essential help. These include Betsy Pittman at the Thomas R. Dodd Center at UConn; Hermann Teifer at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York and other colleagues there; staff at the Harvard University Archives; and Sydney Van Nort at the archives of City College, City University of New York. In recompense, I have donated Harry’s Berlin-related papers to the Leo Baeck Institute and the professional papers of Louis Marks, Harry’s father, to City College (Harry’s papers connected with his service at UConn are in the Dodd Center there). Two interlibrary-loan librarians–Suzanne Haber at the Mount Pleasant Public Library and Eugene Laper at Lehman College–efficiently provided innumerable books and microfilms. Noemi Sicherman patiently solved word-processing problems and later proofread; together with Soji, she gave much comfort. Doris Irons read the page proofs. Long before I dreamed of this book, my daughter Miriam Sicherman, curious about her grandfather’s past, obtained and sent a copy of his congressional testimony, which until then I had thought was secret.
The photographs come mainly from the Marks family archive. Achim Engelberg sent the photograph of the Engelberg family in Geneva in 1938, and Renate Engelberg Rauer explained the background circumstances. Harry took all other photographs of his Berlin friends. He also took the photographs of sites in Germany, with two exceptions–Mommsenstrasse 57, which I took in 2005; and the memorial to Kurt Singer, taken from Wikipedia Commons and published under the terms of its GNU Free Documentation License; Wikipedia Commons is also the source of the map of Germany, published under the same terms. The dates given in captions, some of which quote Harry, are either supplied by the photographers or inferred from other information. All of the illustrations were prepared for publication by Ingrid Finnan with enviable patience and persistence, particularly when she modified the map to include Heidelberg.
My greatest debts are to my husband, Marvin Sicherman, and to Volker Berghahn, professor of German history at Columbia University. It was Marvin who advised me to contact Volker, for he knew his reputation as a kind and erudite scholar. Volker’s immediate response to the merest hint of the materials in my possession was to say: “Write something.” When, in December 2005, I returned from visiting the Engelbergs in Berlin, he said plainly: “Either you give these materials to the Leo Baeck Institute and someone else will write them up, or write them up yourself.” I have chosen both to write them up myself and to donate them so that others may use them in their research. Without Marvin’s initial shove and Volker’s boost, I doubt I would have written this book. Volker’s advice as the book evolved put me in his debt. The mistakes that remain are my responsibility alone.
Abbreviations
| AAUP | American Association of University Professors |
| AEW | Albert E. Waugh Papers, Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut |
| BT | Berliner Tageblatt |
| CPUSA | Communist Party of the United States |
| DNVP | Deutschnational Volkspartei (German National People’s Party) |
| DRC | Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT |
| EEL | Ernst Engelberg letter to Harry Marks |
| FZ | Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung |
| Gestapo | Geheimnis Staatspolizei (Secret State Police) GML Grete Meyer letter to Harry Marks |
| HJM | Harry J. Marks |
| HJMD | Harry J. Marks diary |
| HJML | Harry J. Marks letter (to Louis and Sophie Marks, unless otherwise ascribed) |
| HUAC | House Un-American Activities Committee |
| Kostufra | Kommunistische Studentenfraktion (Communist Student Fraction) |
| KPD | Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (Communist Party of Germany) |
| MIT | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| NCC | National Coordinating Committee for Aid to Refugees and Emigrants Coming from Germany |
| NSBO | Nationalsozialistische Betriebszellen Organization (National Socialist Factory Cell Organization) |
| NSDAP | Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers Party--Nazi Party) |
| NSDStB | Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (National Socialist German Students’ League) |
| NSL | National Student League |
| P.G. | Paul Gottschalk |
| RM | Reichsmark (literally, “Reich’s mark” or sign; the German currency) |
| S.A. | Sturmabteilung (Storm Troop—brown shirts; Nazi para-military) |
| SLID | Student League for Industrial Democracy |
| SPD | Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Party of Germany) |
| S.S. | Schutzstaffel (Protection Squad—political police formed in 1933 as Hitler’s personal guard; later, under Heinrich Himmler, mass army supporting Nazis) |
| UConn | University of Connecticut |
| YCL | Young Communist League |
| VB | Völkischer Beobachter (People’s Observer; Nazi newspaper) |
| Voss | Vossische Zeitung (liberal Berlin newspaper; the name derives from an eighteenth-century publisher, C.F. Voss) |
| WPA | Works Progress Administration |
Rude Awakenings
An American Historian’s Encounters
with Nazism, Communism, and McCarthyism
1
Prologue
In this book I refer to my father, Harry J. Marks, as “Harry,” a name I never used to his face, as a way of distancing him from the “Daddy” I knew, a way of helping me be an honest chronicler. The book originates in a collection of family papers that I inherited when Harry died in 1988. These papers fall into two categories. One group–family memorabilia and photographs–illustrates the assimilation into mainstream American society of immigrant German Jews of modest background. Another set of documents–the literal and figurative center of this book–relates to Harry’s postgraduate studies in Berlin in 1931-33: some two hundred letters home and the diaries he kept during that period, as well as related letters in the following years; several dozen letters written in 1934-45 by people he had known in Germany; and photographs that he took shortly before leaving Germany in September 1933. My purpose is not that of a memoirist, although this book has some memoiristic features. It is, rather,
