they lack the immediacy of diaries and letters, with their fluctuating moods, their errors, and their self-correction. Memoirs and oral histories are, furthermore, selective, sometimes deliberately so. Harry’s own oral history (1980), for example, omits his own leadership role among Harvard’s student Communists.5
The most famous example today of a German diarist is Victor Klemperer, a professor of Romance literatures at Dresden Technical University who was determined to “bear witness.” His anticipation of arrest or death at any moment–which did not come–fueled his efforts. Klemperer’s feelings were far more intense than those of a temporary resident like Harry: fear, “disgust and shame” at the ready capitulation of so many Germans, and “shame for Germany.”6 Because Klemperer was so keen an observer, his diary for the 1930s contains information and observations that complement some of the letters that form the basis of my fifth chapter. He was also close in background to the members of Harry’s circle: like Harry’s teacher Gustav Mayer, he was an academic and a Jew; like Harry’s Uncle Alfred Hirschbach’s nephews, he was a Jew who had been baptized a Protestant. Klemperer also shared some commonalities with Harry, notwithstanding differences in temperament and age. Like Harry, he was awkward in social settings yet confident within academia; like Harry, he was indifferent to religion; like Harry, he was given to grandiose dreams of his future accomplishments.7 In Klemperer’s case, his dreams were fulfilled partly while he was alive, but most remarkably long after his death, when the publication of his diaries created a sensation in Germany.
In contrast with Harry’s and Klemperer’s diaries, those kept by the German journalist Bella Fromm and by three Americans–the journalist William L. Shirer, and the diplomats James G. McDonald and William E. Dodd–cover much more, and very different, ground. These diarists’ professions brought them in frequent contact with power-brokers, which was hardly the case for either Harry or Klemperer. Fromm had access to the highest echelons of Berlin political society, about which she wrote in self-censored columns in the Vossische Zeitung and the Berliner Tageblatt (among Harry’s favorite papers until ruined by Nazi controls). Meanwhile she kept a secret diary trenchantly expressing her real (and often prescient) views. Although Jewish, she was exempt for some years from anti-Semitic restrictions because the Nazis feared adverse publicity from the diplomatic corps, with which she was well connected. McDonald, High Commissioner for Refugees from Germany under the League of Nations, dictated his minutely detailed diary as a historical record and for the information of his co-workers. Dodd, the American ambassador to Germany, used his diary as a historical record; his children edited it for publication shortly after his death. Shirer, who reported for three years from Berlin (in 1934-37), “watched with increasing fascinating and horror” as Europe “plunge[d] madly down the road to Armageddon.”8
Klemperer, Fromm, Dodd, McDonald, and Shirer wrote their diaries from a moral compulsion; they all felt an imperative to “bear witness.” Harry’s impulse was different, although also informed by morality. As a foreigner on a short-term assignment, he lacked the immersion of journalists like Shirer and two other American journalists whose books on contemporary Germany he greatly admired–Edgar Ansel Mowrer (Germany Sets the Clock Back) and H. R. Knickerbocker (The German Crisis). Seeing himself as a future historian of Germany, he wanted to understand the evil that was thrust in front of him. As the tempo of the crisis increased, so did his drive to learn contemporary history. With the truths of events obscured by Nazi rant and lies, he meant to be a vigilant witness, to verify what he could and to expose falsity whenever possible.
2
Harry’s Home, Harry’s Harvard
Part 1. Harry’s Home
The old country was fairly near in psychological terms during the childhood of Harry’s parents, Louis Marks and Sophie Levison Marks. Louis’s parents were both born in East Prussia, as were Sophie’s father and maternal grandparents. Louis’s father, Julius (born in 1834), traveled to America twice in the mid-nineteenth century, the second time as an immigrant. The California Gold Rush lured his two older brothers; Julius, age fourteen, soon followed, traveling by mule across Panama and sailing north to San Francisco. His brothers remained in California and prospered; Julius, however, returned to Germany. When he emigrated some years later, he settled on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in an area so teeming with German immigrants that it was known as Kleindeutschland (Little Germany). In New York, he transmuted his teenage spirit of adventure into entrepreneurship: he ran a small department store and invested in real estate. His “more or less arranged marriage” (in 1865) to a shoemaker’s daughter named Esther Buck, fourteen years his junior, followed a pattern then “common in middle-class Jewish families.”1 Among their six children, two sons–Harry (born in 1875) and Louis (born in 1876)–are significant for our purposes. When Julius Marks died in 1887, he left Esther well off and eager to rise in German-American Jewish society. In 1890, she married the cantor of their synagogue, Herman Goldstein. The Goldsteins lived far from the slums of the Lower East Side in a brownstone on East 68th Street on the elegant Upper East Side, where the synagogue also moved.2 Esther had her portrait painted in oil. They had arrived.
Harry’s maternal ancestors fit the same broad pattern. Sophie’s grandparents, Caroline and Solomon Katz, emigrated in the later 1840s and married in the early 1850s; the oldest of their six children, Sarah, married a Prussian immigrant named Aaron Harry Levison, known as Harry (who became an American citizen in 1880). (Because of the proliferation of men named Harry among the Levison and Marks families, in this chapter I sometimes refer to my main subject as “Harry Julian.”) The Levisons settled in the small upstate New York town of Goshen, where Harry established a tailoring business–“Merchant Tailor” is his occupation in the 1880 Federal Census–and participated in civic life, joining the Goshen Lodge of the Free and Accepted Masons in 1896; thanks to him, the Levison family plot in Mt. Carmel Cemetery in New York bears the Masonic emblem. Harry and Sarah had five children–a son, Leo; and four daughters, one of whom died in infancy. Deborah married Alfred H. Hirschbach, an American-born investment banker who had grown up in Germany and who, later on, introduced Harry Julian to his friends and relatives in Berlin.3 The two other surviving daughters, Hannah Violetta and Sophie, trained as teachers and married two Marks brothers, Louis and Harry. In 1907, Harry Levison met a newsworthy end. A report in a Goshen newspaper– “Suddenly Stricken: Apoplexy Causes Death of Former Goshen Man on Elevated Train”–recounted how “a gentleman sat reading a newspaper” and
remained motionless so long that the attention of the passengers was attracted and one of them, a physician, went to him, felt of his pulse, and then informed the guard that the man was dead, sitting upright in his seat and his newspaper still clasped in his stiffening fingers.
The gentleman was “A. H. Levison, for many years a well-known and highly respected resident of this village, where he conducted a clothing and custom tailoring establishment.”4 He, too, had arrived.
The Levinson–and probably the Marks–family had connections further east than Prussia. Some evidence appears in the will of Harry Levison’s brother Barnett (born about 1835), who emigrated about 1864. When his will was probated in 1910, the Surrogate’s Court published the necessary legal notice (in English) in a Yiddish-language newspaper; it included a long list of possible “heirs and next of kin.” Besides seventeen potential heirs in New York and nearby American states, there were thirteen others in Germany, Poland, and Russia. What happened to the thirteen? How many emigrated? How many, or how many of their descendants, perished in the Holocaust or, for that matter, beforehand in World War I or the Russian Revolution? The answers to these questions would keep a legion of genealogists busy.
For a generation or two, the Levison and Marks families were at least partly German in their language use, and one can assume that the relatives left behind in Europe were also German-speaking, no matter where they lived (there is some evidence that the Levisons knew some Yiddish). The language practice of Harry Julian’s maternal ancestors appears in four brief messages to the
