in 1899, when he passed the Abitur. With a scholarly bent, he chose the antiquarian trade over academia because of the greater chance of success, for most Jewish academics were relegated to the lower ranks.60 For the most part, he acquired on his own the “all-encompassing knowledge” that he thought essential for his chosen profession.61 He was “at heart a pedagogue, with a need to teach all the bright, young, loyal workers he had the knack of finding.”62 In his New York office, even a part-time packer had to read French and German–“somewhat unusual requirements,” recalled Arthur H. Minters, an assistant who became an antiquarian book dealer himself. P.G. lectured his assistants “about the book trade in Europe before both world wars”; subjecting them to a monthly quiz, “he would scold us or box our ears if we answered stupidly. ‘A grown-up must do it!’ he’d say if we called on him for help.” One of his daily habits was looking in the New York Times obits for recently dead collectors whose heirs might be eager to sell.63
During the self-designed study tour to Italy in 1906 that launched his career, P.G. visited museums, libraries, antiquarians, and private collectors. Although only twenty-six, he so enchanted the specialists with whom he talked that they gave him good deals. In Rome the advice of an antiquarian to do business in the United States “struck me like lightening and was decisive for my business and for my life.” On his first American trip later that year, he made cold calls on custodians of major research libraries, persuading them that he could find the rare and out-of-print books that they had hitherto sought in vain. He could, and he did. Beginning in 1907, he issued catalogues listing incunabula and other rare books, runs of European scientific journals, and unpublished manuscripts ranging from holograph scores by famous European composers to Americana by such figures as Franklin and Washington.64 Copiously illustrated, accompanied by scholarly texts, and published privately in limited editions, these catalogues are now themselves antiquarian items. He was well connected throughout Europe. When the philosopher Karl Jaspers traveled in Italy in 1922, P.G.– who knew him through Gustav Mayer, Jaspers’s brother-in-law– arranged for him to meet with the famous philosopher Benedetto Croce.65 He also introduced Harry to Jaspers in Heidelberg. “Too naive to talk to one of Germany’s two leading philosophers,” Harry at least retained “a sort of photo image in my mind.”66
Although P.G.’s life was affected by wars, economic downturns, and the like, his talent for making the best of things gave him success or serenity (and, at times, both). When World War I broke out, three American university libraries asked him to collect war-related materials, which he did even after being drafted; at the end of the war, he sent them collections of historical importance.67 He had no qualifications whatsoever for soldiering. His poor eyesight relegated him first to chopping wood and digging ditches; a 1915 photograph shows him looking incongruously plebeian in his uniform as a Schipper–a man who uses a shovel.68 The authorities soon made better use of his gifts, which included facility in languages; he liked to say that he spoke five languages “fliessend und falsch” (fluently and incorrectly). His military supervisor had him censor correspondence and foreign-language printed matter and later assigned him to appraise an Air Force library.69 Reading German newspapers aloud to his fellow shovelers “gave me an excellent opportunity of becoming acquainted with the psychology of classes with which I had rarely come into contact.” As Harry was later to do, he learned from the foreign newspapers what was being suppressed in the German press.
After World War I, P.G.’s astute decision to conduct business only in dollars shielded him from the economic afflictions of the 1920s, including the disastrous German crash in 1923, and enabled him to buy important collections from destitute collectors. Obtaining a visa to the United States right after World War I was extremely difficult, but not for him: a friend in Washington helped. Because the two countries were still technically at war, American reporters sought him for interviews that, when published, contained “almost nothing I had said!” His business was not seriously depleted by the Depression; friends and relatives continued to invest in it, confident that his reliance on dollars would be protective.70 World War II badly affected his pocketbook, but not his spirit (see Chapter 5).
The idea of “Germany”
For Harry, who never set foot in Berlin’s renowned cabarets and bars, the city was another kind of paradise–a paradise of book shops, opera houses, and newspapers. The bookstores, with their enormous stocks, carried the “danger…that I can buy them faster than I can read them.”71 In the periodical room of the Staatsbibliothek (state library), which also served the university, he felt “the pulse of the world” stirring in the “thousands on thousands of periodicals on all subjects.”72 In Berlin, the center of a “Germany” that felt like an idealized home, he became an adult. Traveling in Europe as well as elsewhere in Germany tested and affirmed his self-sufficiency and, for a while, his love of Germany. If homesick while in other countries, he longed not for America but for Germany. In Rome, the sight of the imperial eagle at the Germany railway office and “the brass plaque on the gatepost” of the German Embassy cheered him up, as did any opportunity to speak German. Living in Germany meant “living in the present instead of scuttling around ruins,” as he did dutifully in Rome.73 It meant “the Reformation and the beginning of living mentally in this world, the antithesis to this church-infested capital of superstition.” It meant moving briskly in “a cold northern exposure where the light is sharp and clear…instead of a hazy swaying in sultry day dreams.” When his parents reproved him for his hostility to Rome, he expressed his disgust with the omnipresent Church. He admitted that “however regrettable in an aspirant historian, the sight of hoodoo in actual practice fills me with loathing and contempt.”74 Yet his “sharp and clear” Germanic intellect was at odds with the dreamy emotions that he confided in his diary. By the time he returned to America, in September 1933, he had begun to reconcile his intellect and his emotions.
Part 3. Harry’s intellectual environment
The University of Berlin
The History Seminar (Department) of the University of Berlin, the epicenter of modern historical scholarship in Germany, was at a significant moment in its own history, for most of the older generation had either retired or were on the verge of retirement, and bright young recruits were emerging on a scene that was about to change dramatically. In his first semester Harry heard “the last series of public lecturers by Friedrich Meinecke, the dean of German historians.”75 His recollection fifty years later of Meinecke’s “sensitive and carefully nuanced refined mind” belies the sharper impression in his diary of the great man’s final lecture, attended not only by students but by colleagues distinguished by their “bald heads, beards, and a professional gravity.” As he was about to begin, Meinecke was presented with “yellow tulips and a red rose bush–it looked like a wedding.” Meinecke “was surprised and touched.” The lecture displeased Harry, who thought Meinecke “mishandled the American revolution in an obsolete manner.”76 Another oldtimer, Werner Sombart, “a celebrated economic and social historian, proved to be over the hill and on the way to foolishness.”77 The most important of the middle generation for Harry was Gustav Mayer, but the young fellows were more exciting. Because Harry’s academic experiences in 1932-33 were of a piece with those in 1931-32, I discuss here Harry’s second as well as his first year.
Assessing the instructors
German historians had a “patriotic duty” to devote themselves to studying the fatherland: so said Hermann Oncken, one of Harry’s teachers, in the year that Hitler took power.78 Harry deplored their “very unpleasant habit of writing Weltgeschichte [world history] which turns out to be the history of Germany with a few comments on the rest of the world.”79 From this nationalist focus it was a short step to Nazi history glorifying the Fatherland. In the meantime, though, there was plenty to learn. In his first semester, Harry “tasted” ten lecture courses, mainly in history, and attended six of them sometimes. In addition, he signed up for two seminars, the signature pedagogical innovation of German universities–one on the modern period, and the other on the Middle
