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 sent a present.18 They “bemoaned my absence, thanked me for the books, and sent me a box of homemade Xmas cookies.” He visited the Dorns in April and July of 1932; in July, their spare rooms were full, but they insisted that he take all his meals with them and treated him like a son. Frau Dorn and her friend came to the station to see him off, waving “as the train went past. I stood in the doorway and felt pangs at pulling out again, this having no roots, I thought, was not always so sweet a joy, and having friends a sweeter one.”19 After the Nazi takeover, the Dorns represented not just German friendship but Gentile decency. When a card came “inviting me down there again,” Harry–too busy preparing to return home to accept–was “glad they haven’t become anti-Semites.” Indeed, Dorn spent the war years translating a book by Hyman Levy, a Scottish mathematician and philosopher who had grown up in an Orthodox Jewish home.20
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
