Читать книгу Rude Awakenings: An American Historian's Encounter With Nazism, Communism and McCarthyism - Carol Jr. Sicherman - Страница 18

For Harry, who never set foot in Berlin’s renowned cabarets and bars, the city was another kind of paradise–a paradise of book shops, opera houses, and newspapers. The bookstores, with their enormous stocks, carried the “danger…that I can buy them faster than I can read them.”71 In the periodical room of the Staatsbibliothek (state library), which also served the university, he felt “the pulse of the world” stirring in the “thousands on thousands of periodicals on all subjects.”72 In Berlin, the center of a “Germany” that felt like an idealized home, he became an adult. Traveling in Europe as well as elsewhere in Germany tested and affirmed his self-sufficiency and, for a while, his love of Germany. If homesick while in other countries, he longed not for America but for Germany. In Rome, the sight of the imperial eagle at the Germany railway office and “the brass plaque on the gatepost” of the German Embassy cheered him up, as did any opportunity to speak German. Living in Germany meant “living in the present instead of scuttling around ruins,” as he did dutifully in Rome.73 It meant “the Reformation and the beginning of living mentally in this world, the antithesis to this church-infested capital of superstition.” It meant moving briskly in “a cold northern exposure where the light is sharp and clear…instead of a hazy swaying in sultry day dreams.” When his parents reproved him for his hostility to Rome, he expressed his disgust with the omnipresent Church. He admitted that “however regrettable in an aspirant historian, the sight of hoodoo in actual practice fills me with loathing and contempt.”74 Yet his “sharp and clear” Germanic intellect was at odds with the dreamy emotions that he confided in his diary. By the time he returned to America, in September 1933, he had begun to reconcile his intellect and his emotions.

Part 3. Harry’s intellectual environment