Читать книгу Rude Awakenings: An American Historian's Encounter With Nazism, Communism and McCarthyism - Carol Jr. Sicherman - Страница 22

Aside from colleagues in seminars, Harry had no direct contact with garden-variety students at the university–65% of whom, in his first semester, expressed support of the National Socialist German Student League.107 He took part in no organized extracurricular activities, instead making up his own. The lack of specific requirements at the university made it easy for him to indulge his intellectual curiosity–occasionally, as with Kauffmann’s lectures, at the university but more often outside of academia. As the next section will show, his travels during academic vacations were almost entirely educational in intent. He wanted to be able to read major European sources, and by the time he returned to America, he had six languages at his disposal: English, German, French, Italian, Dutch, and Spanish. Besides going to France and Italy to improve his knowledge of French and Italian, he found he could read Dutch and Spanish with the help of a dictionary. Armed with a Spanish dictionary, he read José Ortega y Gasset’s Revolt of the Masses in the original: “I tried the first few paragraphs and found it easy.”108 Selfstudy included reading books by such authors as Karl Jaspers, to whom he had been too shy to talk in Heidelberg. Together with the Nazis, but for different reasons, he admired a new book by Jaspers, The Spiritual Situation of the Age. Harry liked Jaspers’s concise exposition; the Nazis admired its apparent exaltation of emotion over reason.109 The reviewer in Goebbel’s paper Der Angriff (The Attack) would have been surprised to learn that Jaspers’s wife, Gertrud, was Jewish–Gustav Mayer’s sister.

Harry devoted important time to his long-standing interest in literature. The book that made the deepest impression on him was not a historical treatise but a novel, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, which his parents had brought to him from Europe in 1928. Having read it off and on for years, in 1932 he “read thru the remainder in spurts that were at times feverish”: “The last hundred pages I read with rising anguish mixed with impatient drive, troubled at the realization that it would last only a few more hours and anxious to know how it would end.” It was “no ordinary story where everything is neatly tied up and labeled at the end…yet there is a fine sense of form, [it is] musically built, it has symphonic proportions, resonances, depths, colorings, melodies, counterpoint, it flows directly into your consciousness without the intermediary hindrance of words.”110 Mann’s other great novel, Buddenbrooks, was “not a book but an experience.”111 Harry speculated that its great success among German-speakers–“more than 900,000 copies…sold”–would not extend in translation, because it was “too localized.” Immediately upon Hitler’s seizure of power, Mann became an exile, a “notorious liberalistic author” whose name was verboten in the press.112

Mann’s novels spoke to Harry as Goethe’s Faust did not. With The Magic Mountain he had felt “an imperious not-to-be-postponed urge to force my way thru,” but not with Faust.113 Still, when both parts of Faust were performed at the Berlin State Theater, he went. Part II, which he saw first, was “in spots very fine, in general minced into pieces, a collection of scenes without unity. Not much better in this respect than reading the text.” Part I, though, was “a great event…. Towering. Miles above II.” The theater, he realized, can make you “forget the proscenium and the footlights. You can be swung away.”114

This repressed young man sought to “be swung away” by film, theater, opera, books, paintings, and even people. It happened occasionally. One evening in Munich, he was “doubly brightened.” by the simple sight of “the glow on a woman’s face that came when she saw her husband” and by an essay in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung about Mont St. Michel. The article gave him a “feeling of being brought out of [him]self, brought into the ideas of the words printed there, brought into a dreamy harmony.” The final sentence– “Thrust in your sword, Michael, thrust it in”–made him dream that night that he was “swinging buoyantly one of those great shining two-handed swords” that he had seen recently in Nuremberg and Munich, and he felt “insuperable and gay.”115 He had similar experiences from time to time at the opera, rejoicing in the “marvelous voice” of Gertrud Bindernagel, “the moving mountain,” and “the heavenly” Sigrid Onegin, who were “pretty nearly the only people who could sing in Götterdämmerung.” Listening ecstatically to Onegin, he felt (echoing Hamlet) that he “could shuffle off this mortal coil painlessly.” He imagined that “opium eaters faintly sense the same sort of exultation” as he felt listening to Onegin sing Schubert lieder and an aria from Glück’s Orfeo.116

What good was all this pleasure, though? Was he any more than a dilettante? Exaggerating his lack of “patience and persistence,” he bemoaned the “wide divergence between [his] ambitions and accomplishments.” His indolence, he speculated, came from his Levison ancestors; he wished that “the Marks characteristics–except surliness, of which I already have an abundance–would come out more decisively.” “Presently I’ll be 23, and no wiser,” he complained, his self-indictment echoing John Milton’s sonnet:

How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,

Stol’n on his wing my three and twentieth year!

My hasting days fly on with full career,

But my late spring no bud or blossom shew’th.

In his own “late spring,” Harry, resolutely areligious, could not follow Milton’s example and resolve his doubts by submitting to “the will of Heav’n.” He could only indict himself for laziness. When he listed the books in English, French, and German that he had read in the year since he sailed from New York, the tally‒by no means negligible‒did not still his self-recrimination. A kinder judge would have said that he had studied reasonably hard.117