Weimar Redux Nine

POSTCARD to Father Bernie McGoldrick, S.J.:

Hi Father, you remember that strange Cold War novel I wrote you about, by the daughter of Ambassador to Berlin? Well, I found just enough more about her that I want you to scan her on the InterNet for me? PULEEZ. "Sowing the Wind" came out in the U.S. in 1945 and was translated in several European languages--but not in West Germany "since the U.S.A. has already forbidden the publication there of my last novel (The Searching Light, 1955). . ."

Then she really lets go:"On the personal side, my family and I know well the lash of American reaction. My mother, father and my brother, all prematurely dead, were slandered, hounded and persecuted for their convictions and activities. Latterly, my husband and I, and our young son, were first driven out of the United States and then out of Mexico. We were reviled, pursued and threatened, even to death, in so melodramatic and fantastic a manner that one might find its equal only in cheap detective fiction or in the anti-Communist, anti-Jewish exhibits which were formerly seen in Berlin and were so enthusiastically supported by the Hitler gang."

What follows is an hysterical rant, but I must try to find out what happened to her and her family when her father's term was over (1938) she went back to the U.S. and wrote a family memoir,"Through Embassy Eyes", and then with her brother edited her father's diary as an ambassador." Her dateline for this was Prague, 1959. Remember, Padre, you used to tell us the greatest historical stories can creep up on you. Only the morbidly curious you argued would make important discoveries. Heh, old Teach, I plead GUILTY, as discharged. God how I miss interlibrary loans.

The Dodd plot thickens! In the Ana Amalia Library today I checked the German edition of his diaries as ambassador to Berlin. The forward is written by our hero, Charles Beard! Dodd was born in Clayton, North Carolina in l869, graduated from Virginia Poly, then took his Ph.D. (are you ready for this) at the University of Leipzig--in l900 with a dissertation on Thomas Jefferson's "Return to Politics in 1796." After teaching for eight years at Randolph-Macon College he was appointed to the University of Chicago.

When that fateful phone call from FDR came to his office on June 8, 1933 he had just been elected president of the American Historical Association for 1934. He asked the President for time to think it over. FDR: "Two hours. Can you decide in that time?" Dodd replied that he thought he could but had to check with the University administration and wondered whether the German government would take offense at his Woodrow Wilson "Anstoss".

Then FDR really turned on the charm: "I'm sure that won't be a problem. Your book, your entire work as a liberal and a professor as well as your education at a German university are the basis reasons for my calling you to Berlin. It's a difficult post and you
have the required qualifications. I want for Germany a man with liberal convictions who would be a living example of what being an American. I want someone there to call and find out what they're thinking over there."

The first thing Dodd did was call his wife. Then President Hutchins. He wasn't in, but Dean Woodward told him he ought to take it and would right away look for substitutes for summer and winter terms. (FDR had said he could come back in a year if the University insisted on it.) He talked it over with his wife over lunch, and at two thirty was connected to the White House, where the Cabinet was in session.

Later his Chicago friend Harold Ickes said there was nary an objection there. The German ambassador, Dr. Hans Luther, cleared it with his home office, and on June 12, Dodd was unanimously approved by the Senate. The AAB has applied to Leipzig for an interlibrary loan (fernleihung) of his dissertation, to Hamburg for the English edition of the diaries, and to Osnabruck for the 1981 edition of William L. Shirer's "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich".

Each loan costs three marks which includes a postcard to say it's arrived--two to eight weeks to fetch it. The auskunft "INFO'" lady even showed me how to use the electronic catalog. Later she will check me out on their INTERNET.

(And there's a language school nearby where I can send e-mail for 5DM a half hour. Now if I couldn't only learn how to really use my Toshiba laptop, I'd be in CyberHimmel. Heh, Padre, do me a big flavor and fax me the DAB entry on Dodd. That's a good overworked professor!)

POSTCARD to Ute: Heh, remember how I invited you to a Bratwurst Fest at the stand behind the InterCity Hotel, die Beste is Irhre Wurste? Well, there's a serious cultural side to this. Word freaks at the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia) have been working on an "Etymologischen Woerterbuches des Althochdeutschen" since 1978 (it's a collab with Friedrich Schiller-Uni in Jena).

They have determined that the word "Bratwurst" is over a thousand years old. (The bad news is they haven't a clue for knowing what those old guys actually were eating when they used that word.) Isn't that just like scholarship. Just when you need them, they go to black. (TA, 2/6/99, p.3,c.7.)