dissertation dealt with Christoph Martin Wieland, one of the German pioneers of the movement. When I became a department head and dean at the University of Cincinnati, I used my prerogatives as an administrator to create a monument to the most distinguished representative of German Enlightenment, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. I convinced the academic leaders of my university and of the Cincinnati University Press to authorize and partially finance the publication of the Lessing Yearbook, as of this writing in the fifty-third year of its publication. I found a collaborator among the colleagues in my German Department. Gottfried F. Merkel, the head of our director of Graduate Studies, became the cofounder of the Yearbook and the Society.
It was a happy collaboration and an exciting time for us all. Merkel had become an aficionado of Lessing primarily out of local patriotism. He gloried in the fact that both he and the philosopher had grown up in Saxony and had studied at the University of Leipzig. As for me, an exile from Germany, I had turned to Lessing at a time when his message was being howled down by Nazi barbarians and his drama Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise) banished from German stages. Later I had rejoiced when I, a Fulbright professor in Munich in the early 1960s, saw the play’s resurrection in a deeply moving, exhilarating performance by the German-Jewish actor Ernst Deutsch in the title role. Although traveling different paths, Gottfried Merkel and I had arrived at the same destination as admirers of one of our cultural heroes. Yet a project such as ours required, of course, many fostering parents. If Gottfried and I were avowed disciples of Lessing, so were two of our American-born colleagues, Jerry Glenn and Edward Paxton Harris. But they were imbued with the spirit of Lessing’s American contemporary and think-alike, Benjamin Franklin. As the masterly managing editors of the early volumes, their enthusiastic ideas, together with those of other members of the department, including our guest professor from Freiburg, Wolfram Mauser, became invaluable.
I tried to recapture that creative spirit when I was asked to chronicle the Yearbook’s first ten years. In his foreword Wolfgang Mauser supplied a summary of the Yearbooks’ achievements.
The impeccable scholarship of the Yearbook helped solidify the reputation of Germanistics. It would be too facile to say that German, Austrian, and Swiss schools at one time had a “colonial” attitude toward scholarship from abroad. But the assumption that colleagues in other countries were but the younger siblings of the older European brothers and sisters persisted for a long time. With the continuity of the cutting-edge Enlightenment research of the society and the equally distinguished work by other American societies that the Cincinnati model spawned, it has become increasingly difficult to maintain a superior attitude.
The Society and the Yearbook also became a bridge-builder through the various symposiums it sponsored; Cincinnati became a vortex of eighteenth-century studies for scholars from three continents. Through those initiatives the severed ties between Lessing’s home country and those of his worldwide admirers became refashioned.
Our department sponsored several conferences on Lessing that engendered their own brand of excitement. We were surprised and elated when our invitation to a Lessing expert from East Germany was accepted. He later told us that he ran a gauntlet of initial bureaucratic objections, all of them rooted in the Communist reluctance to deal with those capitalists across the ocean.
Four German colleagues from West Germany had no such difficulties, of course; but they created their own. We had advised them that the papers to be presented had to conform to the time constraints we had set for each speaker. Apparently they had paid little heed to that admonition, which became obvious on the second day of the conference. Our East German guests had been able to observe our strict enforcement of the time limitations. The next morning the West German crew appeared early, ensconced themselves in the rear of the lecture hall, and began to eliminate major portions of their planned readings. We couldn’t resist a pun. We called them “The German Streichquartett,” which on its obvious level means string quartet, but also can suggest four string players striking away at excessive verbiage.
At the end of the conference, we organized a party in the faculty dining room. I was to give a speech, but I thought that wouldn’t really project the abundance of ideas that had sprung up during the preceding two-and-a-half days. I knew our scholarly president would show up and so I gave a speech called “A Report to Our President,” in which I gave a thumbnail sketch of all the papers offered at the conference. Warren Bennis, with his vise-like mind, surprised our audience with his reaction to some of the papers whose synopsis I had presented. He also termed my report a new form of nonfiction writing. Of course, he made every participant at the conference feel like a pioneering intellec
tual. For a while I was similarly deluded.
