The “pilgrimage” to Sils-Maria: at least two ways of looking at it. On the one hand, it seems to perfectly illustrate Nietzsche’s insight that the (his) greatest achievements were unplanned. It beautifully caps my long preoccupation with Nietzsche, making all that effort worthwhile. Here is the kind of help from Papa that I do not need to reject, because it doesn’t jeopardize my autonomy or integrity. Or does it? That is the other view. Have I come all this way finally to reveal myself as an impostor benefiting from his father’s connections? Have I at a crucial moment failed to remain true to myself, to my resolve to make it (or not to make it) on my own, on my merits? It depends on my level of confidence. When it is high, the contingent quality of how I got to Sils-Maria seems like the smile of fortune, a fated event, the confirmation that I have led my life right, the reward for my long years of integrity. When it is low it feels like I have slipped into opportunism, as if I were conning my way to Sils-Maria in a way that deserves to be punished by my unmasking as a fraud.

Another way of putting it: If my previous refusals to accept Papa’s help stem from fear of failure, of disappointing his expectations, does my willingness to accept this help signify a new confidence, a recognition that now I am ready, that now I won’t fail, or is it the aberration, the lapse from integrity, that will prove that my fears have been all-too-well grounded?

I was quite nervous while preparing for this high-profile assignment, as recorded in my journal in August:

Life is a series of challenges, each of which successively feels like the greatest one has ever faced and each of which later come to be seen as minor hurdles.

So it was in this case. My presentation was a great success, as immediately reported by phone to Papa by Dr. Roemer. I shared the stage with Wolfgang Müller-Lauter, perhaps the foremost Nietzsche scholar in Germany at the time, and later a fellow-contributor to the collection, Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? (Princeton University Press, 2002). Müller-Lauter, one of the editors of Nietzsche-Studien, the leading journal in the field, asked me to submit my manuscript to that prestigious journal, but one of his co-editors felt the time was not yet ripe in Germany for such a sweeping denazification of a philosopher still reviled for his attack on Christianity (and in the case of East Germany, his attack on socialism). To me it seemed clear that for his West German critics, at least, Nietzsche served as a convenient scapegoat to cover up the embarrassing fact that so many German Christians had not only supported Nazism, but had played a leading role in Hitler’s rise to power.

In Sils-Maria, October 1988

Sils-Maria

Returning to Karlsruhe from my Swiss excursion, I arrived just in time for my sister Stella’s 45th birthday celebration. It was, as usual in Karlsruhe, an occasion for a culinary feast with plentiful libations of excellent Russian vodka and fine German wines. The news of my well-received presentation in Sils-Maria had preceded me, and Papa made indirect reference to my talk in his customary Tischrede (dinner speech), in which he addressed his sons and daughters: “Wenn ihr Erfolg habt, das gibt mir auch Kraft (when you have success it gives me strength, too).”

With Stella and Sylvia

My three sisters, half playfully, wanted to hear the Nietzschean perspective on the Stackelberg family and our extravagant revelries. Perhaps they expected a Nietzschean stamp of approval for such splendid Dionysian excess. I didn’t rise to the occasion at the time, but later gave it some thought. In my journal. I recorded die nicht gehaltene Rede (the speech not given). Loosely paraphrased, I would have liked to have said something like this: Papa has emphasized the harmony in our family. I would like to emphasize its variety. All of us have something to offer, but it’s not the same thing. Therefore let us show forbearance toward each other. This gave me the chance to cite one of my favorite Nietzsche quotes: “Denn eines schickt sich durchaus nicht für zweie (for one thing absolutely will not do for two [persons]).“ What could I say on the subject of Nietzsche and the Stackelbergs? That only striving for material goods could not be the purpose of life—this belief I shared with Nietzsche, but a birthday celebration did not seem the appropriate venue for such a confession. “Money and property are means and not ends” was a silly platitude.

With Papa and Susanne, October 1988

Of course I was glad that I had not given this rather sanctimonious response to Papa’s wonderfully amicable Tischrede, even if it did reflect my personal views. At the UCLA seminar with Robert Wohl the previous summer, “consumerism” had been a hot topic of discussion. The term had never meant much to me beyond designating an activity—buying what we need or want—in which we all necessarily engage. After the seminar I began to understand how it could constitute an ideology and a way of life: consumption as fulfillment and as a diversion from engagement in politics, the realm in which all the important decisions affecting our lives are made. Later, in my journal, I tried to analyze
the socializing function of consumerism:

when I go into the Home Club [a now defunct “ big-box” store] and look at the bathroom “vanities” (marvelous use of the word!), the thought of having written a letter to the editor protesting the American invasion of Panama [under President George H. W. Bush in December 1989] strikes me as absurd and embarrassing. How could I get so upset when life is so bountiful and pleasant? And furthermore, wasn’t I trying to have my cake and eat it, too, by indulging in moral posturing while enjoying the benefits of the policies I was protesting? And I end by feeling that by buying a new bathroom vanity I compromise my integrity—which is probably a good sign, because I could just stop writing letters to the editor.

Consumerism, or its absence, was probably the greatest difference between Papa’s and Mama’s lifestyles. 1989 was to be the year that Sally would first meet both of them. “I’ll be nervous when I meet your father,” Sally said presciently; “you’ll be nervous when I meet your mother.” We left Spokane by car in the second week of June, driving to Minneapolis, where we stayed with Sally’s friend from Madison days, Beverly and her husband Michael. From Minneapolis I flew to Germany for a two-week Stackelberg family excursion to Estonia on the 125th anniversary of the founding of the family association in 1864.

View of Tallinn from our hotel, June 1989

Papa in Tallinn, June 1989

Accompanying us to Tallinn, which the Germans used to call Reval, was Countess Nina Stauffenberg, the widow of the hero of the July 20th 1944 military revolt. Her mother had been a Stackelberg.

Papa with Nina Stauffenberg in Tallinn, 1989

Of course we took the opportunity to visit our old family estates. Hallinap had become a kolchos (collective farm) and was in good condition.

Hallinap, 1989

Garden at Hallinap from the attic window

Seal of the Hallinap branch of the Stackelberg family tree

Röal, where my father had been born, was in very poor condition. The basement had been used as a pigsty during the Soviet period.

Röal, 1989

The Stackelberg family townhouse in Tallinn was in good condition and now served as the home of the Economics Ministry of Estonia.

Stackelberg House in Tallinn, 1989

Sally drove my car on to Boston, leaving it with Trina before joining me in Germany at the end of June 1989. Among other destinations, we traveled to Bavaria, visiting my wartime homes in Ried and at the Elmhof, before visiting relatives in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Old Frau Neuner, with whom we had shared a house during the war, was still alive and remembered us Stackelbergs well. It was my first trip back to Ried since the early 1960s, when Sweety Degenfeld had taken me through Ried on our way to Hinterhör after Tempy’s wedding in Bad Nauheim.

I had hoped to scale the Benediktenwand in the summer of 1989, the mountain we had so often ascended in our childhood, but the weather didn’t cooperate. Instead we spent several days holed up in what had been Lautenbacher’s restaurant during the war, but now was a comfortable motel, with easy access to the Franz Mark museum in nearby Kochel. Frau Neuner laughed. “Damals hat man in Sindelfingen über die blauen Pferse nur gelacht (at the time people only laughed at the Blue Horses). Today they are considered great art. At the time he wasn’t popular at all. Today streets are named after him.”

Franz Mark's Blaues Pferd

On our return we visited Mama in Vermont, with side trips to Burke Mountain and the Shelburne Museum in Burlington. On the drive back to Spokane we stopped to see Olaf and Cora in Kent, Ohio, before heading back across the Great Plains as I had done so often in the past. This time, however we also stopped off at Glacier National Park in Montana.

In the late 1980s Allan Bloom’s (1930-1992) The Closing of the American Mind (1987) was all the rage among conservatives. At Gonzaga one of its predictable champions was my colleague, the political scientist Mike Leiserson, whose ingrained conservatism I had underestimated for years, to the extent of referring my friends from CASA (the Central American Solidarity Committee) to Leiserson, who taught a course on constitutional law, for help and advice when they faced legal troubles for civil disobedience.

I am liberated by knowing where Mike Leiserson stands. Only now I can appreciate how “befangen” (inhibited?) I was by the assumption that Mike was on our side.

Less predictably, the AVP, Fr. Peter Ely, was also a fan of Bloom’s book, although that should not have surprised me, as he, too, had made a shift to the political right in the Reagan years. I remember the interview he gave in the Spokesman-Review in the early 1980s, when he in effect welcomed the recession for bringing people back to “the Lord”! I needed to read the book, if only to see what all the fuss was about. Bloom predictably attacked leftist professors, but his attack was somewhat tempered by a countervailing urge to dismiss Marxism as an outdated and irrelevant doctrine. Instead, his book was more specifically aimed at post-modernism, increasingly fashionable in academia in those years and hence the bigger threat to traditional thinking. Nietzsche and Heidegger were his chief targets. Apparently he considered them agents of the left, which was indeed where many self-styled post-structuralists and deconstructionists located themselves on the political spectrum, notwithstanding their conspicuous rejection of the ”logocentric” Enlightenment tradition of rationality or any kind of political activism, for that matter. Bloom was a disciple of the philosopher Leo Strauss (1899-1973), who believed that Plato and the other Greek seers had written their works in a code only decipherable by and comprehensible to an educated ruling elite. Bloom, who like Strauss taught at the University of Chicago, did not go quite so far in his opposition to democracy, but he did believe that the new cult of post-modernism was closing the American mind to absolute truths.

The paradoxically exhilarating effect of reading Bloom’s monstrous attacks on Nietzsche and Marx: He is so obviously wrong that the effect of his attacks is to confirm how right [Nietzsche and Marx] are!

Bloom unwittingly attesting to the validity and pervasiveness of relativism in the use of his title: The Closing of the American Mind. The need to provide alternatives—the alternative supposedly lacking is the “aristocratic” one—is itself an argument of “relativism.” According to Bloom the American mind is closing to the eternal verities, the truths contained in the great books. What he really wants to do is close American minds to other alternatives, except the authoritarian one, but given the validity and attractiveness of a relativism and democracy that even he can’t deny, he couches his argument in relativist language [the language of competing alternatives].

1989 was, of course, the year that the Berlin Wall came down, East European regimes were toppled in a series of popular revolts, and Mikhail Gorbachev plowed ahead in his futile efforts to reform and stabilise the Soviet system in Russia. In November 1988 I had gotten some hint of the turmoil ahead when I was asked to participate in a panel discussion at Gonzaga with Pavel Kuznetsov, head of Radio Moscow broadcasts to the US (and Chris Peck, one of the editors of the Spokesman-Review):

Soviet official sounding very much like a defector in his criticisms and denunciations of the Soviet system. A strategy to ingratiate himself with the American public, or “genuine” cynicism? In either case, most unattractive. It helped me to understand what dissidents mean when they say that the Soviet bureaucracy is not truly socialist.

Just as you can’t have a successful republic without republicans or a functioning democracy without democrats (people who believe in democracy), you can’t have socialism without socialists! But I hadn’t given up hope. On Veterans’ Day 1989 I wrote:

The breakdown of communism as the perfect opportunity for a democratic socialism. Judging by “really existing socialism,” what people resent is not socialism as such, but the obligation, the pressure, to accept officially propagated doctrines. The resistance is similar to the hostility that any kind of effort at intellectual domination—thought control—elicits, for instance the imposition of religious dogmas or mandatory patriotism.

It seems that at least now we have to grant that the communists did have good reason to be afraid of the “idea” of freedom!

Of course, I couldn’t close my eyes to the corruption of communism in practice:

What communism has accomplished: a greater concern for the interests of the disadvantaged, excluded, and oppressed. By the nature of things, regimes dedicated to representing the weaker elements in society against the naturally stronger will be dictatorial. This circumstance provides great opportunity for the abuse of power by people for whom the exercise of power becomes an end in itself.

Sally and I followed the upheavals in Eastern Europe with very mixed emotions. On the one hand we hoped the collapse of the East European regimes would lead to a socialist form of democracy; on the other hand, they resembled counterrevolutions by the opponents of any form of socialism more than successful revolutions. They were certainly celebrated as cold war victories in the West. I tried to remain optimistic, but it was hard, as attested by this journal entry in January 1990:

What’s going on in Eastern Europe, especially the Soviet Union, may be viewed as an effort to develop a socialist system whose mechanisms of socialization are “natural,” not manifestly coercive. A system in which people will voluntarily adopt socialist values; a society in which the institutions will automatically or unconsciously reward socialist behavior and exclude anti-socialist ideas as out-of-bounds, “extremist,” “unrepresentative,” “radical.” It takes tremendous confidence to undertake such an experiment. The “people” are finally to be involved in the establishment of socialism. The risk is, of course, that the people will establish something quite different.

The crucial question, it seemed to me, was whether “Gorbachev’s reforms [are] a loss of confidence in socialism or a sign of confidence.”

How Gorbachev represents confidence in socialism: he has deliberately relinquished control and granted autonomy to individual agents—while not relinquishing the goals of socialism, a decent life for all, the kind of society that capitalism has never yet produced. He is taking great risks. Those who suspect Gorbachev of cunning and chicanery are really afraid of the new power the ideal of socialism may develop in a context of political freedom.

This led me to ponder

why it is so difficult to predict the future on the basis of history (aside from its dialectical quality—i.e., we know contradictions, even unexpected ones, will develop): history is concerned with motives that explain retrospectively and do not provide a basis for future behavior. Conscious recognition of unconscious motives transforms (or may transform) what was habitual into controllable behavior. Thus previous unconscious behavior cannot be used as a basis for prediction.

In my mind I was hatching a project that I never completed, or even properly pursued:

Book on the 20th century: rise of the masses, yes, but events can’t be simplistically blamed on the masses. Rather it is elite attempts to channel and use mass energies that are to blame. The right-left conflict does provide the overall framework for understanding the century. Gorbachev as figure on the left and symbol of transition on left—from class-based politics to humanist-ecological perspective. Revolt of minorities not as revolt of the underclass but seizing of opportunities by would-be dominant elites.

While the prospects of socialism were steadily declining across the world in 1989-1990, in our professional lives Sally and I were enjoying increasing success. Sally, who had published her dissertation as a book, was tenured and promoted at Eastern Washington University, while I was finally promoted to professorial rank, which now also included a sizable boost in pay. For the first time in my life I no longer had any financial worries. I was also elected president of the Faculty Assembly and in May 1990 received the Burlington Northern Scholar-of-the-Year award. At age fifty-five it seemed as if I had reached the pinnacle of my career. I was somewhat nonplussed by my change in outlook:
For many years I could not conceive of success as a serious option: it seemed an exception, a rarity, not the norm. Now it is difficult for me to take failure seriously.

Chridtmas 1988

John Weaver, brunch 1989

Sally with David Brookbank and John Weaver, spring 1989

Ken Lloyd's horse in our pasture

Meanwhile, Nick had graduated from West Valley High School in June 1989 and after a summer in Irasburg was off to college at the University of Washington in the fall. Having failed to pre-register, he was forced to scramble for the few open classes that remained. I returned from Seattle with a new appreciation for my position at GU.

Reflections on Nick finding all the classes he needs closed at the University of Washington. How heartless and callous this intellectually vibrant, overcrowded, ruthlessly competitive campus can be. Returning to Gonzaga and appreciating the peacefulness, slow pace, and underpopulation of the campus. This is an elite education we are offering: not necessarily intellectually more stimulating or challenging, but an education in isolation from the masses. It is to the University of Washington as the country club is to the airport or factory. It is the right to learn without being pushed and shoved and beaten out. The right or privilege not to stand in line. The College Handbook certainly has it right: “less competitive.” Almost idyllic, in fact.

Nike Gurian and John Shideler, brunch 1989

Nick's seventeenth birthday, Nov. 1988

In November 1989 the full consequences of US support for right-wing state terror in Central America became apparent. A death squad of the Salvadoran military invaded the campus of the Jesuit university in San Salvador and murdered six priests, their cook, and her sixteen-year-old daughter in cold-blooded execution style. As president of the Faculty Assembly I gave the main address at the packed memorial service in the Gonzaga Student Chapel. But for those of us who had hoped that this monstrous atrocity would finally bring about a change in American policy, the months that followed would prove disappointing. The election of Reagan’s vice president, George W. H. Bush, in 1988 had left Reagan’s imperialistic policies essentially unchanged, although no one at the time could have foreseen that they would not only continue, but would even intensify in the twenty-first century.

Marching against racism in Coeur d'Alene: front page of Gonzaga Bulletin

Mama, 1988

In Frankfurt I was lucky to find a cheap room to rent, thus abrogating my earlier fears that I might be forced to live at Papa’s, as articulated in my journal:

The sinking feeling on learning that no rooms are available in Frankfurt and that I may have to stay in Karlsruhe. Not that I may be bored or may get in the way, but rather that I will not be able to carry out my critical project in that relentlessly positivist and consumerist atmosphere.

I spent most of my time in the Frankfurt University library, where my cousin Eva Ganzlin, Papa’s sister Tante Lulli’s daughter, tracked me down one day to tell me that Tempy was in town and trying to get in touch with me. He had flown in from London, where he worked for the Kidder, Peabody brokerage firm, to consult with some of his German clients. As usual, we argued about Thatcher’s politics over an excellent meal at one of Frankfurt’s finer restaurants. On the weekends I traveled to Karlsruhe to spend time with Papa and his second family.

With Halinka, 1986

Awarded the Bundesverdienstkreuz (federal service cross) for his litigation of cases before the high court of the Federal Republic, Papa had reached the zenith of his career. At age seventy-five he had become a grand seigneur who loved to entertain his guests with excellent vodka with sakuskas and fine food and wine, just as in his younger years. He had aged very gracefully, as Stella confirmed for me when she said, “er geniesst es, alt zu sein (he enjoys being old).”

What accounts for Papa’s attractiveness? It’s not just the money that permits a sumptuous lifestyle; it’s not just a generosity made possible by wealth, it’s certainly not his skill or success as a lawyer. There is an element of self-sacrifice, as if Papa had given up the right to lead a normal life in order to act out an existence that gives pleasure to others, even if it is only the pleasure of beholding grandeur, the pleasure of vicariously participating in the last grand gestures.

On my 1986 sabbatical I also began work on my book on Nazi Germany, little anticipating that it would be more than twelve years before it finally appeared under the Routledge imprint in spring 1999 as Hitler’s Germany: Origins, Interpretations, Legacies. On January 8th, 1986, I wrote in my journal:

My book on the Nazis must surmount the East-West split: it must be written not from one side or the other, but from the higher vantage point that incorporates the best of both points of view.
Nazism is a political topic, not a question of occultism, psychology, ambition, power hunger, historical accident, etc., etc.

With my Emmet cousin Leslie Lang in Karlsruhe. 1986

Despite (or maybe because of) the accession of Gorbachev to the highest office of the Soviet Union, I was still obsessed with reconciling socialism and liberal democracy. In those days I was often invited by the local media (TV or radio) to comment on international news. Since I taught Russian history at Gonzaga, I was asked to comment on Gorbachev’s emergence as Soviet leader. The precise pronunciation of Gorbachev’s name had not yet been agreed upon, so I called on Ed Yarwood, who taught Russian at Eastern Washington University, for assistance. He said that there was no particular rule that applied in this instance, so I wrongly put the accent on the second syllable, Gorbáchev, to my later embarrassment. Nonetheless, my periodic TV appearances were successful enough to persuade the local ABC station to invite me to serve as their “expert” commentator for the 1988 presidential election. This was an invitation I felt obligated to decline, not only because of my lack of “expertise” on American electoral politics (which I gave as my excuse), but also because I knew I would never be able to disguise my partisanship for the Democratic Party. I had earlier seriously embarrassed my son Nick, who was watching the news with his friends, by my critical comments on Reagan’s cold war policies. “Can’t you ever say anything nice” he admonished me, “about our president?” When I tried to explain the reasons for my vehement objections to Reaganism, Nick’s response was, “Life is more than just a lecture, Dad.”

Nick, 1985

Nick, 1986

Nick playing ping-pong in the basement, 1987

A sampling of journal entries gives some idea of my evolving political views, ultimately disappointed by the failure of Gorbachow’s reforms to bring about a democratic socialism:

16 Jan 1986 Liberalism descends into fascism when it is conceived only as freedom for power.

27 Jan The point is this: a “free” society creates the conditions in which strength can exert itself at the expense of the “weak.” However, to ensure a system in which the “weak” will not be short-changed or exploited, but in which people will continue to remain “free,” people’s voluntary assent to the norms of non-exploitation must be gained. In the absence of such voluntary assent, some form of coercion is necessary, leading to the paradox (and confirming the validity of a dialectical interpretation of history) that strong leaders must exert powers that will seem arbitrary and illegitimate to those who do not accept the norms of a socialist society.

4 Feb The mechanism of coercion is more impersonal and better concealed in the West in that no individual or group—no KGB—can be held responsible. That is not the least “genius” of the market from the conservative point of view. Victims of market forces blame natural causes, or bad luck, not the representatives or institutions of the social order, for their misfortune.

9 Apr The American dialectic: the power that this country wields is at least in part a consequence of its attractiveness—the appeal of its civil liberties—to so many people in the world. But the United States is hampered—thank God—in the full exercise of its power by those very same liberal institutions, which can’t be done away with—much as the propertied would like to—without destroying the source of American attractiveness and hence some of its power. The conflict has to and will be fought out in America itself. Because as long as America retains its liberal institutions it remains strong—and thus at least potentially capable of much mischief in the world. To wish a reduction of American power is in a sense to wish a diminution of what makes the United States appealing—its liberalism. So the responsibility of taming its power lies with us—its citizens. But in the very act of exercising its liberal democratic institutions, we are strengthening the U. S. and contributing to the power we seek to rein in. Is this what Hegel meant by the cunning of reason, the dialectic of history, and the passage of the “world spirit” from one country to another?

11 Apr Problems of socialism: what do you do when there always seems to be a majority in favor of a system that excludes, or exploits, or handicaps, or penalizes certain minorities (for instance, the poor)?

1 May Every system contains the potential for abuse. Liberals claim that their system is best because it recognizes and acknowledges the fallibility of humans. But they thereby enshrine that fallibility!

9 May The positive aspect of Reaganism is that we now know what to fight. Welfare statism puts the left in such a difficult position: on the one hand, it is not nearly equitable enough; on the other hand, we cannot deny our support to ameliorative measures—even if they strengthen a system that is basically inequitable. Reagan eases this uncomfortable choice.

15 May Anti-Marxists want to have it both ways. They argue that “individual initiative“ (i.e., the acquisitive drive) is essential to productivity and progress, but they deny that economic motives and relations are fundamental to human activities. But economic activity always has social consequences because of its effect on property values, the value of money, hence prices and wages, etc. That is why there must be some sort of social control. Farmers (like Mama), for instance, are victims of economic pressures not of their own making.

21 Nov 1987 The challenge confronting America: is it possible to create a truly inclusive middle-class society (the American dream)? Then there would in fact be no need, no use for Marxism.

4 July 1988 Democratic socialism can only succeed within a consensus on the desirability and legitimacy of a socialist economy. The current turmoil in the USSR attests to how far they have finally come: at last the party feels secure enough about the popularity and viability of socialism to permit open debate. No wonder our conservatives view what is going on with such misgivings!

Little did I anticipate that it was the Soviet bureaucracy itself, filled with ambitious people with no real commitment to Marxism, who would take the lead in the transformation of the Soviet Union into a brutally corrupt capitalist system a year or two later!

Mama's sweater, 1986

The other great interest of my sabbatical semester in spring 1986 was my continuing (but ultimately unavailing) project of reconciling Nietzsche with Marx.

If we perceive the great crimes of our age as the product of a perverted morality, then Nietzsche has something to say to us.

Nietzsche’s point?? Christianity is one thing in the minds of the truly humble—Jesus; another thing in the hands of the arrogant and intolerant—Paul. One cannot say Christianity is right or wrong. One can say it is admirable when practiced, an abomination when preached.

[Richard] Rorty’s article in the London Review of Books invoking Nietzsche in behalf of the adage, “truth is made, not found.” Truth is a function of choice of vocabulary, not of more perfect representation of outer reality or more perfect expression of inner reality. The dialectic is evident in that this kind of relativism can serve the communist cause by debunking the absolute claim to truth of religion, etc.; but it is now generally used to invalidate the communist claim of representing the true course and purpose of history. All is contingency. No system is more right than any other—except, of course, the system that acknowledges that truth (namely, liberalism)! To make this angle of attack possible, communism must be portrayed as a secular religion making claims to absolute truth. What gets lost is any appreciation of communism as simply partisanship for the weak and oppressed and the poor, which is exactly what liberals want to lose!

Marxism (or true democracy), by balancing the scale in favor of the under-classes and outcast, by questioning the privileges of the wealthy and powerful, by refusing to accept their superiority as givens, provides the necessary challenge that fosters greatness (which can’t be defined a priori, which develops dialectically). Nietzsche understood this.

Nietzsche’s problem is the German problem: no political awareness. Hence he generalizes his indictment of a specifically German world view into an attack on a human, or at least “Western” world view: Christianity, morality, etc. It is important, especially for Marxists, to situate Nietzsche’s philosophy in the context of his German experience. Nietzsche doesn’t help us to understand the world, as Marx does, but he does help us to understand Germans!

New York Review article on “Volksgeist” vs. “European culture:” what it fails to take into consideration is the crucial difference between Volksgeist as national liberation and as national domination and oppression. What it fails to take into consideration, in other words, is the economic base. It is the economic base that determines victimization or oppression. This neglect is what Marxists rightly impugn. The differing manifestations of Volksgeist provide a good illustration of the dialectic: Volksgeist, a liberating nationalism, carries within it the seeds of oppression. Nothing is either good or evil, except under certain conditions. Nietzsche’s failure to analyze these conditions in political terms is his true weakness.

One thing is undeniably true: Nietzsche has poisoned many minds. Mediocre minds under Nietzsche’s influence make mediocrity stronger. Nietzsche doesn’t change the quality of minds, he enhances self-confidence. Fascism: the petty bourgeois mind under Nietzsche’s influence.

Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man—“a person will desire what is injurious to himself simply to have the right to desire for himself even what is very stupid”—and Nietzsche’s nihilist, who would rather will nothingness than not willing at all.

Nietzsche so “aktuell” (relevant) because his rejection of majoritarianism can be used for a critique of both socialism and bourgeois democracy. Moreover, his criticism of the old order, of Bismarck and Wilhelm II, but also of idealism and religion, absolves him of being reactionary. He is ultra- (hence post-) modern, futuristic, open-ended—hence his appeal today. What those who want to activate him against socialism alone fail to acknowledge is that he can equally well be activated against liberal democracy. But he can’t be dismissed as simply a mouthpiece of the old order, as some Marxists do.

The current Nietzsche renaissance as a desperate search for a philosophically sophisticated alternative to Marxism. But not all negative: it is also a symptom of the kind of urges and motives that inspired Marx, but that cannot express itself as a commitment to Marxism in a system dominated by capital. Nietzsche at least gives one the courage to turn one’s back on traditional authority.

But then there are the “tough” Nietzscheans who appreciate his salutary critique of liberal democracy, the ruthless unmasking of liberal ideology, not out of any sympathy for fascism, but because the tough Nietzschean attack provides a safeguard against fascism. This is quite different from the ”gentle Nietzscheans” who portray him as some sort of proto-liberal.

It all depends on why Nietzsche is valued today: is it because his skepticism serves as a useful counterweight against Marxism, or is it because he has diagnosed the nihilism that has led us to the brink of nuclear self-destruction?

Given my scholarly interests, the most important historical controversy of 1986-1987 for me was the dispute known in Germany as the Historikerstreit. Precipitated by an article by the historian Ernst Nolte (b. 1923) in the leading conservative newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) entitled , “Vergangenheit die nicht vergehen will” (the past that will not go away), the dispute pitted defenders of the “new conservatism” of the Reagan era against liberal critics of the “new cold war.” Nolte called for the same dispassionate analysis of Nazism as all other past events eventually received. Reagan’s visit on the fortieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War with West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to the Bitburg military cemetery that also contained the graves of numerous SS soldiers had already set the tone for the new cold war hawks who wanted to play down the Nazi past to strengthen West German commitment to the fight against Soviet communism. My comment in my journal was: “Bitburg is the revival of appeasement: even the SS have their uses in the struggle against the Reds.” Nolte argued in favor of a more positive reappraisal of Nazism, without denying Nazi extremism or the Holocaust. He interpreted Nazism as an understandable, if excessive (überschiessende) reaction of a fearful bourgeoisie to the greater horror and threat of the Russian Bolshevik Revolution. In that way he could even give the Holocaust a rational justification, while incriminating communism for having precipitated the violent fascist reaction. Some of Nolte’s defenders, such as Joachim Fest (1926-2006), a biographer of Hitler and editor of the FAZ, went so far as to describe the Holocaust as just another of the tragic catastrophies that have always marked the course of human history. For liberal American historians Nolte’s interpretation of fascism as a reaction to and mirror image of the prior and allegedly more lethal communist movement provided an unpleasant provocation, as I tried to sort out in several entries in my journal in January 1987:

The German Historikerstreit: Nolte’s analysis of fascism as basically anti-Marxism is correct; his effort to derive a certain justification of fascism from this is not. Nolte is performing a useful service in “historicizing” fascism, i. e., embedding it in its historical context and thus facilitating understanding. But his analysis does not so much “relativize” fascism (as just a militant and not totally unwarranted response to communism) as it discredits militant right-wing anti-communism (though of course that is not how Nolte, or his liberal critics, see it). Liberal American critics, such as [Stanford Professor Gordon] Craig [who wrote about the dispute in the New York Review of Books] have such problems with Nolte, et al., because they cannot criticize his anti-communism because they share it. So they have to claim (citing [historian Eberhard] Jäckel) that Hitler did not eliminate the Jews out of fear of Bolshevism. They sidestep the real issue—the analysis of fascism—to focus on a much narrower topic—the uniqueness of the Holocaust. The typically liberal cop-out of taking a relentlessly positivistic and empirical approach. What other state, after all, had used gas in so systematic a fashion on men, women, and children? And they reject (or attack) what is strongest about Nolte—his “philosophizing,” his dialectic, or, more accurately, phenomenology—rather than his basic values. Nolte provides a real challenge: he is forcing Americans to confront the implications of their anti-communism. They don’t like it.

The real issue in the controversy was not the historical interpretation of Nazism but the politics of the new Cold War at the height of the Reagan era:

Nolte’s project: in the outrage over fascism and its atrocities, don’t lose sight of the prior and perhaps greater atrocities of communism. Precisely because he is aware of the importance of the anti-communist impulse in fascism, he is concerned (as are Fest and the FAZ) that outrage about fascism (and the charge that Nazi crimes are uniquely horrible, execrable) may dim people’s anti-communist ardor, may turn the youth of the Federal Republic into guilt-ridden pacifists. None of them are apologists for fascism. All of them are Cold Warriors. This is really a debate about motives, not substance. Critics of [Jürgen] Habermas have tried to turn it into a debate about substance—or rather, they have tried to discredit Habermas because he called into question the motives of Nolte and his defenders rather than offering a substantive rebuttal of Nolte’s interpretation. The hidden (and not so hidden) agenda of all the participants is present policies and the present political ethos, not history at all. An extremely instructive example of how the interpretation of history is relevant to contemporary politics! American liberal historians have such problems with this controversy because they don’t even accept Nolte’s analysis of fascism (at least not whole-heartedly). What is at issue is not the interpretation of fascism or the uniqueness of the Holocaust, but the Cold War, the Wende (conservative turn). Nolte is well aware that his quite accurate analysis of fascism can work both ways—to indict anti-communism or to ”relativize” or “historicize” Nazism. Since he doesn’t want the former, he is left with no choice but to pursue the latter. Americans take a cop-out: fascism is not anti-communism (in essence) but unique (demonic) evil.

Ultimately what was at stake for Nolte and his defenders in the Historikerstreit was not just German support for the new Cold War, but rejection of the values of the generational revolt of the 1960s in favor of the new conservatism of the 1980s. Hence the title of the article on the Historikerstreit I published in Radical History Review in 1988: “1986 vs. 1968: The turn to the Right in German Historiography.”

Several years earlier Sally and I had become quite active in protesting the Reagan Administration’s support for the right wing government of El Salvador, whose paramilitary death squads had assassinated Archbishop Oscar Romero and murdered three American nuns in 1980. Reagan also financed counter-revolutionary terrorists known as “Contras” in their efforts to overthrow the Sandanista government in Nicaragua. Sally had become a member of the steering committee of the Central America Solidarity Association (CASA) cofounded by her young colleagues from the economics department at Eastern Washington University, future Democratic majority leader of the Washington state senate, Lisa Brown, and the later Washington delegate to the Northwest Power Council, Tom Karier.

Scott Nicholson, Kevin Baxter. Susan Reicheldorfer, Lisa Brown. Sally, Julie Barnard, Mort Alexander, Tom Karier

In 1986 the so-called Iran-Contra scandal burst on to the scene with the disclosure that money from arms sales to Iran had been diverted by the White House to finance Contra attacks against Nicaragua in violation of a law barring U.S. aid to the Contras—a law passed by the Democratic Congress in a futile effort to halt the aggressive policies of the Reagan Administration in Central America.

Protest at the Federal Building, 1986

But those of us hoping that the judicial system would now function as impartially as it had in the Watergate scandal were to be disappointed. None of the persons responsible for the illegal diversion of funds or efforts to cover up the affair ever went to jail. In fact, one of them, Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North, an aide to National Security Adviser John Poindexter, became something of a national hero to conservatives, despite admitting his role in revising, shredding, and removing key documents in the affair. I was able to use the resulting “Olliemania” as a teaching tool in my course on Hitler’s Germany.

On January 1st, 1987, at Tom Karier’s suggestion, we held the first of our annual New Year’s Day “Open House” brunches.

With Tom Karier and Jill Gibion, 1985

We made a mistake, not to be repeated in future years, of not specifying any hours for our “open house.”. While most of our guests arrived in the late morning, some, including my Whitworth College colleague Bob Lacerte and his wife, did not arrive until late afternoon.

Lisa Brown with Sally, New Year's Day brunch, 1987

Sally spent the summer of 1987 in Seattle at an NEH faculty seminar given by University of Washington Professor Ernst Behler.

Sally in mid-1980s

Sally, 1986

This gave us an opportunity for a number of weekend outings in Seattle and its scenic environs. We spent a particularly memorable weekend on Orkas Island with its well-known hot springs resort, where bathing suits were optional, but not required. I spent most of that summer working on a review of Abraham’s book on The Collapse of the Weimar Republic for the German Studies Review. It was to be counterbalanced by a review by Bob Grathwohl, who took an opposing view on the controversy over the book, but unfortunately he never lived up to his part of the bargain. Pleading lack of time, he failed to submit his review, whereupon the editors forced me to cut down the length of my review by severely curtailing the space they had originally promised.

Christmas, 1987

In June 1988 I traveled east to attend Trina’s graduation from Harvard. Sally was not able to attend this festive event as her semester did not end until the middle of June. Trina and her boyfriend at the time, her classmate Paddy Spence, had visited us in Spokane over Christmas both in 1986 and 1987.

Trina and Paddy

They shared a common interest in tie-dyeing, which they hoped to expand into a business.

Trina's Commencement June 1988

Trina on the veranda of her apartment in Cambridge, 1988

Under the influence of her jewelry-crafting mother, Trina had earlier shifted her major field of concentration from history and lit (my field of concentration at Harvard) to the very different field of environmental design. In her working career, however, which already began with a part-time job while she was still at Harvard, she pursued a different line altogether. She became quite skilled in creating computer models of the cancer risks generated by certain kinds of industrial hazardous wastes. This was the burgeoning field of risk management in which she eventually became very successful.

Trina getting her degree 1988

I tried to give Trina some advice based on my own experience of having delayed my graduate education too long. “I’m not trying to tell you what to do with your life,“ I told her, “but if you’re planning to get a PhD, don’t make the same mistake that I did by waiting so long.” It was advice that went unheeded. Ironically it would be exactly eighteen years, the very same number of years between my AB and PhD, before Trina earned her doctorate in epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health in 2006!

Tie-dye Christmas, 1987

In the summer of 1988 I attended another NEH faculty seminar under the direction of Robert Wohl at UCLA. The long drive to Los Angeles was my pretext to finally trade in my aging VW van and buy a new car, a Ford Escort, though that decision was not reached without the usual brooding over the implications of such a move. In the end I convinced myself with the help of a little casuistry:

Trying to decide whether to buy a new car: is it more materialistic to be attached to the old car than to covet a new one? If a car is just a use object, not a fetish, shouldn’t one buy a new one as the most efficient, time-effective means of transportation (the old car, because it needs constant tending, is more time-consuming)? At the very least, one should not worry about the money that a new car costs, for isn’t it materialistic not to want to trade in money for time and freedom from distraction?!?

My main concern that summer was to prepare for my forthcoming trip to Switzerland, where I was scheduled to give a presentation on Nietzsche and the Nazis at the annual conference in Sils-Maria in October 1988, the picturesque alpine village where Nietzsche had worked most summers in the 1880s. Sally joined me in Los Angeles at the end of July, and together we visited her parents in Phoenix before returning to Spokane via scenic route 1 along the Pacific coast with a stop-over in San Francisco and numerous stops along the Oregon coast.

Oregon coast, 1989

With Sally in 1983

The war between the sexes: the effort to grow beyond the natural attraction to the opposite sex. Hence one competes for the superior psychological vantage point that confers autonomy. Make the other side want you more than you want them.—Insight derived from not being invited to [the] tenure party. Nice to have the insight, but wouldn’t it have been more fun to have been invited?

I took a mordant view of my motives:

Irony: in students as potential lovers I look for the parent-less, because they are more likely to defy convention (Kaye!). In older women as potential mates I look for those with close ties to their parents because they are more likely to have internalized the conventional goals of marriage and children (besides carrying the genes of longevity). They are less likely to give in to Lesbian temptations.

Obviously, my own inhibitions played a part in my problematic post-divorce relations with women:

It is easy to say, why not call her; the worst that can happen is that she’ll say no. For one thing, it isn’t the worst. She may say yes and not mean it. But what is even worse is that she says yes and you do not mean it. You mean it only if she reacts in a certain way. One inhibition, then, is fear of becoming a fraud, of being revealed as a fraud, because your phone call may promise something you can’t deliver.

Another inhibiting factor was the note of desperation that I seemed to convey. Martha Chrisman, an attractive young pianist in the music department who in June, 1986, moved to a better position at Purdue University, gave me some good advice: “You go too fast. You seem desperate. It takes all the romance out of it. A romance needs a little mystery, a little teasing.” Martha told her mother that I seemed very lonely. I asked her what her mother’s response had been. “She said she thought you’d better get your act together before you go out.” But Martha and I were too different ever to have made a harmonious and integrated couple. She was a bit of a born-again Christian who dragged me to Sunday services at a number of churches.

At the Plymouth Congregational Church with Martha. The minister with the ingratiating gestures and self-admiring public speaking style of Bob Carriker. Martha applying the lessons of the sermon to her problems with Fr. Leedale [chair of the music department], who gave her a bad evaluation after a sneak visit to her class: “I’ll get him through love,” and “I’m going to think of my problems as challenges from now on.” About the minister: “He doesn’t play it safe like other ministers. He disturbs people. He has the courage to speak of faith and love instead of how to save the world.”

Martha was quite aware of our basic incompatibility. Of a romantic rival, a young executive at a local credit union with whom she was going out, she said: “I don’t want him, but I want to want him; I want you, but I don’t want to want you.” To my plaint that she got sexually aroused with me but then transferred it to him, she responded, “Maybe it’s the other way round.”

Martha in our back yard at Maringo Drive

When I met Sally, Nick was quite relieved. He had become quite worried that if my relationship with Martha developed any further, he would have to go to church every Sunday!

Twelve-year-old Nick was a bit wary of Sally, too, at first, for fear that our relationship was getting too close, as Sally frequently came over for supper. “When I see three pork chops on the counter,“ he admonished me, “I get really mad.” “I should sue you for waste of gas,“ he said at another time. “Have you and Sally ever thought about how much gas you are wasting when she cones over here?”

Nick

But when Sally finally moved in with us two years later in September 1985, they got along very well. Sally was very much affected by the second wave of the feminist movement, sometimes referred to as the Women’s Liberation Movement, reaching its crest in those years. I sympathized with the movement as well for its emphasis on equality, even if it seemed to make courtship more complicated than it had been when I grew up in the 1950s (not that the more rigid gender roles of an earlier era made it any easier for me). Several months before, on May 6, 1983, I had written in my journal:

Feminism only elevates courtship to a higher level; it does not change its dynamics. If anything, it reinforces the age-old dynamic: men must really be men: must act independently and courageously: must be prepared to court even the formidable new woman: must not sit on their asses: must not be afraid to act just because women, too, are autonomous, career-oriented, and equal. Another way of putting it is that the war between the sexes did not start with feminism: it only took a more honest, less devious form.

The best case for feminism: those who are aware of their own rights are also more aware of the rights of others.

Sally herself was somewhat torn by conflicting emotions, as recorded in my journal on November 23, 1983:

Sally telling me how Miles, her bisexual friend, had analyzed her two personalities and called them “Anna Mae” and “Beatrix” respectively. “Anna Mae” wants to be taken care of by a man, “Beatrix” is the liberated independent woman. The United Nations Association meeting in Cheney the day before yesterday had distressed “Beatrix,” because Sally had behaved so much like “Anna Mae”. Instead of sitting in a comfortable unclaimed armchair (on which we had placed her coat), from where she could have conversed comfortably with other visitors, she sat down in a corner of the sofa next to me. From there she was virtually excluded from the conversation both because I blocked her line of discourse, and she didn’t know any of the people there, except [her colleague in government] Ernie Gohlert, who was giving a talk on his trip to Malaysia. Ernie’s presence only made her feel more inadequate, since she had, in effect, chosen to retreat behind me.—The question in my mind was, do I force her, by my behavior, into the role of “Anna Mae”? I had thought that her self-doubts had a different source: that “Anna Mae” felt neglected by my lack of a firmer commitment than our present practice of sleeping together on weekends. The fact that it is “Beatrix” who is aggrieved does not entirely reassure me. For “Beatrix” is angry at “Anna Mae” for wanting what “Anna Mae” wants.

Sally herself was not happy with this artificial distinction between the traditionalist “Anna Mae” and the feminist “Beatrix”, and by the time I met her she had fully embraced a feminism that explained gender not as biologically given but as a social and cultural construct. This did lead to some animated discussions in which Sally criticized my more traditional views, as recorded on January 22, 1984:

Argument yesterday with Sally: she took issue with my explanation of promiscuity among young male homosexuals, which was that young men between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five have a powerful sex drive for which there is no socially acceptable outlet. Sally objected to this notion, because the powerful male sex drive is sometimes cited as an excuse to meliorate the blame attached to rapists. When I said it was not my intention to provide such an excuse, she nonetheless objected to the notion that men had a more powerful sex drive than women, because that argument could be used to rationalize rape. This frustrated me.: “You deny reality and truth because it is not convenient to the feminist cause.”—“What you call reality and truth may not be truth from a different perspective,” she responded. “The whole notion of ‘objective reality’ has been used to perpetuate an androcentric point of view.” I tried another tack: “All I’m doing is providing an explanation for male homosexual promiscuity, an explanation designed to counter the biased view that homosexuals are by nature promiscuous. What you are saying about the application of this explanation to rape is irrelevant.”—“You are trivializing my argument by calling it irrelevant. It is typical of the male inability or refusal to see any other point of view.”—“I, too, object to using the notion of male hyper-sexuality to justify rape,” I retorted. “But that doesn’t allow me to close my eyes to the truth.”—“What may be true for you may not be true for me.”—“But your truth has no bearing on the statement I am making. It is an entirely separate issue.”—“From my perspective it isn’t. Your failure to see and make the connection is precisely the limited vision I challenge.”—“If our perception of truth is so different, we will never be able to close the chasm between us.”—“All I want you to do is make the effort to see my side and not to trivialize my side by calling it ’irrelevant,’ or ‘irrational,’ or ‘subjective,’ or ‘illogical,’ while validating your own side as ‘objective.’”

The argument made me acutely aware of how real the conflict between the sexes is, how unbridgeable the chasm may well be. For it seems that what I am being asked to do is no less than to give up my objective view of reality—a view that has served male interests and does not take “subjective” feminine perspectives sufficiently into account. The argument helped me to understand the genealogy of [my ex-wife] Steffi’s dictum, “Sex ist alles (sex is everything).” For if the interests and perspectives of the sexes are so different, the sexual attraction is ultimately the only sure bond. It also seemed to clarify the origins of the old saw, to wit that women do not think as logically as men. Thus a feminist attack on sexism reinforces a sexist prejudice.

Sally at home

On December 6, 1983, we attended a firebrand talk by the ex-Mormon feminist Sonia Johnson on the theme epitomized by her militant dictum, “To be born female is to be born behind enemy lines.” Her most damning indictment of men was her assertion, “They say, ‘if you do not meet our demands, we will not love you.’” More valid, in my judgment, was her starkly expressed insight, “Human beings love human beings. They don’t love doormats.” After the talk I confessed to Sally that I felt thoroughly chastened, to which Sally replied, “good!” But Sally credited me with a “maternal streak:” “I like it when you warm up my feet, but I don’t like it when you tell me how to teach. I don’t like it when you seem to do everything that I do better. It does not help my low self-esteem.” John Wagner of the philosophy department went so far as to say (as reported to me by Martha): “The only reason women like Rod so much is because he’s a feminist.”

Martha Chrisman's recital in spring 1986, with John Wagner and Sally

My seventeen-year-old daughter Trina came home to Spokane at Christmas, 1983, with some very exciting news: she had just been admitted to Harvard on early decision, an admissions practice that Harvard ended a few years later to enlarge its pool of candidates and to equalize the opportunities for low-income and minority groups. At the annual Spokane Harvard Club luncheon between Christmas and New Year’s in 1983, Trina announced: “My greatest fear about going to Harvard is that I think of it as so perfect, such a pillar, that I’m afraid this image will crumble when I go there.” She needn’t have feared disillusionment, however. Indeed she ended up marrying a fellow Harvard graduate, Garth Jonson, in 1995 and remained a resident of Cambridge or Boston from 1984 on. She completed a doctorate at the Harvard School of Public Health in 2006 and continues to conduct research there on epidemiological risk assessment to the present day.

Trina 1984

In the spring of her senior year at Kent School, however, her rebellious streak surfaced with a few unhappy ramifications. Trina had taken her mother’s VW bug (Steffi did not drive) with her to Kent, where she parked it at the home of Olaf’s mother-in-law Mrs. Sleighter, as Kent School did not permit its students to have automobiles on campus. However, Trina made the mistake of lending her car to some fellow students who were involved in a minor accident, thus bringing this violation of Kent School’s rules against students’ use of automobiles to light. Although Trina was allowed to graduate in June, 1984, she had to forfeit all of the many honors and awards she had earned for her scholarly achievements. Fortunately, these disciplinary actions did not affect her admission to Harvard

Trina receiving her international baccalaureate diploma from Kent School

Signs of teen-age rebellion continued at least for a while at Harvard. At Christmas time 1984, Trina came home to Spokane with a blue streak in her hair. This even merited a mention in the “Undergraduate” column of Harvard Magazine which noted the presence in the Yard of a freshman girl known simply as “Blue.”

Trinaat Harvard

Although as a child Trina had been highly critical of her mother’s smoking habit, provocatively posting “No Smoking” signs all over the house, now she came home with a carton of cigarettes, which she proceeded to smoke in her upstairs bedroom over the course of her two-week stay.

Aunt Temple died of cancer in Florida on February 24, 1984, the first of her generation of our immediate family (our cousin, Olaf’s benefactor Pauline Emmet, had died the year before). Despite her illness Aunt Temple had stopped off to see me in Spokane on her way to her daughter Liz and son-in-law Roby Rosenthal’s home in Seattle in July, 1983. Perhaps she anticipated the approaching end of her life, because she brought Christmas presents for my family, as if she sensed that she might not be around to send them at the end of the year.

She is exemplary in her grittiness, in her strength in the face of old age and ill health, her total lack of self-pity. But it is precisely this hardness, manifested in rather gruff attitudes, opinions, and even language, this determination not to let the world get to her, this invulnerability, that makes conversation with her, not a bore, but a chore. I was hoping to get some information and insight into Mama’s life in the 1930s. But Aunt Temple could no longer remember when Mama had come to America [on vacations] or for how long. She could not even remember the last year she, Aunt Temple, had been in Germany herself. None of that particularly interested her. To the explanation of Mama’s psyche she did contribute the hypothesis that Mama had had things too easy! She should not have been supported as much as she had been by Granny. There is an unconscious economy in Aunt Temple’s outlook; all her sensibilities have become mobilized in the fight to assert herself against disease, weakness, self-doubt, loss of will. A courageous old lady, but tedious. It is the same quality that years ago I called “impersonal,” though Mama objected and insisted she was “too personal.”

Aunt Temple in the 1930s

The co-residence of Aunt Temple and Mama in the house that Aunt Temple had built for Mama in Vermont had not worked out as planned. Each of their increasingly infrequent attempts to live together in harmony had ended acrimoniously. Just who was most to blame for the friction between the two sisters is difficult to determine. Suffice it to say that they got on each others’ nerves. Aunt Temple had the means to live elsewhere, and that was the course that she chose, eventually settling in Florida, where Uncle Nick and Aunt Virginia had already made their home several years before. Mama claimed that Aunt Temple had resented her since childhood for usurping her place as the pampered youngest sibling, but I did not trust her self-serving explanation. It seemed to me too obviously a rationalization of Mama’s own life-long resentment of her dominant and successful older sister.

In the summer of 1984 I attended a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) faculty seminar conducted by the prolific Germanist Sander Gilman at Cornell University on the German fin de siècle (1890-1900). I was chosen as a seminar participant for my “expertise” on Houston Stewart Chamberlain, on whom I gave a formal presentation, but the research project I worked on at Cornell was quite different. It was an analysis of the Marxist appraisal and almost unanimous rejection of Nietzsche’s philosophy, most famously in Györgi Lukásc’s The Destruction of Reason (1954). My motivation was to see if Nietzsche’s thought, so easily and often misappropriated by right-wing ideologues, could not be made useful for the left. On the basis of my study of völkisch ideology and Nietzsche’s apostasy after his rejection of Wagnerian nationalism and religiosity in the mid-1870s, I suspected that the affinities between Nietzsche and Marx were greater than conventionally assumed. Certainly Nietzsche’s “denazification” was no longer controversial, at least not in the West, especially after the publication of Walter Kaufman’s pioneering demolition of the popular caricature of Nietzsche as proto-Nazi. Also contributing to Nietzsche’s “denazification” was his wholesale appropriation by post-modernists as the preceptor of their key insight that, in the words of Richard Rorty, “truth is made and not found.” While Kaufman had shown the incompatibility of Nietzsche’s ideas with völkisch ideology, I focused more on “The Völkisch Reaction to Nietzschean Thought,” the subtitle of an article I published in March 1983 in a journal edited by my counterpart at Washington State University, Bob Grathwohl. Bob had persuaded me to publish my article in his low-circulation journal, entitled Research Studies. Somewhat against my better judgment I accepted his invitation, not only as a favor to Bob, but also because I was impatient to see my article in print. My doubts proved all too sound when the journal folded only a few issues later. Bob Grathwohl, who lost his wife to cancer at a much too early age, subsequently moved to Washington, DC, where he took a position with the National Endowment for the Humanities

Bob Grathwohl

One of my conclusions in the paper I turned in to Sander Gilman in July 1984 was that Nietzsche’s main target was not the socialism of the left or the ideas of Karl Marx, whose works he only knew through the distorted lens of the renegade Social Democrat Eugene Dühring, whom Nietzsche roundly condemned for his antisemitic views. Instead, Nietzsche’s primary target was the very moralism that was routinely mobilized by the religious right (or the “moral majority”) to oppose and discredit socialism. But I could not simply close my eyes to the fact that Nietzsche’s ideas had indeed proved very useful to the Nazis, whether in distorted form or not. In an oral presentation on “Nietzsche and the Nazis” I tried to account for Nietzsche’s link to Nazism, notwithstanding his unqualified condemnation of German nationalism, his contempt for the Wilhelmine Reich, and his rejection of Christian as well as racial antisemitism:

Although Nietzsche was a profound critic of the German idealist tradition that culminated (in corrupted form) in Germanic and völkisch ideology, Nietzsche (perhaps inevitably) incorporated precisely those elements of that tradition that made it easily possible to misuse his philosophy and misunderstand his aims. His tendency to view politics as a degrading activity was very characteristic of the German intellectual tradition, mirroring the lack of democratic participation in German monarchical society. His philosophy could be easily misused for political purposes because it lacked any grounding in social reality. From the Marxist point of view he did not raise the right questions, since he attached absolutely no importance to the class struggle or economic reform. Living very frugally, he didn’t need to worry about questions of subsistence, because he enjoyed a small but regular retirement pension after he resigned his university position at Basel —a very small-scale example of the Marxian principle that the ideological superstructure is ultimately determined by the economic base. But one can also put it differently: a man of Nietzsche’s integrity could not, in the last analysis, bite the hand that fed him. Nietzsche’s failure to provide any social analysis left concepts like “herd animals,” “blond beasts,” “superman,” or “the will to power” to be misused and exploited for the very cause he most detested. His link with the Nazis lies in the anti-materialist and anti-socialist bias that he shared with the conservative “idealists” that he criticized. He dismissed the “social question,” i.e., matters of social equality, social justice, and social reform, as trivial—a distraction from really important questions. A cruel dialectic was operative in the fate of Nietzsche’s ideas. In the sense that he was himself very much a representative and victim of Germany’s undemocratic tradition, he was indeed, I think, an unwitting contributor to the eventual triumph of Nazism in his country.

So great was my obsession to reconcile Nietzsche with Marx that I finally reached the paradoxical conclusion that while Marxists were right to reject Nietzsche’s aristocratic and anti-political radicalism, one had to share some of Nietzsche’s iconoclasm, integrity, and independence to fully embrace Marx’s ideal of equality—at least in the West. In other words, one had to be an adherent of Nietzsche’s values in order to become a good Marxist. Sander Gilman suggested that I send my paper to Ernst Behler at the University of Washington, one of the editors of Nietzsche-Studien, the journal in which I had published my article, “The Role of Heinrich von Stein in Nietzsche’s Emergence as Critic of Wagnerian Idealism and Cultural Nationalism,” in 1976. But the editors of Nietzsche-Studien objected to such a sweeping “denazification” of a thinker still widely reviled in guilt-ridden post-war Germany for his putative influence on the Nazis. I had to wait until 1989 for my article’s publication in a German translation under the title, “Nietzsche und der Nationalsozialismus,” in the newly-founded philosophical journal prima philosophia. Much later I also incorporated many of these ideas in the concluding chapter of a book edited by Jacob Golomb and Robert S. Wistrich, entitled Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? On the Uses and Abuses of a Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 2002).
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While I was at the NEH seminar in Ithaca in the summer of 1984, Sally was working hard on completing her dissertation, later published as Woman as Feminine Bourgeois Ideal. Occasionally she would call to express her frustration at the slow pace of her progress and to complain that she was stuck and couldn’t seem to find a way to go on. I tried to allay her self-doubts, but I was also acutely aware that if I dismissed them as unwarranted, I might well be accused of not taking them (or her) seriously enough. This put me into a bit of a “catch-22” quandary, damned if I didn’t take her low estimation of her work or prospects of success s at face value, but even more damned if I did. “You don’t realize,” she chided me, “that I have always had low self-esteem, which makes me view things more negatively than they really are.” My quandary was predictably resolved when Sally finished her dissertation and defended it in Madison with flying colors in October 1984. Her department at Eastern Washington University celebrated her achievement with a festive dinner in November of that year.

At Sally's PhD departmental dinner

In the 1984-1985 academic year I went up for promotion to full professor at the earliest opportunity after the mandatory three years in rank. I knew my chances were not good as my book, Idealism Debased, had already been used to justify my promotion to Associate Professor in 1981, and I had only produced one article and several papers since then. But I thought that my service as director of the International Studies Program might tip the balance in my favor. Promotion was important to me for financial reasons. Although at the time there was still no systematic correlation between rank and salary at Gonzaga (that would not come until the administration’s belated acceptance of the annual salary survey of the College and University Professional Association [CUPA] as the standard for determining faculty salaries in 1988 after prolonged negotiations with the salary committee of the Faculty Assembly), the Gonzaga Summer School did peg its compensation to faculty rank. Promotion would mean several hundred dollars more for each Summer School class I taught, and I was forced to teach as many as I could to cover not only our household expenses but also Trina’s tuition at Kent School and Harvard, where, despite the generous financial aid she was awarded on the basis of need, she still had to take out a fairly sizable student loan. Again I knew my promotion would be opposed by my colleague Bob Carriker, but I hoped I could prevail, as I had in my struggle for tenure in 1982. That struggle had continued within the department in 1982-1983 and may have prejudiced our young colleague John Shideler‘s chances for reappointment in spring 1982. Shideler, a Berkeley PhD, had been hired to replace Father Via as the departmental medievalist after Via’s transfer to the directorship of the Gonzaga-in-Florence program in 1981. Shideler, whose academic standards may have been excessively rigorous for the kind of students we served, received poor student evaluations in his first semester, but what may have been even more decisive in the department’s refusal to reappoint him was the fact that he tended to side with me in departmental disputes. He may have been right on the merits of the specific cases in dispute, but he undoubtedly overestimated the power or influence I wielded in the department—or in the university, for that matter.

John Shideler

At any rate my application for promotion was turned down in spring 1985. My reaction was foolish and impulsive. I resigned my position as director of the International Studies Program, thus further marginalizing my status and giving my departmental rivals exactly what they wanted!

In resigning as director of the International Studies Program, had I cut off my nose to spite my face? It reminded me of a nightmare I had recorded in my journal on September 21, 1983, a month before meeting Sally.

Extraordinary and therapeutic nightmare of giving up my job at Gonzaga. Extraordinary in capturing the psychological nuances: saying goodbye to faculty services [the secretarial pool]—they are incredulous and slightly resentful of my departure, as if it reflected on them. In the outer office (administration?) they are so busy, they hardly take notice of me. Sitting in the waiting room is Ernie Gohlert [director of International Studies at Eastern Washington University], sympathetic, silently solicitous, reflecting in his attitude his conviction that I am behaving like a fool or a madman. I go outside and am overwhelmed by what I have done—and can’t even remember the reason why I did it. It must be because I wanted to write?? The only consoling thought is the one I frequently have in less critical situations: good if things go bad, because it forces me to write, since there is nothing else I can do, no other fulfillment. I turn to a nondescript female friend, round-faced, almost like Sandy Raynor [our friend from Vermont], except it’s someone closer to me. She does not want me to talk to her, because she is afraid of the emotional burden it will place on her. I compel her, “Look at me,” but saying it in a way to reassure her that I wasn’t going to ask any favors or cry on her shoulder. “Why did I do such a foolish thing?” I ask, half-knowing that her response will be one of relief that she is not being called upon for any greater donation than perfunctory encouragement.

Origins: seeing Mike Matthis [my colleague in philosophy who had been denied reappointment by his department], laughing to himself on the couch in the faculty lounge at lunch time, making me aware of how much I have neglected him, making me think he must feel like an invisible man.

Mike Matthis, who shared my interest in Nietzsche (though less so in Marx), was my best friend at Gonzaga until his forced departure in August 1984. We played tennis together, enjoyed each other’s company, and engaged in long and sometimes disputatious conversations about philosophy and politics. We also shared a lingering disaffection from Gonzaga as a result of the hostility we faced in our respective departments. Mike and his wife Rose “house-sat” for me at my place on Maringo Drive in the summer of 1984, shortly before they left Spokane for the east coast. Mike later returned to his home state of Texas, where today he is a tenured professor of philosophy at Lamar University in Beaumont.

The election of 1984 was another huge disappointment. In retrospect, it seems strange that we could ever have had any expectation of a Mondale victory. Reagan and Bush carried every state in the Union except Mondale’s home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia. But Reagan’s tax cuts for corporations and huge increases in defense spending had led to the largest budget deficit in American history in 1982 and a temporary economic recession. This, coupled with his recklessly militant rhetoric against the “Evil Empire” and his plans for a “Star Wars” missile shield undercutting the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Soviet Union, gave us some hope that his presidency would receive the popular rebuff it so richly deserved, unlikely as that prospect may seem in retrospect. There was an air of gloom as our small circle of friends gathered to watch the election results at the home of Ursula Hegi, newly arrived in Spokane to teach in the creative writing department at EWU. Ursula was not only a writer, but also a chess player. She had contacted me before her arrival to inquire about opportunities for joining a chess club in Spokane. I was happy to be able to tell her about our active local club, called the Inland Empire Chess Club at the time, which I had helped to revive from its moribund state several years before.

As champion of the Spokane Chess Club

In August 1985, after Sally spent a summer in Germany at a Fulbright seminar similar to the one I attended in 1982, she and I visited her twin sister Sue and her family in Evanston, Wyoming. That gave me a chance to see Sally’s parents again. I had already met them in June, when they came to Spokane to attend an Elder-Hostel course at Whitworth College. On our trip to Evanston and especially on the way back we did some sightseeing and visited Yellowstone National Park.

Grand Tetons 1985

After our return from Wyoming, Sally moved in with us at 9708 E. Maringo Drive. It extended her commute to Cheney to 26 miles each way, often delayed by trains at the railroad crossing on Argonne Avenue until the construction of an overpass a few years later. But living together greatly reinforced the stability of our relationship and worked out well to everyone’s satisfaction.

Sally at Christmas 1985

We briefly explored the possibility of moving into a different jointly-owned home, but were somewhat limited in our choices by Nick’s desire not to leave West Valley High School, where he had just started his freshman year. The houses for sale in that district were certainly no improvement over our humble and inexpensive abode on the Spokane River at Maringo Drive. There we would remain for another sixteen years.

Sally's parents, sister, and niece in Evanston, WY, August 1985

‘

There was a little hiccup in the faculty’s acceptance of the U.S. Department of Education grant for the establishment of an international studies program. The Academic Council at first voted to reject the grant, but this was based less on opposition to the new International Studies Program than on friction between faculty and administration on decision-making and governance and especially on some faculty members’ fears that international studies was being funded at the expense of faculty salaries (not entirely unfounded, since the grant did call for matching university funding). As I had helped to write the grant proposal, Fr. Ely had asked me to make the case for the grant to the Academic Council, so I could not help but take their initial rejection a bit personally. However, numerous members of the Council came up to me later and apologized for their vote and explained that it had nothing to do with me. On a second vote the following day, the Academic Council reversed itself and the grant was accepted by an overwhelming margin. I knew Carriker (who was not on the partly elected and partly appointed Academic Council) didn’t like my prominent role in the International Studies Program, which gave me a semi-independent base outside the department. But he claimed that his opposition to the International Studies Program was only because he wanted me for the History Department one-hundred percent.

My scholarly credentials could hardly be impugned. My book, Idealism Debased: From Völkisch Ideology to National Socialism, based on my dissertation, was published by the Kent State University Press in 1981. In October 1979 I began presenting papers at the annual meetings of the newly-founded German Studies Association (GSA—then still known as the Western Association for German Studies). I had learned about this organization from the Germanist Karen Achberger while I was still at Oregon. The conference that year was held on the campus of Stanford University, allowing me to visit my Harvard roommate Paul Russell’s sister Arlie Hochschild, whom I had not seen for more than twenty years. Arlie was now a successful sociologist at Berkeley and soon to achieve considerable acclaim for a number of widely-publicized studies on women and work. She and her husband Adam owned a lovely home in the Castro district of San Francisco. I soon found myself in a lively dialogue with Adam in which I defended, to my later embarrassment, the Soviet experiment in socialism despite all its obvious faults. Adam Hochschild, who had recently returned from a visit to the USSR, set me straight on the reality of the repression in that country, but I wasn’t yet prepared to give up on the 1960s dream of a democratic socialism and thought at the time that the best way of supporting this goal was to keep the Soviet experiment going. It seemed to me that Adam Hochschild’s criticism of the Soviet Union presaged the very deliberate revival of the Cold War by President Ronald Reagan the following year (of which Hochschild, the founding editor of the investigative journal Mother Jones, was to be duly critical). My journal entries reflected my point of view:

9 Jan 1980 It is incredible that people don’t recognize that something must be wrong when the killers of SALT II, the apostles of nuclear armament, gloat at the [Soviet] “rape of Afghanistan.” Finally a reason for their intransigence! Things are going their way!

27 Jan 1980 The difference between our and the Russian “fathers of the H-bomb”: Again the Russians have us beat. [Edward] Teller is paving the ground for its use, [Andrei] Sakharov tries to prevent it.

17 April 1980 Fears of a Soviet nuclear strike, insofar as they are genuine, and all evidence point to the fact that they are not, but that they are professed for ideological reasons—so obviously a projection of our own aggressive impulses as to be almost obscene. Based on a total Verkennung (misreading) of Soviet socialism. Their confidence is so strong that they would never jeopardize their budding system by waging an aggressive war; for the only thing that can destroy socialism now is a war that destroys everything. We, unfortunately, have none of that confidence—only a propped-up righteousness based on self-interest, the interest of maintaining economic dominance. Hence our obsession with the threat of socialism, which translates into a readiness to destroy it at the first opportunity. Only we have good reason to use force, because we feel in our bones that time is not on our side.

16 Jun 1980 Olaf’s attitude, such a barometer of American values, on our policy toward the Soviet Union proving that he—and indeed America—have learned nothing from Vietnam. “Where would you draw the line on Soviet aggression,” he asked.

18 Jun 1980 To those who propagate the 1914 thesis drawing parallels between the U.S.S.R. and Imperial Germany (encirclement theory, preventive war, etc.), I want to say: Grown men and women, behaving like children in your righteousness and self-delusion! The parallel is there—but it is you who are behaving like the Imperial German leadership. It is you who can’t be trusted. It is you who fear for your wealth and privileges and see enemies all around you.

19 Jun 1980 We should ask ourselves: why do we want the experiment in communism to fail? Even if our criticisms are well-taken, why should we not hope that this experiment in communal living will eventually succeed? The charge that communism leads to the formation of a power elite is true enough. But we certainly can’t argue, given our values, that providing incentives or rewards to those who “make it” by contributing to its success is wrong. If we accepted as our basic premise that a well-functioning communal society is desirable, we would see nothing wrong with an arrangement that rewards efforts to work toward its achievement.

27 Jun 1980 Why isn’t it obvious to all that the re-intensification, the real cause of the revival, of the Cold War is America’s frustrated response to its disastrous failure in Iran?

28 Jun 1980 I have this feeling about America: what if the brakes give out? At the moment they still seem to be adequate. There are enough persons of integrity and sense scattered around to dampen the fervor of chauvinism.

20 Dec 1980 There is a dialectic at work that makes socialists the most individualistic of people and “individualists” the most conformist and colorless.

28 July 1980 The irony is that socialism will gain appeal in the U.S. precisely for its repressive qualities.

6 Sep 1980 It is not, as [Daniel] Moynihan maintained, that we must be afraid of the younger generation of Russians, who no longer remember World War II and pursue the hope of Russian supremacy, but that we must be afraid of the older generation of Americans, who cannot forget World War II and the era of American supremacy.

31 Aug 1981 The Soviet threat to the U.S. is one of ideas and values; the American threat to Russia is one of arms and power.

3 Dec 1981 If religion is the grounds for attacking communism, then communism has grounds for suppressing religion.

4 Jan 1982 We don’t have any agreed-upon standard of measurement of human misery. But who is to say that it is less in this country than in the U.S.S.R.?

16 Jan 1982 Life under communism: when you have set yourself the goal of taking care of everyone, you cannot allow the same leeway for prima donnas as in a liberal society in which everyone is free to go to the dogs.

24 Jan 1982 What we accuse the communists of—superficial, distorted, “censored” reporting—we are guilty of. [The Coeur d’Alene-based silver mining company] Bunker Hill as a case in point: although it is an obvious case of callous exploitation—the workers are simply cast off, having completed their usefulness—the union is made the scapegoat. Every gain the unions have been able to obtain for workers is portrayed as an obstacle to full employment. Workers are encouraged to express their outrage at the union. In a communist country Bunker Hill would have been kept in operation even at very marginal profitability. That is why their economy “stagnates,” but the needs of their citizenry are met. If communism disappeared from the earth, millions would be left to face poverty without anyone to take their side. To understand communist repression one must realize that to them bourgeois traits—acquisitiveness, aggressiveness, self-seeking—are criminal traits, and bourgeois freedoms merely the climate that tolerates criminality. We consider it a world turned upside down; they consider it a world turned right side up.

To me it seemed clear. The New Cold War launched by Ronald Reagan represented the Vietnam hawks getting their belated revenge. Indeed, one of Reagan’s major goals was to overcome the “Vietnam syndrome,” defined as the reluctance to use American military power to defend the world-wide interests of America’s dominant elites.

In the summer of 1981 I participated in an National Endowment for the Humanities faculty seminar offered by the noted scholar Henry A. Turner at Yale. Turner had dedicated his scholarly career to defending the liberal capitalist system from its Marxist critics. At the time of the seminar he was hard at work on his opus magnum, German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler. According to Turner, if the Marxists were right and capitalists were responsible for the rise of fascism, then capitalism stood condemned by history. This was not a conclusion Turner was prepared to accept. He preferred to emphasize the anti-modern and anti-capitalist features of fascism. He did, however, appreciate my book Idealism Debased, perhaps because I stressed ideology rather than economics. We did a lot of good natured sparring in the seminar, where I gained the reputation of resident leftist. I did score one point when I forced Turner and his assistant William Patch, a specialist on the administration of Heinrich Brüning, to concede that the Nazis were anti-union. A surprising number of seminar participants seemed unaware or unwilling to acknowledge that the Nazis were strongly anti-labor.

A seminar outing at Yale, summer, 1981

The publication of Turner’s book was delayed by the appearance of David Abraham’s Marxist analysis of The Collapse of Weimar Republic in 1983. Turner assailed Abraham’s book as well as its author, whom he accused of deliberately falsifying the facts. And indeed, the book was replete with errors of translation and transcription, the result of carelessness and sloppiness rather than any intention to deceive. But Abraham’s inaccuracies gave Turner the chance to evade all discussion of interpretation and methodology, the areas in which the real differences between the two scholars lay. Turner was rigorously positivist in his approach, suspicious of explanatory conceptualizations, especially ones that were critical of existing economic relations. He found in his research that business people had indeed contributed substantial sums to the Nazis, but he attributed their largesse not to sympathy for Nazi goals, but to their understandable wish to be prepared for the contingency of the Nazis’ coming to power. His campaign against Abraham was successful, who lost his teaching position at Princeton and was effectively blacklisted within the historical profession for a time, despite the publication of a corrected version of his book a few years later.

Of course, the political shift to the right in the 1980s could not help but have an effect on my tenure decision as well. It strengthened the conservative political forces in the university, as it strengthened the religious right in the nation as a whole. They could not get me on professional criteria, but they could attack me on ideological grounds. Was I really in tune with Gonzaga’s uniquely Catholic mission? As long as social justice was the Jesuits’ primary goal, as indeed it was during the 1970s, no one could accuse me of failing to represent that mission. But once priority shifted to reaffirming Catholic orthodoxy through the primacy of faith and the institutional authority of the Church—as it did at least to some degree with the more general shift to the right in the 1980s—I became vulnerable to charges of misunderstanding the “unique mission of Gonzaga University.” Two of the three senior (i.e., tenured) members of the department were political and religious conservatives. They identified me, not inaccurately, as a “secular humanist,” who eventually might try through curricular and personnel decisions to recreate the department in my image. Their objective was to counter that danger by denying me tenure. And they almost succeeded.

However, I did have on my side the third tenured member and only woman in the department, Betsy Downey, who had replaced Fr. Via as chair and fiercely and effectively campaigned on my behalf. Fr. Via had been reassigned to direct the Gonzaga-in-Florence program and did not take part in the tenure decision, which probably worked to my disadvantage, as Fr. Via was quite aware of Carriker’s bullying tendencies and helped to keep them in check (as did Carriker’s wife Eleanor). Ultimately the crucial factor in the decision in favor of tenure was that the administration, including the president and academic vice president, had a vested interest in my success and continued service at Gonzaga. And there were many others rooting for me as well. Tony Wadden, my colleague in the English Department, called the opposition to my tenure “embarrassing.” My student Thad Lightfoot was the first person to inform me that the Rank and Tenure Committee had failed to recommend me for tenure. He had heard of this decision through a back-channel source at Jesuit House. All the bad news reached me while I was visiting Olaf on my return flight from an international studies conference in Cincinnati in February or March 1982. Olaf had left Duke in 1976 to become head of the mathematics department at Kent State University for the next twenty years.

The vote on my application for tenure had been tied three to three in the Rank and Tenure Committee, leaving the final decision to the ex-officio chair of the committee, the Academic Vice President. On my return to Spokane Fr. Ely called me into his office and began by explaining to me that the university was legally entitled to make personnel decisions purely on religious grounds. He said that there was some concern that I was not only non-religious, but perhaps even anti-religious. He said he didn’t think this was the case, but he needed some corroboration from me. I told him I considered myself religious in the sense of being extremely interested in and concerned about the “Big Questions”–questions about the meaning of life and the nature of the universe. He graciously accepted my rather forced explanation. My tenure application was approved.

What I really thought about religion I confided only to my journal:

Feb 27 1979 The Church in an atmosphere of tolerance is so much more attractive than in a climate of orthodoxy, because in the former instance you know people become priests and nuns because they really believe, rather than for career or power.

Nov 28 1982 Perhaps in religion the question really is, do we take time out to ingratiate ourselves with God or do we go about His work quietly, steadily, using all our faculties, guided by the inborn compass that presumably He has given us. In that sense dogma is an obstacle to true religion. True religion defined: awareness of the mystery of the universe without brown-nosing. Can we live more religiously than we do when we constantly overcome self—and that includes overcoming the selfishness of…religion.

That spring of 1982 was one of the happiest and most exhilarating periods of my life. I finally had a secure position doing what I did best and enjoyed most, namely, writing and teaching. Trina spent her spring vacation from Kent School in Spokane, keeping Nick company and seeing all her old friends while I traveled to Vancouver to give guest lectures on Nietzsche and Nazism at the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University at the invitation of Ted Hill and Martin Kitchen, respectively.

Trina in Spokane for spring vacation, 1982

Nick and Bursche at Mt. Rushmore, August 1981

Mike Matthis and Franz Schneider

With Rose Matthis, 1982

Fulbright Seminar, summer 1982

With Todd Hanlin, 1982

Later that summer, in August 1982, we celebrated Mama’s seventieth and Olaf’s fiftieth birthdays. Mama demonstrated her youthfulness by standing on her head!

Seffi and I made one last, half-hearted effort at reconciliation in the summer of 1982, but it was no good. Tenure and the prospect of an extended stay in Spokane made me want to start a new life without the burden of an unhappy wife. Final separation and divorce (finalized in April 1983) was very painful for both of us. In fact, Steffi threatened to fight the divorce all the way, but fortunately for me, she fell in love with a fellow patient in an alcohol-addiction treatment program in which she enrolled in late 1982. I missed her very much for quite a while, but derived strength from Oscar Wilde’s paradoxical aesthetic dictum, “One must always seek the most tragic.”

Snack bar in Whiteriver, Ontario. Ordering a “butter tart,” but sending it back when I saw it had a rich dairy-based filling. “You mean you didn’t know what a butter tart was? They been out a long time.” But then the waitress-owner relented. “It’s not so unusual, eh? When I first got married I didn’t know what celery was. I grew up around Niagara Falls, we never grew it, and we couldn’t afford to buy such stuff. When I saw my husband eat it I thought it was some sort of green pepper.”

The next day in Ishpenning, Michigan, I noted “the smokestacks amid the forests on the banks of Lake Superior” and “the reverse side of the coin: railways still ‘disfigure’ Canadian villages.” I was subjected to an

attack of mosquitoes at a rest area in Jacobson, Minnesota, forcing and following me into the car. Turning on the radio, I am informed: “That mosquito bite might be more serious than you thought. Investigations are still under way into whether the death of an eight-year-old Windham boy was caused by encephalitis borne by mosquitoes.”

The radio was my constant companion, offering me such apothegms as Malcolm Muggeridge expounding on the uniqueness of the Jews: “God is their king. There are no Caesars.” I spent the night of August 11th in Fargo, North Dakota, noting that the entire town smelled “like my breakfast bran buds.” It must have been a seasonal thing, because on our return trip the following spring, the smell was entirely absent. In Miles City, Montana, I was impressed by the ubiquity of the wide-brimmed Western hats. I recorded a

dream of having an insight about Mama and recording it in my journal, to wit that she had experience of only two countries, the U.S. and Germany, and that this experience was alike. Both countries “always wanted more.”

My final stop before Spokane was in Bearmouth, Montana, thirty-five miles east of Missoula—the first destination I did not make on schedule. In Spokane the next day I was heartened by a sign in front of a church: “Failure is the path of least persistence.”

I stayed at the Shamrock Motel on Sprague Avenue, the main East-West business street, while searching for an affordable house with the prearranged help of a local real estate agent. She was quite enthusiastic at first, but her interest declined rather noticeably when she found out that my starting salary at Gonzaga would be only $14,000. I soon discovered that houses in the most attractive residential area, the South Hill, were priced beyond our means. The next best option, it seemed, was to buy a house in the Mission district, within walking distance of the Gonzaga campus. I made an offer on a $32,000 house on Augusta Avenue, which was in fact accepted. However, only a half-hour later, my agent called me at my motel, informing me that the owners had changed their minds. Apparently I had made the mistake, while touring the house, of telling my agent rather too loudly what a good buy I thought this house was. The remark had been overheard by the current tenants, one of whom was the owner’s daughter. She promptly reported my comment to her parents, encouraging them to demand the full price, as it seemed reasonably certain that if pressed I would pay more than I had offered. My agent tried to convince them they were making a mistake in a rather depressed housing market (and in fact the house did not sell until the following spring). I was offended by the impropriety of their belated repudiation of a legitimately concluded deal and took it as a signal to explore other options, even though my return flight left me only one more day for my search. Early the next morning I revisited a house I had already looked at in a semi-rural area known as Pasadena Park seven miles east of town. The one-acre property at 9708 East Maringo Drive was located directly on the Spokane River and was zoned for small-scale farming, which meant I would finally be able belatedly to make good on my promise to Trina many years before to buy her a horse when she turned ten (a date that at the time had seemed safely in the distant future). But what really clinched my decision to buy the house was seeing a mallard take off from the scenic river in the early-morning fog. This evidence of romantic rusticity so close to town seemed too good to pass up even though it would lengthen my commute to at least twenty minutes each way. Fortunately, we had just enough savings to make the required $8,000 down payment on the $40,000 house.

When I returned to Spokane with Trina in late August in time for the start of school (Steffi and Nicky were once again to follow at the end of October), I realized what poor condition the house I had so impulsively bought was in. Apparently the previous renters, forced to move when the house was put up for sale, had taken their revenge on the landlord by destroying two of the toilets in the house and doing much other damage besides, most of it not immediately visible. The landlord did agree to replace one of the toilets, but most of the damage did not come to light until some time had passed. Trina, however, helped me get over my discouragement by her evident delight in the property. “This place is great,” she exulted; “there’s lots of sawdust in the barn!” Steffi’s reaction, when she finally joined us in Spokane in the fall, was less positive: “This is not a house I can be proud of.” Its dimensions paled in comparison to our Victorian Irasburg home, but it did have lots of tiny rooms, one of which we converted into Steffi’s Werkstatt. The children slept in the two upstairs bedrooms, which adults could only reach by ducking down very low at the head of the stairs. Detracting from the otherwise rather idyllic location was the Inland Empire Paper factory about a half mile downstream on the other side of the river. Some precautions against pollution have been taken since the 1970s, but excessive toxic effluent is still regularly discharged into the river even today, and fine sawdust continued for many years to blanket properties on the opposite side of the river when the wind was right, or rather wrong. Nonetheless I remained at 9708 East Maringo Drive for twenty-three years, until finally I could afford to move to the South Hill in 2001, in part because the factory was willing to buy up properties on “our” side of the river to prevent any concerted action by residents to push for environmental controls.

Through Trina’s seventh-grade classmate and best friend Colleen McCuddin, who shared her passion for horses, I got to meet the artist Mel McCuddin and his wife Gloria, who lived across the river close by and for a time became our best friends. Mel was still a teamster at the time delivering milk early in the morning to make a living that would permit him to pursue his true calling after hours. Evenings he spent in his hand-built backyard studio, turning out paintings with a very distinctive personal style that can perhaps best be characterized as a dream-like mixture of realism and phantasmagoria. Mel reminded me of my cousin Nick Edmonds in his total commitment to his art. Both felt most at home in their studios, to which they frequently retreated, without any rancor but never feeling it necessary to erase the impression that they were only too happy to limit their contacts with the “workaday world.” Mel and I played tennis together and took turns chauffeuring the girls to their weekly riding lessons in Deer Park about fifteen miles northwest of Spokane. He and Steffi traded paintings for jewelry, allowing us to build up a nice little collection, to which I added over the years while his paintings were still affordable. As he was able to devote more time to his art, Mel’s work became quite well known locally and regionally. Like all true art, his work was refreshingly blunt and unconventional. Commissioned to paint the murals for the new Spokane sports arena in the 1990s, he caused a healthy controversy by painting the American flag upside down, ostensibly to protest our government’s neglect of its veterans.

Politically 1979-1980 was a historic year of transition as amidst growing stagflation at home President Jimmy Carter’s conciliatory, human rights-based foreign policy increasingly lost public support. The hopeful historical moment ushered in by the end of the Vietnam War and the collapse of the Nixon presidency was rapidly passing. The turning of the tide was presaged by the election of Margaret Thatcher as Europe’s first woman prime minister in May 1979. Elected on the promise of cutting taxes, restraining unions, and dismantling the welfare state, her popular libertarian motto was “free choice is what ultimately life is about.” Never mind that a totally unregulated market inevitably meant support for the rich at the expense of the poor. In January 1979 the Shah of Iran had been forced to flee a popular Islamic insurgency after 37 years of brutal U.S.-supported dictatorship. In July the dictator Anastasio Somoza, whose family had ruled Nicaragua with American backing since 1933, was ousted by the left-leaning Sandanista revolution. A violent insurgency was threatening the repressive American-supported military dictatorship in El Salvador as well. Carter did enjoy some transient successes, chief of which were the peace accords between Egypt and Israel negotiated at Camp David (though the results brought no relief to the Palestinians in the occupied territories) and the signing of the SALT II arms control treaty with the USSR (though the failure of the Senate to ratify the treaty meant that it never officially went into effect). The crowning blows to Carter’s popularity and prestige came in the fall of the year. In late October 1979, his government granted entry to the Shah in the United States to seek medical treatment for an as yet unknown disease that turned out to be terminal cancer. In furious retaliation, revolutionary Iranian students seized the American embassy in Teheran with support from the Khomeini regime, taking 52 hostages who were not released until the day of Reagan’s inauguration in January 1981. Meanwhile, an effort to free the hostages by military means failed badly in April 1980, further throwing Carter’s leadership into question. But the crucial blow to Carter’s reelection was probably the Soviet invasion of neighboring Afghanistan in December 1979. Carter immediately toughened his cold war stance, going so far as to invoke a boycott of the Moscow Olympics in the summer of 1980. In toughness, however, Carter could never compete with his Republican rival. Ironically, the Carter and Reagan administrations also mobilized and armed the very same anti-American (and anti-Soviet) Islamic fundamentalists, including Osama bin Laden’s Al Quaida, which would later launch a world-wide “jihad” against our nation.

Our move to Spokane did not alleviate the strains in our marriage, which paralleled the nation’s political decline. There probably is some truth to Tolstoy’s famous remark in Anna Karenina, to the effect that all happy families are alike; all unhappy families are unhappy in different ways. Speaking from my own experience, I can identify neither one specific event nor one specific cause that precipitated the breakdown of our marriage. That it was not of recent vintage, however, became clear to me as early as our year in Burlington in 1970-1971, when I could hardly believe that two people we knew were getting married. “How can anyone want to get married?” I thought. “Do they really have any idea what they’re getting into?” Steffi later pinned the blame on me for wanting a younger woman, but I did not even meet my second wife Sally until six months after our divorce became final in April 1983. Infidelity certainly did play a part in our break-up, but we were probably about equally guilty on that score and it has never become entirely clear who took the first misstep (which already occurred in Germany). Suffice it to say that there was no single act of infidelity on either part that can bear the brunt of blame for our parting. More important was a basic incompatibility which came out in a number of ways, not least in escalating mutual recriminations. We were different in many ways, differences that only surfaced or only caused friction over time. One example was in the way we made our living. Steffi was a craftsman with a strong aesthetic sense, which from her perspective I entirely lacked. She did not like intellectuals, preferring artists or people who worked with their hands. This was a sentiment reinforced by her sister Ulrike who referred to me (when I was out of earshot) as “that intellectual asshole”. When she first met Sally in the late eighties, before Sally and I were married, Steffi warned her that I was “all brain and no body.” Steffi didn’t particularly like the Jesuits, either, and accused me of kowtowing to them. Like a true artist she valued independence above all, and some of her criticisms of the Jesuits were actually quite well taken.

Das Leben der Pater is falsch (the fathers’ life is false). They look for a secure niche in the Church. But life is not like that; life is struggle.

Steffi even offered to set me free to pursue a career in the Church: “Do you want to become a priest? I’ll gladly separate from you to give you the opportunity.” To my chagrin even Mama seemed to suspect me of wanting to return to my wartime Catholic roots–for opportunistic reasons. I, on the other hand, thought I had been hired by Gonzaga to reaffirm and strengthen their links to the larger secular academic community from which I had been recruited and in which I had originally hoped to find an institutional home. Nonetheless, I was always aware of a certain underlying tension: would I succeed in giving Jesuit education a more liberal turn, or would the Jesuits succeed in making me more religious? The contemplative life had an undeniable appeal.

Reinforcing our differences, Sally was very gregarious and found it difficult to be alone, whereas I had few close friends and enjoyed my solitude. In the final analysis it may have been simply our living arrangements that made divorce too easy to forgo. With two houses 2,500 miles apart the opportunity to split was simply too great. Our dispute rested on what on March 9th, 1981, I diagnosed as a mutual charade:

Steffi’s claim that she wants me to give up my job and move to Vermont and my claim that I want her to give up Vermont (sell the house) and move here. For reasons of self-vindication we must invent the myth that separation is the other person’s choice alone.

In the end I was no doubt mainly to blame, because I welcomed the split, while Steffi regretted it (or at least that’s what she said).

As is undoubtedly true in most failed marriages, infidelities were more a sign that something was wrong in the marriage than the actual cause of the final break. One obvious sign that something was wrong was a development in the spring of 1979 that took me quite by surprise. I fell in love with one of my students. I had been attracted to students before, and would not wish to deny that there is a benign erotic-charismatic component to most good teaching (in one of his books the always provocative Paul Goodman claimed that one of the great perks of college teaching was to be able to spend so much time around vivacious, intelligent, good-looking young people), but this was something new. Toward the end of my course on twentieth-century Europe in spring 1979 one of my students—let’s call her Kaye—started attending my office hours with suspicious frequency. What really caught my attention was the fact that she had no hesitation admitting she had not read one of the assigned readings in my class. This struck me as a rather risky way of gaining an instructor’s attention, but I couldn’t help admiring the seeming indifference to grades that her ready confession implied. In fact, however, she was an A student, who wrote an outstanding final exam in the course and got all A’s in her other courses as well. I was flattered to learn that her greatest motivation to excel in my class was to live up to my expectations by showing me what she was capable of! When Steffi had returned to Irasburg in the spring of 1979 (I had to wait around for the end of Trina’s school before driving back to Vermont) I invited Kaye to visit me at home after the end of the semester. She was a basketball cheerleader and a state beauty queen, the kind of girl I would never have suspected of having the slightest interest in me, but to my delight she was evidently quite taken by me as well—although I suspected it was more the challenge of getting a professor to come down from his high horse that provided her incentive (reminding me of Professor Unrath’s unhappy fate in Heinrich Mann’ novel and in “The Blue Angel,” the movie based on it). She was beautiful, sensitive, and intelligent—the ideal student. Above all she represented youth to me, the youth I no longer possessed. I was also very taken by her insistence that age difference makes absolutely no difference when two people are in love. I could not resist fantasizing about having a beautiful wife who actually appreciated intellectual people and was open to tutelage and instruction. For a while I was infatuated enough to believe that a student-teacher relationship was the perfect match (and this at a time when the equal rights amendment and the corrosive effects of power imbalances in personal relationships were everywhere being debated)!. No doubt this was for me the start of a mid-life crisis that culminated in my separation from Steffi in 1981. Kaye and I were well aware of the risks we were running—especially me, as a romance between teacher and student was an absolute no-no at Gonzaga, regardless whether it occurred inside or outside the halls of academe. In the end the romance did not last beyond a week or two that spring and remained mostly in my mind. But I cannot deny its strong emotional impact. As absence makes the heart grow fonder, so my infatuation reached its height in Irasburg in the summer of 1979. I could not believe the ending of some television show in which the hero magnanimously foreswore a certain romantic relationship for what seemed to me to be utterly conventional and insufficient reasons. Virtue triumphing over love because social mores demanded it—is that even remotely credible? I could not help thinking of something I had read somewhere by Bertrand Russell: “Of all forms of caution, the one most fatal to happiness is caution in matters of love.”

Steffi and I resumed our cross-country shuttle in academic year 1979-1980, Steffi as usual arriving at the end of October and returning to Vermont with Nick in May. Trina stayed behind to complete the school year. In May 1980, after dropping off Sally and Nicky in Vancouver for the trans-Canada train trip back to Vermont, I made my first return trip to Germany since 1967 for my father’s seventieth birthday. Leaving Trina with the McCuddins, I traveled via Canada, participating in a chess tournament in Vancouver on the way. The timing was fortuitous, as we left Spokane several days before Mount Saint Helens blew its top on May 18th. There had been warning signs for weeks beforehand, but no one expected the strength of the eruption when it occurred. It unexpectedly made my flight to Germany much more comfortable as the clouds of ash from the eruption prevented us from landing to pick up the passengers in Calgary, thus leaving the plane half empty. Most of us had two or three seats on which we could stretch out and even get some sleep.

With Sylvia, Papa, Tante Lulli, Stella, and Stella's husband Ernie, May 1980

After I returned to an ash-clogged Spokane in June, Trina and I drove east, this time accompanied by Gloria McCuddin, who was planning to spend the summer with friends and relatives back east. We also brought along a stray mixed-breed dog by the name of Bursche (lad) whom we had picked up during the year (or, more accurately, who had picked us up). After dropping off Gloria in Connecticut we headed straight for Olaf’s son John’s June wedding in Kent, where the rest of the family had gathered as well.

With Steffi at John Stackelberg's wedding in Kent, CT, June 1980

The summer of 1980 marked the crisis of our relationship. It turned out that Steffi had a male counterpart to Kaye in Vermont. Dale was a skilful furniture restorer and decorator, only in his early thirties at the time, but he had struck Steffi’s fancy. The relationship had apparently been going on for some time. Whereas I yearned to teach a receptive Kaye about history, literature, and philosophy, Steffi looked forward to learning from Dale the secrets of fine craftsmanship in wood. She also wanted to give him the confidence he lacked to make something out of himself. Both Steffi and I basked in the admiration of our respective young fans. We thought of them as our muses and potential protégés, sources of inspiration, full of erotic charm. I found out about Dale when Steffi called him at 3 in the morning one night—I had followed her downstairs and overheard the conversation. Steffi thought I’d be much angrier than I was, but I was full of mixed feelings. Though the Kaye lodestar had dimmed in the past academic year and we had not resumed our brief romance, she was still very much in my thoughts, as I imagine Dale was in Steffi’s. Was this our opportunity to go our separate ways? I knew it would be hard on the children, now nine and fourteen, respectively.

Trina and Nick in Spokane, 1980

We decided to stay together for the children for at least one more year. Trina was an extremely bright student going into her last year at the old Argonne Junior High School in the fall of 1980. We decided it was our duty to do whatever we could to further her education. In July 1980 I took her to Concord, New Hampshire, to interview for admission to St. Paul’s, where Olaf and I had gone to school from 1946 to 1948, and which now was open to girls as well. However, Trina adamantly insisted on attending a school that had a riding program, something St. Paul’s did not have at the time.

When I tried to console her for the lack of riding at St. Paul’s by telling her of the many other activities, she replied: “Would you want to switch from chess to checkers?”

She ended up being accepted at Kent School in Connecticut, another prestigious preparatory school now open to girls, where she was to enter the fourth form (tenth grade) in fall 1981. If Steffi and I were going to separate, it made sense to do so at that point. Trina had already made it clear that she did not want to live with either of us.

Trina playing both sides against each other as a means of l legitimately asserting her independence–for who can blame her for refusing to live with quarreling parents??

The summer of 1980 was an emotional roller-coaster ride for the entire family with lots of ups and downs, bickering and caustic exchanges. Neither Steffi nor I were sure what we wanted to do, although each of us insisted that whatever decision we reached, it would be our own, not the other one’s. “Ich bin hin und hergerissen (I’m torn back and forth)” Steffi told me; “not between two men but between two ways of life (Lebeweisen).” Both of us felt increasingly hemmed in by our failing marriage. My condition for staying together another year was for Steffi to accompany me back to Spokane in August. I did not want to leave Steffi on her own in Vermont for another two months as in the past. This is the way I put it in my journal on July 15th:

Taking Steffi along in August: the obvious motive is vanity—to show that I can do it. But perhaps there is a more subtle motive as well: to insure that the break, when it occurs, is final: to prevent Steffi from following after (for instance, by arrangement with Gloria, who would pick her up in Calgary) thereby perpetuating the lifestyle she would prefer: six months here, six months there, with a lover in every port.

With Steffi at her sister Ulrike's place, summer of 1980

All summer we argued about whether Steffi should come to Spokane in August or whether we should call it quits right then. Our problematic marriage was the talk of the family that summer. Mama actually commented on how much friendlier Steffi had unexpectedly become to her. Steffi even noticed a change in herself. “I’m full of love this summer. I want to embrace everyone.” But Mama was critical of Betsy who first told Mama about Steffi’s romance: “It’s slightly pornographic to see those kinds of things. Betsy is interested in that kind of thing.” But then she conceded: “It is interesting.”

Mama in Vermont, summer 1980

As it happened, Steffi’s entire family, mother, step-father, and sister (Ulrike and her boyfriend Nick Plein had bought some property in Vermont), visited us that summer and were very much witnesses to the drama.

The matter-of-fact way in which Steffi’s mother and Hans have accepted the situation, as if prepared well beforehand (through Steffi’s letters?). Their reaction has been only an increased sense of proprietorship over the house, as with total impunity they now plan restorations and remodeling without once thinking it might be necessary to consult me.

Ulrike and Nick Plein's property in Vermont, 1980

When Steffi asked her mother for advice what to do in her dilemma, Lilo was noncommittal: “Choose Dale,” she said, ”only if he is an improvement over what you have.” But unwittingly she encouraged Steffi’s indecision by admitting, “Ich traue keinem Mann mehr (I no longer trust any man).” Steffi even sought the advice of my friend and former Harvard roommate, the psychiatrist Paul Russell, who practiced in Boston and occasionally came to see us in Vermont with his girlfriend Franny: “I want to ask Paul whether leading a double life can make one sick.” I had earlier written Paul about Kaye. “That was a powerful letter,” he told me later, immediately making me regret that I had not had the courage to send the letter to Kaye instead. Even Trina got into the discussion by citing for me a slogan that hung in her school: “If you love something, set it free. If it comes back to you, it’s yours. If it doesn’t, it never was yours anyway.” Trina later told me that at the time she had thought the term “nuclear family” referred to its potential for explosion. I was working on a paper on Nietzsche that summer. Steffi attributed my bad moods to the influence of “diesen Weiberhasser (this woman-hater).” But reading Nietzsche was a solace to me, especially this pronouncement by Zarathustra: “Wohl brach ich die Ehe—aber zuerst brach die Ehe—mich (true, I broke the marriage—but first the marriage broke—me)!” I also rather liked his analysis of why some women hated men:

Also sprach das Eisen zum Magneten: “Ich hasse dich am meisten, weil du anziehst, aber nicht stark genug bist an dich zu ziehen.“

Thus spake the iron to the magnet: „I hate you the most, because you attract, but are not strong enough to draw [me] to you.“

The academic year 1980-1981 was our final year together. The coming separation gave all our activities that year a wistful, melancholy quality, but my mind was made up. I did not know what the future would hold, but I knew I wanted a change and was determined to seize what would very likely be my last opportunity to make that change. Steffi was more ambivalent, mainly because in that fateful summer of 1980 Dale had not exhibited the level of enthusiasm for and commitment to their relationship that she had hoped for or expected. Falling for weak and passive men seemed to be her unenviable fate.

As in the previous year in Eugene, I proceeded ahead to South Dakota and Steffi followed with Nicky via Amtrak at Omaha, Nebraska, at the end of October. But this time Trina accompanied me to Vermillion, as she was now entering sixth grade and we thought it best that she start the school year at her new school—her fourth school in six years. Nicky started first grade in Irasburg, a decision we later regretted as it put him a year ahead of himself for the rest of his school career. He made the varsity baseball team as a high school senior in Spokane, but graduated at seventeen before he had reached his full height and strength. Trina and I set out for South Dakota on 21 August 1977, reaching the Chicago area on August 24th and our destination the following day. En route I experienced the following epiphany, playing cards with my bright eleven-year-old daughter:

Defeated at the game of “Liar” by Trina despite my best efforts. Feeling more and more aggravated not just by Trina’s success in fooling me (the idea is to get rid of one’s cards by hook or crook, but if one is caught, one must take the whole pile), but by her manner of absorbing setbacks without psychological defeat: a continuous laughter not apparently warranted by events, but most disconcerting to opponents already baffled by her strategy. For the brief time of the game I could sympathize strongly with Nicky, who is of course always in the position I found myself in, unwillingly, in this game.

We made occasional sight-seeing stops along the way, one of them at Herbert Hoover’s birthplace in West Branch, Iowa:

Defensive tone throughout, trying to exonerate Hoover from culpability in the Depression. Isolated quotes from obscure speeches framed and spot-lighted to show that he was not unfriendly to labor interests. He even called on private insurance companies to go into unemployment insurance in the 1920s! A newspaper column from 1935 (!) assured the visitor that Hoover had tried to warn against over-speculation in the late twenties. Much coverage of Hoover’s war relief work, but no mention of the Bonus Army. But, surprisingly, his negative reputation may have produced a positive effect. The building is much less ostentatious than the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, or Johnson libraries. There wasn’t much there, and less is better in these things. The attendants, too, seemed friendlier, more personable, as if grateful that we should have bothered to stop by.

Vermillion was a picturesque little town, close to the Missouri River. It looked more like a farming village than a university town, except that it had more bookstores than one would have expected to find on the prairie. I actually experienced a greater culture shock on first coming to Vermillion than either in San Diego or Eugene, where the differences from the East Coast were less noticeable. A feeling of isolation was hard to avoid. The closest town of any size was Sioux City across the border in Iowa, about twenty miles away. Sioux Falls, which today has branches of both USD and South Dakota State University, was quite a bit larger, but it was sixty miles to the north. I soon discovered that for permanent residents the destination of choice for relief from rural monotony and cultural aridity was Minneapolis, some 200 miles to the northeast. We settled into the comfortable Craftsman-style home at 116 North Yale Street of Donald Pryce, the faculty member I was replacing for the year. The department faculty, fewer than a dozen, was a close-knit group with quite a bit of friendly socializing among them. We were immediately included in their various activities, including tennis, and, in bad weather, basketball. I was somewhat disconcerted, however, by their shared disdain for their hometown, out “in the middle of nowhere.” When the first winter storm struck in early October, I could appreciate some of the disadvantages of the harsh continental climate to which they were subject. But as someone desperately trying to get a foothold in the profession, being stuck in a place like Vermillion did not seem like the worst fate to me! This was not the dominant consensus among my colleagues, however. Most of them actually envied me for not having tenure, because it meant that I didn’t face the prospect of having to spend a good part of my life out in the sticks. I was free (in the sense of being unhindered by inner restraints, such as prudence) to look for another job. In my journal I noted that in their view “the very fact that I have to look for a job provides me with the same kind of advantage as a binding deadline does for someone who needs to get a project done.” The younger members of the department were frequently applying for positions elsewhere, usually deanships in the hopes that the administrative track might provide a means to get away. They were also very aware that only through publications and other professional achievements could they hope to improve their career chances. Teaching, no matter how conscientiously practiced, was not going to get the job done. As the chair of the department, Steve Ward, blithely put it, “We teach for show and write for dough.”

I shared an office with young Bob Hilderbrand, a tall, athletic, easy-going native of neighboring Iowa and a University of Iowa PhD who was replacing an American historian on sabbatical leave for the year. Bob eventually managed to gain a permanent position at USD, where, unlike most of his colleagues, he felt quite at home—so much so, in fact, that he contemplated staying in Vermillion the following year even if his job was not renewed. In the event, however, he went on to spend his entire very productive career at USD. Bob represented the best of “prairie populism,” an open-minded, progressive attitude worthy of the state’s popular senior senator, George McGovern. Bob was flush with the confidence of youth. “I know I will write novels some day,” he told me when I revealed to him that this had been my secret ambition. “I’ve got it in me. It’s just a question of when it will come out. Writing novels for me is a diversion. I can do it in my free time.” Whether he ever wrote those novels I don’t know, but he did write several excellent history monographs, including what is probably the leading academic study of the Bretton Woods Monetary Conference after the war and the origins of the United Nations. He was not a pedant, but he did take his responsibility for teaching the correct rules of grammar to his students very seriously. “Now at the start of my career I have to make a fundamental decision,” he said. “Am I going to enforce the correct usage of the pronouns ‘which’ and ‘that,’ or is insisting on this distinction just a hopeless cause?” Bob and his wife were Mormons, which led to an amusing misunderstanding at one of our social gatherings. As cream and sugar were circulating after dinner in anticipation of the coffee to come, we both made reference to the approaching poison. “No such decadence!” we agreed. But whereas I meant the cream (because of my lactose intolerance), he meant the coffee!

I soon became aware of the peculiar sartorial obsessions of the department, which always made me feel somewhat negligent in my personal appearance. Perhaps it was the informality of life on the prairie that made the university-connected personnel so conscious of dress and so enamored of formal attire. Our chairman Steve Ward, an historian of Britain, set the tone. His improbable model was the sophisticated British don. It struck me as ironic that in the heart of the Great Plains, of all places, I should encounter the greatest sensitivity to proper dress. Bob Hilderbrand rationalized his habit of wearing ties every day as a way of distinguishing himself from his students. “Otherwise I’d be completely one of them,” he said. This led me to reflect that I deliberately avoided wearing ties—in order to reduce the distance between myself and my students. “My accent is what skin color is to Blacks,” I wrote in my journal. “Try as I may, I can never fully blend in. It is an involuntary badge of otherness.” Bob’s easy relations with his students and other members of the department made me even more conscious of my involuntary outsider status. In the spring of 1978 I reflected on the department’s sartorial conventions:

The tennis game last fall as Ward’s partner against Wolff and Watterson: only now do I realize what a faux pas it was to have taken off my jersey. Only now do their rules and conventions exert their constraints on me. Only now do I realize that my failure to wear tie and coat to classes—more a token of conformity than of rebellion on my part—must strike them as perverse. This is especially noticeable when one of them doesn’t wear tie or coat: it appears not just out of place but out of character. One feels sorry for and slightly contemptuous of him. His democratic or liberal gesture just seems like backsliding.

Nonetheless my reaction to South Dakota was overwhelmingly positive:

So much easier to get a handle on it than on California (or just San Diego) or Oregon. In fact it seems as if California and Oregon only now fall into place in the light of my experience of South Dakota. I should feel less comfortable here, but I don’t. Perhaps it is because I am basically a missionary type—and here I really do have a mission: teaching the critical approach to students who study history for its conservative, antiquarian appeal, and, even more difficult, teaching critical German history to students of largely German stock who want to hear what’s good about their past.

With Hilderbrand I attended the AHA annual meeting in Dallas in search of a job for the following year. I placed some hopes in an interview I had scheduled with the representative of Hampshire College, Anson Rabinbach. He was the well-known editor of the outstanding journal New German Critique and today is a professor at Princeton. However, he canceled the interview at the last moment, pleading too much to do and leaving the dozens of candidates who had signed up angry and disappointed. Some of us even went so far as to write a letter of complaint to the AHA, pointing out that such late cancellations not only meant the loss of that particular interview but of a valuable time slot, as it was then too late to sign up for an alternate interview. No wonder the job fairs at annual meetings came to be referred to sarcastically as “meat markets.” The incident led me to reflect on the apparently unavoidable dialectic of the personal and the political in movements of the left:

The “callousness” of the party functionary in a cause ultimately designed to rid the world of callous relations; but you can’t be “humane” to every individual and effectively further the cause.

I helped my own cause that spring by becoming the only USD faculty member to give a paper at the annual Mid-American History Conference in Omaha, Nebraska, for which I had applied as soon as I learned that I would be teaching in South Dakota that year. The paper was a spin-off of my work on H. S. Chamberlain’s World War I pamphlets and precipitated an animated discussion. My session moderator, Evelyn Haller, paid me the compliment, “That was the liveliest session I’ve ever been at,” and wished me well in my job search: “You have so much to offer.” Steve Ward also appreciated my initiative, an appreciation reflected in the excellent recommendations he wrote for my job applications that spring. The job hunt continued to absorb much of my time, inducing me to write in my journal of “my fear that by refusing to permit myself to hope for success in the job hunt (in order to avoid disappointment) I am actually failing to mobilize all potential resources in that hunt.” My most promising opportunity once again came late in the year. In the first week of May 1978 (the last week of classes) I was invited to a campus interview at Gonzaga University in Spokane. A Jesuit university was the last place I expected to end up, but the interview went surprisingly well. The topics of the trial class I was asked to teach were fascism and Nazism, the subjects closest to my research interests and field of specialization. I was fortunate, too, in that I was given an honors class in Western Civilization to conduct. It was not hard to get its bright students to ask questions and participate vigorously in the discussion. At the end I got an additional boost when on leaving the classroom several students urged the assembled departmental faculty to “hire him” and “sign him up.”

A few days later I received a call from the departmental chair, Father Tony Via, informing me that the department had voted unanimously to offer me the position. I was so thrilled by this offer that I accepted it on the spot. Fr. Via urged me to take the full 48 hours they were prepared to grant me for so important a commitment, but I didn’t want to take the risk that due to some unlucky fluke their offer might yet be withdrawn! In retrospect I realized that my eagerness might have come across as desperation, a reaction that was not likely to enhance the value they might attach to their new acquisition. It might have been much more politic to leave them with the impression that in hiring me they had beaten out strong competition for my services from other prestigious universities! This was not the case, however. It was I who had beaten out what I later learned were 125 applicants for the job (only one of whom, however, besides myself, was invited to campus for an interview). I did receive two additional tenure-track offers in the days that followed (my first tenure-track offers since getting my PhD in 1974), but they were not of a kind to make me regret having made too hasty a decision in choosing Gonzaga. One was from Kansas Wesleyan, where I would have constituted the entire history department with responsibility for all fields from ancient to modern. The only thing going for Kansas Wesleyan was my admiration for the Methodists for having opposed the British slave trade so fiercely in the nineteenth century! The other tenure-track offer was from Fayetteville State College in North Carolina, an all-African American college with a teaching load of five courses per semester. Accepting this arduous assignment might have eased my conscience about having failed to fulfill the community service obligations of my Leadership Development Fellowship back in 1970, but I can’t say that I regretted my commitment to Gonzaga even for a moment!

Painting easter eggs in Vermillion, SD, spring 1978

That spring I read that Bob Hope would be the commencement speaker at Gonzaga in 1978. His invitation seemed a fitting way to commemorate the untimely death of his friend and Gonzaga’s most illustrious alumnus, Bing Crosby, of a heart attack on a golf course in Spain the previous October. Crosby, a native of Spokane, never actually graduated from Gonzaga, having left for Hollywood with his band as an undergraduate before receiving his degree, but he became one of the university’s most generous donors. In the 1950s he had provided the funding for Gonzaga’s library, and during my recruiting visit there was some speculation that he might have left some of his sizable estate to his Alma Mater. This was not the case, however, as he had turned against the university in the 1970s when the anti-war movement began making inroads among students and faculty even in such hotbeds of conservatism and conformity as Spokane. Gonzaga was certainly not untouched by the emancipatory trends of the late 1960s and 1970s. While on my recruitment visit I had the chance to view the President’s Report, which featured an essay by the university president, Fr. Bernard Coughlin, on the importance of addressing the problem of social and economic inequality. The Jesuit order had only recently announced its celebrated “option for the poor,” giving top priority to its mission of promoting social justice. The Jesuits were particularly active in missions in Central America, where social conflict was rife and liberation theology was beginning to take root, especially among the base communities of the unpropertied and dispossessed. I was surprised and cheered when Fr. Via compared the present moment in time to the Church’s belated but ultimately successful efforts to come to terms with secular liberalism in the nineteenth century: “It’s time that we came to terms with the socialist movement as well.” There was even some talk of making peace, not with the Soviet Union, but with Eurocommunism, which was then enjoying its brief ascendancy in Italy. When the tide again turned after the Reagan election in 1980, I found myself in an unexpectedly contentious struggle for tenure against the conservatives in the department. I thanked my lucky stars that I had been hired at a time when the Jesuits were still so open to egalitarian values and causes.

Steffi and the children were already back in Vermont when I told her of my hiring over the phone. Her reaction was unexpected: “Vielleicht warden wir noch fromm (maybe we’ll yet become pious)!” My USD colleagues were very happy for me. I could tell that my stature had risen in their eyes when Steve Ward–always impressed by appearances–said, “I didn’t know you had such a new VW van!”

In late August I set off by myself for the Northwest in our VW bus, stopping off to visit my cousin Ellen (Edmonds) and her husband Roger Fleenor in Boise and spend a day with them at their vacation home in McCall.

Ellen and Roger Fleenor on my return trip, July 1977

In Eugene I rented a 1950s three-bedroom, ranch-style house at 3425 Onyx Street and furnished it with rented furniture and things I picked up at the garage sales I scoured around town. Of all the temporary positions I held before finally settling in Spokane, the one at the University of Oregon was the most desirable one. This was not only because Eugene was a delightful place to be, with its youthful counter-culture still in full swing in the mid-1970s, but also because of the teaching conditions. Except for my graduate assistantship at the University of Massachusetts, this was my only experience of teaching at a “research university” in my entire career. After teaching four courses every semester at SDSU, three of them at the introductory level, I found the teaching load of two courses every semester at Oregon ideal for pursuing scholarly interests and projects. Of course, it did entail teaching graduate students in a PhD-granting department, which led to a peculiar conflict of interests, as in some cases I would actually find myself competing for jobs with the very students I was supposed to be training and whose careers I was supposed to be promoting! But the additional challenge of teaching graduate students carried its own special rewards in intellectual stimulation and the opportunity to remain abreast of research at the cutting edges of the discipline. On the introductory level, my only (and very enjoyable) duty was to lecture to a large group of several hundred freshmen and sophomores twice a week on the history of western civilization in the modern era, while graduate teaching assistants conducted the small once-weekly discussion groups and handled all the grading. It is hard to overstate the relief that this liberation from the responsibility of correcting exams and papers represented. It allowed me to put correspondingly greater effort into preparing my lectures and my upper-division courses, activities from which most university teachers derive their greatest satisfaction. The obligation to write and do research that went along with the lightened teaching load felt much more like an opportunity than a chore.

In 1976 the second of the three articles I carved out of my dissertation appeared under the title, “Völkisch Literature: The Case of Friedrich Lienhard” in The Wiener Library Bulletin, a respected peer-reviewed journal on German-Jewish history and anti-Semitism published by the Institute of Contemporary History in London. Lienhard (1865-1929), an arch-conservative, Alsatian-born dramatist, novelist, and publicist, was one of the founders of the anti-urban, nativist Heimatkunst (local or regional art) movement in Germany at the turn of the century. By propagating Heimatkunst, Lienhard wanted to mobilize such traditional rural values as deference, duty, patriotism, and religious faith against the intellectual culture, permissive lifestyle, commercial ethos, and social democracy of Berlin and other urban centers. Lienhard prided himself in his “idealism”—the rejection of “modern” materialistic values, among which he would have included the political values of liberalism, democracy, and socialism. The problem presented by such literary figures as Lienhard to scholars was how their “idealism” related to the militantly racist völkisch movement that emerged in strength in Germany in the late nineteenth century and culminated in Nazism after the First World War. “Respectable” conservatives like Lienhard criticized the “materialistic” racism of the radical right and their resort to physical force, but shared all their ight-wing anti-democratic, anti-liberal, and anti-egalitarian values. While they rejected the violent tactics of the radical right, they could not help but embrace their general political perspective. This ambivalence, expressed in simplistic literary or journalistic forms, is what turned Lienhard’s aesthetically undistinguished works into fascinating historical documents despite themselves. They unintentionally give readers insight into the mental and psychological contortions through which avowedly quiescent and “spiritual” conservatives rationalized the excesses of the radical right by attributing to them good, patriotic intentions even if their methods were flawed. Lienhard rejected racial justifications for his right-wing prejudices, but he did not reject the prejudices themselves; instead he gave them a “spiritual” or “cultural” dimension, thus actually reinforcing and strengthening the very racism he ostensibly opposed. For me this insight from Lienhard’s works became one key to the crucial question that all historians of Germany face at some point: how could the Nazis have gained power in a nation justly celebrated for its high culture, artistic creativity, and advanced level of civilization? The corollary question of course is, could it happen again? Many of these conservative “idealists” eventually turned against Nazism (especially after its defeat in the Second World War), but much too late, when the damage had already been done. For me there was an even larger lesson to be drawn from the often willing, sometimes grudging, but ultimately essential support that conservatives in Germany gave to Nazism: the importance of having national debates not just about political tactics or specific policies but about fundamental values, particularly the political values subsumed under the broad headings of “left” and “right.” Lienhard’s cautionary example also convinced me that at the heart of any truly liberal outlook is its rejection of the principle, “the ends justify the means.” Pacé Lienhard, the means are always part of the ends and can never be neatly disjoined.

My reduced teaching load at the University of Oregon gave me the opportunity to complete the third of the articles I carved out of my dissertation. “Houston S. Chamberlain: From Monarchism to National Socialism” was published in The Wiener Library Journal in 1978. Chamberlain was a quite different kind of publicist than Lienhard. Like Lienhard, he had no artistic talent (nor, for that matter, any artistic pretensions), but he had scholarly pretensions, ideological and political ambitions, and a gift for language, which he used in writing his notorious two-volume, best-selling tract, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899-1900). This was an extraordinarily influential work that popularized a racialist interpretation of history. The purpose of Chamberlain’s racialism was to give the stamp of “scientifically proven” to his political biases, thus joining science to the conservative alliance of throne and altar. For Chamberlain, modern European history was largely the result of a still-continuing contest for supremacy between the allegedly creative and spiritual Germanic race(s) and the allegedly materialistic and worldly Jewish race. According to Chamberlain, the outcome of this contest was still up for grabs and would presumably be determined by how the all-important twentieth century unfolded. His racialism represented desperation: recognition that the struggle against the “left” was being lost by ordinary methods and discourse. Chamberlain held out hope for a reversal of the momentum that the modern “materialistic” forces of the political left had gained in the nineteenth century. His practical proposals were to undo Jewish emancipation, revoke Jewish rights, avoid intermarriage, and introduce eugenic practices designed to “purify” and strengthen the Germanic race. What made Chamberlain an important historical figure was not just the astonishing international resonance of what seems to us a blatantly racist point of view today, but also his close connections to the Wilhelmine monarchy. Invited to meet Wilhelm II in 1901, Chamberlain carried on a detailed correspondence with the Kaiser that lasted beyond the First World War. For me Chamberlain personified the easy transition that so many conservative monarchists made to the activist radical right after the war. By now married to one of Richard Wagner’s daughters, Chamberlain lent the prestige of his celebrity status to the growing Nazi movement by receiving Hitler in Bayreuth in October 1923, a month before Hitler’s “Beer Hall Putsch” in Munich. My purpose was to show that the First World War played a crucial role in the transformation of monarchists like Chamberlain into fascists. In one of the many war-time pamphlets that Chamberlain churned out for the German war effort, he quoted verbatim from a personal letter he had written to Kaiser Wilhelm as early as February 1902:

Germany is destined to become the heart of mankind; every other nation is now finally eliminated… Of this I am firmly convinced: Germany can succeed in dominating the entire globe within two centuries (in part politically, in part indirectly through language, culture, methods) if she can be made to adopt the “new course” early enough, and that means to bring the nation to a final break with Anglo-American ideals of government.

War-time passions allowed Chamberlain to openly spread the vision of German exceptionalism and world domination that he had expressed in his private correspondence with the monarch many years before.

Chamberlain was also a devout fundamentalist Protestant, fearful not only of international Jewry but of international Catholicism as well. His example helped me to understand that deep religious faith was absolutely no guarantee against the perpetration of evil. Indeed, quite the opposite. Religious fundamentalism went hand-in-hand with hyper-nationalism in a way that we still see at the beginning of the twenty-first century. God and country merged as entities to be worshipped—as creative forces that could do no wrong. Blinded to their own (self-)destructive impulses, fundamentalist “true believers” were the very source of the evil that they so readily projected onto non-believers and other outsiders. It was the Manichaean “us versus them,” “good versus evil,” “you’re either with us or against us” mentality itself that was the cause of so much destruction in the world. When Chamberlain’s Foundations first came out, one of Chamberlain’s Wagnerian in-law relatives accused him of plagiarizing his ideas from the master without properly acknowledging his source. This was not quite fair, as Chamberlain did in fact repeatedly acknowledge his intellectual and political debt to the Wagnerian world view. But it was a perceptive comment nonetheless. Chamberlain’s work could be seen as Wagner’s posthumous revenge against his apostate disciple Nietzsche, whom Chamberlain roundly condemned for leaving the path of orthodox virtue by preaching an anti-Christian and anti-nationalist world view “beyond good and evil.” In my journal I wrote on 18 March 1977:

Nietzsche—stimulated to reflect upon “supermen” by Germany’s imperial triumphs (and a conscience-ridden Lutheran upbringing). But the “slave revolt” that he condemns is the triumph of German philistinism. Not for a moment does he equate supermen with the makers of the new Reich, though the making of the new Reich made him think in the terms that he did. In a sense (overly dialectical, I suppose), Nietzsche is sympathizing with victims: the unsuspecting, unbegrudging, magnanimous, spontaneous, cheerful, open, (overly-)trusting, proud masters—the victims of the slave morality. It is not the masses as victims he despises, it is the masses as oppressors. Like Gobineau, Nietzsche was obsessed with the decline of aristocracy (he would have had to have been blind and deaf to have been indifferent to this nineteenth-century “problem”). But what a difference in the results of their respective reflections! Of course, Nietzsche idealized aristocracy even more than Gobineau. His idealism, absorbed in the very air he breathed, betrayed him into thinking material goods were inconsequential and demeaning.

When Steffi and the children joined me in Eugene via Canadian railway and Amtrak in November, we had already drifted apart to some degree, as manifested in a number of ways, including some most disconcerting episodes of sexual dysfunction on my part. No doubt contributing to my marital tensions was the rather close relationship I had developed to my congenial and attractive new colleague, Mavis Mate—the medievalist in the history department, who generously showed me the sights of the beautiful Willamette Valley and surroundings.

With Mavis on an outing to Crater Lake in June 1977

Steffi was genuinely peeved at me for always being around in her dreams, thus preventing her from achieving fulfillment with the handsome young men who were also present in her dreams! Adding to these tensions was my very precarious employment status. At one point I drew hope when informed that the person I was replacing on the faculty, Roger Chickering, was considering extending his leave for another year. Chickering, who had trained under Gordon Craig (1913-2005) at Stanford, was known to be unhappy about being relegated to a university not reputed to be in the top ranks in terms of its national prestige. Although he did move to Georgetown University a few years later, Chickering turned down the opportunity to renew his Fulbright grant in 1977 and returned to Oregon for the 1977-1978 academic year, thus leaving me no option but to look for a position elsewhere. Other younger members of the Oregon faculty also went on to very distinguished careers at other universities. Foremost among these was Tom Brady, who went on to become one of the world’s leading authorities on the German Reformation at Berkeley. A refreshingly radical and student-oriented voice at the sometimes rancorous meetings of an otherwise rather stodgy department faculty, Tom was one of the leaders of the youthful, liberal faction in what was clearly a badly divided department. The corporate solidarity of the older members of the department was not only based on their shared political conservatism, but also on their openly expressed disdain for student autonomy and what they perceived as an alarming decline in academic standards. Tom Brady and his wife, however, went out of their way to make us feel welcome in Eugene. Another colleague whom I only got to know briefly after his return from leave in April 1977 was Robert Berdahl, a nineteenth-century scholar a couple of years younger than me. Berdahl went on to a stunningly successful career as president of the University of Texas at Austin, then chancellor of the University of California system, and president of the Association of American Universities in 2006.

Inevitably, my best friends were two other temporary appointees (in U.S. history) who shared my (un)employment predicament. I particularly admired Eckard Toy, who had given up a tenured position at one of the subsidiary University of Wisconsin campuses several years earlier in solidarity with students rallying for more open administrative policies and protesting against what they felt was the university administration’s complicity in the Vietnam War. Several years older than me, Eckard now found himself forced to seek temporary positions in an increasingly constricted job market. Although an Americanist, his research specialty—the Ku Klux Klan and the American radical right—was topically related to mine, and our left-liberal points of view were very compatible. Career setbacks seemed to bring out his humanity, leading me occasionally to wonder what kind of professorial type he might have become if he had abdicated his principles in order to climb the academic ladder, as he had every chance to do. Working in different fields of history, we were not competing directly for jobs, but there was an unavoidable element of competition nonetheless for the approval of our graduate students, who annually selected the “teacher of the year.” This is how I described the awards ceremony in early June 1977:

Eckard selected as “Teacher of the Year” by the graduate students. Indirectly, it seems, a slap at me, and deservedly so, for failing to take a more active interest in graduate students this year. Nonetheless I feel slightly aggrieved, because I cannot help suspecting my teaching assistants, notably Pete Wallace, of voting against me, or failing to back me, for the wrong reason, namely competitive envy [from students in my Western Civilization course I had heard that in the discussion section he led, Wallace, a specialist in early modern Europe, had frequently contradicted points I had made in my lectures, specifically on the nature of feudalism]. But Eckard was a marvelous choice, and he accepted the award with that dignity peculiar to him—or is it lassitude?—which is one of his most attractive traits. His joke, “I expected maybe an iron jock for last Saturday [a reference to the annual departmental faculty vs. graduate student softball game, unexpectedly won by the faculty with the significant assistance of its temporary members], but nothing like this,” close to the one I had prepared just in case (“I must have won this on the strength of my pitching”). I had suspected that one of the one-year appointees would get the award—if only to shake up the regular faculty—and I guess I then thought it would have to be me…

The other member of our trio of temporary faculty was Warren Blankenship, the oldest of the three of us and the one least disposed to sympathize with the student radicals who still formed a formidable contingent in the Oregon student body.

Blankenship citing his daughter’s admiration for Dan Pope [a liberal faculty member in American history], because he so effectively silenced the radicals who thought they could use his class as a platform for radicalism. He deflated them by introducing historical information of which they were ignorant. Blankenship rubbed his hands at the thought: “You know, those guys who run at the mouth, who only know how things ought to be, but have no conception of where we’ve been or where we’re at right now.”

Eckard, Warren, and I got along very well indeed, despite the almost unavoidable rivalry imposed on us by our temporary status, leading Steffi to comment, “Ihr könnt gar nicht Freunde sein” (there’s no way you can be friends). The following entry in my journal on 16 March 1977 seemed to prove her right:

I must guard against bitterness and I must guard against paranoia. The latest instance of the latter: learning from Eckard that Warren Blankenship had applied to Reed College for the same position as I had and may have stayed over after a conference in Portland in order to try to get an interview. Feeling of being betrayed, not because he doesn’t have as much right to the position as I do, but because his failure to tell me seems to prove that he sets no store by our friendship. Also, anger at his initiative—he called them—and the feeling that it is unfair that he should get the job not on his merits alone, but because he went after it. And then the reflection—strangely something of a comfort—that the system bred competition and conflict among those at the bottom, and it did so in order to prevent solidarity. It did so to the benefit of those who hogged the lion’s share of benefits that the system can confer.

This led to a further reflection:

Conventional wisdom has it that communism flourishes in times of economic scarcity. Logically it should be so. One would expect the dispossessed to band together. But in actual fact it may be that fascism benefits most by conditions which create a proletariat [the unemployed] below the working class, thus making the latter anxious to maintain their status as job-holders against those below.

To be fair, however, most of the U. of O. history department, at least the younger ones we associated with, sympathized with our plight. Jack Maddex, a historian of the American South, called us exploited “migrant labor” and Joe Esherick, an Asia specialist, appreciatively referred to us as “itinerant preachers.”

Despite the hope engendered by Jimmy Carter’s victory in the presidential election in November 1976, it was becoming clear that the conservative tide that would overwhelm the country a few years later was growing, and the progressive changes in popular consciousness resulting from the 1960s movements were not only petering out, but going into reverse. The economy of the mid- to late 1970s bred a new word in the American vocabulary, “stagflation”—the unexpected combination of inflation and unemployment. The conservative, nationalistic, anti-liberal movement started by Goldwater in 1964 to dismantle the “welfare state” and devote more resources to fighting communism did its best to exploit the popular anger and disaffection generated by economic decline. Ronald Reagan, who had already unsuccessfully challenged the nominally more liberal Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination in 1976, led the growing backlash against not only the 1960s, but against Roosevelt’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society as well. When he came to Eugene in June 1977, he also criticized the ongoing Strategic Arms Limitation (SALT II) talks with the Soviet Union, calling for the U.S. to play its trump card, “which is to say, ‘Okay, we’re going to turn our industrial machine into developing weapons’…and the Soviet Union knows there’s no way in the world they could keep up with us.”

Even I found myself somewhat ambivalent about affirmative action programs that were coming under increasing attack from the right, but were also a potential hindrance to me in applications to departments actively recruiting women candidates. The widely publicized Marco De Funis case, a suit won by a rejected applicant against the University of Washington Law School for reverse discrimination, because several Black applicants with inferior academic records and test scores had been admitted, drew the following comment from me in February 1977:

[Like De Funis] I would have been bitter, but I would not have fought it. That’s the difference. Fighting is necessary: to lose bitterness!

An even more contentious case was the suit of Alan Bakke for admission to the University of California, Davis, Medical School, decided in Bakke’s favor the following year. I commented as follows:

The Bakke Case therapeutic in a sense, even though it will be decided in his favor: at least it explodes the myth of a career in medicine as “service.” What counts in the American system of values is the success and financial reward that a medical career entails. Bakke is fighting for himself (and his supporters for themselves), not for better medical services. The right of the Black community to have doctors of their own kind is quite forgotten.

At the University of Oregon I was unexpectedly reunited with my old college friend Gordon Goles, by now a prominent scientist in the geology department, widely recognized for his pioneering work on the chemical composition of stones retrieved from the moon. He took the initiative to contact me, a gesture for which I was very grateful, as I’m not at all sure whether I would have had enough gumption to overcome my embarrassment about my lowly professional status to contact him. We met again for the first time since our college years at a Bach chamber music concert at which good old Gordon, very much in character, jumped to his feet to lead the enthusiastic applause. Unfortunately, our communications lapsed again after I left Oregon in July 1977. I had hoped to see him again at our fiftieth Harvard reunion in 2006, but he was not in attendance. Perhaps he is as averse to class reunions as were both of my roommates, Paul Russell (before his premature death in 1996) and Sy Goldstaub. However, I am hoping that Gordon and Sy will come to our fifty-fifth reunion, scheduled for May 2011.

My job insecurity and marital tensions affected my health in Eugene. I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, after a colonoscopy, which in those days was still done without any anaesthetic. Some years later, after a more thorough examination (with anaesthesia), my diagnosis was changed to the much milder though still chronic condition labeled “lymphocytic colitis.” At one point my weight dropped to 135 pounds. Steffi rather predictably blamed my malady on Mama, at least by implication. On 25 November 1976 she commented on my upset stomach after Thanksgiving dinner: “Du kannst nicht kotzen, weil du dich vor nichts ekelst. Das ist weil du im Schmutz aufgewachsen bist“ (You can’t vomit because nothing disgusts you. That’s because you grew up in dirt). But she sympathized with me: “Du hast es schwer gehabt. Mama hasst alles Schwache” (You had a hard time. Mama hates everything weak). And indeed, it was that summer that Mama explained her new-found admiration for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) (who had settled in Vermont) by asserting, “I like people who are absolutely sure of themselves.” What she disliked about people, she explained, was “the worm’s-eye view.” The conflict between mother and wife made me wonder whether the only way I could “cut the umbilical cord” was to cut my marriage ties as well.

In Eugene, beside Steffi's workbench, 1977

Steffi also felt vindicated by the description of colitis in our Gesundheitsbuch (a health manual for the home): “Eine Krankheit, die sich mit Vorliebe verkrampfte Gemüter aussucht” (a disease that seeks out tense and rigid temperaments). I took some satisfaction from the fact that colitis was an auto-immune disease. I was allergic to myself, which rather accurately described how I often felt! I was also officially diagnosed with lactose intolerance, although it was clear to me that I had been suffering from this condition ever since the war.

Colitis forced me to adopt a healthier lifestyle. For a full year I entirely gave up alcohol, not only alleviating my symptoms but also occasionally making me feel quite smug about my newly-acquired self-discipline. Here is how I described my reaction to a faculty party on 14 May 1977:

Ten minutes into Karen [Achberger's] party for Mavis yesterday, the sobering question occurred to me: “What am I doing here? Whatever impelled me to come?” Normally I then would have proceeded to get drunk. Compelled by my colitis to remain sober, I came away from the party feeling extremely good about my disciplined conduct. But regretting my lack of courage in having risen only to the level of conventional party chatter.

In December 1976 we visited our Vermont “hippie” friends, Paul and Sandy Raynor, who had moved (only temporarily, as it turned out) to the Oregon coast—attracted by the state’s mild climate, scenic beauty, and ecological consciousness in their futile search for the ideal counter-cultural community. Paul, of mixed Korean-American parentage, was a painter, quite devoted to his art, but also determined to lead a self-sufficient rural life free of commercial constraints. His quest for authenticity had impressed me years before when he told me, “I don’t want to find myself at the age of forty stuck in a job I don’t like.” In Vermont he had built three log-houses in succession for his family, each one larger and sturdier than the one before, but was forced to abandon the last one, a building of truly palatial dimensions, when the bank financing he had uncharacteristically applied for ran out. We acquired quite a few of Paul’s provocatively gothic paintings, some of which we paid for in cash and others we traded for with Steffi’s jewelry. Sandy had grown up in the same northwest corner of Connecticut as we Stackelbergs, and though younger than us, she had heard all about us from our mutual friends, the Kügelgens. On the beach only a few hundred yards from the cottage Paul and Sandy had rented on the Oregon coast we dug up the huge clams peculiar to that area. Paul and Sandy tried to help us resolve the marital tensions that they had noticed and we did not try to conceal. They suggested that a temporary sexual partner swap might serve a therapeutic purpose, but neither Steffi nor I were interested. We reacted in different ways, however; Steffi cried at the prospect of the end of our marriage that Paul and Sandy’s proposition implied, while I went into an equally uncontrollable laughing jag at the preposterous nature of their proposed therapy! It was clear that Paul had hoped to sleep with Steffi. My revenge on him was to decline the opportunity to sleep with Sandy! Perhaps inevitably, Paul and Sandy’s open marriage dissolved even sooner than ours, leaving Sandy to raise three daughters on her own.

Although I had never formally studied the Hegelian dialectic, it seemed to me as if life was almost daily teaching me how it operated in practice. The ever-present threat of unemployment also cleared my mind for egalitarian ideas that questioned the inequitable status quo. It was part of a continuing radicalization process that ultimately made me ready to openly acknowledge my preference for a socialist transformation of society and to do what I could to realize this goal—from within the social institutions in which I was compelled to work if I wished to support my family and exercise any influence at all. I have subsequently been accused of hypocrisy for advocating socialist change while living a bourgeois lifestyle. Even my son Nick once asked me why I didn’t move to Russia if I liked communism so much. I retorted that I wouldn’t want to give the nationalist Right the satisfaction; right-wingers would like nothing so much as for leftists to give away all their property including the shirts off their backs! How better to disable any opposition to corporate domination and control? In my journal I left an admittedly superficial, simplistic, unsystematic, and incomplete record of some of the examples of the dialectical nature of life and thought that I began to see everywhere, especially in the politics of the continuing Cold War:

12 Apr 1976 The dialectic: one can care very greatly about radical social reform, but dislike equally greatly the individual exponent of such reform.

5 Jul The greatest defense for the study of history: all misunderstandings occur because statements (or events) are apprehended in isolation rather than in their social context. That is also the weakness of non-dialectical, linear thinking.

21 Jul Nietzsche and Marx: saint and sinner? The trouble with Marx is that he slept with his housekeeper, the trouble with Nietzsche is that he didn’t (not that we know of, anyway)! Nietzsche’s thought too much a product of his life; Marx’s life not enough a product of his thought.

The true Golden Mean will even balance moderation—with occasional excess! Moderation must be tempered by excess.

19 Sep Equality leads to progress because it evens out competition: it puts people on the same level, in the same arena. It equalizes the conditions of competition. It levels the playing field. It eliminates the artificial barriers to true competition: the barriers created by wealth, position, hierarchical structures, habits of deference. In education this is clearly visible. Professors are challenged today as never before. They can no longer pontificate ex cathedra.

16 Nov How to explain the dialectic? Where are the best examples? Perhaps in the changing meaning of words? “Appeasement” used as a positive term (“reconciliation”) at Locarno. “Pacification” and its changed meaning in Vietnam.

The dialectic of Marx, who set out to help mankind with a doctrine that in practice inflicted suffering and woe, and Nietzsche, who had no similar humanitarian impulse, yet whose philosophy has a therapeutic effect on individuals.

12 Dec Was this Barry Marks’s [one of my students at SDSU] point on the thinking process falling into dialectical patterns without fail? You cannot think out a pure truth outside the realm of vulgar positivist fact (the barn is red). You always run into contradictions. Two perfectly valid truths may be diametrically opposed to each other (e.g., the desirability of both liberty and equality). The dialectical nature of life (truth in totality) is what makes debate so difficult. It is what makes it possible to accuse egalitarians of elitism—because they actively advocate egalitarianism, i.e., they want to get people to accept it, hence they proceed from an elitist assumption: I know best what is good for you (or us).

Further example: liberalism is emancipatory—but precisely because it frees individuals from restraint, it gives rise to resentments and competitive rivalries, which in turn lead to a longing for the re-imposition of restraint upon one’s rivals. Liberalism gives rise to its own antithesis. The contradictions are even more intrinsic than the foregoing would suggest: liberalism itself makes it possible—by granting the requisite freedom—for some to restrain (or exploit) others. The contradiction is built in. By the same token you cannot achieve total equality because of the absence of total uniformity. Every breath upsets the balance. The horror in the present confrontation between socialism and liberalism is not that they are at odds, but that both—unwittingly in league in this respect—are giving birth to what will destroy them both: militarism, global war. The dialectic is insidious, not obvious; complex, not simple. A variety of contradictions are constantly intersecting. And often contradictions do not emerge as such until the war between them is already on (or over!) We do not recognize that our defenders of liberalism are undermining it.

The dialectic of psychology and sociology, of psychological motivation and sociological causation. (It takes a certain kind of person to be a Marxist.) This is what makes psycho-history so difficult, so problematical.

The dialectic in day-to-day situations: [Gustav] Alef [an older conservative faculty member] wants to convince me of the low standards in the department. “Is this a distinguished department?” he asks. I answer “yes” in order not to second his argument, but in secret I agree with him: what makes the department undistinguished is that people like Alef are in it, riding their sinecures!

16 Jan 1977 One implication of the dialectic is that you cannot think out solutions to problems. By trying to do so you get hopelessly lost down one-way alleys. What you come up with will even make some sense. But other one-way alleys pointing in other directions will make equal sense. Truth (always provisional, never absolute) only emerges in practice. Thought must be brought to bear to recognize it. But thought alone is useless, even pernicious, because misleading.

21 Jan One can favor both liberty and equality, as liberals do, but one must realize that without equality there can only be liberty for some, not all.

31 Jan A world of general equality provides better hope for personal liberty than a world of liberty does for equality. A world divided provides neither.

11 Feb Liberals learn to live with “pluralism,” but they don’t learn to live with the “dialectic.”

20 Feb Situation today not unlike the Ancien Regime of the late eighteenth century: PhD’s (like titles of nobility) easy to acquire (for sale!), but ladders of hierarchy harder to climb.

24 Feb Why it is important to keep alive the consciousness of the anti-Marxist, anti-humanitarian, anti-egalitarian thrust of fascism: fighting it is what makes us realize our collective responsibility, our responsibility for our fellow humans.

12 Mar Perhaps the fatal divergence in western civilization did come with the rise of modern science—not because it has turned us to materialism and exhausted our resources, and upset our ecology, but because it made us ask “how” of things rather than “why.” Not because it introduced skepticism and criticism, but because it eliminated a truly critical attitude. Proposal: call the humanities and social sciences the “critical sciences.”

14 Mar American society institutionalizes competition; Soviet society institutionalizes cooperation. The former produces hardship, the latter strait-jacketing.

18 Mar The principle of compensatory nature (Emerson) and the principle of the dialectic are of course one and the same. But the former is an expression of Nietzschean amor fati, the latter of Marxian revolutionary activism, the will to change the world.

26 Mar The liberal fallacy: to worry only about the loss of freedom (imprisonment of dissidents in the USSR) rather than the loss of livelihood or prosperity. Callousness about unemployment. Insensitivity to the hardships—psychological and physical—of unemployment and underemployment. A “prosperity” based only on GNP and not on the general welfare is fraudulent. Liberals worry about being thrown into prison (or mental hospitals) because of their ideas—usually ideas that are useful in maintaining the prerogatives of those who benefit from a liberal system. But they care much less about people who are thrown into hospitals (or prisons) for lack of money. Beware the hypocrisy! It is as dangerous as an H-bomb! They talk about freedom of ideas, but not about the middle-class comforts which economic freedom protects at the expense of the less fortunate. The excluded in a socialist state (liberal dissidents) are a far smaller minority than the excluded in a liberal state (the impoverished). The victims of socialism—those who refuse to go along with the communitarian ethos—must be put in jail for the system to function effectively. The victims of economic liberalism—the impoverished—can be safely left to fend for themselves as long as they remain deferential and at least tacitly accept the individualist ethos. Socialism creates more opportunities for (or categories of) crime because more forms of exploitation or anti-social behavior are stigmatized than under liberalism (capitalism).

30 May Mama’s “You can’t fool those below”: Those above are easily blinded by their vested interest in the status quo. How can they be expected to perceive the dialectical nature of historical change—except as a terrible threat? Above all the legitimacy of dialectical change must be questioned. Nothing could be more threatening than to regard such change as inevitable.

12 Jun The disgust engendered by Eldridge Cleaver, the reborn Christian. A turncoat, a betrayer of revolution. But maybe not. Maybe his career is just another example of the cunning of reason: no longer analyzing Babylon’s decadence, he contributes to it—unwittingly. Perhaps he digs its grave more effectively than he could have as a revolutionary …Or is this only wishful thinking?

24 Jun The fascist dynamism of war: the will to war–self-sacrifice for the nation–is the ethos that best serves the interests of the powerful and propertied at home. To maintain this will, this ethos, you
need a mission, a crusade, external enemies, the goal of conquest. Which comes first, imperial ambitions or the zeal for war?? Perhaps we take too much for granted that it always is the former.

It was not until May, after Steffi and the children had already returned to Vermont (and I had stayed on to teach summer school), that my employment dilemma was resolved, at least for the following academic year. I received an invitation for a campus interview at the University of South Dakota for a one-year appointment to replace their German history specialist, Donald Pryce, who had received a research fellowship at one of the California universities. My visit went surprisingly well, despite a bout of the colitis that had plagued me all year. But in another example of the law of compensation in nature, my illness had a relaxing effect, putting all my other troubles into soothing perspective. I gave a strong and confident presentation and unexpectedly got the job. What clinched it for me was the fact that the only other candidate invited for a campus interview had trouble with his German. The USD Germanist Werner Kitzler was asked to test my language skills and pronounced them more than satisfactory. So in that way, too, I profited from my years as a “drop-out” in Berlin.

Two trucks, battling for the lead, at a snail’s pace on a long hill, hogging both lanes. The traffic builds up behind. I am behind the truck in the passing lane. Someone in a great hurry pulls into the right-hand lane, betting that the truck in his lane will win out. The lead changes several times. In the end, after a good ten minutes, the truck in my lane wins out. The car next to me cuts in ahead of me from the right and spurts past. We have dropped back into the right-hand lane, nonplussed and a little scared by this naked display of competition. Car upon car with Ohio plates pass us, as if used to such goings-on on the highway. Only a woman in the passenger seat, passing close to my left, shakes her head very slowly with closed lips while staring straight ahead—as if to reassure me that not all Ohioans had become inured to such highway dramatics.

Unable to get a room at the Holiday Inn at Akron because most rooms were reserved for a convention. A charter bus of convention-goers was just arriving, neck-tied and well-fed. Steffi was disappointed. “Ich wollte schon immer da bleiben wo die Welt sich trifft (I always wanted to stay where the world meets).“

August 14, Effingham, Illinois. Sign on the window of a car from Pennsylvania passing us: “Hang on—San Diego”. “I wanted to put a sign in our window, too,” Steffi said.

August 15, Joplin, Missouri. Memories of my first over-night stay in Joplin, in my Olds on a cold night in March 1958. Memories, too, of Route 66 out of St. Louis to Fort Leonard Wood. Much of it has now been converted into Interstate 44, killing off most of the old businesses en route in the process.

Trini selecting a postcard of a Marion pony to send to Juliet (she bought it in an Indiana county famous for its ponies). Steffi chided her for always selecting a card with a subject that interested her rather than the person for whom the card was intended. Trini took this reproach to heart at the Meramec Caves in Stanton, Mo., and selected a picture of a stalactite that resembled a statue of the Virgin Mary. “Alexi likes the Virgin Mary,” she explained.

The Meramec Caves a disappointment. Not because they weren’t worth seeing, but because of the trappings: gaudy lights, hyperboles, and sensation-pandering. The presentations diminished the natural sights, as if they were worth seeing only because famous people had viewed them: Art Linkletter’s use of a nook in the cave for a honeymoon room on his practical joke show, “People are funny,” was billed as a main attraction, and as a climax an American flag was projected onto a wall of onyx stalactite, reenacting the dedication of that part of the cave to those who had fallen in World War II.

August 16, Clinton, Oklahoma. Ran into 110 degree heat in southwestern Oklahoma and turned in early. Trini spent two hours in the pool and learned by herself what I had been trying to teach her, without success, all summer: to dog-paddle. Now the temperature is 97 degrees and seems cool. “If it would only stay that way,” Steffi says.

August 17, Albuquerque. The heat yesterday as scary as the severe cold in Vemont. The fear that it would never cool off again, and that we would have to crawl to San Diego in short, frantic laps.
Steffi, on seeing the Coca-Cola advertisements of American scenery: “Why do we never go by these scenes?”

August 18, Flagstaff, Arizona. On the road: a small roadside chapel, a wood-frame building the size of a chicken-coop, at a rest-area on Interstate 40 west of Gallup, New Mexico. A sign to get travelers to stop: “Relax and Reflect.”

In a café, Winslow, Arizona. Ill feeling toward what appeared to be a typically boisterous redneck, cracking crude jokes partly with, partly at the expense of the waitress—but relieved of my distaste by the discovery that one of his companions was what appeared to be a full-blooded Indian.

The coolest, most pleasant weather of the trip in—Arizona!

Shortness of breath and chest pangs yesterday and today: worries greatly diminished by a sign at Holbrook, AZ: elevation 5,000 feet. Flagstaff is 7,000 feet: the first night without an air-conditioner.

August 19, Yuma, Arizona. Not quite believing Bill Mitchell [a fellow grad-student at UMass] when he told me of making much better mileage at high elevations: thinking this was one more of those little exaggerations that everyone makes. Greatly surprised, however, to make better than 25 miles per gallon between Albuquerque and Holbrook after averaging only 19 to 20 miles per gallon before.

The heat so intense between Phoenix and Yuma that one longed to remain completely motionless—to avoid the heat factor of the wind.

August 20, San Diego. Thoughts on driving through the desert: Vermont is lovely; California is magnificent.

Not all of my impressions of San Diego were positive, however. I was put off by a large sign raised high in front of a Presbyterian church: “If God were permissive, He would have given us the ten suggestions.” The “educational” TV station identified itself with a salute to “San Diego, America’s Finest City.” I soon noted a predilection for using the term “world-record” as a descriptive qualifier, whether it be of a marathon, a volleyball tournament, or a banjo-playing contest.

We settled into the home on 5358 Saxon Street of a colleague on leave, Bob Filner, who would later be elected to Congress for many terms as one of the more progressive representatives from southern California. My appointment was temporary, a one-year contract, with some prospects of renewal, but very little likelihood of conversion to the tenure track (despite the hope I was given of this possibility at my AHA interview). With an over-sized history department of forty-two members, San Diego State University was in retrenchment mode, and concern about my job dogged me for the entire year until my contract was finally renewed for one more year in the spring. In my journal I noted the irony that I had felt more confident about getting a teaching position the year before—although I had not yet begun writing my dissertation!

In retrospect, I made a serious error of judgment in dragging my heels in joining the faculty union. My salary was only $14,000, and I could hardly afford the considerable annual dues, especially with the likelihood of the termination of my contract at the end of the year. But I had another, less defensible reason for rejecting the requests of my colleagues, who wanted 100 percent departmental membership to strengthen the union in its negotiations with the administration. My insecure status had made me quite critical of the tenure system, which at this early stage of my career seemed to me less a vehicle to job security than an obstacle to getting a job. Elimination of tenure would open up many more positions to competition based (at least in theory) solely on merit; in a fair contest I selfishly believed I had an excellent chance to prevail. My fellow one-year appointee, John Cumbler, a labor historian who succeeded in getting a job at the University of Louisville for the following academic year, tried to convince me that collegial solidarity would ultimately be of much greater benefit to me than going it alone. How right he was became clear to me in spring 1976 when the department, forced to cut back by a dean who rejected all “decisions of the heart,” voted by a narrow margin to eliminate my position. The Russian specialist in the department, Neil Heyman, offered to take over my upper-division courses. Henceforth SDSU would no longer have a specialist in German and European intellectual history.

I did not help my cause, either, when at a departmental meeting on 3 October 1975 I found myself casting what turned out to be the swing vote—and I was on the conservative side!

The issue was whether a Native-American history course, taught by Native-American studies personnel as a course in the history department, should be permitted to continue teaching the course in the department despite very critical student evaluations. The curriculum committee (with traditionalists Jon Sutherland, Raymond Starr, and Dennis Berge) recommended that the course not be offered next semester in order to give the Native-American staff a chance to iron out the flaws in the course. The course would then continue in the fall with the participation of a history department member (probably Berge, who claimed not to have enough time to participate in the coming spring semester). But a sizable group in the department felt that this was another case of the white man telling the redskins what to do and pleaded for a continuation of the course in the spring. A motion to that effect was made. It was amended to read that the course be given, provided the course was revised to the satisfaction of the department and a member of the department participate in its planning. I supported the amendment, which passed, but opposed the motion, which failed—by one vote.

When I got out of the meeting I had pangs of conscience. Why, when I had the chance, had I not stood by the liberal forces? After all, Ray Starr’s arguments that the syllabus was lacking in organization and that the teacher of the course couldn’t say whether he was teaching a course in Indian history or in Indian-White relations were extremely flimsy and only reflected Starr’s prejudices about what constituted a good course. The reason probably was that I did not like the downgrading of student evaluations that the liberal motion implied. After all, my good evaluations were the strongest thing I had going for me in my quest for a job. If they were to be dismissed as unimportant, my position was weakened. I could rationalize my vote against the motion on other grounds as well: Dave Weber [1940-2010], who supported the motion, had suggested that it might be best to just let the curriculum committee handle the matter rather than jeopardize good relations by having the whole department come down on the course. But the amendment to the motion had precisely this effect and would in any case have prevented the course from being offered in the spring. My sense of guilt, however, resulted from the realization that this was just a rationalization. In the crunch I had come down in favor of traditional attitudes intolerant of failure, because, at the moment, or so it seemed, I stood to gain from such attitudes. Whether I really stand to gain is very questionable. The people who initiated the motion to retain me last year all came from the liberal camp. Raymond Starr would vote against me anyway—good evaluations or not—because he accepted the conservative administrators’ arguments that the department was too big, etc., and the more I reflected on the meeting, the more I recognized the necessity of opposing the exclusivist, authoritarian mentality embodied in the curriculum committee’s treatment of the Native-American course: the presumption of “white fathers” running the department along the rigid lines that places their own rigidity in a favorable light, because it sanctifies rigidity as the educational summum bonum. In the long run that attitude is far more damaging to me than any failure to heed teaching evaluations. One has to be consistent in one’s support of democracy and experimentation.

I recalled Steffi’s warning the previous year not to trust Raymond Starr: “Trau dem Raymond nicht. Er ist schadenfroh.” And indeed his was the only dissenting vote (as I was told by Bob Filner, back from his sabbatical) when the department voted almost unanimously in December 1975 to request an extension of my contract for a third year, a request that the administration denied. Filner and I had something else in common, besides our distrust of Raymond Starr. Bob was fighting for tenure while I was fighting for a job. I admired his chutzpah in making no concessions to the conservative forces despite his precarious position. He entitled his colloquium talk “Sex, Science, and Society,” starting his talk by saying, “I don’t know if it’s science screwing politics, or the other way round, but that’s where the sex comes in.”

Students were my strongest supporters in my quest to remain at SDSU. One of my best friends was a very intelligent student, son of a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother, whose maiden name he adopted. He had been brought up by a rigid, anti-intellectual step-father who resented his step-son’s bookishness. Though obviously drawn to his Jewish background as a potential source of strength and belonging, my student proclaimed himself an agnostic—which made it easy and comfortable for me to get along with him. In my journal I noted the following observation: “His attitude toward his Jewish background like my attitude toward my aristocratic background: proud of it, but unable to fully identify with it—and to some degree therefore turning against it.”

This student acknowledged a weakness, his attraction to “powerful intellects:”

Walking by a classroom in which Charlie Hamilton [a recent acquisition from the University of Chicago] was teaching, the word “transubstantiation” on the blackboard caught his eye. He stopped and looked in: “I’ve got to sit in on one of his lectures some time.” It was something of a let-down for him to be told that I had left the writing on the board in the class preceding.

Another good student friend, though only sixteen at the time, was Stuart Schechter, now a successful lawyer in San Diego, with whom I have exchanged lengthy holiday cards for the past thirty-five years!

My strongest supporter was an adult student by the name of Harvey Silvers, who was impressed by my “Hitler’s Germany” course, which he took in the spring of 1976. A native of Chicago, Harvey was a self-made man, the first person in San Diego to manufacture hairpieces for individual clients. He got most of his customers at an annual fair in Del Mar. Now he was doing very well, with several employees. “All I need now is a little bit of culture,” he said. “I’m getting there.” A former socialist, he had become an active Zionist and defender of Israel. However, I found myself very much in sympathy with his distrust of Christianity. Behind the growing de-emphasis of the humanities in university curricula, for instance, he detected a religious Christianizing motive that did not want to raise problems and issues for discussion and analysis. Harvey did his best to keep me at SDSU, as noted in my journal on 27 February 1976:

“In teaching German history, he’s gotta attack religion,” he explained to Steffi. “There’s no way he can teach the course without that. He can’t do that in private colleges which draw their funds from religious groups.” He supports me because I am “educating” San Diego college students. He is impelled by a genuine fear of repression, intolerance, and anti-Semitism in America. Beyond that he is impelled by a genuine revulsion against a mindless, unfeeling system in which educational values can be so distorted (e.g., in the administrative argument against continuation of temporary faculty members— “We need flexibility to serve student needs”) and in which people can be treated so callously. He is impelled by a deep-seated feeling that rights must be constantly defended, abuses constantly challenged.

Although I didn’t believe there was a real threat of a resurgence of classical anti-Semitism in the U.S. (and opposed the invocation of such a threat as an argument for Israeli expansion), I found myself encouraging Harvey’s incipient paranoia, just to keep him so delightfully subversive! Harvey wrote a registered letter to the president of the university (who coincidentally became president of Kent State University a few years later, where Olaf headed the math department from 1976 on) to try to get him to change the rule against third-year temporary appointments. According to his report, Harvey also gave Neil Heyman a dressing-down for having volunteered to teach German history next year, appealing to his Jewish conscience! He even called up the German-American Club in San Diego to ask them if they had a job for me—as if to alert them to their duty to take care of their own!

In San Diego I also worked to extract some articles from my dissertation prior to revising it for publication as a book. A publication or two would certainly enhance my chances of getting a job, and completing a scholarly article looked more manageable and less time-consuming than converting my dissertation into a book, a more long-term project. The library resources at SDSU were limited, but the very good library at the University of California, San Diego, located in La Jolla an hour away, contained in its holdings the personal library of the famous historian Koppel Pinson (1904-1961). My article, “The Role of Heinrich von Stein in Nietzsche’s Emergence as a Critic of Wagnerian Idealism and Cultural Nationalism,” was published in the German journal Nietzsche-Studien in 1976. It allowed me to write the text in English while leaving all quotes in the original German—a great advantage in any publication dealing with Nietzsche! I had been attracted to Nietzsche since my undergraduate days when I discovered that he was one of the few non-Jewish German intellectuals of note who was not only entirely free of anti-Semitism, but also took an uncompromising stand against this malignant but growing politico-cultural movement at the end of the nineteenth century. To me his clarity on this particular question salvaged at least a remnant of German honor in the face of the more dominant rival aesthetic and political tradition, perhaps best personified by Richard Wagner, which defined German exceptionalism in contradistinction to allegedly Jewish traits, such as materialism, commercialism, immoralism, and secularism. Nietzsche’s response to the “Jewish question” still strikes me as exemplary today. “Let us rejoice in Jewish successes and achievements,” he said (loosely paraphrased); “for they help us all.” A Wagnerian in his youth, Nietzsche unequivocally repudiated German nationalism, ethnic supremacism, and political Romanticism in his later works. But Nietzsche was also sullied by his reputation as a power-monger whose vitalist philosophy had appealed to and was appropriated by many Nazi followers (though not by the more honest ones, who were quite aware that Nietzsche was their antagonist, not their ally). My liberal Harvard teacher Crane Brinton (1898-1968) had written a devastating critique of Nietzsche during the war (as George Santayana [1863-1952]) had already done during the First World War). In college I could not yet claim to understand the full scope of Nietzsche’s purpose in attacking Christianity and the Western moral tradition. My main effort in my oral examination on Nietzsche was to try to refute the conventional notion that Nietzsche was advocating or condoning ruthless competition in a perennial human contest for power and supremacy.

Nietzsche’s purpose became much clearer to me once I understood what he was arguing against. That insight came as a result of my research into the Wagnerian and anti-Semitic intellectual tradition culminating in the openly racist publications of Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927), the Germanophile Englishman who embraced German nationalism with all the exaggerated fervor of a convert. An early and much less extreme exponent of Wagnerian völkisch nationalism was the talented but short-lived young aristocrat Heinrich von Stein (1857-1887), who had been engaged as the tutor of Wagner`s children. Nietzsche saw in the thirteen-years-younger man an alter ego of his former self, before his bitter falling-out with Wagner in 1876. Hoping to enlighten Stein about the perils of Wagnerism and convert the promising youth to his own life-affirming philosophy, Nietzsche carried on a lively correspondence with Stein and invited him to visit Sils-Maria in 1884. Stein had just published a very conventional celebration of Germanic heroes and saints in the Wagnerian mode, to which Nietzsche responded cooly in December 1882: “As for ‘the hero’: I don’t think as well of him as you do. Neverthelesss: it is the most acceptable form of human existence, especially if one has no other choice.” One sentence in that same letter suddenly clarified for me what Nietzsche was trying to do: “Ich möchte dem menschlichen Leben etwas von seinem herzbrecherischen und grausamen Charakter nehmen (I would like to take from human existence some of its heartbreaking and cruel character).“ No sooner have we come to love something, Nietzsche went on to explain, than the tyrant inside us (whom we like to call “our higher self”) forces us to give it up. It was this nihilistic (i.e.,life-denying) “ascetic ideal,” so brilliantly dissected in The Genealogy of Morals (1887), that was the target of Nietzsche´s ever more virulent attacks on Platonic idealism, world-renouncing Christianity, and the secular movements such as scientism, liberalism, socialism, and nationalism that rested on the same “nihilistic” metaphysical foundations. How different Nietzsche’s conception of the self-overcoming “Übermensch” was from the pious, battle-crazed warriors of Wagnerian myth! In my journal I noted that “one understands philosophers not by reading them, but by thinking about the problems they thought about.”

This publication on one of the most important German philosophers in a peer-reviewed international journal no doubt helped to get me a temporary position at the University of Oregon for the 1976-1977 academic year. It was a replacement position for the well-known historian Roger Chickering, who had just received a Fulbright award to Germany. The offer from the University of Oregon came as a huge relief, very late in April 1976. I had already accustomed myself to the thought of unemployment, preparing to turn all my attention to supporting Steffi’s business, which would probably become our main or even sole source of income. I even took lessons from a colleague of Steffi’s in San Diego on how to cast silver jewelry, the “lost wax” method that Steffi had never tried. At the annual AHA meetings in Chicago in December 1975 and in Atlanta in December 1976 I interviewed for academic jobs, but without result. I also applied for prep school jobs, gaining an interview at the Harvard School in Los Angeles, but was turned down for the position in favor of someone who could also coach a sport. In my journal I reflected on approaching unemployment with a certain ambivalence:

The bitterness out of obligation: as if I am missing something if I do not extract from my experiences [of unemployment] the full potential for bitterness that they contain.

I thank my fate for making me unemployed and anxiously await the morning mail for an interview invitation or a job offer. In that order. At the moment, thanking my fate is still a form of protective sour grapes.

Papa’s remarks, which seemed so jejune [and didactic] at the time, now making sense to me. In answer to Sylvia’s question, how one gets to achieve a high position like his: “One has to work very hard between the ages of twenty and thirty.” Or in response to my remark (which seems jejune to me today) that one could always make money: “Ja? Bei uns ist das nicht so leicht (here it is not so easy).”

The depressing, mean-spirited article by an émigré from the Soviet Union in The New York Review of Books: “Russia today is an enormous rest home for the indigent in which the government pretends that it pays wages and the workers pretend that they work.” How callous that sounds to someone who is about to go on unemployment, as does the passage, “Free, if substandard, medical services, relatively cheap rents, and small guaranteed pensions encourage a sense of dependency on the state.” The word “substandard” says everything. What is the standard?

In my search for potentially remunerative projects, I even thought of writing a study of the Dr. Seuss books, which I was reading to Nicki at the time:

Dr. Seuss books as marvelous barometers of their times: today we read one published in 1940, Orton Hatches an Egg. An elephant (100% dependable) hatches an egg for a tropical bird. Because the elephant has promised to do this until the bird returns, he does not budge, even when derided by his fellow animals or captured by hunters for a circus. While the circus was playing in Palm Beach, the bird—enjoying the easy life—happens to see the elephant. At the same time the egg finally hatches. Now the bird wants to reclaim it. But it turns out to be a flying elephant! The reward for perseverance! The elephant is America, the bird is decadent Western Europe. And Nazi Germany is repudiated by the triumph of environmentalism over the principle of heredity or race. What better repudiation of racialism than the transformation of a bird into an elephant simply because the elephant cared for the egg!

At the end of April 1975 the Vietnam adventure finally came to its ignominious close with the evacuation of the last American soldiers from the top of the American embassy building in Saigon (which was immediately renamed Ho Chi Minh City by the victorious communist forces). The following day I enjoyed one of the best and most successful classes I have ever taught. I opened up my introductory U.S. history class to students’ reflections and comments on the dramatic events of the previous days. One after another student got up and, without any prompting, condemned the American intervention in the war and elaborated on what a huge mistake it had been. Having been careful not to introduce current politics into the classroom, I had no idea of the depth of opposition that these students harbored to the American role in the war. It was an educational moment that left me with enormous hope for and optimism about the future, even if dampened somewhat by the furious American bombardment of Cambodia in the wake of the seizure of the American merchant ship, the Mayaguez, on May 12th.

As was the case with most recent arrivals in San Diego, we had a succession of visitors anxious to experience the California lifestyle. Steffi’s mother and Tümmi came in spring 1975. The old Nazi, then in his mid- to late sixties, admired the hang-gliders and surfers and said he wished he were young enough to engage in such dangerous sports as well. The following year it was Steffi’s father’s turn to visit. He came in January and February 1976, the best time of year to experience the dramatic difference between temperate and subtropical climates. Unfortunately all his photos were over-exposed. He had not counted on the intense light of the southern California sun. However, he was delighted to discover a pomegranate tree in the back yard. “Das ist ja die reinste griechische Antike (this is pure Grecian antiquity)!” he exclaimed. Gerhard, an architect by profession, also taught an adult education course in his hometown of Nuremberg on the psychological meaning of colors. He distinguished between two German words for “feeling,” Empfindung, a corollary of the color red—the active quality of reacting to outside stimulus and hence able to forget—and Gefühl, the corollary of the color blue—the passive quality of internalizing outside stimuli and hence unable to forget. He was much given to performing psychological tests, one of which I recorded in my journal:

He presented me with four squares on a page, each containing a dot, a line, or some other simple figure. His instructions were: “Draw something around them.” I took this to mean that I was to enclose each figure in some way. My immediate temptation, for the sake of simplicity and because I felt I would be breaking the rule of spontaneity by thinking about more elaborate designs, was simply to draw a circle around each figure. The square with a dot seemed especially to invite such a simple solution. Then I thought that was too easy, and such an automatic response would reflect unfavorably on my personality, so—noticing a notation, g. Selbstbewusstsein (self-confidence) at the side of the sheet—I made a g out of the circle. Similarly I tried to add a twist to the circles I made around the other figures. These twists gravitated toward the bottom. Gerhard was marvelously shocked when he analyzed what I had drawn: “Das ist ja ein Trauma! Du kommst von der Mutter nicht los (you can’t get away from your mother). There’s something that is pulling you down to the Mutterschoss (mother’s womb or lap). That is quite clear from all four drawings.” Steffi was delighted. “I’ve always said that.” Her exultation knew no bounds. But Gerhard was marvelously serious, as if there could be absolutely no doubt about the validity of his findings. “Was ist es denn, das du nicht verarbeited hast (what is it you haven’t worked through)? Maybe you can speak about it. That there is something from which you can’t free yourself is quite clear.”

My ultimate judgment on this experiment was rather spiteful:

In Gerhard one sees clearly the mental aberrations (astrology, color psychology, etc.) to which Germans, it seems, are driven by the lack of an appropriate mode for self-expression in the objective world.

Of course, I was very curious about Gerhard’s take on Nazism, which he had experienced as a soldier in the non-commissioned ranks during the war. He did some very funny impersonations of strutting officers.

“Mir ist alles Sektiererische verhasst (I hate everything sectarian). That is what disturbed me about National Socialism.“

When asked why he thought that Nazism had come to power in Germany, he gave three reasons:

First, the threat of Marxism. “I was not a proletarian and as a result I did not want to belong to the proletariat.” Secondly, the need for unity. “There were so many national Bünde (associations) of all kinds, which supposedly were pursuing the same goal. One sensed that all that would have to be simplified, reduced to a lowest common denominator.” Third, the Jewish problem. “We had six million unemployed, but no Jews were unemployed. They stuck together.”

It was easy to see, however, that Gerhard must have had a hard time in the Nazi era. This was not a person who fit in easily anywhere, least of all in a highly regimented society.

For the summers of 1975 and 1976 we returned to Vermont, always varying our cross-country routes a bit and stopping for sight-seeing diversions on the way. Our stops on our return to San Diego in August 1975 included Syracuse, NY; Fremont, OH; Davenport, IA; York, NB; Cheyenne, WY; Evanston, WY; St. George, UT; and Victorville, CA. Among the places we visited were Pioneer Village in Nebraska, Fort Bridger in Wyoming, the first state house in Fillmore, Utah, and several Spanish missions in California. Only an hour or so out of Irasburg, while still on Interstate 89, three-year-old Nicki asked, “Are those the Rocky Mountains?” On our museum stops Nicki had plenty of chance to use his newly-acquired expression “neato,” a word he had picked up from Trina. In Iowa, angered that he was not allowed to buy candy at a roadside store, Nicki refused to return a pack of gum to the rack but instead threw it across the room. The shopkeeper reprimanded us: “You gotta lot of cathin’ up to do. You can have your fun with him now, but he’ll be a lot of trouble later.” That prediction fortunately never came true. Nicki had some wonderful expressions when he wanted to be dressed or undressed in the morning or at night: “Put me on, Daddy,” or “take me off, Daddy” (literal translations of zieh mich an or aus). The climatic variations on our trip were quite stunning. In Nebraska it was too hot to have lunch outdoors, in Wyoming it was too cold to have breakfast outdoors. At a camp site in Green River, Wyoming, we were told by one of the natives, ”You know what they call that stretch of road between Laramie and Cheyenne in winter? Ho Chi Minh trail.” We marveled at some of the wonderful compound place names: Wagonhound Road, Sweetwater County, Medicine Bow, Big Blue Creek, Eight Mile Road. Dead Man’s Wash, Horse Thief Basin. A sign in a barren Wyoming landscape read: “Keep Wyoming Green.” Above it someone had painted in, “Smile.” “Typical California small town,” I noted in my travel journal as we were nearing our destination:

The crests of “service organizations” (Lions, Rotary, Optimist, Kiwanis, Altrusia—with its slogan ”patriotism, efficiency, service”—American Legion, Women’s Professional League, etc.) prominently displayed at the entrance to the town, as if to warn against intruders who would disrupt the self-congratulatory homogeneity of the community.

Returning to Vermont in May 1976, we chose a southern route with stops in Gallup, NM; Santa Rosa, NM; El Reno, OK; Rolla, MO; Indianapolis; Youngstown, OH; and Poughkeepsie, NY. In the California desert we ran into a frightening sand storm that forced us to the side of the road for several hours. In my journal I noted

The Texas-sized pothole in the parking lot of a café in McLean, Texas, which caused the rear end to scrape bottom and sent the boxes in the back toppling forward. We feared it might have broken the rear axle—just the kind of accident which one so often has or hears of on trips of this kind. The leering, gloating faces of the bull-necked ranchers and cow-hands staring at us through the windows of the café.

The only damage, however, was to one of the gallon-size bottles of wine we were carrying in the back seat. It broke and left behind a wonderfully decadent aroma for most of the rest of the trip. Trini, who had been selected for a gifted class in San Diego (turning me from one day to the next from a critic to a champion of gifted education), learned the poem “The Distlefink” by heart to get a free hamburger at the Dutch Pantry restaurants en route.

The last show we had seen on public TV in San Diego was Somerset Maugham’s “Quartet,” prompting the following comment in my journal at the end of May 1976:

What makes him good is his commitment throughout the most insipid plots and stock characterizations and verbal diarrhea to the proposition (reappearing in one form or another in all his works) that “art is the only thing that matters, not wealth, not power, not love.”

Vermont in the autumn

UVM Professor Wolfe Schmokel had quite properly cautioned me against pursuing a PhD. The 1960s growth in the job market for fresh PhDs had come to an abrupt halt and gone into reverse. He thought I was making a big mistake to give up a secure position at Lake Region Union High School, especially with two young children to support, and warned me that I was quite likely to face unemployment on finishing my degree. Steffi, however, encouraged me to continue. We had no immediate financial worries, as I was a beneficiary of the GI bill, which in the mid-1960s had been extended to cover my years of military service. Steffi’s flourishing jewelry business, to which I contributed by manning her booths at crafts fairs during the summers, even allowed us to save a little money and pay off the mortgage on our Irasburg home early.

My favorite class in the spring of 1972 was Bob Griffith’s course on 20th-century U.S. history. Griffith, a 1967 PhD from the University of Wisconsin, had written an excellent book on Joseph McCarthy and very much shared the critical perspective on American Cold War policies of the new wave of younger American historians in the 1960s. His class was extremely lively with lots of open discussion and debate. Among my more interesting classmates was young Dennis McNally, who later wrote fascinating books on Jack Kerouac and on the Grateful Dead. He is today one of the leading authorities in the country on both those subjects. Griffith tried to get me to change my specialization to recent American history, but my mind was already made up, despite the fact that the German historian at UMass, Harold J. Gordon (who became my default advisor), represented the very opposite of my own political perspective. Gordon had recently published a book on Hitler and the Beer Hall Putsch, the obvious objective of which was to discredit the New Left and the sputtering, but still active student movement by drawing wholly unwarranted links to the right-wing Free Corps movement that had led to Hitler’s failed putsch attempt in November 1923. Gordon went so far as to compare the civil rights march in Northern Ireland on “Bloody Sunday” in January 1972 (where thirteen marchers were killed by the British army) to Hitler’s march on the Feldherrnhalle in Munich. Apparently to Gordon all youthful rebellions against constituted authority were the same. Knowing that he would not be able to avoid calling attention to the massive ideological differences between Hitler’s movement and the American New Left, Gordon deliberately excluded all evidence from Hitler’s 1924 trial from his book. Ironically, the book received a favorable review from the British medievalist Geoffrey Barraclough in the New York Review of Books for its challenge to the Whiggish liberal consensus on Nazism, which failed to adequately take the role of proletarian social forces into account. If Barrraclough had read the book closely, he would have realized that Gordon’s dissent from the liberal consensus came not from the socially-oriented left but from the hard-core conservative right.

Gordon harbored an ill-concealed grievance against his Alma Mater, Yale, for having banished him to a second-tier university by neglecting to offer him a position on their faculty. He claimed that he would never get a position at an Ivy League school because he was brought up a Catholic. A colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve, Gordon admired the military caste, by no means excluding former German Wehrmacht officers, to whose post-war apologetics he gave rather too much credence. The villains in his narrative of the collapse of the Weimar Republic were the Social Democrats (SPD). When I asked him why he was so critical of the one party in Germany that best represented American values of civil liberties and democratic process, he claimed that it was the SPD that had undermined Weimar democracy by its excessive social welfare demands. Gordon had some more likable eccentricities as well. He had a pet guinea pig who freely roamed around his library, forcing students whom he had summoned to tutorials at his home to keep a close watch over their papers while he lectured in a dreary monotone without notes, guided only by his deeply ingrained conservative biases. He brought his well-trained dog to his office, but sometimes it was difficult to tell whether his terse reprimands were addressed to his dog or to me. In my journal I recorded some of Gordon’s idiosyncrasies and epigrams:

Gordon: “I don’t like people who are holier than me.” My worst fears about Gordon, first raised by the warm acknowledgement that Schmokel gave him in his book, are confirmed. A rabid opponent of the “liberal left”—in this sense he is far to the right of Schmokel—he trembles with rage at the suggestion that Nazism had anything in common with conservatism. Suspecting that a book that I showed him—Reinhard Kühnl`s Die nationalsozialistische Linke—might have taken this line, Gordon said: “I believe in the Sidney Painter way, to go to the primary sources first. If you read secondary sources first, you’re likely to go to the sources with your mind already made up. I believe in the Yale system, reliance on primary sources. At Harvard they put more emphasis on explication de texte. The Harvard people are always telling me I don’t use enough secondary sources.” Very strait-laced students, usually recently discharged junior officers from the army, are attracted to Gordon and call him “sir.” His positivist approach actually makes a virtue of not taking ideas too seriously or going into them deeply; this is one course where a straightforward chronicle of events—with only a rudimentary explanation of causes—is not only acceptable, but desirable. One of his loyal students cautioned me, “Gordon likes papers that assume that the reader knows nothing about the subject.” Gordon’s autocratic manner appears deceptively informal, especially when he slings one leg over the side of his easy chair. His technique is more to ignore rather than subdue, although on occasion he will shout. He browbeats by monopolizing the conversation, in which he displays an undeniable virtuosity, smoothly shifting gears and direction by constantly qualifying what he says in a kind of free association. Taken as a whole his monologue is a mass of contradictions, but because of its spontaneity it appears to be entirely consistent—as indeed it is as a reflection of a closed ideology. When he speaks he leans back genussvoll (with pleasure), and closes his eyes…

Gordon held back by his own prejudices so much that he won’t even read Peter Gay’s book on Weimar culture (subtitled, The Outsider as Insider [1968]), although Peter Gay’s interpretation is colored by the same anti-student-movement bias as Gordon himself subscribes to. Probably Gay’s previous books in defense of Rousseau and the Enlightenment have put Gordon off…

Gordon: “I’m for law and order, although I do think our laws are for the most part no good and we’d probably do best to start over again from scratch…”

Gordon: “Hitler was just as moralistic as Martin Luther King.”

Gordon’s study: shelves of books framing a glass-enclosed collection of hand-guns. The cobwebbed quality of his study. It could be gemütlich, it should be gemütlich, but it is cold, lifeless: everything is dusty and superannuated. It is institutionalized disorder. Things have been lying in the same state of disarray for decades. It reeks of unwillingness to change.

Gordon’s worst moment came in a seminar he conducted with the well-known Russian specialist and chair of the history department at UMass, Robert H. McNeal (1930-1988), who was killed a few years later in a tragic automobile accident. Somehow it came out that I could trace my ancestry to the Baltic-German nobility. Gordon blurted out that the Baltic-German nobility were heavily intermarried with Jews. No doubt he meant this as an explanation of my perversely left-wing views, but I was very pleased. Unintentionally he had exposed his anti-Semitic bias for all to hear. One of my fellow-students told me later that he had been quite shocked, and even Professor McNeal later apologized for Gordon’s uncalled-for remark.

Gordon’s teaching assistant Michael Barrett, today a respected military historian at The Citadel, gave me what I thought was a telling example of Gordon’s problematic influence on his students, as described in my journal on 26 November 1972:

How history gets distorted: Michael Barrett planning to ask his class whether they think the narrator of All Quiet on the Western Front, disillusioned with the war, might not have made a highly likely candidate for Nazism. Far more serious than his erroneous assumption that the narrator actually returned from the war is his failure to appreciate the incongruity between the narrator’s values and the values of Nazism. The extent of his misunderstanding: he claims that, after all, the narrator, who was disgusted by the patriotic tub-thumping and the beer-hall strategy with which he was confronted while on leave in his home town, therefore also [like the Nazis] believed in a stab in the back on the part of civilians!

As my advisor and the only Germanist in the history department, Gordon could not be excluded from my oral exam or dissertation committees. Fortunately, I could balance his influence with much more congenial members of the department. I chose as my dissertation supervisor the young intellectual historian William M. Johnston, who had graduated from Harvard College two years after me and had already completed his PhD under Crane Brinton in the mid-1960s. Through Johnston I received what I called “my second Harvard education.” Johnston was conservative and anti-Marxist as well, but he was much more open to critical opinion than Gordon and was genuinely fascinated by ideas and ideologies of all kinds. Unlike Gordon, Johnston’s conservatism reflected the “ethos of scholarship,” a renunciation of all activism and presentism in favor of disinterested contemplation and explanation. One of Johnston’s most endearing traits was his appreciation of defenders of lost causes, the tragic view of life he found best represented in the European rather than the American intellectual tradition. He had just published a massive tome, The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History, which was, however, panned by the eminent historian Carl Schorske in The American Historical Review for allegedly neglecting the social context of the ideas and the authors he discussed. Johnston was an excellent teacher, generating enthusiasm for his discipline of intellectual history while maintaining strict academic standards, encouraging open debate, and allowing students to pursue specific interests of their own. In my journal I noted “Johnston’s effect of making me suddenly doubt things I say, things I have said before with perfect confidence. His effect of making me aware of my contradictions and inaccuracies.”

Johnston at his best, conveying an excitement about Hegel and the Hegelian dialectic, which far from being exclusive and rigid, will always want to embrace and understand the other side. Johnston is a better teacher than he is a writer. He is especially good in refusing to be caught in sophistries and technicalities, at going to the heart of the matter. I find myself (sometimes deliberately) imitating his expression when listening intently, mouth barely open, lower lip slightly drawn in, eyes focused in midair.

His course on European intellectual history in academic year 1972-1973 remains one of my fondest memories of my time at UMass. From Johnston I also picked up the habit of very close reading of student papers, a practice for which I later gained a positive reputation at Gonzaga University. Students appreciated my very specific stylistic and substantive suggestions, which they found much more helpful than vague comments such as “awkward” or “unclear” or “needs revision.” Gordon, by contrast, used a rack of ready-made stamps—“VAGUE,” “HOW?” “WHY?” and so on—to speed his correction of student papers.

The third member of my dissertation committee was Miriam Usher Chrisman, a pioneering scholar of the German Reformation in Strasbourg in the sixteenth century. Having done most of her research in the formerly German province of Alsace, she could corroborate for me that my study of the Alsatian dramatist and publicist Friedrich Lienhard (1865-1929) accurately reflected the völkisch ideology so prevalent in Germany`s contested border regions in Imperial Germany before and during (and even more so after) the First World War. She gave me encouragement and a sense of achievement; she said that writing her dissertation had been much harder than giving birth to her children. Mrs. Chrisman, as she was called at UMass, had a famous father, also a professor, who once invited a theologian to their house to explain the Trinity to her. She suffered from asthma, which did not affect her when she was speaking, but came to the fore when she was forced to listen to rambling students in class. Her one rather unpleasant trait was talking tough out of the side of her mouth—the product, I thought, of her pre-women’s liberation years in a masculine world.

Lienhard was one of three protagonists of my dissertation on völkisch ideology; the other two were a devoted, but short-lived Wagnerian, Heinrich von Stein (1857-1887) and the influential racial theorist Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927), through whose biography I could establish links between nineteenth-century völkisch ideology and National Socialism. My model was Fritz Stern’s pioneering work on The Politics of Cultural Despair, a study of three prominent German nationalist writers, Paul de Lagarde (1827-1891), Julius Langbehn (1851-1907), and Arthur Möller van den Bruck (1876-1925), that first appeared in 1963. Reflecting the affirmative culture of 1950s America, Stern targeted what he considered to be radical outsiders and negativistic prophets of doom who believed that Western civilization was on the path to ruin. Hence the famous title of his book, which added a new phrase to the vocabulary of historians of the German Empire. Influenced by the radical counter-currents of the 1960s, I was more concerned to show how very much part of the monarchist mainstream völkisch ideologists actually had been. After substantial revisions, my dissertation was eventually published as Idealism Debased: From Völkisch Ideology to National Socialism in 1981.

As a student at the U. of Massachusetts in 1973

My closest friend at UMass was a young German exchange student from Freiburg University, Andreas Kunz. He was married to a woman of Lebanese extraction, the daughter of a restaurant-owner in St. Johnsbury, VT, less than an hour from our home in Irasburg. Hence we saw quite a bit of each other both in class and outside the classroom setting. Although Andy was thirteen years younger than I was, politically we saw pretty much eye-to-eye. Heavily influenced by the radical German student movement, he still had strong Marxist sympathies in those days. This did not make it easier for him to get along with Johnston, who called him a “self-hating German.” Johnston did, however, agree with my rejoinder, which was, “He’s better than his elders!” Although Johnston was open-minded and fascinated by all ideas—even those of Marx—he was put off by what he claimed was the “reflex reaction” of Marxists. His real beef against Marx was that he made metaphysics irrelevant, the realm in which Johnston felt most at home. Johnston could not abide the notion that religion and metaphysics were mere “superstructures,” forever doomed to be determined by the “economic base.” Andy would later go on to earn his PhD at Berkeley under the preeminent economic historian Gerald Feldman with a dissertation on the German civil service in the 1920s. This was Andy’s stepping stone to a brilliant academic career in Germany at the Institute for European History in Mainz. Just when Andy lost his left-wing orientation I can’t say, but I do remember his telling me, at the time of German reunification in 1990, that there would be no room in Germany for any party to the left of the SPD. I tried to contradict him, but he brushed my objections aside. Today Die Linke, the Left Party, is very much alive, though bearing little resemblance to its East German predecessor, the SED.

In August 1972 my brother Tempy had a life-threatening auto-accident in France, where he had been working for the brokerage firm Kidder, Peabody for several years. He had to have his damaged spleen removed, but otherwise made a remarkably rapid and successful recovery. In my journal I commented on one of his letters,

fully retaining his objective, descriptive eye despite the battering his body took in the accident. Sign of health: the only lesson he seems to have derived from the accident is, fasten your seatbelts. Because he now believes in this, he has become, in his words, “less of a cynic.” He calls his present hospitalization “without doubt the longest period of wasted time” in his life and frets to get back to Kidder Peabody where things are currently in unrest because a key figure has just quit.

Tempy enjoyed his work, even though he disarmingly confessed to me, “I’d like to make a lot of money, but I don’t know just how.”

Meanwhile, Mama was idolized by many of the local “hippies” for her embodiment of agrarian self-sufficiency, having turned her back on “chasing the almighty dollar” and living quite contentedly off the land. In 1973 Mama was actually featured on the cover of Yankee Magazine as a model practitioner of a newly popular rural lifestyle.

Mama on the cover of Yankee Magazine, 1973

Some of Mama’s “hippie” friends earned some money working with the local construction crew on the home and barn that Aunt Temple was building for Mama on Mama’s property that summer of 1972.

1972 was the most frustrating election year of my long life, the disappointments greater even than they would be in 1980 or in the year 2000. Senator George McGovern of South Dakota had won the Democratic nomination for President, raising hopes not only for an end to the war in Vietnam, where American involvement was winding down under public pressure in any case, but also for a true break with the imperialistic foreign policy that the United States had pursued since the end of the Second World War. On 25 October 1972 I recorded In my journal my sense of helplessness in preventing Nixon’s reelection:

The peculiar satisfaction and strength I got out of the blazing NIXON-AGNEW bumper sticker on a shiny huge new car of one of Steffi’s customers at her Open House. A guest of [our neighbor] Yvette’s had rather provocatively parked her car to block the driveway. When I went over to ask the guest to move, I knew it would be unpleasant. The sticker on Steffi’s customer’s car made me feel more sure of myself and my rights—though I regretted feeling so, for it just proves how unbeatable they are this year.

Who has not felt the inevitability of certain events—despite the fact that you can see what’s coming in the future? The absolute hopelessness of turning things around. The realization that only bitter experience will be able to provide a corrective. It is then that one can share, if not Kissinger’s contempt for intellectuals, at least his conviction that they are not important. Only, where he is glad, I am sorry.

Even news of the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate complex in June 1972 could not prevent Nixon’s landslide reelection in November. Nixon used the opportunity to once again escalate the war in the so-called “Christmas bombing” of Hanoi in December. I followed the news on CBS:

Walter Cronkite choking on the irony of Nixon’s annual physical check-up, in which he was pronounced in excellent physical shape, except that he did not get enough exercise! And this while the heaviest bombardment in the history of aerial warfare rained down on Vietnam. Eric Sevareid running scared (of the Administration’s campaign to get locally affiliated stations to reject the national network’s “ideological plugola”): formulating his criticisms in language no one can understand who isn’t already familiar with what he’s talking about.

Mama, who had preferred Eugene McCarthy to Robert Kennedy in the run-up to the 1968 election, but was now firmly in the McGovern camp, compared the public mood to the mood in Germany during the war: even those persons quite opposed to Nazism felt they had no choice but to support them to the hilt in the war to prevent the destruction of their country. She thought the same dynamic might be at work in this country, except that Americans did not risk destruction of their country, only a “loss of prestige.”

The United States finally agreed to stop fighting in Vietnam on 27 January 1973. I had no illusions that the end of active American participation in the war would heal the divisions at home. On January 26th I wrote:

The quite misplaced confidence that the end of the Vietnam War will end divisions at home based on the misunderstanding that the division was caused by the war. But the division was part of the war: it continues even after the fighting has stopped, even if it is temporarily repressed by the energy which the dominant power can now bring to bear against the “enemy” at home.

It was the Watergate scandal that finally brought an end to the Nixon presidency in 1974 and the subsequent end of the Vietnam War in 1975 (two years after the peace accords, which Nixon had ignored by ordering the secret bombing of Laos and Cambodia). Incriminating details about the Administration’s direct involvement in the break-in, and later the cover-up, trickled out at regular intervals beginning in January 1973. The Administration had successfully prevailed on the burglars to plead guilty to avoid a potentially damaging trial, but two young Washington Post investigative reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, discovered that the burglars had been paid off to keep quiet from a secret slush fund under the control of the White House. Woodward and Bernstein had been alerted to the fund’s existence by an FBI agent known only as “Deep Throat”, who told the reporters to “follow the money.” His identity was not revealed until after his death in the 1990s. For its enterprising investigative journalism, the Post would receive the Pulitzer Prize. Top presidential advisers Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman were forced to quit in April, and in May a special committee under Senator Sam Ervin was convened to investigate the cover-up. The committee hearings led to the disclosure of one incriminating fact after another. Nixon sought to avert the inevitable by firing the special prosecutor in the case, Archibald Cox, who had insisted that the White House turn over crucial incriminating audiotapes of the President’s discussions of the case. The incident became known as the “Saturday Night Massacre” when both Attorney General Elliott Richardson and his Deputy William D. Ruckelshouse resigned to avoid having to carry out the President’s order to fire Cox. In 1974 Nixon finally lost his hold on power. In July the Supreme Court ruled 8-0 that the President must turn over his tape recordings to the Watergate prosecutor. The House Judiciary Committee under Peter Rodino voted 27-11 to recommend impeachment for the President’s role in the Watergate conspiracy, and in early August, seeing the handwriting on the wall, Nixon became the first President in American history to resign his office.

This was an exhilarating period for me, in retrospect two of the happiest years of my life. The disintegration of the Nixon Administration, with its odious personnel and policies, was exciting to behold. The judicial system functioned as it was meant to, enforcing the law without distinction as to rank or status, and the constitutional conflict between the legislative and executive branches of government ended with a victory of the former, as indeed the Constitution had prescribed. A tragic exception to the generally up-beat development of events in 1973-1974 was the news of the CIA-supported military coup in Chile on 9/11. The brutal killing of Salvador Allende led me to record in my journal “the same sickening feeling as at the death of Kennedy, and the [Soviet] invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968.” In early 1974 the expulsion of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from the Soviet Union left me with very mixed feelings. On the one hand it seemed to show the bankruptcy of a communist system that could tolerate no dissent. On the other hand, I was disgusted by the efforts of right-wingers to exploit his expulsion to revive an anti-communist (and anti-Marxist) crusade, based on the totally mistaken claim that Solzhenitsyn was a representative of Western democratic ideas. He soon proved to be as critical of Western democracy as he had been of that other “Western” import into Russia, Marxism. In my journal I wrote, “Why Solzhenitsyn had to go: it is easier to subvert a system based on cooperation ([the USSR] at least in theory), than one based on competition [the U.S.].”

In search of a college-level teaching position at a time of severely declining job opportunities, I attended the annual conference of the American Historical Association (AHA) in San Francisco in December 1973. On transcontinental flights most airlines still furnished the upper deck of the huge Boeing 747s as a lounge open to all passengers, and I remember a delightful flight, sipping cocktails on comfortable couches and conversing with members of the UMass history faculty heading to the same destination. I stayed with my young “godson” Johnnie Van Duyl at his place near Berkeley, commuting by BART to the conference every day. I had only one pre-scheduled job interview, with a committee from San Diego State University that was looking for a combination of specializations in Modern Germany and European Intellectual History. As one of perhaps 50 or 60 candidates being interviewed for this job at the conference, I didn’t think I had much of a chance. However, to my great delight, some months later I was offered the position. I attributed my success to two factors: Having been told that the retiring professor I would be replacing was hard of hearing, I made every effort to speak as loudly and clearly as I could. More importantly—as I was later told by the chairman of the committee—I was the only candidate who had a clear idea of how he would organize a nineteenth-century European intellectual history course. Interested as I was in political ideas, or in the political consequences of ideas, I said I would use the French Revolutionary tradition as my organizing principle, tracking support for or opposition to this tradition in various European countries and analyzing intellectual movements in their relationship to this tradition. I envisioned a course in which I could juxtapose the French and German political and intellectual traditions, a framework in which I could readily draw on my dissertation research on völkisch ideology. The fact that the Latin American specialist Lewis Hanke of the UMass history faculty was the president-elect of the AHA in 1974 didn’t hurt my chances of successfully competing with PhDs from much more prestigious universities, either!

I spent the academic year 1973-1974 writing my dissertation on Stein, Lienhard, and Chamberlain. Chamberlain was the most interesting and most important writer of the three. My unifying theme was the evolution of völkisch ideology from an apparently innocuous and high-minded anti-commercial aesthetic doctrine (Wagnerism) to a virulently racist and anti-democratic ideology (National Socialism) in the span of half a century, in which the trauma of the First World War was, of course, the main catalyst in the transition. The topic involved a thorough study of anti-Semitism, probably the most distinctive marker of German völkisch thought. The one consistent theme, I concluded, in all historical forms of anti-Semitism, from theological and Christian anti-Judaism to the lethal modern economic, political, and racial varieties, was the conviction that Jews were inherently selfish and “immoral,” refusing to accept the prevailing Christian religious creed or to conform to the conventional dictates of gentile society. If the political right stood for received tradition and existing arrangements in all areas of life, it was virtually inevitable that anti-Semitism would become a major ingredient in right-wing thought, and Jews the major scapegoats for all the disruptive changes that modernization, commercialization, democratization, industrialization, secularization, and urbanization entailed. The fateful radicalization of the anti-Semitic movement in Germany occurred in my view in 1920, not only because of the consolidation of Hitler’s leadership of the fledgling Nazi Party in that year, but because of the different reactions of the youthful leaders of the Nazi Party and their older conservative counterparts to the failure of the “Kapp Putsch” to overthrow the Weimar Republic in that same year. While the older conservative nationalists, despite their generalized anti-Semitism, were willing to work with those (few) conservative and German nationalist Jews who supported the establishment of a military dictatorship and an authoritarian government, the Nazis and their extremist allies attributed the failure of the coup precisely to the willingness of conservatives to cooperate with those Jews who shared their conservative and German nationalist ideology. The Nazis came to the fateful conclusion that their project of destroying the Republic and its democratic institutions—necessary preconditions in their view for reversing the results of the First World War and preparing for a renewed war of aggression—could only succeed if all cooperation with Jews, whether “conservative” or not, were suspended. The categorical extrusion of Jews from Germany (and eventually Europe) became in their view the indispensable prerequisite for German expansion.

As it happened, my intensive study of anti-Semitism coincided with the so-called Yom Kippur war in October 1973, which, after initial setbacks resulting from the surprise factor, turned into another decisive Israeli military triumph. The unquestioning American and European support for Israel brought into focus the peculiar symbiosis between Zionism and European anti-Semitism I had already discovered in the völkisch writers I had been studying (but surprisingly also in the works of Theodor Herzl, one of the pioneers of Zionism). On 20 October I tried to put this counter-intuitive symbiosis into words in my journal:

The connection between anti-Semitism and support for Israel: Israel is seen both as a convenient receptacle for the “excess” number of Jews in other countries of the world, but, more importantly, as a vehicle for instilling in Jews the “positive” values of nationalism and militarism. At the very least, support for Israel is seen as an effective way of defusing Jewish skepticism, pacifism, and social radicalism. At its worst it serves as a cover for anti-Semitism at home, and the whole complex of anti-intellectualism that accompanies it.

Although the fundamentalist Christian Zionism of the radical religious right was not yet the powerful political force it was destined to become at the end of the century and the beginning of the twenty-first century, the dynamic at work in the growth of this malignant reactionary movement was already clearly discernible.

The Yom Kippur war provoked a retaliatory boycott on oil exports by the oil-producing nations of the Middle East and led, temporarily, to long lines at gas stations here in the U.S. and Europe. Mama “loved the energy crisis,” as Ginny put it, which seemed to validate her own decision to give up driving a year or two before. She was impelled to this decision not only by the expense of maintaining a car, but also by her failing eyesight, which sometimes forced her to enlist the aid of her passenger(s) to determine whether the car she saw in the distance was coming toward us or going our way. Unbeknown to us at the time, the oil crisis marked a turning point in American economic fortunes, launching a period of “stagflation” that lasted well into the 1980s, and a redistribution of wealth upwards to the highest income groups that is still continuing today. However, the price of gas was still very inexpensive in the U.S. In 1974 our cross-country trip in our new Volkswagen bus to our new destination in San Diego cost us only a little over $100 in fuel.

I finished my dissertation in the spring of 1974. Steffi took the children on a trip to Germany to visit her mother and father in April, allowing me to devote every waking moment to the completion of this project. On April 5th I noted two “overlapping ambivalences” in the motivations I brought to my dissertation:

One, wanting not to fall into the trap of just joining the winning side and ritualistically condemning Chamberlain and Lienhard as precursors of National Socialism: wanting to show, in other words, the persuasive side of National Socialism. Secondly, wanting to condemn as strongly as I can similar forces on the American scene in the present. How to accomplish both?? I call these purposes ambivalent, because each serves to weaken the other.

In the end I was dissatisfied with the final product not because of the content, but because of its sloppy appearance. Trying to save the cost of a professional typist, I typed the entire manuscript myself on my old portable typewriter. The final copy was marred not only by the inadequacies of my superannuated machine, but also (as I later discovered) by the numerous typographical errors caused by my excessive haste just to get the damn thing done!

In Burlington, 1970-1971

Later that year, in November, our house in Irasburg became the source of a terrible row with my former colleague and political soul-mate at Lake Region, David LaRoche and his wife Jean. They had returned in June from a year’s tour of duty with an American aid agency in Laos, which turned out to be a front for the American government’s expansionist policies in Asia. David was very active that summer on the staff of the failed Senate election campaign of former governor Phil Hoff, for whom we had given, at David’s request, a well-attended house party in Irasburg. After the unexpected disappointment of Hoff’s defeat in November, David and Jean asked if they could stay in our now empty house in Irasburg for about two weeks until they had figured out their future plans (which eventually took David to a well-paying legislative staff position in Washington DC). Steffi was very unhappy at the prospect of their staying in her home while we were in Burlington. To her the idea of somebody else living there seemed, if not a defilement, at the very least a violation of our privacy. Although at heart I agreed with her, I found it impossible to say no. Denying good friends such a modest request would have given the lie to our protestations of solidarity and friendship, especially as they also offered to pay rent. But Steffi adamantly refused to accept any money for fear of legitimizing and perhaps prolonging their stay. In my journal I analyzed my disagreement with Steffi:

The ease with which I was überrumpelt (taken unawares) made things worse. It appeared [to Steffi] that I wanted only to play the role of magnanimous benefactor. And it is true that I could have refused David’s request only on the grounds of a selfish property fetishism that David probably knew I could not afford to embrace.

It was useless to try to persuade Steffi that a house serves just a utilitarian function, that it did no damage to have people living in it, that in fact it was good for the house. Her attitude toward the house, to objects in general, is much too aesthetic for that. Each object, even as mechanical an object as the stove, has its own intrinsic aesthetic value: it is there not only to be used, but also to be appreciated. If it is used in a purely utilitarian spirit it is devalued and profaned. Though she is worried about possible dirt (especially from their dog and cat), it is the spiritual devaluation that seems to weigh most heavily. In her mind everything is fragile, delicate, though when pressed to give an example, she cannot think of one. A radical refurbishing is now her only hope. “Ich werde alles rausreissen und neu streichen (I’m going to tear everything out and paint it new),” she said. “And then I’m going to stay there and then I never want to see you again.” By my action I had denied the sanctity and integrity of “home.”

Trina at the piano, 1970

What hurts, too, is the realization that what we would like to do but can’t for the time being – live at home in Irasburg – others can. It throws into bitter relief the dissatisfaction of our present way of life. It questions the very premise of a happy life – that one is doing what one wants to – while showing us how apparently easy it is to do what one wants to do.

And so, with all-too-evident reluctance, we gave the LaRoches permission to move in. But things did not go well.

David’s distressingly “political” side: calling to say that they had finished moving in and that everything was OK: I asked him if the broiler was on, and he said, yes, supper was cooking and all was fine. A moment later, after Jean had said something, he was forced to retract: “Could you repeat your instructions on the [propane] gas? There’s no gas coming in.” Apparently he had simply left the lighting of the stove to Jean, who must have said she knew how. His primary interest was to reassure me. Political principle number one: give the people what they want; make them think they’re getting what they want; tell them what they want to hear.

The dispute with the LaRoches reached a terrible climax after they had moved out, under not-so-subtle pressure from us, around Thanksgiving. I tried to maintain our friendship but had underestimated the degree to which they had found our conduct humiliating. Here is how I described the climactic end of our friendship in a journal entry on December 4th:

At Steffi’s insistence, I called Dave at 10 o’clock at night at the Mosher’s. He was breathing audibly hard when he came to the phone, and I was struggling with myself, too. At first, he was content to follow Jean’s example, or a pre-agreed plan, and spoke in a deliberately brusque and distant way. I asked, “Is anything the matter?” in order to have it out, but I should have waited until I had better control of myself. David said, “I’d like an explanation for the way you’ve treated us, the terse, unfriendly note, and so on.” Without reflecting, I blurted out what I had been thinking, vaguely feeling all the time that I must not back down, as I seem always to have done in relations with David. “Since we have so little money ourselves, I don’t see why we should support you.” – “Support us? You support us? You’ll never support us!” I tried to retract, but it was too late. “You son of a bitch, Rodi. You son of a bitch.” And he hung up. I tried to get him on the phone again, apologizing to Jean and explaining that I had not meant it that way, and had obviously chosen the wrong word in the heat of the moment. But Jean only hung up on me, too. “We’ve had enough of you. Goodbye, Rodi.”

My dilemma was, though I wasn’t aware of it at the time, that I could not give the real reason for our unfriendliness, the reason Dave and Jean were quick to sense: the fact that we (especially Steffi, of course) didn’t want anyone in our house. I had to find something wrong in the LaRoches and clumsily fastened on what was bound to humiliate him most. Now the whole hatred of his violent-prone temperament is concentrated on me. His present predicament, robbing him of his manhood, only aggravates his wound. Telepathy: sensing his hatred, fearing his violence (the symbol of his shotgun shells lined up on the bookshelf. In the old days, I suppose, I would, like Pushkin, have died in a duel.) The sexual symbolism of his intrusion into the house; also the symbol of bacteria and disease. My prophecy (in connection with the [unexpected rise of our] property taxes), “There are bound to be encroachments from outside.”

How property breeds bourgeois values! How my radicalism cracks when it is tested in actual practice! How our happiness and prosperity – our house –seems to invite disaster! And how those underneath, the repressed and excluded, are always right!

Dave and Jean proceeding through life in a series of moral confrontations, each one providing the energy for the next stage of life. Just after he moved in to our house he proudly announced that he had turned down an offer to teach English at North Country [in neighboring Newport]. It does not seem to him, as it does to me, that it is proper to take any job in order to pay your bills.

A few days later I added the following reflections:

What makes it so hard to bear is being in the wrong (particularly hard for someone who has tried to base his life on being in the right).

Realization that what makes David effective as an activist, as a political force, is that he won’t allow himself to be pushed around in the world, whereas I accept that as an inevitable part of life.

And thus I managed by writing about it to somewhat alleviate the pain.

Before our move to Burlington, we had made another visit to Annie Fisher, who had just celebrated her 85th birthday. On August 12th I wrote the following commentary on our visit:

Again the surprise to find her so alert and healthy-minded (meaning ornery and independent). It explains how she can survive in that moribund atmosphere for so many years. “I am dying by inches.” Lacking her mental stamina, the other old persons, whom Annie commandeers with absolute confidence, come in and get some strength from her. She has signed off her body long ago, seeming actually thereby to increase her ability to survive, since its vagaries have become somewhat irrelevant. Even though she was quite well able to get downstairs, she was very annoyed to have been pressured into it (for a birthday cookout on the front porch – her first time out in three years), and she obstinately refused to enjoy it. She still thrives on the love-hate relationships with her various sets of former neighbors, notably the Bedards, who took down her fence and made a hotbed on her property. Thank God for us she defended it! She is marvelously free of self-pity, and even when she says, as she did twice, “Life is sad,” she says it matter-of-factly and firmly, uncomplainingly. How different from old Mrs. Kahn, for whom I “baby-sat” in New York! She has certain stock jokes: “Body by Fisher,” for instance, or “I had an operation on my jaw, but it didn’t hurt my tongue any!” Her age puts things in perspective, too. She refers to Avis Harper, school board member and rather severe pillar of society, as “that little Harper girl.” “She’s an Irasburg girl, you know, Avis Pike. She’s been very good to me.” Even Doris Alexander [in her late sixties] is pushed down a generation.

That same August Olaf took me to visit a former colleague of his, the European historian Fred Krantz, now teaching at Concordia University in Montreal. Krantz had left Duke University out of protest against the Duke administration’s hostility to the student movement. I recorded our visit in my journal on August 21st:

Impressions of visit to Fred Krantz in Montreal, former colleague of Olaf’s at Duke where he was dismissed for his radical views: More Canadian than the Canadians. Struck by the suburban quality of his life, in such contrast to his alleged radicalism. “Showing off” not only the city of Montreal, but also the model apartments and shops in the rather exclusive complex where he lives (Ile de Soeurs). Apparently a rather doctrinaire Marxist: “Chomsky is the guru of the hippie youth today. He’s too anarchist for me.” Krantz is working on a modern European history text (to replace Palmer) from a Marxist point of view. “We have the most with-it department in America today. . . We’ve got quite an intellectual proletariat here.” He was very depressing about Vietnam: “It looks like the U.S. is going to win. It looks like they’re going to bring home the coon-skin. The revolution isn’t going to take place. Vietnam will stay divided.” He had an interesting theory about the First World War: “Germany should have won. Then there would have been a traditional settlement, like 1870.” He had a deep-seated resentment against Duke and in fact the South. “I hate those southerners. I hate WASPS.” Every time Olaf mentioned returning to Durham Krantz laughed, reaching a peak in a kind of falsetto scream, reminiscent of Howard Mosher. Both he and Don Ginter, another “exiled” colleague, had a barely discernible contempt, not for Olaf, but probably for his lack of radicalism. Yet, though I agreed with everything they said, I was surprised how much I preferred Olaf as a person . . .

Krantz and the French Canadians: He belittles the problem, or more exactly, seems unconcerned about it: “If the separatists win, it wouldn’t affect us a bit. I might have to teach my courses in French, but that wouldn’t matter.” A quote from the New York Review of Books on the New School of Social Research seems to apply to him: “Having fled persecution in their homelands, and having found a tolerable environment elsewhere, do they consequently evade all potentially embarrassing political involvement? Does their exile negate their engagement? The exile readily becomes an exilarch, that is to say, a sort of hereditary ruler in the place of exile, recapitulating the culture of the past so far as that is possible, while drawing strength from the mythos of persecution. At the same time the host society is held at bay. . . All is subordinated to the memory of the initial trauma.”

As it turned out, Krantz would later follow a left-to-right ideological trajectory similar to David Horowitz’s, though perhaps not quite so extreme. The erstwhile anti-war and civil rights activist became a staunch defender of the Israeli government, condemning critics of Israel’s apartheid policies and denouncing as “terrorists” students demonstrating against an appearance of former and future Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Concordia University in September 2002. Promoted to the position of Director of the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research, Krantz, the former supporter of the 1960s student movement, came to see youthful rebellion in support of Palestinian rights as a dangerous harbinger of fascism. But there were already signs of his coming defection from progressive causes back when we visited him in August 1970:

Krantz voting for Nixon: at the time he told Olaf it was to undermine the system; now he defends it as saving North Carolina from Wallace.

He fears most of all that the student movement is open to demagoguery from the right. He is suspicious of the mass appeal of rock festivals.

His car – the one he sold to Olaf – says as much about him as his words: fitted out with frills and eye-pleasing extras as well as devices to enhance its power. “It’s the biggest car on the road. I found out that for really very little extra money I could make it into something special.”

And already then he subscribed to The New Republic, “to keep up with the left libs.”

As much as I enjoyed studying – what luxury to devote full time to intellectual activity and cultivating the mind – it was not at all easy at my age to return to the subordinate status of student. What made it even more difficult was that quite a few of the profs who had joined the UVM faculty in the rapid expansion of the 1960s were younger than I was. I did not know it at the time, but my later Doktorvater (dissertation supervisor) at the University of Massachusetts, the intellectual historian Will Johnston, had graduated from Harvard two years after I did! By the time I finished my dissertation in 1974 he had already published several books! One of them, The Austrian Mind (1972) is still in print today. On September 2nd I recorded my impressions of my first days back in a university setting:

Remanded by Professor Schmokel for laughing when he said he didn’t know anything about the course in German history he was going to teach: “That’s an inside joke.”

The disagreeable twosome of history profs at the sectioning meeting in the gym: the task – entering students into sections on a large chart – turned them into petty and pompous functionaries. And how docile the students were!

Peculiar kind of awe or fear that Schmokel and Overfield seemed to have of me: Schmokel recommended that I not take German history until the second semester, since he didn’t feel he had enough to offer. Overfield discouraged me from attending his lecture, although presumably I will conduct a discussion group in his Western Civ course. Are they suspicious of me as a potential troublemaker?

The peculiarly strong difference that age makes in contact with students. I sometimes feel I belong to a different species.

Overfield, on taking the discussion sections himself, rather than having me lead them.”They pay so much tuition, I want to give them their money’s worth. I want to at least give them a professor.” And this after I had said I understood perfectly wanting to conduct the discussion sections in one’s own course. Overfield: “Oh no, it’s nothing that selfish.”

My feelings about returning to grad school at age 35 were ambivalent (an experience shared by so many women over the years who had devoted their twenties to raising a family). On the one hand I chafed under a hierarchical system that once again put me on the bottom rung at a time when my peers were becoming well established in their professional careers; on the other hand I understood that the perspective I gained “from below” and “from outside” gave me a certain psychological and perspectival advantage over those of my age cohort in academia who had never tasted failure and whose freedom of thought and political attitudes were constricted by institutional strictures to which they had to submit if they wished to advance in the profession. Although I felt I was being held at arm’s length by the faculty, this sense of exclusion was far outweighed by the delight I felt in finally having returned to a milieu that over the course of a lifetime would prove to be most congenial to my interests and aptitudes.

What do I remember from that year in Burlington? The local cause célèbre at UVM in the fall of 1970 was the student-led campaign in support of young Michael Parenti (b. 1933), a fierce critic of the Vietnam War, who had been denied tenure by the Political Science department. “Why aren’t you indicted? Why aren’t you in jail?” he challenged his faculty colleagues, many of whom also opposed the war, but the decision stood, and Parenti went on to a fine career as an investigative journalist and articulate critic of American imperialism.

My favorite class, or at least the most intriguing one, was an evening seminar given jointly by an Americanist, Jeremy Felt, and a Europeanist, Patrick Hutton. Felt, chairman of the department at the time, was a bit older than I was, and Hutton was a bit younger. I no longer remember the specific topic of the seminar, but in effect it was a comparative intellectual history course on certain ideas and ideologies in their American and European contexts. What made the course so interesting was less its content, though that was interesting enough, but rather the considerable variety and unconventionality of the students it attracted. One such character was a hippie girl named Gwen who always came to class with her well-behaved dog. One time she recommended LSD (“acid”) for the straight-laced Mr. Hutton’s cold! She was quite sincere: “It’ll really get rid of it fast.” Mr. Hutton was not one to take kindly to such scurrility, however. On December 11th I recorded his effort to put her in her place:

Hutton at his meanest last Wednesday evening. The tall “hippy” girl Gwen teased him for being so traditional – the atmosphere in class was light and genial at the time. Hutton paused, and it was obvious that he was collecting himself for a riposte. “If you knew what the word ‘traditional’ meant,” he said, with acid dripping from every word. Gwen did not speak again that class. The incident certainly proved that her criticism had found its mark.

I had my own troubles with Hutton the following spring when he downgraded a paper I had written on Rousseau for its inordinate advocacy of Rousseau’s ideas of participatory democracy. One of the books Hutton had assigned in the course was The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (1952) by J. L. Talmon, whose interpretation I criticized in my paper. Hutton had earned his PhD under George Mosse at the University of Wisconsin and shared his mentor’s political moderation and suspicion, at least at that stage of his career, of any challenges to middle-class values and conventions, whether from the left or the right. This fetishization of “balance” led me to the following rather sophistic reflection in my journal:

The “golden mean” or “golden rule” does not reject “extremes,” it validates them! It pays tribute to the fact that one’s behavior is constantly modified by “extremes” and in the absence of this modification all behavior is extreme. You can define your view as “moderate” because there are “extremes.”

Hutton had developed a specialization on the nineteenth-century French revolutionary leader Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881) on whom he later wrote a book critical of his ideas.

Hutton and Felt evinced an easy and genial rapport in class, based in part on corporate solidarity.

Felt and Hutton laughing gleefully at the thought that garbage collectors get paid more than college professors: “It looks like we chose the wrong profession.”

Felt had rather different limitations than Hutton, which I analyzed as follows:

The Felt syndrome: exposed for so long and on all sides to so much intellectual argumentation that his intellectual honesty no longer permits him to speak in anything but vague generalities and distinctions – such as optimistic vs. pessimistic. His confusion is genuine: because he sees so much, he sees only a maze: hence, perhaps also, his suspicion of what he calls the “New York Review of Each Other’s Books,” which he nevertheless conscientiously reads.

My most uncharitable summation of the Wednesday evening seminar I divulged only to my journal: “Mr. Glib (Hutton) and Mr. Simple (Felt) make up the team of Messrs. Superficial.”

Despite Steffi’s half-feigned objections to my studying German history – “Du hast uns nicht zu studieren (you have no business studying us)” – I had decided to make this my field of concentration, partly, of course, to achieve some clarity about my own background. The faculty member with whom I worked most closely was Wolfe Schmokel, the specialist for Germany in the UVM history department. Through his Doktorvater Hajo Holborn (1902-1969) at Yale via Friedrich Meinecke (1862-1954) in Berlin he proudly traced his disciplinary line of descent all the way back to the celebrated historian Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886). A thoroughly self-made man, Schmokel had obtained American citizenship by joining the U.S. Army directly from Germany. He was recruited into a unit formed in response to the Cold War and made up of European displaced persons from the East. One year younger than Olaf, he graduated from college (the University of Maryland in Iceland!) one year after me. He had been at UVM since 1962 and had published a book on Nazi colonial ambitions in Africa in 1964. We differed on almost everything, from the Parenti case to the student movement, but got along very well nonetheless.

Schmokel on Parenti: “I have spoken to a student who told me, ‘He preaches.’”

On the poster celebrating the Tet offensive, which Parenti had defended: “To glorify the victories of your enemy, that’s going a little far.”

“The trouble is that we take politics too seriously. We think that it can solve all questions. In politics there are no ends, only means.”

He worried that the Parenti controversy would adversely affect the town-gown relationship in Burlington, which up to then had been very good. The conservative Burlington Free Press indeed missed no opportunity to cast aspersions on Parenti and the anti-war cause he represented. Schmokel was also highly critical of the student movement, going so far as to cite the nationalist historian Heinrich von Treitschke (1834-1896) at length in class on the unshaven, uncouth liberal youth of the 1820s and 1830s. Schmokel: “Some of the puny prophets of today might do well to look back at this period, the early nineteenth century, for a much better discussion of what is going on today.” I saw his inclination to line up with power rather than to question it as the main difference between us. He, for his part, good-naturedly pronounced me to be “far gone.”

What I liked about Schmokel, despite his limitations, was that he seemed to recognize something in me. It is this feeling that a teacher ought to convey to his student. Of course, it may only have been my aristocratic descent that he admired. That was certainly the case with his wife Varian, a socialite whose first husband was related to the Biddles. “We heard a lot about the von Stackelbergs,” she said. Schmokel was impressed to have discovered, on his own, that one of our forebears had been the Russian representative to the Congress of Vienna. What Schmokel professed to hate most were intellectual snobs, whom he seemed to encounter with rather suspicious frequency. “I can remember my own revelation at Damascus very well,” he told me.

When I first got to Yale I was completely cowed. I had never been to college and I had always thought, if you have a historical problem, the way to solve it is to search for another fact, which is one perfectly valid approach to history. At Yale the other graduate students were talking about intellectual movements and concepts I had never even heard of. One day in a seminar the professor asked, “By the way, when was the Peace of Augsburg?” and nobody knew except little old me, and then I knew they were phonies.

Of course he hated the “new left,” which put him in a bit of a quandary in interpreting fascism. On the one hand he wanted to discredit the “new left” by associating them with fascism; on the other hand, perhaps as a result of his family background, he sought to portray Germany’s submission to fascism as not such an unnatural event. What seemed to anger him most was the Marxist concept of “false consciousness,” which for him illustrated the presumption of intellectuals thinking they knew what was best for the working class. He defended the right of people to allow themselves to be deluded or seduced into supporting policies or embracing values that objectively were not in their own best interests. I thought a quote from C. B. A. Behrend’s excellent book on the Ancien Regime in pre-revolutionary France captured Schmokel’s outlook very well: “. . .His belief in the virtues of bourgeois ideology, which indeed he does not see as an ideology at all but as the only correct way of looking at things.” But Schmokel was by nature quite tolerant and easy-going, the opposite of an ideologue – probably a result, as in the case of Papa, of his experience with politics during the war. He didn’t let our ideological differences get in the way of friendship and good relations.

The faculty member who made the greatest impression on me was the preeminent Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg (1926-2007). Although I never had a chance to take a course from him, I heard him at several university functions. One that particularly sticks out in my mind was a panel discussion on the 100th anniversary of the end of the Franco-Prussian War and the unification of Germany in the spring of 1971, at which Schmokel was also a panelist. Hilberg was a commanding presence. He spoke with the kind of authority that only comes from deep conviction and personal experience. His talk was mesmerizing, not so much because he had a way with words, but because he spoke from the soul.

A most enjoyable aspect of my return to graduate school was my exposure to books that I might never have read if they had not appeared on course syllabi. I was very impressed, for instance, by Erik Erikson’s (1902-1994) Young Man Luther (1962), a book viewed by some historians as an unwarranted encroachment on their turf. Schmokel dismissed the whole genre of “psychohistory” as faddish and only marginally legitimate. “After all, you can’t put dead historical figures on the couch.” To me Erikson’s book demonstrated how rewarding a psychoanalytical perspective could be. I loved Erikson’s characterization of Luther’s “secret furious inviolacy.” Some of his insights were more banal, of course, but sound nonetheless: “Fathers, if they know how to hold and guide a child, function somewhat like guardians of the child’s autonomous existence.” One of his statements would have even more meaning for me a few years later, when I experienced the dissolution of our marriage: “Whatever ends in divorce loses all retrospective clarity because a divorce breaks the Gestalt of one love into the Gestalten of two hates.” I recognized myself in the following rather uncomplimentary description of Luther as “one of those addicts and servants of the word who never know what they are thinking until they hear themselves say it, and who never know how strongly they believe what they say until somebody objects. . . Hearing his own words had inspired his convictions.” I could readily empathize with the following piece of advice: “Many individuals should not do the work they are doing, if they are doing it well at too great inner expense. Good work it may be in terms of efficiency; but it is also bad works.” I recognized our own family dynamics in Erickson’s analysis: “In truly significant matters people, and especially children, have a devastatingly clear, if mostly unconscious perception of what other people really mean, and sooner or later royally reward real love and take well-aimed revenge for implicit hate. Families in which each member is separated from the others by asbestos walls of verbal propriety, overt sweetness, cheap frankness, and rectitude tell one another off and talk back to each other with minute and unconscious displays of affect – not to mention physical complaints and bodily ailments – with which they worry, accuse, undermine, and murder one another.”

Another book from which I learned a lot was Peter Pulzer’s The Origins of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (1964). It revealed to me how closely modern (and Christian) antisemitism were related to animosity against the emancipatory values of the left: equal and inalienable rights for all, democracy, internationalism, liberalism, socialism, secularism, indeed the whole set of social and political allegiances emanating from the Enlightenment and French Revolution. It also revealed to me how instrumentalized the charge of antisemitism had become after the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, when it was the left that was increasingly accused of antisemitism for standing up for Palestinian rights. It surely is one of the great ironies of history that today it is the Likud Party in Israel that represents the greatest political continuity of any governing party in the West with the ethnic nationalism of the European far right before the Second World War.

Another book that made quite an impression on me was Ernst Nolte’s (b. 1923) Three Faces of Fascism (1963; English translation, 1967), the book that launched this former high school teacher’s reputation as a historian and legitimated the notion of a generic fascism manifesting itself in varying forms in the 1920s and 1930s in every European nation with the exception of the Soviet Union. However, I instinctively questioned his judgment in identifying Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) as the progenitor of fascism. Only later, after Nolte’s successive works documented his increasing shift to the right, did I realize that his deprecatory interpretation of Nietzsche was a function of his efforts to exculpate the Christian conservatism that had been so instrumental in the fascists’ rise to power all over Europe.

On June 8, 1971, Mama’s sometime partner Connie Sherwin died of liver failure in the hospital in Newport. Mama had already moved out of her house and back into her shack (and after the fire, a trailer) on her own land, adjacent to Connie’s farm, in April 1968. In June 1969 I wrote of their feud:

The Mama-Connie affair come full circle: eight years ago Connie was attracted to Mama because of the goat in her house, the unconventionality that freed her from her New Yorker dead end. Now she courts the approval of the townies by making fun of the goat in Mama’s house.

Their relationship had undergone many ups and downs, and Connie was still hoping, shortly before the unexpectedly sudden end of her life, to persuade Mama to move back in with her. But Mama had a stubborn streak and rejected all invitations and inducements, even to the point of subsisting, for lack of money to buy food, on corn flakes in the winter of 1970-1971, as we did not find out until after our return from Burlington at the end of the semester in May.

Trini with Cowie, Mama's trailer in the background, and Minicucci's new house

Last impressions of Connie: driving Mama home from the library [Mama had volunteered as librarian in Albany] one day last year: Connie is walking up the hill toward [her neighbor] Roland Lawrence’s. I slow down. She sees us, and, instead of ignoring us as expected, waves and makes a gesture as if to speak to us when we stopped. I ask Mama whether she wanted to stop. She says no, and I pick up speed as we go by. Shortly thereafter I vow to stop next time, no matter what Mama says, but there is no next time.

We never were closer to Connie than at the time that Mama and she broke up. Steffi had already prepared an Easter present before we heard that Mama had moved out. She asked us, indirectly, to help persuade Mama to return. “What made her leave?” she asked. I said it probably was her drinking. “But I’ve been drinking ever since she knows me.” Shortly thereafter Mama successfully pressured us to break relations with Connie. “Talking badly about me is the passport to her house.”

Her inferiority to Mama; she was in the wrong because she was weaker.

Mama lost her voice (for about three weeks) from the moment she heard of Connie’s death. “At five after eight Kate Davis drove up and said Connie had died at ten to eight,” Mama reported. “I immediately went with her to call [Connie’s brother] Bob, and when I got to the phone I had no voice.”

Steffi attended the funeral a few days later, but I did not go. On June 13 I outlined what I thought would be a good plot for a novel:

Story of Connie’s funeral: Unable, despite the instructions she left, to prevent a ceremony at which Mama plays a leading part, sitting at graveside, in the “seats of honor,” from which she would have been rudely dislodged if Connie were alive. Playing hostess afterward in the house she deserted more than three years ago. Returning in triumph to live there and “run” the farm she was not permitted to run when Connie was alive. Will she permit Connie’s cows on her land [a constant source of quarrels while Connie was alive]? Mama’s main complaint against Connie was that she went back on their original bargain – to farm together, using Connie’s cows and barns, and Mama’s land. It developed into a struggle for dominance, for who was to have the say-so. For Connie the need to play the “male role” was probably greatest. She wanted to take care of Mama, and certainly did for a time. Psychologically she was more dependent on Mama than Mama was on her. She behaved as she did to Mama, because she wanted to make Mama equally, or more, dependent on her. But she could not get Mama to return on her, Connie’s, terms. The only thing that could make Mama come back was her death. Now it is Mama who is taking care of Connie, or what’s left of Connie. Mama suffered enough, no doubt, before reaping the harvest of her constancy. Her life is an object lesson on how to survive without worrying about it, or even trying very hard. To the superstitious it might seem that fate always rescues her just in the nick of time. And only last week I worried about the fact that the refrigerator which we procured for her (for a dollar at auction) had no shelves, and that with the hot weather her trailer would be invaded by the mosquitoes and black flies that find so many excellent breeding places in the vicinity!

A week later I commented on

Mama’s defenselessness, it seemed, seeing her again for the first time after Connie’s death. Aged in one way, yet more childlike in another way (there is no contradiction). For the first time I thought I could recognize what Connie must have found so attractive about her, that quality so entirely concealed behind a front of abusive anger and vituperation.

Steffi’s refusal to look at Mama while she (Mama) was talking. This gesture, which I generally approve as a necessary method of retaining independence, surprised me now and brought me back to the reality of Mama’s strength. I had expected Steffi to pity her.

Perhaps the grain of truth in Steffi’s remark, when I asked her why she didn’t want me to go to Connie’s funeral, is what humiliated me so: “Ich habe Angst du sagst etwas Peinliches zu Mama (I’m afraid you’ll say something embarrassing to Mama).”

Mama with Steffi, 1970

Connie’s brother, to whom Connie left the farm, asked Mama to run it until he could find a buyer. This meant that, ironically, several of our family get-togethers that summer were in Connie’s house, where Mama had lived from 1964, after her first fire, until 1968. Mama now emphasized her cohesion with Connie, perhaps to remove the potential stigma of living in the house to which she had refused to return while Connie was alive. Her conversation was now sprinkled with, “We did this, we did that.” Faithful not unto death, I thought, but after death. Gathering at Connie’s house made me somewhat uncomfortable, not so much because it seemed a violation of Connie’s memory, but rather because it acknowledged the power that Mama had to determine whether and when we were permitted to visit Connie’s home.

Connie’s death gave us four “children” the opportunity to pay off the mortgage on Mama’s land, a right that Connie (who had taken out the mortgage in her own name with the bank in Orleans) had denied us in order to maintain Mama in a state of at least partial financial dependency even after Mama’s steadfast refusal of Connie’s repeated offers of financial support if Mama would return to her. After her death, Connie’s brother was happy to be relieved of the monthly mortgage payments on Mama’s land. In an effort to retain her financial independence Mama had previously sold about 25 choice acres of her property to “flatlanders” (the Minicuccis) from Connecticut, much to the dismay of us “children.” Minicucci built a cabin in a very visible location on his newly acquired land for his family to visit during hunting season and vacations. To avoid having to sell off further parcels to support herself and pay the taxes, Mama decided to deed her property to her four children in return for the right to its use for the rest of her life. In the summer of 1972 Aunt Temple generously had a brand-new three bedroom ranch house built for Mama on the farthest reaches of her property near the Black River, along with a small gambrel-roofed barn for her animals, mostly goats and sheep, with a hayloft on top. Aunt Temple’s original intention was to reside with Mama in Vermont at least part of the year, but over the years her stays grew ever shorter as she sought to avoid any friction with Mama. Olaf, the only one of us without a foothold in Vermont at the time, subsequently bought out his chronically impecunious siblings as co-owners of Mama’s property, and Aunt Temple deeded the house and the barn to him later as well. Olaf, in turn, took over the obligation for Mama’s welfare. By paying off Mama’s last outstanding contributions to qualify for social security (Mama had paid into the system in the late 1940s and early 1950s while working at the Briscoes and at various odd waitressing jobs) he enabled Mama to draw monthly social security checks at age 62 in 1974, thus assuring her a steady, if minimal, source of income that would make her economically independent, though not entirely self-sufficient, for the rest of her life. Olaf benefited as well by claiming her as a dependent on his income tax form and gaining possession of her 150 acre property with house and barn.

That summer Steffi and I again made the rounds of an ever-increasing number of crafts fairs, a practice we had begun in the summer of 1969 at an annual juried fair sponsored by a consortium of craftsmen in the picturesque town of Bennington in southern Vermont. The site of the fair shifted to Rhinebeck, New York, in the summer of 1971 to accommodate the growing number of exhibitors.

The new sign in front of our house.

John Stackelberg, 1972

I had noticed some time ago that Mama’s attitudes were often quite conservative, at least compared to mine. I thought, for instance, that her attitude toward American crimes in Vietnam was excessively forgiving (no doubt because they paled in comparison to the crimes she had witnessed in Germany during the Second World War), and I was shocked by her refusal to condemn with what I thought was appropriate harshness the young people involved in the nightrider attack on the Johnson home in the Irasburg Affair. Paradoxical as it may sound, Mama’s conservatism was a function of her growing tolerance for all types of people, even the narrow minded and reactionary natives who were still well represented in the Northeast Kingdom in those days. She had the optimistic and progressive conviction that people were basically good, though she never hesitated to point out their corruptions and mistakes. Mama was a bit of a misanthrope, but the opposite of a cynic. She saw through sham and delusion clearly enough, but despite ritual exclamations of “it’s hopeless” or “it’s useless,” she never gave in to pessimism or bitterness. Hence there was no contradiction between her penchant for personal and political criticism and her sometime acceptance of eccentric right-wing views. She did temper her apologetics for the Vietnam War in the 1970s, but her growing disenchantment with the war was often expressed rather indirectly, in such statements as, “I’m sick of war. It’s the funniest thing. I can no longer read about war.” Even Aunt Temple, who remained hawkish for a longer period and mocked my pacifist views, was beginning to change. “This war has lasted entirely too long,” she conceded, though not yet quite ready to have it shortened by pulling out rather than by applying greater force. The publication in June of 1971 of the Pentagon Papers did much to legitimate the anti-war movement and led me to record the following observation in my journal: “Suddenly my article, calling for governments to act under the same rules and standards that govern the conduct of individual relations, doesn’t seem so childish, silly, naïve anymore.”

Trina, Pferdi, and I with our new Franklin stove.

Mama’s life may be said to have consisted of unfulfilled dreams, nicely captured (along with Mama’s personal authority, her sense of humor, and her propensity to tease) by my sister Betsy in two vignettes she wrote in 1970 and subsequently sent to me:

I was living in my mother’s hand-made tarpaper shack [in 1966]. It was hard to keep it clean but one could manage it. All around the shack, however, was a tumble of mess and ruins from the old burned-down farmhouse. Wood lay all over, bricks, papers, it was not a pretty sight. At times I was very depressed by my fate which had brought me to this pass. However, there were times without compare.

Every afternoon my mother came down to feed her animals and I always very formally asked her in for a cup of tea. My mother made a big point of not coming in unless she knocked, or I asked her in. She said: “Yes, put the water on, I’m dying of thirst.” It was an extremely mild November afternoon and my mother suggested we drink our tea outdoors. We did. There we sat, behind us a tumble-down tarpaper shack and all around us a terrible mess.

Suddenly my mother said: “How do you like my rose garden?” Of course, I saw none, and I said so. “Why, I can see it plainly, the vines are only half-way up so far,” my mother insisted and still I resisted. “All I can see is a terrible mess,” I said with a certain vehemence. “Why Betsy, I can’t understand that. I see that rose garden so very clearly, not only the flowers, but the steps that lead down to them, because it’s a sunken garden. You do see that, don’t you?” I was becoming infected as I knew I would and I said, very reluctantly, “Yes, I am beginning to see your rose garden, Mama,” and once converted, I became quite enthusiastic and we added many details of perfection to the scene.

“And don’t you love living in my mansion, Betsy? It’s so spacious, three stories high with lots of extra rooms.” For one minute I wanted to resist again and say, No, I don’t like your tarpaper shack, but instead I really caught the fever and saw the beautiful house.

I don’t live there anymore, but every time I go back to visit I see that lovely sunken garden in front of my mother’s beautiful three-story white house.
*****
Yesterday I visited my mother, and it was another classic encounter. As I was driving down she stood in the middle of the road to see who it was. When she recognized my car, she turned away, and I again felt that sinking feeling – Oh my God, she’s in a bad mood. Well, I’ll tell her I can only stay five minutes.

However, she recovered herself and before I had even stopped, she said: “How very opportune. I need you to stand in front of that pig who is trying to get out, while I get nails and a hammer.” So, of course, I did. There I stood, waving a stick at a grunting pig, and thinking, you never know, now, you never do.

That done, I said, could we take a small walk, and my mother jumped at the chance. Half way across the field I knew my dog was getting tired. I suggested we turn back, but no, my mother said we had hardly begun, and I knew we must continue.

We walked. Suddenly my mother stopped, looked all around her at the sloping valley and rolling hills and said: “This is my house.” For one moment I was very startled, no house being visible, but then I said, “It’s very lovely, you chose a beautiful spot.”

“Yes, I like my houses to be protected.” — “I can certainly understand that,” I said and wondered what would come next. It came:

“Oh well, you know,” my mother said, “this is only one of my thirty houses.”

I have pretty much given up resisting my mother and I said: “I didn’t know, Mama. You must show me your other houses too.”

“Well, that would take at least five hours,” my mother said in all seriousness. “I guess we don’t have time for that today then,” I said. “By the way, is this a two-story house?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” and with a sudden loss of interest we moved on.

My dog, Tamara, was very tired by now and I had to pick her up.

“Why not put her in your purse?” asked my mother. So I did. There sat Tamara, only her head looking out.

“She’s not completely happy, but she’ll settle,” announced my mother. After that we walked in silence back to her trailer and I finished the visit with a cup of tea and two pieces of bread with honey.”

In the spring of 1971, after two years of trying, Steffi finally got pregnant again. Our son Nicholas Olaf, named after my two brothers, was born on November 1st.

Nicki, November 1971

Trina nursing her Teddy

Trina with her new brother

Trina with Granny, Christmas 1971