by Guy Stern
The session ended at five. We went downstairs for a cup of coffee. “Karen,” I asked her, “are you full-time at the Office for Teaching and Learning?” “No, I’m a part-timer,” she replied. “Do you have another job as well?” I asked. “No,” came the reply, “but I am married and have responsibilities at home. My husband is Peter Frade, the head of the Department of Mortuary Science.” I looked at her through bleary eyes and quipped, “Karen, after this day of cramming a week’s worth of information into one day, I’m ready for your husband!”
My wife and I occasionally ran into the Frades at faculty functions. As her obedient pupil, I told her each time of my halting progress on the computer.
The advance in technology was one of the reasons that made convention-going an essential part of my annual routine. A venerable German proverb tells us:
Meister werden ist sehr schwer,
Meister bleiben noch viel mehr!
To become a master is a chore,
To stay a master, even more!
Convention halls were also fabulous meeting grounds with old friends and, as the years progressed, for reunions with my students and former colleagues.
Sometimes I made a revealing discovery about hidden agendas, for example, the propagandistic efforts of another country trying to influence us Americans, even down to the visitors at a local conference. In 2012 I was asked to give an address and to receive an award at the annual meeting of the Michigan Council of Social Studies, held that year in the medium-sized town of Kalamazoo, Michigan. I went through the exhibition hall, and lo and behold, a certain foreign country had mounted more bookstands than any American publisher. Obviously that country, the People’s Republic of China, was trying to get its Communist doctrine to all high school and college students via its books in English.
It would be impossible to chronicle all the conventions that I enjoyed (and occasionally abhorred) throughout all the years, but there are some that have stuck in my mind, possibly because they became the catalyst for surprising discoveries. So it was with one of the annual Kentucky Foreign Language Conferences held on the campus of the University of Kentucky. I’d given a paper on a topic related to my favorite subject, the writings of exiles from German-speaking countries. The ever gracious German Department head, Paul K. Whittaker, had invited out-of-town professors of German to his home for a reception. In the course of the evening, he soon found out that I had been one of the Ritchie Boys. But that didn’t elicit any revelations about his own participation in WWII. Nor did he say anything during the subsequent years when I was repeatedly invited to his house.
Finally, the reason for his secretiveness became clear: He had been not only an officer in military intelligence, but also an “Ultra-American,” to borrow the title of a 1986 book by Thomas Parrish. In short he had contributed, as a skilled translator, to arguably the most spectacular piece of intelligence work during the war: breaking the top-secret German code called Enigma. Paul had waited at least forty years before going public with his ultra-secret role in the war. Without our becoming closely acquainted, I would probably not have learned, even at that stage, the connection between that fine gentleman, fastidiously dressed like a Southerner, and his role as an American translator borrowed from our army by our British allies. He had been at Bletchley Park, a site commemorated in The Imitation Game, an award-winning 2014 film.
Another meeting evoked a similar excitement that took me back to my days as a Ritchie Boy. I served for many years—more than fifty, in fact—as a board member of the Leo Baeck Institute. The organization, as one of its goals, preserves evidence of the symbiosis between Jews and non-Jews, right up to the time when that mutually beneficial relationship was ripped asunder by the Nazi barbarians. The meetings took me from my home campus—wherever that happened to be—to the LBI in New York. Once when addressing my fellow board members, I referred in passing to my role in WWII. Right after the meeting, a relatively new board member, John Weitz, stopped me in my tracks. “So, you were at Camp Ritchie?” I reaffirmed that fact.
His response surprised me. “Well, so was I!”
He had by now sat opposite me during several meetings; I was delighted to suddenly encounter in him a comrade-in-arms. “And what was your assignment?” I asked.
“Hold on,” he cautioned. “Are you free for about an hour?” We ended up at a coffee shop across the street.
“I didn’t stay long in military intelligence. OSS wanted me,” he said.
“Oh so secret!” I punned, winking an eye at an inside joke of WWII, often applied to the initials of the Office of Strategic Services.
“I can say without exaggeration that my German has stayed flawless. Also, with all due modesty, I looked at one time like the prototype of a Nordic superman. And I had command of all the Jewish chutzpah to carry out the very mission for which I had been selected. OSS put me in the uniform of a German officer of high rank and dropped me behind the German lines, equipped with foolproof faked documents, which gave me a new identity. I was to ferret out the new German battle plans after the Battle of the Bulge.”
“You fooled those Krauts?” I asked, lapsing back into my army jargon of a long time ago.
“Damn right!” he answered. “I attached myself to several German units, got the info, and got out in a bit of a hurry—or I would have occupied a piece of our fatherland for all eternity.”
When he ended his incredible story, I stared at him in silent admiration. Then my hero worship turned vocal until I asked a rather mundane question. “What is your present occupation?”
“When you get home, look at the shirts in your wardrobe,” he said.
I did that the moment I got home. John Weitz is what it said on the label of a couple of my shirts. Before we parted, he had also told me of his leisure activity: “I have just finished writing a book, the first biography of Joachim von Ribbentrop.” Of course I knew the name of Hitler’s Minister for Foreign Relations, who finished his dubious career on the gallows, hanged as a war criminal after the Nuremberg Trials. There now was an added reason to look forward to the meetings at the Leo Baeck Institute because of the charismatic presence of John Weitz.
Of course few of the meetings I attended sported such dramatic highlights. For better or worse they were entirely scholarly, but not unrewarding. I was a featured speaker at a SAMLA (South Atlantic Modern Language Association) meeting in Atlanta. I had been billed as a comparatist and keynote speaker on Henry Fielding’s novel Tom Jones, which had been the mainstay of my dissertation. Now I was asked to provide further insights on the work. I foolishly agreed without knowing whether I had anything original to say about it. Thousands of treatises had preceded my investigation. I found one unexplored item. Fielding had preached in one of his famous introductory chapters that perfect characters, either as exemplars of goodness or of evil, were unrealistic. And yet, scholars argued, he had created such a character in Tom Jones: Mrs. Miller, the widow of a clergyman, who befriends and advises the title hero. I went through the novel for every mention of this paragon. And I found what I was looking for! Separated by miles of text, Fielding subtly supplied all the information necessary to show us a flawed Mrs. Miller. The diligent reader could deduce that her first child had been born out of wedlock. Fielding had practiced what he preached. And I had advanced scholarship not by a milestone but by inches.
One might think, based on some nasty accounts of our meetings in newspapers, that we professors were a stodgy and dour bunch. At the beginning of my career I shared that view, especially when I encountered the esteemed leaders in our specialty fields. At another conference that took place in 1972 in Atlanta, with the American Council for Teaching Foreign Languages (ACTFL), I had reason to shed that prejudice. Charles Osgood, the journalist and media personality, was the keynote speaker of the conference. He didn’t confine himself to the usual entreaties for more language studies and a salute to us toilers in the field. He dared to be shamelessly entertaining, spicing up his talk with anecdotes about
growing up during WWII, and relating some choice bits of army humor. (I later learned that Osgood, at the time of his Atlanta address, was preparing an entire anthology on the same subject, Kilroy Was Here: The Best American Humor from World War II.)
In his book he explained why soldiers had to have recourse to humor during some of their most desperate experiences. I think it applies just as much to the lives of professors. Osgood argues that all of us can profit by a sense of humor:
But humor and laughter are a part of life, a part of being human. Even in the grimmest of times, people find things to laugh about . . . there’s a fine line between tragedy and comedy, between tears and laughter . . . the more fearsome and threatening the situation, the more we need a sense of humor to keep going and hold on to our sanity.
His speech lightened up the atmosphere at that convention, as if it were lit by a galaxy of chandeliers. There were many veterans in the crowd who, following Osgood’s performance, dared to share their own brand of army humor, some of it quite raucous. He encouraged all of us academics to become equally loose-lipped. “Share your favorite jokes with your colleagues,” he admonished.
Of course, more staid colleagues reminded us of the seriousness of our undertaking at that meeting and beyond. I still recall incidences from those more conventional conferences. But I must confess that the hook that makes me remember things is frequently not at all scholarly. Why do I recall a meeting of our group of American students taking part in a work-study program in Germany, conceived by my colleague, Professor Helga Slessarev, and me? It was planned to take our students from the city of Hamburg to a spectacular heath near the city of Lüneburg in northern Germany. I was scheduled to be the speaker at this get-together. This forgetful professor, I mean me, arrived in the city and found to his chagrin that he had forgotten the location of that specific youth hostel where the retreat was to take place. (There were many of these hostels, spread across a huge territory.) I had no idea where to meet my supposedly eager audience. I sat down in the town’s market square, reproaching myself and clutching at straws. At the very last moment, praise the Lord, inspiration struck. I bought a telephone card and started calling all bus companies advertised in the Yellow Pages. The telephone card was nearly used up when a gruff voice answered that yes, they had taken that unruly group of Americans to a youth hostel earlier that day. I arrived there by taxi at the last possible moment. Breathing more easily now, I confessed that frequently the Prussian in me was in conflict with the “forgetful professor.”
A more recent conference afforded me a welcome chance to broaden my involvement in current affairs. The meeting of the 39th Annual Symposium for German-American Studies came in October 2015, not too long after riots erupted in the suburban town of Ferguson, Missouri. Led back to my American roots, to my early years in Saint Louis, I felt duty bound to present a paper that would set a positive example for conflict resolution. My intention was advanced by the fact that a reporter for the Saint Louis Post Dispatch approached some of us speakers in advance of the meeting. I told him, “I’m glad you contacted me because my most recent interview by the Post Dispatch lies more than seventy years behind me. That was right after the Normandy Invasion and your star reporter, Virginia Irwin, interviewed me at our prisoner of war enclosure in Fourcarville, France. Does your paper always space interviews at such immense intervals?”
He laughed and said, “I have unearthed a story about a Saint Louis boy beyond all expectations.” I gave him all the background information he asked for, but what was important to me was to link my paper to the contemporary events in Ferguson. The reporter wrote, “For his presentation Friday morning at the symposium, Stern will try to do his part to bridge a small piece of the racial gap that the Ferguson saga laid bare. His paper is titled: “German-speaking Refugees in an Afro-American Setting—Afro-American Poets in a German Setting.”
I was pleased that this advance notice probably swelled the audience attending my presentation. Of course I stressed how, via the material I presented, the meeting of two different cultural backgrounds led to greater harmony and understanding. I was gratified that I had fulfilled my purpose of linking a scholarly paper to a civic cause. Whenever I had a chance, I used this example to reinforce the idea that we must retain our obligations as citizens even while discussing some seemingly unrelated scholarly subject.
Overall, the conferences I attended were carried out in a spirit of collegiality and mutual respect. Alas, there were occasions when that good-natured spirit didn’t prevail. I recall those incidents because once or twice I was the victim of, let us call it, collegial rivalry. The initial such criticism occurred after my first scholarly presentation. As I was congratulated by some of my colleagues and fellow students, a professor from a small and less than distinguished college threw a barb at me: “Dr. Stern, after hearing your paper, I don’t understand why my paper was rejected.” This kind of crossfire followed a predictable dialogue. Today I find those somewhat catty exchanges largely amusing. Yet as I wrote at the outset of this chapter, I was more often enchanted than cast down by our meetings, even when incidents like that one occurred. I have come to understand that many fellow attendees used these break-aways from their daily routine to bolster their wounded egos. As to my reflecting on my history of attending conferences, it is a way to measure how far I’ve come. When my friend and frequent collaborator, the late Gustave Mathieu, and I planned to be in New York for an MLA convention in the mid-fifties we had one concern: We were just out of graduate school and felt the need to save our nickels. (We were both newly married and needed to be extremely prudent with our funds.) Even at reduced convention rates, the hotel costs in New York made us decide to live for three days as cheaply as possible. We ended up sharing a stamp-sized room at a nearby YMCA, along with many other young conventioneers and a few homeless or destitute people. At the last memorable meeting we attended together, again at the MLA in New York, we two were treated like honored guests to a truly sumptuous reception. We had authored, in collaboration, a textbook reader for undergraduates. It was a success, and after several years, W. W. Norton presented both of us with a leather-bound copy of our textbook. In further appreciation we were invited to a cocktail party, synchronized with the conference, where the food and the drinks were exquisite. Gus and I used the occasion to recall our humble beginnings during our fledging flight to a MLA meeting. Being wined and dined was to us a barometer of progress. We relished it as though we had been invited to Buckingham Palace.
On the campuses of the University of Cincinnati and Wayne State University, I was blessed by the cohesiveness, harmony, and abundant goodwill that pervaded there. I had no fears in helping to introduce new courses, though knowing full well that experiments, as is the nature of the beast, frequently court failure. Our departments brainstormed and came up with such courses as “The Changing Face of Europe” and “The European Immigration to the United States.” My flexibility was tested when I became involved in a new arena of teaching started by Wayne State. One of the counselors there felt that the university needed additional outreach to an underserved population, retirees. He proposed the founding of such an outreach program. The university administration endorsed his proposal and allocated space and resources at its Oakland Center branch in the suburbs. The response of the Greater Detroit community far exceeded the modest expectations of the founders. Today it has a constituency of more than five hundred participants and has spawned courses ranging from semester-long offerings to single presentations.
SOAR, an acronym for Society of Active Retirees, relied for its initial leadership on a distinguished English professor and successor to me as provost, Marianne Wilkinson. Most of the guest lecturers are former professors from Wayne State or other neighboring universities. When I was asked to become one of the presenters, I immediately joined the staff of the new undertaking. My very first lecture demonstrated to me that the enrollees were highly sophisticated men and women from all walks of life. I was able to present my la
test research—augmented by some needed background material—for the SOAR audience, at the same level (or nearly so) as for a graduate seminar. I must have given nearly twenty of such presentations, ranging from an analysis of Jewish conceptualization of the Messiah to masterly works of children’s literature composed by exiled writers. During this latter lecture, I had the satisfaction of teaching parents and grandparents who had regaled their offspring with the saga of Curious George, without realizing that two exiles from Germany had created this American classic. Emboldened by these successes, I distilled my latest research on World War I and its literature, a topic suggested by the centennial anniversary of the beginning of the Great War, as a team-teaching effort with a distinguished colleague from the WSU Humanities Department. As an indication of the advanced level of that course, I can report that I had given the same presentation before the Michigan Joint Social Studies Conference, who, on the strength of this lecture, awarded me the Terry Kuseske Memorial Award. It worked just as well as at SOAR.
As a department head, I had given newcomers to the profession of teaching a set of guidelines: “Respect your students! Don’t put a student down! Remember, they are probably as smart or smarter than you, only less knowledgeable in your discipline or the roles would be reversed. Don’t mistake the excitement and love of learning on a student’s part for a sign of personal affection. Don’t play favorites with students.” I also frequently said, “You learn while teaching.” For me, walking into a classroom was a simultaneous exchange of ideas.
It is my conviction that one of the most effective ways of teaching is to bring the subject into the off-campus lives of students in a manner that is not banal. This truism was brought home to me as during early as my army career, when we Ritchie Boys, during our preparation for the invasion, were instructed to teach our front troops some commands in German. Unlike with many army lectures of the past, the GIs listened closely. They knew that the enemy was deadly serious; many of the troops we would encounter were seasoned veterans. So in German, the command “lay down your arms” might become a verbal weapon on which their lives depended.