had previously been neglected.
By the end of 1932, Harry’s social skills allowed him to talk with Fräulein Brose, who had just returned from studying in the United States, “about Europe, America, and what not–for three hours.” Eventually they “agreed to swap German and English conversation.” His sociability spread. When a neighbor asked Frau Meyer if she knew anyone who could use a student ticket to the opera, he accepted–even though his fellow opera-goer would be a woman.102 He laughed to think that “after how many years I suddenly in one month make the acquaintance of not one but two girls.” Before long Fräulein Brose and Harry were “doing Hamlet” together. Another session on Hamlet made him exclaim: “My God I’m getting sociable.” One evening Harry accompanied a woman named Eva Sinauer, apparently a guest of the Meyers, to hear the famous diva Fritzi Massary in Oscar Straus’s new operetta Eine Frau, die weiss was sie will (“A Woman Who Knows What She Wants”). His judgment– “perfectly foul”–was not shared by the rest of the audience: the operetta was “one of the last glittering theatrical events that Berlin would ever see” before the Nazi takeover, which forced Massary, a “non-Aryan Christian,” to flee to London.103 Some weeks later, he walked Fräulein Brose home through the Tiergarten from a lecture, grilling her on her political views. It was possible to be friends with a woman, even one like Fräulein Brose with conservative politics.104
On the last day of 1932, Harry summed up his current academic situation in his diary: he had acquired 965 books and pamphlets and had completed his paper on Singapore. Ever self-critical, he castigated his paper as “repetitious, stylistically grotesque, and not properly spatially distributed” but felt confident that Gerhard would be unable “to contradict the ostensible facts.” In the seminar, Fräulein Brose read her piece first; Harry was not impressed. The next week it was his turn: “Read Singapore this afternoon and got hoarse. Gerhard thinks I asked the right questions & gave the wrong answers.”105 He appreciated the value Gerhard put on “the right questions.”
Sometimes Harry attended lectures in other fields. In his last semester, Hans Kauffmann’s lectures on Dutch painting in the seventeenth century fed his love of Rembrandt and Vermeer. Like most art historians in Harry’s view, Kauffmann was “a pleasant lecturer, slow and daintily speaking.” Harry’s initial praise of Kauffmann’s “penetrating” discourse gave way to complaints of seven weeks “wasted…on Rubens.” He enjoyed the lecture on Vermeer but wondered impatiently: “When is he coming to Rembrandt?” Finally Kauffmann delivered “a very fine lecture, full of understanding and feeling,” about Rembrandt as a painter of “the dialectic of life”: he painted the prodigal son when his own son died, and Bathsheba when his beloved Hendrikje Stoffels died. Harry was overcome with emotion by a slide of a self-portrait and another of Jacob blessing his grandchildren. He struggled to describe his feeling:
It is not that ecstasy I feel when I hear [Sigrid] Onegin’s voice–it may be what Spinoza meant with his intellectual love of god. It is less sensual, more appreciative than being dissolved into exquisite sensations by that heavenly voice. I love that man…. Learning to meet Rembrandt is maybe the most important result of these two years.
In Rembrandt, he saw an image of the man he hoped to become: faithful to his ideals and “independent…of his Mitmenschen,” his fellow human beings.106
Extracurricular activities
Aside from colleagues in seminars, Harry had no direct contact with garden-variety students at the university–65% of whom, in his first semester, expressed support of the National Socialist German Student League.107 He took part in no organized extracurricular activities, instead making up his own. The lack of specific requirements at the university made it easy for him to indulge his intellectual curiosity–occasionally, as with Kauffmann’s lectures, at the university but more often outside of academia. As the next section will show, his travels during academic vacations were almost entirely educational in intent. He wanted to be able to read major European sources, and by the time he returned to America, he had six languages at his disposal: English, German, French, Italian, Dutch, and Spanish. Besides going to France and Italy to improve his knowledge of French and Italian, he found he could read Dutch and Spanish with the help of a dictionary. Armed with a Spanish dictionary, he read José Ortega y Gasset’s Revolt of the Masses in the original: “I tried the first few paragraphs and found it easy.”108 Selfstudy included reading books by such authors as Karl Jaspers, to whom he had been too shy to talk in Heidelberg. Together with the Nazis, but for different reasons, he admired a new book by Jaspers, The Spiritual Situation of the Age. Harry liked Jaspers’s concise exposition; the Nazis admired its apparent exaltation of emotion over reason.109 The reviewer in Goebbel’s paper Der Angriff (The Attack) would have been surprised to learn that Jaspers’s wife, Gertrud, was Jewish–Gustav Mayer’s sister.
Harry devoted important time to his long-standing interest in literature. The book that made the deepest impression on him was not a historical treatise but a novel, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, which his parents had brought to him from Europe in 1928. Having read it off and on for years, in 1932 he “read thru the remainder in spurts that were at times feverish”: “The last hundred pages I read with rising anguish mixed with impatient drive, troubled at the realization that it would last only a few more hours and anxious to know how it would end.” It was “no ordinary story where everything is neatly tied up and labeled at the end…yet there is a fine sense of form, [it is] musically built, it has symphonic proportions, resonances, depths, colorings, melodies, counterpoint, it flows directly into your consciousness without the intermediary hindrance of words.”110 Mann’s other great novel, Buddenbrooks, was “not a book but an experience.”111 Harry speculated that its great success among German-speakers–“more than 900,000 copies…sold”–would not extend in translation, because it was “too localized.” Immediately upon Hitler’s seizure of power, Mann became an exile, a “notorious liberalistic author” whose name was verboten in the press.112
Mann’s novels spoke to Harry as Goethe’s Faust did not. With The Magic Mountain he had felt “an imperious not-to-be-postponed urge to force my way thru,” but not with Faust.113 Still, when both parts of Faust were performed at the Berlin State Theater, he went. Part II, which he saw first, was “in spots very fine, in general minced into pieces, a collection of scenes without unity. Not much better in this respect than reading the text.” Part I, though, was “a great event…. Towering. Miles above II.” The theater, he realized, can make you “forget the proscenium and the footlights. You can be swung away.”114
This repressed young man sought to “be swung away” by film, theater, opera, books, paintings, and even people. It happened occasionally. One evening in Munich, he was “doubly brightened.” by the simple sight of “the glow on a woman’s face that came when she saw her husband” and by an essay in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung about Mont St. Michel. The article gave him a “feeling of being brought out of [him]self, brought into the ideas of the words printed there, brought into a dreamy harmony.” The final sentence– “Thrust in your sword, Michael, thrust it in”–made him dream that night that he was “swinging buoyantly one of those great shining two-handed swords” that he had seen recently in Nuremberg and Munich, and he felt “insuperable and gay.”115 He had similar experiences from time to time at the opera, rejoicing in the “marvelous voice” of Gertrud Bindernagel, “the moving mountain,” and “the heavenly” Sigrid Onegin, who were “pretty nearly the only people who could sing in Götterdämmerung.” Listening ecstatically to Onegin, he felt (echoing Hamlet) that he “could shuffle off this mortal coil painlessly.” He imagined that “opium eaters faintly sense the same sort of exultation” as he felt listening to Onegin sing Schubert lieder and an aria from Glück’s Orfeo.116
What good was all this pleasure, though? Was he any more than a dilettante? Exaggerating his lack of “patience and persistence,” he bemoaned the “wide divergence between [his] ambitions and accomplishments.” His
