7B stuff, which most of the class faithfully copied, word for word. At home only the girls are this way. Meinecke I cannot judge because I couldn’t understand him. Sometimes he stutters over a word, all the time he speaks into the desk, and I could only catch the higher parts of the waves of his ascending intonation.82
Attendance requirements were minimal. In order to obtain the instructor’s signature in their Studienbuch (study book), students had to attend a class once at the beginning and once at the end of the semester; the rest didn’t matter. They paid a fee for each course, the source of income for most teachers, including the Privatdozenten (lecturers), who formed the majority of the teaching staff.83 In Harry’s first semester, he brought his Studienbuch to the medievalist Martin Weinbaum, who provided some adventitious amusement. They spoke German until Weinbaum, noting some hesitancy or a slight accent, asked whether he was German. Harry answered:
Ich [I]. Ich bin Amerikaner.
Er [He]. Well, why don’t you speak English?
Ich. !84
Weinbaum continued in unaccented English, and Harry attended most of his lectures. The “singsong” of another medievalist, Erich Caspar, nearly put him to sleep. He dragged himself to the final lecture to get Caspar’s signature, but he “scuttled out of the room like a rabbit and walloped down the hall so that I will have to waste another hour on Saturday. A shameless ingrate, when I’d paid him $1.50 just to sign my book” at the beginning of the semester.”85 Harry’s Studienbuch, signed by eminences like Sombart, would “serve as window dressing back at Cambridge [Harvard] where they probably don’t know what a completely unendurable person Sombart is.” “I’ve never heard such a big fraud,” Harry told his parents (in German, to show off his skills): he was full of gas, just like Harvard professors, and he “looks like a billy goat but speaks like a donkey.”86
Harry gave no quarter to anyone, no matter how distinguished. In one class Oncken, a leading light of German historiography, disputed the view of two Marxist students that “economic forces were the leading cause of the American revolution.” Deducing that “Oncken’s knowledge of the Am. Rev. did not form the basis of his professorship,” Harry advised the Marxists to bolster their position by “read[ing] Beard & Schlesinger,” and he resolved to “read a few books myself and see what we can do to overcome Oncken’s insufferable complacency.”87 Only the prospect of disproving Oncken spurred him to continue in the seminar, which he scorned as “a high school class in history”–an echo of the opinion of his Harvard mentor, William L. Langer, that German seminars were “kindergarten stuff.” The American Revolution was forgotten in the next class: “Instead Oncken asked me about the motives of Gustavus Adolphus. My dislike of the seminar system is growing.”
The one professor whose classes Harry faithfully attended, although often complaining, was Gustav Mayer. Mayer’s expertise was exactly what he needed for his proposed Harvard dissertation on the Social Democratic Party. In his first semester, he took Mayer’s seminar on the early history of Marxist philosophy and his lecture course on German political parties. Assured by Mayer that there was room in the historical literature for his research, he began collecting the “protocols” of the SPD–the records of the proceedings of meetings that would be his “fundamental source”; soon he had acquired a complete set from 1887 to 1917.88 Mayer introduced him to the director of the archive of the SPD newspaper, the Vorwärts.89 He was thrilled by the SPD “library of 40,000 books on the socialist movement and history, economics, and sociology.” A few months later, experiencing the common fumbling of the neophyte scholar, he was suffering from an embarrassment of riches: there was “too much material and the copying of it takes so much time”; he was looking for “a way out.”90 The SPD protocols presented another Everest, but eventually he realized that it was unnecessary to take notes on “everything these quibblers say in their repetitious hairsplitterei” (the German suffix -erei, substituting for the English “-ing,” was an example of Dorn’s “Gemixte Pickles”).91 He was learning to be a scholar.
On Harry’s first visit to his home, Mayer generously offered me guidance and any kind of assistance on my thesis.”92 He “spent a grand couple of hours” in Mayer’s “glorious library hearing how he dug up the [Ferdinand] Lassalle documents” for his book on that German socialist thinker. Mayer described his experiences as a reporter for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in Belgium during the war. He talked, too, “about writing to a certain Ulyanov before the war–so that he is now the possessor of an interesting letter from Lenin–the later name of Ulyanov.” Valuable as his personal connection with Mayer was, it carried with it “a certain disadvantage”: he felt obliged “not to fall asleep” in class.93 He “detest[ed] Mayer’s classes, his lectures are not to be endured but his seminar is aggressively unbearable. To hell with Geistesgeschichte!”94 Later on, though, Geistesgeschichte–the history of ideas, which was pioneered at the University of Berlin–became a central theme of his teaching and writing. A few days later, Mayer’s lecture was “better… than usual” and even rose to “fairly interesting.” But complaints resumed: “I had to listen to two hours of dry rot in Mayer’s Seminar in an intolerable suffocation–all around me people were slouching, reading, or even (at the beginning) eating…. Result: nil.”95 The next lecture, though, was “not very intolerable.”
Why did he find Mayer so disappointing as a teacher? The most obvious explanation, supported by the students’ rude behavior, is that Mayer had no gift for teaching. Students came out of ideological sympathy: sixteen of the eighteen seminar students were Communists; the rest were “one SPD, and me.”96 Harry wanted teachers to connect past and present, as the previously despised Oncken did: “This afternoon Oncken…cited gleefully the Action Française of ca. 1924 to show that French desires for a disunited Germany didn’t end with the 18th century.”97 The adverb “gleefully” suggests that Oncken lectured with feeling. Gerhard Masur made a good impression for a similar reason. “Very sensible and pleasant,” he began his seminar by detailing “a dozen or more illuminating problems of the Reformation, passing present-day matters not timidly but tastefully…. Most of the time we sat there silent, but there are more live ones than in [Dietrich] Gerhard’s troupe of last semester.”98 What pleased Harry, then, was a combination of two factors. He required a teacher who, unlike most German professors, connected the past with “present-day matters,” and did so “not timidly but tastefully.” And he demanded enough lively students to stir up discussion, as happened from time to time.
Reaping the benefits
For all his grumbling, Harry found a good deal of stimulation in Mayer’s seminars. Early in 1932, when Mayer assigned him to report on two early papers by Engels, he indulged his “natural bent” to nitpick, “avidly seeking Engels’ errors.”99 This was not hard: Engels “was at the time of writing only a year and a half older than I am now.” He found “a certain agreeable peril in discussing Engels before the Engels authority.” He enjoyed Marx’s German Ideology “because it is so vigorously and spicily written”; Marx and Engels “tear into theory…with such gusto and vim and malice that you read it with pleasure.”100 An unanticipated payoff came some years later, when Harry taught “Scientific Socialism of Marx and Lenin” for the Communist student organization of which he was president (see Chapter 6).
In the same semester that he was reading Marx and Engels, Harry took Dietrich Gerhard’s seminar on the British Empire, his paper for which formed the basis of his sole published book. Gerhard assigned two students–Harry and a certain Fräulein Brose– to study the transfer of power in Singapore from the Dutch to the English. Harry was well equipped intellectually. In Paris he had bought a Dutch grammar and dictionary because he wanted to read a Dutch newspaper; “a misleading language” because of its likeness to German, Dutch nonetheless posed little difficulty. He mined the amazing Staatsbibliothek, which held all the “early 19th century things on Singapore…–practically
