A richly detailed portrait not only of a man struggling to lead an ethical life but of the disturbed times in which he lived.<br><br>Drawing on family papers, wide-ranging interviews, FBI files, American and German newspapers, a wide array of published sources, and her own memories, the author traces Marks's German American heritage, his education both formal and informal, his marriage to a fellow Communist from a poor Russian family, his rocky start as an academic, his anguish when confronted by his Communist past, and his ultimate creation of a satisfying career. Her sleuthing encompasses as well the paths to safety taken by his German friends as they found sanctuary around the world–in Russia, England, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Turkey, Palestine, Brazil, the United States, and Canada.<br><br>"Of particular interest is Carol Sicherman's carefully researched description of the anti-Semitic atmosphere that Jewish students encountered at Harvard in the twenties and thirties, as well as the experience of a young American thrown into the turmoil accompanying the collapse of Germany's democracy and the appeal of Communism as an alternative to Nazism." –Curt F. Beck, Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Connecticut.
Оглавление
Carol Jr. Sicherman. Rude Awakenings: An American Historian's Encounter With Nazism, Communism and McCarthyism
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
1. Prologue
The nature of the evidence
Diarists and letter-writers
2. Harry’s Home, Harry’s Harvard
Louis Marks in the private sphere
Louis Marks in the public sphere
“Darling Harry” at Fieldston–the route to Harvard
Undergraduate studies
Jews are “better off at Harvard”
3. A New Young Scholar in the (Old) World
Starting in Berlin
The values of Harry’s social circle
Paul Gottschalk, alias P.G
The idea of “Germany”
The University of Berlin
Assessing the instructors
Reaping the benefits
Extracurricular activities
Travels in Europe
Paying attention to current events
4. Germany 1933
Hitler becomes chancellor
The Reichstag fire
Consolidating Nazi control
Finding out what was happening
The “gentlemen” take charge
On vacation: exploring opinion in the hinterland
Changes in educational institutions
Atrocity stories
German and Jewish
The Meyers
The Hirschbachs
The Gottschalks
Harry as confidante and tutor
Ernst Engelberg: a decisive friendship
Gustav Mayer172
Hajo Holborn
Dietrich Gerhard
5. The Dispersal of the Berlin Friends
Grete and Ernst Meyer
The Meyer children24
Grete and Ernst in the New World
Paul Gottschalk51
The other Gottschalks
The Hirschbachs
The Freyhans
Gustav Mayer and his family
Dietrich Gerhard
Hajo Holborn
Ernst Engelberg108
6. Harry and the Communists. Choosing sides
Why Harry joined
Harry in the NSL and YCL
The peace strikes
Harry’s activist colleagues
Politics and love
The demonstrations against the Karlsruhe
The Hanfstaengl affair
Harvard and German universities under the Nazis
Harry and Bunny in love
Why Harry and Bunny left
7. The Knock on the Door: Harry before HUAC
The background
Accusations at UConn
The Committee of Five
Zilsel’s testimony
Emanuel Margolis: a reminder from the past
Margolis and the Committee of Five
The risky profession of social work
A friendly witness
Harry in “the odious role of an informer”
Why did HUAC persist?
8. Harry as an Academic
Starting a career
Harry as teacher and colleague
Paying the price: Harry’s career
Harry’s professional writings
Timeline of Events in Germany
Notes. Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Timeline
Bibliography
Отрывок из книги
A number of people have been vital to my work on this book, which originates in the papers of Harry J. Marks, my father. The family of Ernest Engelberg, an age-mate and friend in Harry’s Berlin days, has been generous with hospitality and information. A visit in 2005 to Engelberg, then ninety-six years old, his son (Achim), and wife (Waltraut) gave powerful impetus to the research. Achim later made a gift of his book about German refugee intellectuals who returned to Germany. Engelberg’s biographer, Mario Kessler, also provided useful information. Relatives and friends of other people whom Harry knew in Berlin have also been generous with their knowledge. Dorothee Gottschalk–the widow of Lutz (Ludwig) Gottschalk, whom Harry had known in Berlin–contributed her knowledge of the Gottschalk family and some of their friends. Michael Freyhan contributed knowledge of the Freyhan family. David Sanford and Irene Hirschbach gave information on the Hirschbach family, and Irene sent two unpublished biographical essays by her late husband, Ernest Hirschbach. As time went on, I came to know (electronically) Peter-Thomas Walther of Humboldt University, Gottfried Niedhart of Mannheim University, and Daniel Becker, all of whom have shared their learning.
Other people have been generous in giving me information. Harry’s late cousins, Margaret Marks and Hannah Bildersee, sent me family history twenty-five years before I dreamed of this project. Cousins of my generation, Mary Misrahi Rancatore and Julienne Misrahi Barnett, supplied additional information. When I interviewed my mother’s oldest surviving sibling, Vida Castaline, in the mid-1970s, I had no idea that I would later rely on her remarkably detailed recall of life in Russia and, later, in Boston. Sidney Lipshires, who had been a Communist official in Massachusetts and, later, Harry’s doctoral student, knew valuable details about Harry’s Communist past. Curt Beck, whose long career at the University of Connecticut (UConn) overlapped Harry’s, offered additional information about the 1950s. Emanuel Margolis, a victim of McCarthyism at UConn, was kind enough to recall those painful days with a frankness that took my breath away. Bruce Stave, also of UConn, had just finished his excellent history of the university when I began my work and helpfully answered questions. Ellen Schrecker sent the spare but illuminating notes that she made when she interviewed Harry in 1979 for No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities. Miriam Schneir gave invaluable advice at the end of the process and suggested the title. Lily Munford, Peter Schaefer, and Waltraut Engelberg helped transliterate the old German script in which most of Grete Meyer’s letters and some of the other Berlin letters were written, as well as short notes written in German by my maternal grandmother’s family. Lily, in addition to doing the lion’s share of transliteration, undertook the considerable task of translating the Meyer letters. At the very beginning, Ingrid Finnan translated three of Engelberg’s letters and insisted that I could do the other three, thus giving me an incentive to revive my college German; at the very end, she provided essential expertise in preparing the photographs for publication. Except for the Meyer letters and those that Ingrid translated, translations of letters from the Berlin friends are my own, as are any otherwise unascribed translations. Michiel Nijhoff helped with Dutch. Members of H-German, the HNet discussion group on German history, advised a trespasser in their realm.
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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.
