Weimar Redux Five

LETTER to Professor Bernie McGoldrick, History Department, University of San Francisco:

Yo, Bernie: I feel I've finally settled into Weimar: Yesterday Petra helped me thread through the red tape of getting three (!!!) library cards. You remember your joke in History 101 that you didn't become a citizen until you had library cards. So I got ones at Bauhaus Uni (for serious architecture and design books), one at the elegant Rococo Ana Amalia Bibliothek (she was the eighteenth century regent/duchess who inveigled Goethe into settling in Weimar), and finally at the City Library.

It's just reopened, splendidly refurbished, computers, Internet, the woiks, part of the city's boodle as the Cultural Capital of Europe, 1999. CD's (I'm giving myself a crash course in German classical music--Johann Sebastian actually lived here between 1807-14), CD Roms on how to learn German. (Man, at 72 that is a drag--I read the Herald Trib and Bild (a tabloid with usually a boobily exposed Madchen on the front page and a vocabulary and syntax that fit my increasingly senescent mind.)

But the English language collection is absurd. Mostly DDR relics, Seven Seas Books, which translates into Russian or other left wing writers. But every once in a while, a marvelous freak, such as the one I'm reading right now, Martha Dodd's novel, "Sowing the Wind" (1941). It's about a working class fly boy who gradually loses his anti-Nazi convictions as he rises in the hierarchy of Goering's Luftwaffe. No great shakes as art, but what a gloss on the author's life: as a twenty-year-old American innocent she joins her father William E. Dodd, in Berlin when he becomes FDR's ambassador to Germany (1933-38).

Later, she and her brother, William, Jr. edit their father's diary, and inevitably become personae non gratae to the State Department, which refuses them visas to cover the war on the Eastern front. I immediately clicked on my CD rom Encyclopedia Britannica (son Walt gave it to me for Xmas) to get some perspective on the Dodd's. Not a word. But it's very good on Nazism. Dodd was a professor of history at the University of Chicago before going to Berlin.

I wonder if he didn't get along with William Benton who eventually bought the EB from the university. I run it on the Toshiba laptop I bought in San Jose last summer at COMP USA. If faxes could kill they would have many fewer personnel at that store. In spite of $300 for three years service (the Satellite set me back $1500), they haven't answered one of my problems.

After ten years with my trusty but unportable MAC (You remember son Hank tried to clean up my sloppy Mss reputation with a spare Macintosh from his advertising office) I'd dump this damn Toshiba (Its arrogant motto THE WORLD'S BEST SELLING PORTABLE COMPUTERS--emblazoned right under the computer's screen) if I weren't an ornery cuss.