John Milton’s sonnet:
How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,
Stol’n on his wing my three and twentieth year!
My hasting days fly on with full career,
But my late spring no bud or blossom shew’th.
In his own “late spring,” Harry, resolutely areligious, could not follow Milton’s example and resolve his doubts by submitting to “the will of Heav’n.” He could only indict himself for laziness. When he listed the books in English, French, and German that he had read in the year since he sailed from New York, the tally‒by no means negligible‒did not still his self-recrimination. A kinder judge would have said that he had studied reasonably hard.117
Travels in Europe
Earlier in 1932, Harry’s undergraduate mentor Frederick Artz had weighed in with some unsolicited advice. Harry’s “wideranging”– his extracurricular activities–“will unfit you for doing a thesis and getting your degree” at Harvard; if he wanted that degree, Artz advised, he should return immediately, even though his chances of an academic job would be “infinitesimal.” Harry wondered how he could “collect the material for a thesis without being here,” and he doubted that “getting my eyes opened” would “unfit” him for Harvard.118 Indeed, a major part of Harry’s education took place during vacations. In 1932 he traveled for language study to Paris in the spring, and to Rome in the summer for Italian (with stops en route in Germany, Switzerland, other Italian cities, Vienna, and Prague). In spring 1933, he roamed around Germany to find out how Hitler was received outside of the capital (see Chapter 4).
Five weeks in Paris, lodging with a family and working with a tutor, sufficed to improve Harry’s French. He took no interest in Paris: “I live in a dream, I walk the streets of this city and am not there, I think of Germany, of Berlin, as from the distance of years, and calmly inquire how much tickets are to Mainz, steamers to Cologne, trains to Berlin.” By the time he left, he understood spoken French (when “the daughter of the house told me her troubles with the Serb who has proposed marriage to her”); he owned seventy French books; and he could translate an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeiner Zeitung into French. As usual, he read the newspapers, an activity that gave rise to a “horrific sensation…of living in a twilight, and in the half dusk I make out huge forms writhing and wrestling in the mist, but what they are exactly is not clear to the excited crowd of commentators who write us dispatches.” He thought of the comment attributed to Edward Gray, the British Foreign Secretary: “‘The lamps are going out all over Europe,’ said Gray one late afternoon toward the end of July 1914, “‘we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’” If the period 1904-1914 was “the era of the armed peace,” Harry wondered, “what will they call 1919-? It is armed but is it peace?” The nightmare he imagined would not “be dispersed by daylight,” which only showed it “growing heavier, more frightful.” What was happening? What was a “fact”? To judge “a new fact or pretended fact,” a historian had to see how “it fits into the rest of ‘facts.’… It is the sum total of changing knowledge which is the touchstone for any one of the member facts.” Developing his theory of historiography, he continued:
Thus the whole of knowledge and all experience are woven together into a web–at any one point vulnerable, perhaps, evolving as we regard it, supported by nothing but other similarly weak grains of “knowledge” but which twisted together, interlaced, intertwined, entangled, spun and woven, offer a net of elastic, indeed often fragile material upon which civilization and culture in all aspects bounces and floats.119
From France, where he felt “hotter and hotter for things German,” he made straight for Heidelberg. Professor Dorn met his train and took him home, where the Dorns’ servant, Gertrud, “stood at the head of the stairs with a friendly grin…. And in the hallway stood Guga & then Frau Dorn. It was very nice to be welcomed to a place instead of asking for a room.” He had brought a toy elephant for Guga, who “later showed how well she had studied the book I sent her at Christmas.” With her parents, he “talked and talked.” Aware of his “Berlinish attempt at an accent,” he found the Dorns’ southern accent “friendlier, maybe, than the northern, at least less sharp, more gentle.” After much talk, “we ate–what a relief after French meals!”120
On Harry’s next trip, on the eve of the Reichstag election in July 1932, he proceeded to Rome very indirectly. His luggage consisted mainly of “seven Baedekers, assorted dictionaries, a camera, and other junk (pliers).”121 The Germanic thoroughness of the famed Baedeker guidebooks, which suited Harry, later gave rise to a legend that after the British bombed the historic city of Lübeck, Hitler–Baedeker in hand–ranted in a Reichstag speech that Germany would return the favor; “Baedeker raids” did in fact take place on five British cathedral cities.122 As Harry prepared for his trip, P.G. dispensed travel advice above and beyond the Baedekers, and Heinz told him “how to pat children on the head to create a sympathetic atmosphere in the [train] compartment.” From Frankfurt, where he observed the election, he proceeded to Heidelberg. The Dorns were “more favorable to the left & center than I expected” in the election, in which the right received 45% of the vote.123 Artz was in Heidelberg, studying German with Dorn and working on his book Reaction and Revolution 1814-1832. Conceding that another year in Germany “would be all right,” Artz warned that “it would take two years of residence at Harvard afterwards to land the degree.” That prospect was fine with Harry, “if my parents don’t mind supporting their son for a little while longer.” They didn’t mind; he remained in Cambridge until 1939.
Artz had earlier sent Harry the outline for his book and asked for comments. Harry was flattered that Artz “sacrificed research time which he earnestly devoted, ordinarily, to study, to gab with me.” He boldly suggested that Artz “give the book a statistical background: population, vital, trade, manufacturing, social statistics, such as history books never are furnished with but which would take some of the vague flabbiness out of them.”124 Artz “had no flair for that sort of thing,” and so–in a classic use of free labor from a graduate student–he asked Harry to gather the statistics and promised to “put my name in the book.”125 Throwing himself into this project, Harry discovered so many statistical subjects for Artz’s appendix that there was danger of appendicitis or worse: “perhaps the appendix might even burst & spill over into the rest of the book: acute peritonitis.”126 He worried over the statistics for the rest of his time in Germany.
From Heidelberg, Harry proceeded to southern Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. His object in Germany and Austria was to integrate new knowledge with old. In Rothenburg, he noted that the present inhabitants’ “gardens, chickens, cats, their fruit trees, their sheds and haymows” looked much as they had in the Middle Ages, an impression further supported when “someone dumped a pot of urine” into the alley through which he was walking, luckily missing him. The most wonderful discovery was the Deutsches Museum in Munich: “This confoundedly colossal assemblage of universal objects is worth a dozen–a gross–of libraries. I can learn more history here in a week than from a whole history faculty in a semester.” In Switzerland, reached via Innsbruck in Austria, his purpose was different. P.G. had persuaded him that he needed a rest and should go to the Alpine resort of Pontresina; Harry admitted that “it would be a great pleasure to relax, to not be solemn and heavy and scowling and full of hopes that tomorrow I’ll begin to work.” Resolutely solitary, he spent ten days reading intensely and walking in the mountains ruminating about himself and his future. Once he cast “a meditative eye on a girl in brown pants, a yellow polo shirt, and a beret, who is motorcycling by.” He scolded himself: “You think a great deal more about girls and marriage than you talk or write about them, a great deal more than you imagine you ought to.” When the proprietor of his pension commented that he talked to no one, he was defiant: “I shall preserve my isolation, cost what it may.” But
