by Guy Stern
Hence, the steady insertion of another guest professor in Cincinnati proved to be a boon to our program. But one of them was marred with a tragic ending. Hans-Georg Richert came to us from the University of Uppsala in Sweden. He became not only a trusted colleague and collaborator but also a fellow participant in leisure activities. Both of us were dedicated swimmers, rivals at the ping-pong table, and each other’s confidantes. I advised him to hold on to his admirable wife (this advice didn’t prove successful), and he advised me to run, not walk, to the nearest exit from my marriage. He also played locus parentis to my son when obligations took me out of town.
But Hans-Georg was bedeviled by an unwarranted guilt feeling. As a German he assumed the guilt of his countrymen in relationship to the Holocaust and felt that I and my fellow survivors were constant reminders of his people’s complicity, which, of course, didn’t apply to him at all. He was only a youngster when the Nazis came to power. Occasionally he would return to that self-imposed burden in his conversations with me.
Yet our first meeting started beneath a cloudless sky. Hans-Georg had been recommended to me by Dr. Fritz Schlawe, his predecessor as visiting professor. “He has an unquenchable sense of humor and a foible for practical jokes,” Fritz had told me. Guided by his friend’s characterization, I came up with my own version of a reception marked by high jinx. I wrote Hans-Georg that he and his wife would be picked up by a university car and taken directly to his campus apartment. I didn’t tell him that I would be awaiting him there. The couple arrived on time to find me in their apartment and I introduced myself with a gross bit of deception: “You must be Mr. and Mrs. Richert. They told me to meet you here and lend you a hand in your move.” They gratefully accepted. When the task was completed, Hans-Georg pulled out his wallet to tip the handyman. That was the moment to drop my incognito. There were startled looks, then unrestrained laughter. My prank set the mood for our relationship.
His divorce, which took place about three years after our first encounter, didn’t appear to change his behavior. In fact, after his wife’s departure, Hans-Georg had no trouble finding solace with one of our graduate students. But then his guilt feelings took over at an ever-increasing rate. When he first threatened suicide, I reminded him of his Christian faith: “You Christians are told that Jesus died for everyone’s sins.” My exculpation didn’t hold for long. As his determination seemed to grow, I appealed to his friendship with me. “I want you around when Ambassador Pauls comes here to give me an award. You must be one of the speakers at that occasion!” He promised and kept his word. But a few months later, a similar appeal failed. My department lost an inspiring teacher. I lost one of my closest friends and confidants. I believe Hans-Georg Richert could be considered yet another victim of that indescribable evil that was the Nazi regime.
Hans-Georg’s death increased my sense of loneliness, especially since neither Cincinnati nor Wayne State helped me to break down the walls that restrained a president or vice president in his explorations of social contacts. Dating a faculty member was encumbered by a code of do’s and don’ts. Nevertheless, it was through Wayne State that my future wife Judy and I met. On a wintry day I received a call from one of the university’s trustees. “Could we have lunch today? There are a few things I’d like to discuss with you. We could drive to the German Club. Good German meals there!” I accepted with alacrity. The promise of a good German meal would mean a most desirable change from my amateurish self-cooked meals.
I also had a commitment later that day. Lillian Genser, the director of Wayne’s Center for Peace and Conflict Studies, was giving a dinner at a local Italian restaurant for a dignitary from Washington, DC. As provost, I was to extend the greetings of the university. But when my luncheon host dropped me off on campus after a meal “both good and plenty,” I felt that another copious meal, Italian this time, would disable me. I called Lillian and made my elaborate and lame excuses; but as the time of the meeting approached, conscience made a coward of me. What I had done reminded me of our army’s definition of “dereliction of duty.” I called Lillian and agreed to attend after all.
Much later I found out that my vacillation had saddled my good colleague with a major headache. She had given my “seat of honor” to another university official; what to do now with me? She asked one of her board members, a charismatic teacher, to sit next to me. “No way,” Judy stormed. “I came here to see old friends. And what the hell is a provost anyway?”
“Someone you don’t want to offend!” Lillian said. She won out. So did I! Judy and I sat next to each other at dinner, and I felt I had never met a more dynamic, independent personality. I thought I heard a line from a well-known musical invade my brain. “Someday she’ll come along, the girl I love.” (I have a penchant for Old Tin Pan Alley songs.) Judith Owens, née Edelstein, was the jewel her maiden name signified in German. A determined woman, yet with infinite kindness and humanity. Imposing and attractive, she proved her mettle as early as childhood. She and her younger brother Sol were the offspring of deaf parents; both had lost their hearing due to accidents early in their lives. Judy became her parents’ guides through a bewildering city, their purchasing agents, their interlocutors, and in some respects, their teachers. And some of those functions she also assumed for her brother. Yet her parents did get by and were able to provide for their children. Judy’s father was a skilled mechanic and held a lifetime job with one of Detroit’s auto manufacturers.
In a world of silence at home, she became an inveterate reader and radio listener. She excelled in high school and acquired three degrees from Wayne State University. The last one she earned, a doctorate of law, can stand as a symbol of her resolve and idealism. As an undergraduate, she had majored in history and political science. I have never seen her stumped by any question about US history and government. Then she acquired a master’s of education and a job at a high school in suburban Royal Oak, which she held for forty years. (Inevitably, at our outings to restaurants in Royal Oak, admiring graduates at various stages of adulthood would surround our table and cause our meals to grow cold on our plates.)
In the suburbs and in municipal Detroit, Judy joined social causes, such as Model Housing, and movements against war and racial discrimination. At times she would integrate her extramural causes into her classes. She took classes to local court sessions and to the state capital in Lansing. She helped organize trips to Washington, DC, for her seniors, with built-in attendance at sessions of the House and Senate, followed by meetings with elected members. As a one-time member of the Fulbright Screening Committee for Germany, I marveled when she received three successive Fulbright Summer grants to different countries in Southeast Asia. She would pass on the insights she gained to her students and enlivened her classes by showing them photographs of her meetings with Madame Ghandi or of her group of Fulbrighters as they, on her initiative, crossed the Khyber Pass from Pakistan to Afghanistan. Judy had guts. I urged her, in my strongest voice, to come home at once when riots broke out in Sri Lanka. She brushed me off.
One curious episode during our courtship had sped us along on our way toward marriage. Judy was visiting me in my campus apartment. We both knew, of course, that we were twenty years apart in age—which had not bothered my young future wife. We were talking about the signs of the zodiac, in whose predictions she believed and I did not. “When is your birthday?” Judy asked, pursuing her astrology. “January 14,” I answered. She first looked at me in astonishment, then burst out laughing. “You sly fox. You must have looked at my driver’s license,” she concluded. Even though I was a nonbeliever, the fact that we shared a birthday and were both born under the sign of Capricorn greatly advanced our romance.
We were married on July 19, 1979, in front of the botanical conservatory of Belle Isle, where Detroiters of all backgrounds would congregate, especially during the summer. When choosing the site of her wedding, Judy wanted to set a symbol of her dedication to the City of Detroit. As a further symbol she asked her favor
ite rabbi, Dannel Schwartz, to officiate along with Damon Keith, a frequent and admired professor of hers during her studies at Wayne Law School, as well as Head Judge of the Ninth US District and one of the highest ranking African Americans in the legal profession. Judy had planned everything. But our wedding, as my Associate Provost E. Burrows Smith put it, turned into a happening.
Rabbi Schwartz, who had never been to Belle Isle, had apparently lost his way. Our numerous wedding guests, smoldering in the hot July sun, were getting restive. Judy took command. “Damon,” she addressed her former professor, “there is no sign of the rabbi. You will have to marry us.”
“But I have never done that,” he protested.
“All you have to do is to ask us whether we want to get married and then pronounce us man and wife.”
Judge Damon Keith took his stand on the balustrade. As if in a rehearsed drama, Rabbi Schwartz entered at that exact moment. Helping hands catapulted him up the balustrade. The rabbi and the judge were now collaborating. The rabbi named the team Schwartz and Schwartz, making a pun of the basic German meaning of the latter term (it means “black”). You might think the ceremony now proceeded without interruption, but it did not. Halfway through the proceedings, a beautiful young African American lady, formally attired, was climbing up the slope, bearing a large, unwieldy picture frame. “Your Honor, Rabbi, Ladies and Gentlemen! I am here on behalf of the Michigan State legislature. Its members heard of this event in advance. By these greetings they extend to you, Judge Keith, the right to confer marriages for one-half year.”
Both the learned judge and Judy, the legal scholar, were dumbfounded. They did not know or did not recall that the right to marry people at that time belonged to the states and not to the federal government and its judiciary. With that additional document in hand, our marriage was legal!
The marriage, so dramatically launched, soon turned into a pleasant routine. Family ties as well as higher education and social problems were our continuing topics of conversation at home. In the evenings we often sat side by side, correcting tests and students’ papers and moaning in unison. But we became by no means sedentary. The trips Judy planned took me on new routes: a cruise circling the Greek islands and another to Jamaica; a visit to Crested Butte, Colorado; and overseas trips to China and Japan. We did crazy things together. When an airline offered a bargain on a flight from Detroit to New York, we booked an early flight to the city, returning at night the same day. In between we burst into the birthday party of Jonathan Dudley, a former student of mine at Denison and now a successful composer—it was probably just a pro forma invite—but we thought it would be fun.
From the peak of mixing with delightful and sophisticated friends, new and old, during that weekend, we tumbled, like all Americans and international well-wishers of our nation, into a tragedy.
September 11, 2001, started like any other Tuesday in my office at Wayne State. I was reviewing my notes on the paintings of the Romantics, updating them a bit; a wonderful new study had appeared since the last year, and my student assistant was preparing some handouts. No problem. I had an hour-and-a-half before my sixty-odd students, enrolled in German Cultural History Part II, would begin to arrive for class. The telephone rang and I heard the frantic voice of my wife on the line: “Guy, I’m rushing to an unscheduled high school assembly; something horrible is occurring in New York. Turn on your radio!”
Across the hallway of Manoogian Hall, I already heard the blaring of broadcasts. As the coverage of the attack on the Twin Towers continued—the horror of lives lost, the cries of the bereaved muting the announcers—I said to myself that to walk into that auditorium with replicas of serene Moritz Schwindt paintings would approach a travesty. And to dismiss the class? That would be cutting a bond between me and the students. My mind went to wondering how my friends and colleagues, here and abroad, were reacting to the disaster. Cultural history was in the making.
I rushed down to our language lab, laudably up-to-date with the most technical innovations for the pedagogy of ancient and modern language departments. I found its director, Dallas Kenny, immediately. “Dallas,” I said, “Would it be possible to pipe the German coverage of this horrific event into my classroom?” “No problem, Guy. I can do that in an instant.” And he came through.
We witnessed how our national mourning was shared by an allied nation whose leaders expressed their sympathy and outrage. We had the feeling that we Americans weren’t alone in our grief. And then came a tangible reinforcement of that sentiment. The city of Frankfurt designed an artistic poster expressing sympathy. A colleague of that city’s university, whom I’d informed of my classes watching the event on German national TV, sent me a copy of the poster by Federal Express. Before mounting it, I had each student sign it, and then made copies for them as a memento of a national tragedy experienced in common. The poster carried the message: “Americans, the City of Frankfurt stands with you.”
I reported all of this to Dallas and thanked him for making such a meaningful contribution to my classroom via his up-to-date expertise. “Technology,” he said, “can help you teachers in the classroom. And you did the right thing by your students on that day.”
I like to think so, because on another occasion, in my penultimate year of teaching, I truly failed them. My class in German Cultural History, Part I, began as all those many ones before. My students and I had reached the necessary comfortable feeling with one another. But then one of my female students came to my office hour, scheduled right before the lecture running from 6 to 8:30 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The late hour accommodated that large cohort of working students who could only attend the university after work. “I am troubled,” she said right at the start of our meeting. “Perhaps I can help you,” I offered. “I don’t know,” she answered. And then her story came out. One of the male students in that class was stalking her, following her at the conclusion of each session. “Professor Brostrom, whose Russian class ends at the same time as ours, and I will walk you to your car,” I offered. “Perhaps that will discourage him.”
But she was back again when my next office hour came around. “He’s still at it?” I asked. “Yes, in fact it’s gotten worse. He found out where I work. I’m a waitress in a restaurant at the Oakland Shopping Mall. He came there and asked the headwaiter to be seated at my station. Fortunately when I told him the trouble I was having, my boss asked one of the other waitresses to serve him.”
Wayne State had evolved the right procedure to deal with her concerns on campus, but had no tool to deal with the rogue student at her place of work. He must have sensed that I had a hand in protecting his intended victim and gave me a hateful look when by chance, we passed each other. I was but just one example of a bystander to an incident involving inappropriate behavior toward an innocent young woman, and had become a further, if indirect, victim of his hateful behavior. My student evaluations from that class were the worst of my teaching career. The whole incident had gotten to me, and I was gripped with fear. And I was afraid each time I came to campus that the obviously disturbed student might escalate his antisocial actions. My classroom presentations became uninspired. Was I still the same person who had dealt with 9/11? I had found a pragmatic and kind solution for one student and let down fifty-nine others. But finally, after talking to colleagues who had had similar experiences, I was able to put the incident behind me and regain faith in my teaching ability.
That opportunity to commiserate and consult with colleagues, and, more positively, to find inspiration in their work, gave me unalloyed pleasure. Year in and year out I could be found at one or more gatherings of our clan of academics. I have never lost my zest for them. All our conventions had an unwavering purpose. In addition to being a job market (we called it a slave market), it allowed us to acquire expertise beyond what we learned in classrooms and seminar rooms. At MLA conventions I learned of the various new approaches to dissecting literature, gaining further insights into fiction I previously felt I’d fu
lly understood. I also learned new methods of pedagogy, particularly in relation to the technology that was becoming important to the profession.
I will cite one example of my sink or swim approach to technology. It is, of course, an imperative of good teaching that you are and also stay ahead of your students. But three years before my retirement in 2003, I noticed that the brightest of my charges were not lagging far behind. I went to see Amanda Donigian, the secretary of the German section of our department—and everyone’s confidante. “Well, Professor Stern,” she answered, barely able to hide her laughter, “your students have discovered the Internet,” she explained. “Good grief,” I said. “I’d better learn something about computers! I don’t even know how to turn on that monster!” “That’s easy to fix,” she said. “They give lessons at our Office for Teaching and Learning.” During my next semester’s sabbatical I called the Office for Teaching and Learning’s director, Dr. Donna Green. I had had some contact with her in the past. “I need to become computer literate,” I told her. “High time!” she cracked, “Let’s make a date.”
One week later at her office, she introduced me to one of the tutors, a graduate student a bit older than the average graduate assistants. “Karen Frade, Guy Stern,” she introduced us. “But most of us are on a first-name basis around here. She can work with you all day.”
She was unrelenting as a teacher, but used subtle psychology when my attention lagged after lunch. Good God, she complimented me more than my just desserts, when I discovered an alternate way to complete a procedure by twisting the wheel on my mouse. I pulled out of my slump.