Sometimes I didn’t get a seat in the rear or the balcony, so I had to stand with others in the “standing room only” section. But I didn’t care, because I was enthralled with the music. I could close my eyes and imagine the people interacting on the stage. When I began going to the opera, I went to the old Opera House, and toward the end of my time in New York, I went to operas at the new opera house at Lincoln Center.
Besides going to the opera, I went to symphonies that had the same old-world charm I had experienced at symphonies in Germany. At both, dozens of musicians played all kinds of instruments from violins, oboes, and cellos to a grand piano that was like an anchor in the center of the vast hall.
While the opera and symphony reflected old-world tradition, I soon discovered New York was a cultural mecca that reflected voices from dozens of cultures, much as the I-House did. I began visiting art galleries showing different styles of painting and sculpture and I visited many jazz clubs, which were especially popular in the ’50s and ’60s. Typically, I went with several other I-House students, and we visited the major clubs and coffeehouses of the day. We went to Birdland, the Village Gate, and the Village Vanguard. We heard John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, and Duke Ellington, among others. We watched Shakespeare’s plays in Stratford, Connecticut.
The I-House also took us on outings. We went to Massachusetts to see Revolutionary War sites, including Lexington and Concord, and visited Boston where we learned about its rich colonial history. We stayed with American families who took us into their houses for several days. I had expected Hollywood-sized houses, but these were just ordinary people who lived in ordinary houses.
It was fascinating to learn about each other’s cultures and interests for the future, and I was impressed by how the people I met had a deep knowledge of their history and wanted to learn about our countries, too. I was surprised to learn about the Americans’ devotion to their favorite TV shows of the time: Life with Father, I Remember Mama, I Love Lucy, Your Show of Shows, and The Ed Sullivan Show. Television was still not very popular in Germany or even available to most people there. As for the future, we all hoped for a world without war.
Working as a Research Scientist
I felt extremely lucky that Dr. David Nachmansohn was my professor and mentor. He was a German Jew who was fortunate to have gotten out of Germany and out of the reach of the Nazis. From Berlin, he fled to Paris and then to London. He finally ended up in New York at the invitation of Columbia University, since he had been a famous scientist in Germany. Now his goal was to hire the best young European scientists, and he encouraged me to continue exploring New York while I lived at the I-House. At our first meeting, he told me, “Besides your work here, I’d like you to take some time to get to know New York and all it has to offer.”
Then he introduced me to his staff: Phil Rosenberg, Fran Hoskin, Sarah Ginzberg, I. B. Wilson, and many others, with whom I later worked in neurobiology. These colleagues were well educated, but they were very different from the Europeans in their love of sports, especially football. During football season, they came to work on Mondays and threw the paper on the table with disgust if their team lost. By contrast, the German scientists thought that being interested in sports was not sufficiently intellectual, and I did not share the Americans’ interest in sports either. But even if the Americans loved football and other sports, their scientific abilities were as good as or superior to their German counterparts.
Over the next few years, I did research with many talented Americans, including Fran Hoskin, Phil Rosenberg, and I. B. Wilson, whom I met on Dr. Nachmansohn’s staff. We wrote many articles together under the supervision of Dr. Nachmansohn and we often wrote articles with him. We wrote about nerve cells, the excitation of neurons in rats, and the nerve fibers of frogs. While some of our research may seem arcane, we considered how our research findings might apply to humans since both frogs and rats have the same types of nerve fibers as humans.
Wolf (left) and his mentor, David Nachmansohn (center), at Columbia University, circa 1961.
During the holidays, we researchers often got together. I spent many holidays and weekends with the Rosenbergs and their twin daughters and son, or with the Hoskins and their daughter. Both families took me around their suburban neighborhoods in New Jersey so I could see a less urban place to live than Manhattan. I loved driving over the double-decker George Washington Bridge into New Jersey. I had never been on such a bridge before, and I found it fascinating to see the different views from the top of the bridge going in one direction and from the lower section going in the opposite direction.
Later I kept up these connections from my first years in New York and traveled with my wife and children to spend holidays together. We spent Thanksgiving with the Hoskins, now in Chicago, until our children were almost grown.
I’ll never forget New York for its cultural offerings as well as for the people I met. My colleagues became lifelong friends. But eventually, in 1968, I decided to leave New York because I wanted greater independence. While Dr. Nachmansohn had been my mentor and had taught me very much, I felt I would always be in his shadow so I felt it was time to move on.
Though my employment at Columbia ended in 1968, Dr. Nachmansohn believed that the contact between young German scientists and scientists from the rest of the world should continue, and he sought to keep the contacts alive by inviting German scientists to work with him. He even helped me get my research job at the Marine Biological Laboratories (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, in the summers. There I met many great scientists and found good support for my research. I worked at MBL every summer for most of my career. Even after I had a family and had moved to Nashville, my family and I spent summers in Woods Hole while I worked in the MBL.
Woods Hole was an excellent place for research because of the collegiality and the abundance of sea animals, which were used in our research. Squid, for example, have large nerves, which we found were ideal for studying the reactions of the nervous system under different conditions. We studied their sensitivity to electric stimulation, which was possible because the nerves were large enough for us to insert electrodes to measure the response. We also experimented on lobster—and then we ate them for dinner. We used even more lobsters than squids because they have the same large nerves but were easier to obtain.
It was also fun being at the lab in the summer. We swam in the ocean, lay on the beach, partied at night, and ate fried clams. We also went on trips to Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, where the soft, white sand beaches are particularly big and beautiful. I remember those days with the fondest of memories.
Wolf’s Certificate of Naturalization, 1968.
Wolf lecturing at a conference in Sweden, 1978 or 1979.
Marriage and Family
I met my first wife, Christine, in New York, at the International House. We met over dinner in the cafeteria. In the summer we went to Long Island to a big beach house owned by the I-House. We shared the house with three or four families, and each family had a job to take care of the house: one cleaned, one shopped, and one cooked. We alternated these jobs from week to week.
After a while, Christine and I moved out of I-House and into an apartment in the same neighborhood on Riverside Drive. While I continued to work at Columbia, Christine entered Columbia College and completed an undergraduate degree there.
We had our first child, Donata, while in our Riverside Drive apartment. I drove my VW Bug down Fifth Avenue with the top down on the night of her birth, singing with joy. Christine continued her studies with the help of a young woman who watched Donata while Christine was in school.
One summer, before we started going to Woods Hole and before Donata was born, Christine and I drove through the United States in our little VW Bug convertible, which uniquely had its gas tank in the front of the car. Gas station attendants were confused when we stopped to get gas. “But where’s the engine?” they asked us, and we showed them the engine in the back.
On o
ur trip we visited Chicago, Mount Rushmore, the Grand Canyon, the Rocky Mountains, and Yellowstone Park. We enjoyed visiting the Grand Tetons and walking around Jenny Lake. One day as we walked, an American tourist, realizing we were from Germany by overhearing us talking in German, came over to us and asked, “Doesn’t this beat the Alps?” Of course, I said yes.
Later, as we drove on, we had to stop for a bighorn sheep in the road. It planted itself there and wouldn’t move, though I honked furiously. It just stared at me while I sat at the wheel and cars backed up behind us. It was as if the sheep wanted to display his power by holding up a line of cars. But finally he seemed to tire of the confrontation, turned back toward the forest, and loped off.
We drove on and farther down on the road, we saw a mama brown bear and her two cubs. The mother turned to face us, and we thanked heavens we were in the car. As she looked on, the babies climbed up and looked through our windows, as we sat there terrified that the mother would soon join them. Fortunately, she didn’t. After the babies got tired of looking at us and jumped back onto the road, we drove away as fast as we could, thankful to still be alive since the mother bear could have easily torn through the convertible top of our car.
Chapter 15
On to Nashville
After ten years in New York, I began to be known for my work in neurobiology. I got several invitations from different universities offering me positions in their departments of neurobiology and pharmacology. I knew then that I would spend the rest of my life in the United States. I could not go back to the rigid and hierarchical world of science in Germany. To this end, I became a naturalized citizen of the United States in July of 1968, and I have never looked back.
Finally, I decided to take a job as full professor in the Department of Pharmacology, with a secondary professorship in the Department of Neurology, in the medical school of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. The departments gave me enough time to continue my research, and I also taught courses to medical students. My research was mostly in the area of acetylcholinesterase, also known as AChE or acetylhydrolase, which is an enzyme that catalyzes the breakdown of acetylcholine and some other chemical substances in the neurons that function as neurotransmitters, which transmit electrical impulses between the nerves. AChE is found mainly at the junction of the nerves and muscles, where it terminates the transmissions between the synapses. This research is important in the study of nerve gases, chemical warfare, and pesticides.
Given my work on AChE, I did a great deal of research for the U.S. Army, which was interested in the effects of nerve gas and chemical warfare. This research was particularly important at the time of the first Gulf War, Desert Storm, when I researched what caused the Gulf War syndrome, a chronic disorder with many symptoms that affected about 250,000 veterans out of 700,000 who served in that war. I sought to discover what was causing these acute and chronic symptoms, which include fatigue, muscle pain, cognitive problems, rashes, and diarrhea. I also looked for ways to treat the symptoms of the men who returned from the Gulf War.
When I taught at Vanderbilt, I found the approach to teaching students in the United States was totally different than in Germany. The contact between the professors and students was much greater. Each knew the other by name, while in Germany the professors knew no one, even after having taught them throughout their time in medical school. This U.S. approach, involving greater professor-student contact, helped to motivate the students, and I found the students not only very intelligent but very inquisitive and dedicated to their studies.
Our second child, Henning, was born in Nashville. Christine and I named him after one of Von Staufenberg’s co-conspirators in the plot to kill Hitler, as told in the film The Valkyrie. We raised our children here and found it a good place to raise children. It was safe, and there were many outdoor activities.
Now, twenty years since I retired, Vanderbilt University has continued to grow. Its Pharmacology Department, of which I was a member, is reputed to be the best in the country. The medical school has continued to expand, and many of its departments are ranked in the top ten in the nation.
When we moved to Nashville, it was a sleepy southern city with very few cultural activities. Today it is a thriving, growing metropolis, with a first-class symphony, excellent opera, many theaters, and a popular museum. It has a worldwide reputation as the home of country music with a roster of stars that outdoes Hollywood in this musical genre. The city also has a multitude of new restaurants, whereas there were only three good restaurants when we arrived.
My first wife and I divorced in the 1980s. In 1993, I met Penny at a dinner party at the home of my neighbors, who were mutual friends of both of us. It took a year for me to get up enough nerve to call Penny, but I did, and the rest is history. We married in 1996, the same year I retired and slowly learned to unwind.
During the first ten years of our marriage, Penny, who was a French teacher, and I traveled frequently and enjoyed the benefits of retirement. In addition to traveling I tended my garden, worked out at the gym, and did some writing and correspondence in an office provided for professors emeriti.
Then, on August 25, 2006, my vision suddenly seemed blurry, and Penny drove me to Vanderbilt Hospital to determine what was wrong. While we were there, I suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage that caused a catastrophic stroke. Though the doctors didn’t expect me to live, I did. They told me I might never walk, but after a year of rehab and two more surgeries, I learned to walk again.
However, the stroke has left me with certain deficits. My sense of time is distorted, and I don’t understand numbers anymore, though numbers were at the heart of my research. I sometimes stumble over words, but generally my speech has not been impaired. So here I am at eighty-nine, still swimming and doing tai chi twice a week, still going to the symphony and the opera, and participating in a discussion group. Penny and I take retirement learning classes at Vanderbilt in a variety of subjects to keep our brains agile. My daughter is married and lives in New Hampshire, and my son and his wife live in Austin, Texas. Penny also has two children, and a fourteen-year-old grandson.
Looking Back
When I look back over my long life, and at the young man who was involved in such perilous activities, it is hard to believe that it all happened. But it did, and it formed my personality and my character. I have been told that when I was younger I was very demanding of myself and of those around me. It is easy to understand why. So much was demanded of me at such an early age. As my father told me when I was at boarding school, there’s no point in saying “I cannot.” Somehow, no matter what the situation, I had to carry on.
I have a few regrets, as does everyone. My greatest regret was that I did not talk to my father more about the war and the whole Nazi era. He wanted to put those years behind him, and like many men of his time, he was not comfortable talking about things that had greatly affected him. But he did once say, “I’m much prouder of having been a lieutenant in the Prussian Army than having been a colonel in the Wehrmacht.” I saw that as a statement of regret for all that had occurred.
Of course, as in anyone’s life, there are huge gaps in my memory of the past. What’s astonishing to me is how much I have remembered since I started on this project.
I have spent my life reading about the period in which I grew up, and I have tried to understand how my country could behave in such an atrocious way. But I will never understand. I only know we need to learn from our mistakes and try to make sure this human tragedy never happens again.
Timeline
About the Author
Wolf Dettbarn was born in Berlin in 1928 and grew up in a family with a long history of military service. When he was ten years old, he was a member of the Jungvolk and witnessed Kristallnacht in Eschwege. At thirteen, he joined Hitler Jugend and was enrolled in the elite Adolf Hitler Schule in Sonthofen, Bavaria. He was in Kassel in 1944 when the city was being bombed by Allied forces, and in October 1944 was conscripted into the Volkss
turm. He was captured by American troops in April 1945 and spent several months in a POW camp before returning home to resume his studies in preparation for medical school.
Wolf Dettbarn received his MD degree from the University of Goettingen in 1953, and worked in medical research in Switzerland and Germany. He came to New York in 1958 to work with Dr. David Nachmansohn at Columbia University, and in 1968 became professor of pharmacology at Vanderbilt University. Wolf Dettbarn is the author of over two hundred articles on neuropharmacology in major scientific journals, has presented papers at conferences throughout the world, and has done research for the army on chemical warfare. He is currently professor emeritus of pharmacology at Vanderbilt University.
From School to War: Growing Up in Hitler’s Germany (Contemporary Nonfiction) Page 21