Part of an Intellectual Autobiography

Summary

I PROPOSE TO DEAL HERE with this question: How was it possible for me, a nominally Jewish refugee from Nazi Austria to take up the study of German literature in America at a moment in history — the autumn of 1941 — when Germany was staging the most horrendous persecution and clearly threatening the destruction of Europe’s Jews? What could possibly motivate me to begin the disciplinary study of the language and literature of a nation officially dedicated to the elimination of the people to which I belonged by birth?

Three years before, I had narrowly saved my life through a riskbraving escape — dizzying in retrospect — from the death trap that was Nazi Mitteleuropa, and thereafter had arrived in New York, my sole possession eight dollars cash and the clothes I wore. What, in such circumstances, could conceivably propel my intellectual and spiritual return to the cultural realm of the people whose elected regime would most certainly murder me should I attempt a physical return? And how did such a — in the circumstances — profoundly problematical decision shape the form my approach to the study of German culture would assume? What kind of professional work would result from an enterprise fraught with such momentous questionableness?

My choice of this profession at such a time constituted an enormous provocation to the milieu in which I lived. It would challenge me to justify myself for years and years to come. I vividly recall an encounter that epitomized this challenge. It occurred in New York in 1944, in the last phase of the war against Hitler’s Germany. I was a graduate student in the Columbia University German department and a teaching assistant in Columbia’s Extension School, teaching a second- semester German language course. As I was making a purchase in the little candy and soda-fountain store on upper Broadway, across from Columbia University, the aged Jewish store owner spotted our textbook, Continuing German, under my arm, and, quavering with indignation, bellowed: “Beginning German is bad enough, but continuing German is unforgivable.” This incident, symptomatic at the time, shook me up, heaping fuel to feelings of shame and guilt, forever lying in wait in myself.