as a world phenomenon and, more particularly, its presence in the United States; and the reaction to Communism known in the United States as McCarthyism.
Harry’s diaries and letters from Berlin constitute an eyewitness response to the catastrophe unfolding in Germany, a response unmediated by the kind of retrospective analysis one finds in memoirs.1 His friends’ letters speak of the thunderstorm unleashed over their heads and their efforts to find shelter. While often plain and analytical in style, Harry’s letters and, particularly, his diaries rise at times to lyrical beauty and at others are marred by the precious self-consciousness of a lingering adolescence. Although he traveled elsewhere in Germany and made study trips to other European countries, Harry’s diaries and letters focus on Berlin, ground zero of the Nazi “revolution.” In 1933, his writings increased in volume to accommodate the momentous events unrolling before his eyes. His letters (but not his diaries) became more circumspect both because he did not want to alarm his parents and because he feared confiscation and censorship. As one would expect, he omitted significant events; however, when he focused on a particular event, the detail often surpasses what even the most attentive historian might present.
In addition to conveying Harry’s experiences, this book touches on the lives of more than thirty Germans with whom he was friendly during his two years in Berlin. These thirty include a group of people allied through family connections, including ties with Harry’s family in New York; a fellow graduate student named Ernst Engelberg; and several professors who were forced out of Germany shortly after Hitler came to power. Of all of these people, only one had no Jewish connection by either descent or marriage: this was Engelberg, who was in peril because he was a Communist. These friends and relatives shared an atypical fate: all escaped from Germany, and all survived the war.
Harry’s time in Germany, the subject of chapters 3 and 4, is the fulcrum of this book. The preceding chapters examine how his prior personal history shaped him for those two years, while the succeeding chapters depict how the Berlin years affected the rest of his life and the lives of his friends. As a budding historian, he felt fortunate to witness an unfolding cataclysm. “Even the dullest student at the University of Berlin during those years,” wrote another neophyte American historian, “could not but have been aware of the fact, that there were sources of historical knowledge beyond the confines of the Historical Seminar,” the department at the university encompassing modern history.2 As Harry sailed home in September 1933, he envisioned a future as both a historian and a socialist; within months, he was a Communist. His future turned out less rosy than he had expected. He had a number of strikes against him, some not of his own making: the Depression and his Jewishness combined to foil his initial efforts to land an academic job, and for some years he taught high school. After World War II, he managed to achieve much of the academic career of which he dreamed, despite his painful experience of McCarthyism. His professional life at the University of Connecticut (UConn) coexisted with the evolution of a land-grant university from a “cow college” to a major research university. His yearning to belong to a community, manifested through his Communist activities in the 1930s, was fulfilled by his contributions to this academic community.
Harry’s was an academic life well lived, but also one with a shameful secret. It has been unpleasant to investigate his early uncritical enthusiasm for Communism and dismaying to observe his later infection with anti-Communism, an infection that made him eager to inform on those who he believed were Communists. “Some of their descendants might wish this not to be true,” writes Alice Munro about her own ancestors, “but there is not much to be done about the politics of our relatives, living or dead.”3 She speaks for me.
The nature of the evidence
Harry’s Berlin letters are not, for the most part, especially private. Knowing that his parents would save the letters, he rarely repeated himself in his diary. He confided his most intimate thoughts in the diaries, which in other respects were similar in scope to the letters. Forty-eight years later, he used his diaries for a talk before the UConn History Club that he called “The Rise of the Nazis–A Kind of Personal Memoir.” He seems to have used them the previous year to prepare for an interview for a UConn oral history project documenting the university. Some years earlier, he consulted the diaries when writing about the Dutch historian Jan Romein (see Chapter 8).
In order to highlight an apprentice historian’s direct encounter with history in the making, I have ignored nearly all the passages in Harry’s letters and diaries referring to family matters, as well as his (frankly boring) disquisitions on economics, lists of books he had read (or meant to read), opinions of opera singers, and so on. The letters that he received from German friends, in contrast, contain very little extraneous to my purpose. Almost all of them illustrate the writers’ experiences of unspooling repression; some contain requests to make certain information known to others who might help save people at risk in Europe. I cannot believe that the writers, if alive, would reprehend me for quoting their words or for trying to uncover additional information about their escape from Nazism. Those of their descendants whom I have met or contacted have been pleased, without exception, that their ancestors’ experiences will come to light.
Diarists and letter-writers
The centrality of Harry’s diaries and letters in this book makes it necessary to establish their relationship to other such writings devoted to Germany in the 1930s. Uncounted diaries were written by Germans and other Europeans in 1933-45, some published and more unpublished (or lost), many of them concerning the war period and thus beyond the scope of this book. Of those focusing on the 1930s and published, only one diary raises the possibility of comparison with Harry’s. In manuscript until an edited version appeared in 2009, An American in Hitler’s Berlin: Abraham Plotkin’s Diary, 1932-33 covers the period of four and a half months when Plotkin, a forty-year-old trade unionist, lived in Berlin while undertaking an intensive study of unions and labor conditions in Germany. Differences in their ages, personalities, and purposes, as well as Harry’s far longer stay and his immersion in a large Jewish social circle, make Plotkin’s and Harry’s diaries complementary rather than duplicative. While, for example, Harry felt safer if he avoided demonstrations and read about them in the newspapers, Plotkin sought them out and described them vividly. Harry’s stance as a historian-in-training contrasts with Plotkin’s thin knowledge of current and past German history: Plotkin’s allusion to “anti-Semitic riots in the University of Breslau…against Prof. Cohn” (otherwise unexplained) is complemented by Harry’s detailed analysis of Ernst Cohn’s travails. Harry wrote his diary for himself, with the intimacy that such a reader implies; Plotkin, envisaging publication, wrote reportage for future public use and did indeed publish an article on his return. Plotkin’s advantage over Harry lay in his long analytical interviews with union leaders, some of whom escorted him to meet the kinds of slum-dwellers about whom Harry only read. Overall, Harry’s intensive reading of newspapers and his discussions with friends gave him a considerable advantage in assessing the dizzying developments of the early Nazi period; he understood immediately the consequences of Hitler’s seizure of power. Plotkin was not so certain: while anticipating some kind of dictatorship, he thought that Alfred Hugenberg, leader of the German National People’s Party, might well prevail over Hitler.4
Other published diaries and letters differ more markedly from Harry’s than does Plotkin’s diary. The diary and letters of the artist Oskar Schlemmer, for example, who moved to Berlin in 1932, focus on Nazi oppression of artists. The diaries of Count Harry Kessler, who was in Berlin for much of the 1920s and early 1930s, have nothing in common with Harry Marks’s except left-wing sympathies and a revulsion against the Nazis. None of the (relatively fewer) volumes of published letters of the period are comparable; one can hardly put Thomas Mann’s letters and Harry’s in the same category. Harry’s diary and letters are distinguished by his foreignness, his youth and inexperience, the intensity of his gaze, and–most notably–his self-education as a historian.
Memoirs and oral histories give another kind of witness to the times than do diaries
