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CHAPTER 1
From Berlin and Heidelberg to Exile in London
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My parents, both born in 1902, came from families of what is usually called the Bildungsbürgertum (loosely translated as "educated upper bourgeoisie"), whose members constituted a recognizable group in early twentieth-century Germany. Theirs was a universe of generally prosperous civil servants and professional people, as well as some in the world of business. They were university educated, well traveled, cultivated lovers and supporters of the arts and of the German humanistic tradition, with a high respect for learning, and not always immune to a belief in the superiority of German culture. Jewish families of this cohort, to which my mother belonged, were in large numbers assimilated, having usually converted at some point to Christianity in the later years of the nineteenth century, secular in outlook, and regarding themselves as patriotic German citizens.
My father's father, Christian Friedrich Ludwig Holborn (usually known as Ludwig), was a well-known research physicist, specializing in thermodynamics, who became a director and also board member (together with such luminaries as Albert Einstein and Max Planck) of the Imperial Institute of Physics and Technology (Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt, now the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt Berlin). He died in 1926, shortly before my parents' marriage. Son of a gymnasium (secondary school) instructor (and married to the daughter of another), he had earned his doctorate at Göttingen. Ludwig Holborn's career seems to have progressed smoothly and steadily. The impressive certificates, now in my possession, conferring annual appointments, regular promotions, and various honorific awards, signed by both the emperor and a succession of chancellors, testify amply to his solid and secure position. After World War I and the abolition of the monarchy, the institute retained its "Imperial" title while coming under republican auspices and struggling to maintain its stature of renown under the economic circumstances of postwar Germany.
My grandfather was a liberal in politics and a stout defender of the Weimar Republic; my father was much engaged in political discussions at home throughout his youth. My grandmother Holborn, of Frisian stock (Friesland, on the North Sea coast, is both Dutch and German; hence my father's name of Hajo), was a quite conventional academic wife and woman of her class with a finishing school education and few intellectual interests. The family lived a comfortable existence in the Charlottenburg area of Berlin in a substantial house set in the institute's spacious garden. In a memorial tribute to my father, his close friend and fellow student Dietrich Gerhard remembered his visits to the Holborn home as occasions for entering an "oasis in the midst of the turbulence of Berlin."
My mother's family was Jewish by origin on both sides. Her father was a professor of medicine at the University of Heidelberg, like my other grandfather a prolific author of scientific papers, a man of broad cultivation with a passion for music, literature, art, and travel. Born in Bayreuth, Siegfried Bettmann held a strong dislike for Wagner. I am not sure when he or my grandmother's family converted to Lutheranism. She, like my other grandmother, had been given only a typical young ladies' education. Married at a very young age, she then received an advanced introduction to the arts and humanities from her husband, whose cultural interests and tastes became hers as well. My grandfather was a patriarchal figure who ruled with a distinct force of personality. He seemed very stern to me, but I did recognize that he was witty as well. His medical pronouncements fortified his moral judgments; good health was aligned with virtuous behavior (thus, for example, mountain climbing was good for your character as well as your body, not to mention its spiritual and aesthetic benefits).
Household chores at the large Bettmann house on the Kronprinzstrasse (now the Dantestrasse) were performed by an array of helpers. My grandmother had never cooked when she came to the United States, but she had managed an extensive household, and she had read widely, was thoroughly versed in classical music, had visited the major museums of Europe, and knew the principal cities, landscapes, landmarks, and vacation resorts of the Continent. Already sixty when she came to America, she accepted her new life in a new country uncomplainingly, with an exemplary grace and fortitude and an extraordinary self-discipline. There remained always about her an aura of stateliness and privilege, yet she was in essence a quite unassuming lady of the Old World who inspired immediate courtesy. Something about her made people straighten up and mind their manners in her presence.
The Bettmanns' environment differed considerably from that of the Holborns' Berlin. Heidelberg was a tight-knit university community celebrated for its picturesque setting on the Neckar River, its iconic castle, its romantic myths, and a long academic tradition that outstripped Berlin by centuries. My grandparents were part of a circle of friendships among professors and professionals who saw themselves as cultural leaders in a relatively homogeneous world where the people who counted knew one another. Such eminent figures as Max Weber belonged to this circle. My grandfather sent a death mask of Weber to my father, who stored it in his study cabinet together with a photograph of Weber lying on his bier. I peeked at these occasionally in my youth, finding the whole idea of death masks ghoulish but this one oddly fascinating. Despite his admiration for the great sociologist, my grandfather was said to have commented, when after her husband's death Marianne Weber published a memoir, that he now understood the rationale behind the Indian custom of suttee.
The world in which my parents were raised was hardly idyllic, certainly not after 1914. They experienced the Great War and the deprivations of its later period, Germany's defeat and the continuing resentment and backlash over the terms of the Versailles Treaty, the country's economic disasters, from hyperinflation to the Depression (with a brief period of recovery and greater normalcy between 1925 and 1929), the revolution of 1918–19 that culminated in a republican government unable to provide any lasting stability or peace and that lacked for any widespread support. They witnessed political assassinations and social unrest, widespread unemployment, the conflict of right-wing and left-wing extremes, a political impasse that spawned conditions verging on civil war, with open violence on the streets and paramilitary armies serving the major parties that conducted lawless mayhem. My parents' contemporaries were too young to have fought in the war, but old enough to feel and to be disillusioned by its impact on what had seemed a fairly stable, predictable, and satisfying existence.
Both my parents attended excellent humanistic gymnasiums, steeped in the study of Greek and Latin, and both received their PhD degrees from the Friedrich Wilhelm University (now the Humboldt University) of Berlin. I have the registration booklets in which they inscribed the titles of the lectures and seminars taken semester by semester, accompanied by the signatures of the professors who taught them. Among those are the signatures of such giants of scholarship as Friedrich Meinecke, Ernst Troeltsch, Adolf Harnack, and Karl Holl (for my father); Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Eduard Meyer, and Eduard Norden (for my mother).
My grandfather Bettmann was determined that his daughters should get a good education and be prepared, if they wished, for careers. Both excelled in and finished their gymnasium programs, among the very few girls still in their gymnasium class at the final scholastic level, and both went on to university. Their father required them to attend housekeeping school beforehand; he wanted to make sure that, even with advanced degrees, they would continue to be marriageable. While her sister, Gertrude, sowed some wild oats in Weimar Berlin, my mother, Annemarie, immersed herself in a sobersided pursuit of graduate study in classical philology and in courtship with the young historian whom she was to marry after receiving her PhD in 1926.
My mother was an ardent supporter of the Weimar Republic and a left-of-center Social Democrat, a partisan consistently loyal to her cause but not an activist. She was and remained a deeply idealistic person, with an ascetic streak and a perfectionist's conscience, by no means humorless — on the contrary, no one enjoyed humor more — but opposed to superficiality and materialism where she thought seriousness and profundity of thought should prevail, as, for example, in choosing literature to read or a play to attend. Her standards and expectations of conduct and accomplishment, for herself and for those around her, were very high indeed. She was extremely economical, always anxious about money even after the clouds had lifted. She never quite recovered from the shocks of the Weimar inflation (while at university she received her allowance in suitcases of cash delivered weekly by a maid sent to Berlin by her father; the mark changed value very rapidly), the fears born of the Depression, the loss of the resources that had to be left behind in Germany, and the need to start all over again from scratch amid the insecurities of the early years in America. At the same time, she quietly and generously assisted other refugees and to my knowledge helped at least two who had lost their refugee parents to complete their college educations.
My mother's own ambition was to become an instructor in a classical gymnasium. Her dissertation, which had to be composed and published in Latin, took on the controversial subject of the "pseudo-Sallust." Her thesis argued that two letters to Julius Caesar and an invective against Cicero attributed by tradition to the historian Sallust were in fact genuinely his. Today's consensus, alas, holds that the weight of evidence shows this conclusion to be mistaken, although some very significant scholars had thought those writings authentic. But my mother's Latin was superb. Early in their marriage, she and my father coedited a volume of selected works by Erasmus that is still widely cited for the excellence of the texts she established. It was a source of some sadness that, although she taught and tutored in Latin and Greek whenever she could and also worked at translation, she could not find a lasting position that would allow her fully to realize her evident learning and talent.
That was one of the prices my mother paid for the emigration to America. It made her still more fiercely anxious that her daughter have the opportunities she missed. My mother was always busy, from the outset of their marriage, in assisting my father's work — typing, editing, preparing indexes — and she held a number of middle-level jobs in a variety of research centers around Yale; she also worked at the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the contemporary CIA) in Washington during the war. But her true pleasures came in studying and analyzing and learning everything she could about languages and in rereading the classics, both ancient and modern. She was a romantic humanist with a deep veneration for the achievements of high scholarship and a strong desire to serve its goals; she could imagine no higher vocation than that of scholarship. When, shortly before her death and failing in memory, she asked me what I was doing, and I replied that I was president of the University of Chicago, she sighed and said, in German, "Oh dear, and I thought you had a talent for Wissenschaft!"
My father's report cards from the Kaiserin-Augusta-Gymnasium zu Charlottenburg show that his work was generally deemed satisfactory in all subjects except, most unfortunately, English. At university he became something of a prodigy, studying medieval and modern European history, church history, and religious thought while moving with unusual speed toward his degree. As his principal field he chose modern history and made rapid progress in the seminar of Friedrich Meinecke, who saw him as an especially promising student and gave him his fullest support.
Friedrich Meinecke was regarded as one of the truly outstanding historians of his time. A man of immense learning and range, his major works dealt with the history of ideas, relating this to the developments of political history. His book on the idea of "reason of state" and its history (Die Idee der Staatsräson, translated into English as Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d'État and Its Place in Modern History) is probably now the best-known of his works. Editor for almost forty years of the principal German historical journal, the Historische Zeitschrift, and chairman of the Imperial Historical Commission (Historische Reichskommission), a prominent figure in public life, Meinecke retired in 1932 and was forced in 1934 and 1935 to resign from his other posts under pressure from the Nazi regime. He lived in "inner exile" from 1935 to 1945 when he returned to his home in a devastated Berlin and helped found the Free University of Berlin, becoming its first rector. One of the few academic elders of my father's youth to survive into the postwar age, he died in 1954. He left behind a still-debated legacy, having argued that the catastrophe of the Third Reich was the tragic consequence of the "special path" (Sonderweg) taken by Germany over its longer history, in contrast to that of Western Europe, citing also Germany's difficult geopolitical situation and a series of unforeseen and determining contingent events. My father was, with some sorrow, sharply to criticize the implication he saw in this interpretation that Germany and the Germans might be to some degree excused, if what had transpired was partially the result of inexorable historical forces beyond their control, from some share of a collective guilt.
Meinecke attracted a great many gifted students to his seminar. In a university world that was dominantly conservative in the political and social outlook of its professoriate, rigidly hierarchical in its structures and policies, resistant to change in its institutions, and continuingly inhospitable to Jews or people of liberal republican views, Meinecke took on an unusual number of such persons and treated them with tolerance and respect. Gerhard Masur, one of his students, actually heard the seminar referred to as "the Jews School." In addition, Meinecke did not insist that his students share his opinions and was supportive of those who went in new directions of historical method and interpretation that differed from his own. Nor, unlike most professors, did he insist on handing them their dissertation topics.
Meinecke had concluded that the republic, however unsatisfactory and however tempting it might be to yearn for the good old imperial days, had realistically, if without enthusiasm, to be accepted. Adherents to this position were called "rational" or "prudent" republicans (Vernunftrepublikaner). In his view, one had to commit to the new state while hoping for reforms that might strengthen its effectiveness by diminishing the role of a weak multiparty parliamentary system and increasing the power of an elected president. His moderate stance and toleration attracted many who were further to the left than he in a university environment that was highly politicized, and in which, despite the role in university appointments taken by the federal government and those of the states that were of a more liberal tenor, leftish candidates were suspect and could easily be passed over and even denied an academic future.
My father's fellow students were of differing political persuasions, mainly, but not exclusively, on the republican left. My parents and many of their contemporaries were critics of a university system they considered unresponsive to the possibilities and needs of a democratic society and weighed down by outmoded and obstructive traditions and practices. They wanted to diminish the privileges and forms of power assumed by the small elite of an old academic guard whose authority they found excessive and whose scholarship might be seen as serving flagrantly partisan ends. While these Young Turks were relatively tempered in their public rhetoric, and indeed in wanting to introduce reforms from within, they looked forward with some impatience to helping bring about change in the academic universe.
It is not surprising to find that a disproportionate number of the German historians who emigrated in the 1930s were Meinecke students, given his openness to both Jewish students and political dissidents. The best known among them, in addition to my father, were Dietrich Gerhard, Felix Gilbert, Hans Rothfels, Hans Rosenberg, Gerhard Masur, and Hans Baron (and there were more). Each of these men struck out in his own scholarly directions, but all showed Meinecke's influence and retained their veneration for their Doktorvater and pride in the training they had received. Meinecke did not produce a "school" of history, but he provided a model of scholarship and taught a profound respect for scholarly integrity and for a breadth of inquiry that marked them all.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "An Academic Life"
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