The Real Comeback Kid is .... & Torino 2006 Olympics
And the Real Comeback Kid is .....
About three weeks before our expulsion from Germany to Zbaszyn on October 28, 1938 (discussed in the preceding posting), thus a month before the Kristallnacht, I had received an unusual report card at the gymnasium in Dortmund. It is shown midway at the left of the collage below, above the picture representing my delivery there 13 years earlier. To view details of the report card ("Zeugnis" in German) you will probably have to follow the directions below for the enlarged version. (The collage is from a kind of supplement to my Last Emanations from the Dungheap of History written in the mid 1980s).
[ To view a larger, more detailed version of this image click on it. If you are using Internet Explorer, click then on the icon at the lower right of the resulting image. ]
I can think of only two earlier events during the almost six preceding years of Nazi rule that loom worse in my recollection than getting this phony Zeugnis, and it was one of the last times that I cried. That may require an explanation (later); but it evidently also had the effect on my father to finally make him decide to become serious about emigrating; too late.
You may have read (as I did more than once, e.g. in Time and / or Spiegel) that Jews had been barred from public gymnasium (~ high school, junior & senior combined) in Germany years before that. It seems very unlikely that Dortmund would have been an exception in something like that. More likely those reports had to do with a "numerus clausus", under which only a small number with the highest grades could continue. I don't know about this Ludendorffschule, the former Oberrealschule just renamed after the WWI general who had participated in Hitler's failed 1923 Munich putsch attempt, but at the Bismarck Realgymnasium, then just about to be renamed Hermann Goering Schule, which I had attended until 1937, we were only five Jews out of about 1500 students. So if the Zeugnis was honest, I would have had to have undergone a very abrupt decline in learning ability. Some evidence indicating that it wasn't honest can be seen by comparing the average or overall grade "Gesamterfolg" of "noch ausreichend", i.e. barely adequate or 4- with your own averaging using the numbers given in the "Leistungen" row. You won't even have to "do the math", since there so obviously are more "befriedigend" or 3 than the one "mangelhaft" or 5, so the result has to be between 3 and 4, not worse than 4. (don't conclude that the Nazis lost the war because their teachers couldn't do such simple calculations).
But assuming that I really had suddenly deteriorated that badly, there are two things worth pointing out. First, that at least they didn't flunk me. Second, if it was true, I sure ought to be able to claim that I'm the real comeback kid; as the grades below ought to show convincingly enough (typing at left on another 1980s collage).
[ To view a larger, more detailed version of this image click on it. If you are using Internet Explorer, click then on the icon at the lower right of the resulting image. ]
They are from the graduate school of "Brooklyn Poly" (now Polytechnic University of New York, after addition of some NYU departments); at the time the foremost anywhere for my chosen field of polymer science (about very big molecules). There had been less than four years of formal education since the "Zeugnis" above. (My unexpelled "Aryan" classmates needed more than five years just for high school graduation; and it would have been more than six, had not Der Fuehrer made a special gift to award the "Abitur" a year earlier, so they could serve Fuehrer, Volk und Vaterland in a lost war; after Stalingrad and El Alamein). I could also show my similar intervening grades for my undergraduate degree ("with high distinction", or magna cum laude). But since this is supposed to be about bragging, the framable document below, for election to the New York Academy of Sciences shortly thereafter, ought to look more impressive. And that was before my real contributions to science.
[ To view a larger, more detailed version of this image click on it. If you are using Internet Explorer, click then on the icon at the lower right of the resulting image. ]
But couldn't all this just be personal bragging about what is really a social achievement? Could human kind be the real comeback kid from fascist insanity? So what; I had still managed to play my part in that. In any case, even any really personal successes of mine became possible because of very unusual people I was with, some of them already mentioned earlier. If this here were to follow the usual practice of other modest authors in their book forewords, I would have to point out now that, on the other hand, my failures are mine alone. But why don't I instead leave something for my detractors to detract.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2006
Torino 2006 Olympics
In 1937, more than four years after the Nazi takeover at the end of January 1933, I was still on my class football team (that's soccer to North Americans) at the Bismarck Realgymnasium in Dortmund. (That may surprise you, if you were born yesterday or a few decades earlier and have had to make do with the treatment of the period in the mass media. The Nazis did not, and could not, start murder factories as soon as they took over government; and any subsequent power intrinsically capable of comparable stuff against any community ought to be challenged at earlier atrocity levels.) Then, in 1937-8, our situation began to deteriorate rapidly. Early in 1933, there had been one of the worst incidents during the boycott of Jewish businesses, including my father's shoe store, when SA brownshirts stormed into our apartment in the evening to pick up my father. He had evidently been warned and was away in Pirmasens, centre of the German shoe industry. A non-Jewish friend of my mother's and her coal miner husband, Herr Scheida, were with us. The stormtroopers first tried to take him, then relented. Dortmund still had many coal mines, and miners.
Then there was a period without much serious trouble, at least not what would affect wholly Jewish kids; the Nuernberg "race" laws having been about things like "mixed marriages". It is widely thought that there was a policy of caution, to minimize negative economic consequences of persecution. Later, there was a real lull for the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, for which the Nazis wanted to create an impression of civilised reasonableness, in addition to power, on the many foreign visitors. Those may have been the first Olympics where competition between top athletes became subordinate to a "higher" goal, the greater glory of the regime. (Having been to the following games, 1948 in London, which still were real games of sport lovers, i.e. amateurs, I can affirm that the commercial ascendency and concomitant hoopla started later; also performance enhancing drugs).
Some time before the Berlin games, a classmate told me that in "Rassenkunde" (~race knowledge, maybe even race "science"), a class from which I was excused, they were told that there had to be caution, and not to molest people who look like Jews, because "our Italian friends" also look like that.
And now the winter Olympics are on in Berlusconi's Italy, right next to Fiat's city, beautiful Torino; or Turin as the place is called in Germany and Austria, but also here in no less beautiful Vancouver; where the next winter games are to take place in 2010. Everything is already affected by that here. Even before the Torino games, a major cost overrun was announced; also a suggestion to import temporary workers from abroad to counteract it, and union protest against cheap temporary labor. The Safeway supermarket sale this week of "Olympic Wieners" of two packages of eight at $ 5.00 (or, shown in small print, one for $ 2.50, for the benefit of those who can handle more complex mathematics, like fractions of a dollar), a saving of over $3 for two, need not have been related to the performance of Austrian athletes at the Torino games.
But they have been doing very well with a lopsided number of gold medals for such a small country. The other lopsided performers have been the Canadian women, with more than three times the number of medals than the men two days before the end; and not just in hockey, where they almost had to apologize for making the competition look so harmless; without any doping suspicions. The Austrians did have a doping scandal. Their quarters were raided by the Italian police after a tip that their former long distance skiing trainer Walter Mayer, already barred from both Turin and Vancouver games, had been seen there. The final results are pending, but Mayer managed to escape across the border back to Austria, where he was arrested after ramming a police car. Some long distance skiers were also reported to have fled across the border.
It was enough to make one wonder whether Herman Mark, my main professor (doctoral thesis advisor) might have been on performance enhancing steroids. It would be the easiest way to understand how he could have done all the things he did, including an earlier Austrian cross border escape. He had been born near the end of the 19th century in Vienna, then the capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire of legendary Kaiser Franz Joseph; for whose army the even more legendary good soldier Schweik was reported to have enlisted in 1914.
[ To view a larger, more detailed version of this image click on it. If you are using Internet Explorer, click then on the icon at the lower right of the resulting image. ]
Mark had joined that army a year earlier, right after high school, so he wouldn't have to do his military service after university. Then the crown prince was assassinated in Sarajevo, leading to World War I in August 1914. So instead of quickly getting his required one year service behind him, Mark was iin from 1913-19, was wounded three times (first at the Russian front in bitter battles near Lvov; Lemberg on map in November 21, 2005 posting) and became the most decorated soldier in the Imperial army. Along with the whole division, he was later a POW 1918-19 in Italy, got his doctorate two years after that at Vienna, played on the then famous Austrian national football team, started work 1922 at the Kaiser Wilhelm (forerunner of current Max Planck) Institut in Berlin, where he became one of the first pioneers in what was to become polymer science, as much by his efforts as anyone's; reinforced that while directing IG Farben polymer research at Ludwigshafen (now BASF again) until 1932, when the imminent Nazi takeover made leaving advisable.
So he became professor at his old University of Vienna. Until in March 1938 the Nazis came there, too. After Gestapo detention the next day and days of severe interrogation in their special prison, he decided to take off. According to the grapevine during my student days, he just skied across the border into Switzerland.
That would be more than the current Olympian long distance skiers and Walter Mayer are credited with now, sneaking into Austria, but it turns out to have been overdone. The American Chemical Society published a book (see cover below) as part of a series about the lives and work of eminent chemists, which I had just got after first trying to see it through the Public Library. It is partly biographical, partly autobio. Mark's own account is that he put his family into their car with their skis mounted on top and a swastika flag on the radiator and thus drove across the Swiss border(without ramming any police cars there).
If you are interested in his accomplishments to follow, the most thorough way would be to get the book. I ought to have some more to say, but meanwhile a couple of links to what others wrote. The more intimate and best informed is likely to be the one by Prof. Herbert Morawetz. Another, by the American Chemical Society, should also be of interest. Here only that he had a long standing offer to come to Canada to organize a modern research lab for the Canadian International Pulp and Paper Company. With his prompt acceptance now, he got the Canadian visa, thus the transit visas needed.
As a personal aside, I ought to mention that I was a sort of beneficiary of the "Anschluss" that drove him out, since I got to see two of the famous Vienna football teams (I believe Rapid and Austria Wien, who came to tour in their new Vaterland) play against Borussia Dortmund; before we got kicked out later that year. The yellow class card for my last semester of thesis research also shows a phony grade; for research, there was no S+, only S (as the grade is actually entered, see above) for satisfactory and U for unS; but here the intention was just to make me feel good, a characteristic generally ascribed to his origin in Franz Joseph's Vienna (he was fondly adressed and referred to as Geheimrat).
[ To view a larger, more detailed version of this image click on it. If you are using Internet Explorer, click then on the icon at the lower right of the resulting image. ]
[ To view a larger, more detailed version of this image click on it. If you are using Internet Explorer, click then on the icon at the lower right of the resulting image. ]
It is the Monday after. While I was struggling to keep this from getting too long , the long distance skiers and skaters have finished their thing and the Olympic flag has been passed to Sam Sullivan, our new mayor. Austria is in third place (at least for now) in the official medal rankings, which emphasize the gold, with only Germany and US above. Canada is fifth, but with more medals than Russia, #4, or Austria; and one of its glorious women, Cindy Klassen, the star of the Torino Games. They had Andrea Bocelli do what here is a job for a fat lady. We are unlikely to march that (although I know places here with musicians who can play much louder). But I'm ready to bet that nobody saw sunsets like those below in Turin. For those, you'll have to come to Vancouver.
[ To view a larger, more detailed version of this image click on it. If you are using Internet Explorer, click then on the icon at the lower right of the resulting image. ]
[ To view a larger, more detailed version of this image click on it. If you are using Internet Explorer, click then on the icon at the lower right of the resulting image. ]
About three weeks before our expulsion from Germany to Zbaszyn on October 28, 1938 (discussed in the preceding posting), thus a month before the Kristallnacht, I had received an unusual report card at the gymnasium in Dortmund. It is shown midway at the left of the collage below, above the picture representing my delivery there 13 years earlier. To view details of the report card ("Zeugnis" in German) you will probably have to follow the directions below for the enlarged version. (The collage is from a kind of supplement to my Last Emanations from the Dungheap of History written in the mid 1980s).
[ To view a larger, more detailed version of this image click on it. If you are using Internet Explorer, click then on the icon at the lower right of the resulting image. ]
I can think of only two earlier events during the almost six preceding years of Nazi rule that loom worse in my recollection than getting this phony Zeugnis, and it was one of the last times that I cried. That may require an explanation (later); but it evidently also had the effect on my father to finally make him decide to become serious about emigrating; too late.
You may have read (as I did more than once, e.g. in Time and / or Spiegel) that Jews had been barred from public gymnasium (~ high school, junior & senior combined) in Germany years before that. It seems very unlikely that Dortmund would have been an exception in something like that. More likely those reports had to do with a "numerus clausus", under which only a small number with the highest grades could continue. I don't know about this Ludendorffschule, the former Oberrealschule just renamed after the WWI general who had participated in Hitler's failed 1923 Munich putsch attempt, but at the Bismarck Realgymnasium, then just about to be renamed Hermann Goering Schule, which I had attended until 1937, we were only five Jews out of about 1500 students. So if the Zeugnis was honest, I would have had to have undergone a very abrupt decline in learning ability. Some evidence indicating that it wasn't honest can be seen by comparing the average or overall grade "Gesamterfolg" of "noch ausreichend", i.e. barely adequate or 4- with your own averaging using the numbers given in the "Leistungen" row. You won't even have to "do the math", since there so obviously are more "befriedigend" or 3 than the one "mangelhaft" or 5, so the result has to be between 3 and 4, not worse than 4. (don't conclude that the Nazis lost the war because their teachers couldn't do such simple calculations).
But assuming that I really had suddenly deteriorated that badly, there are two things worth pointing out. First, that at least they didn't flunk me. Second, if it was true, I sure ought to be able to claim that I'm the real comeback kid; as the grades below ought to show convincingly enough (typing at left on another 1980s collage).
[ To view a larger, more detailed version of this image click on it. If you are using Internet Explorer, click then on the icon at the lower right of the resulting image. ]
They are from the graduate school of "Brooklyn Poly" (now Polytechnic University of New York, after addition of some NYU departments); at the time the foremost anywhere for my chosen field of polymer science (about very big molecules). There had been less than four years of formal education since the "Zeugnis" above. (My unexpelled "Aryan" classmates needed more than five years just for high school graduation; and it would have been more than six, had not Der Fuehrer made a special gift to award the "Abitur" a year earlier, so they could serve Fuehrer, Volk und Vaterland in a lost war; after Stalingrad and El Alamein). I could also show my similar intervening grades for my undergraduate degree ("with high distinction", or magna cum laude). But since this is supposed to be about bragging, the framable document below, for election to the New York Academy of Sciences shortly thereafter, ought to look more impressive. And that was before my real contributions to science.
[ To view a larger, more detailed version of this image click on it. If you are using Internet Explorer, click then on the icon at the lower right of the resulting image. ]
But couldn't all this just be personal bragging about what is really a social achievement? Could human kind be the real comeback kid from fascist insanity? So what; I had still managed to play my part in that. In any case, even any really personal successes of mine became possible because of very unusual people I was with, some of them already mentioned earlier. If this here were to follow the usual practice of other modest authors in their book forewords, I would have to point out now that, on the other hand, my failures are mine alone. But why don't I instead leave something for my detractors to detract.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2006
Torino 2006 Olympics
In 1937, more than four years after the Nazi takeover at the end of January 1933, I was still on my class football team (that's soccer to North Americans) at the Bismarck Realgymnasium in Dortmund. (That may surprise you, if you were born yesterday or a few decades earlier and have had to make do with the treatment of the period in the mass media. The Nazis did not, and could not, start murder factories as soon as they took over government; and any subsequent power intrinsically capable of comparable stuff against any community ought to be challenged at earlier atrocity levels.) Then, in 1937-8, our situation began to deteriorate rapidly. Early in 1933, there had been one of the worst incidents during the boycott of Jewish businesses, including my father's shoe store, when SA brownshirts stormed into our apartment in the evening to pick up my father. He had evidently been warned and was away in Pirmasens, centre of the German shoe industry. A non-Jewish friend of my mother's and her coal miner husband, Herr Scheida, were with us. The stormtroopers first tried to take him, then relented. Dortmund still had many coal mines, and miners.
Then there was a period without much serious trouble, at least not what would affect wholly Jewish kids; the Nuernberg "race" laws having been about things like "mixed marriages". It is widely thought that there was a policy of caution, to minimize negative economic consequences of persecution. Later, there was a real lull for the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, for which the Nazis wanted to create an impression of civilised reasonableness, in addition to power, on the many foreign visitors. Those may have been the first Olympics where competition between top athletes became subordinate to a "higher" goal, the greater glory of the regime. (Having been to the following games, 1948 in London, which still were real games of sport lovers, i.e. amateurs, I can affirm that the commercial ascendency and concomitant hoopla started later; also performance enhancing drugs).
Some time before the Berlin games, a classmate told me that in "Rassenkunde" (~race knowledge, maybe even race "science"), a class from which I was excused, they were told that there had to be caution, and not to molest people who look like Jews, because "our Italian friends" also look like that.
And now the winter Olympics are on in Berlusconi's Italy, right next to Fiat's city, beautiful Torino; or Turin as the place is called in Germany and Austria, but also here in no less beautiful Vancouver; where the next winter games are to take place in 2010. Everything is already affected by that here. Even before the Torino games, a major cost overrun was announced; also a suggestion to import temporary workers from abroad to counteract it, and union protest against cheap temporary labor. The Safeway supermarket sale this week of "Olympic Wieners" of two packages of eight at $ 5.00 (or, shown in small print, one for $ 2.50, for the benefit of those who can handle more complex mathematics, like fractions of a dollar), a saving of over $3 for two, need not have been related to the performance of Austrian athletes at the Torino games.
But they have been doing very well with a lopsided number of gold medals for such a small country. The other lopsided performers have been the Canadian women, with more than three times the number of medals than the men two days before the end; and not just in hockey, where they almost had to apologize for making the competition look so harmless; without any doping suspicions. The Austrians did have a doping scandal. Their quarters were raided by the Italian police after a tip that their former long distance skiing trainer Walter Mayer, already barred from both Turin and Vancouver games, had been seen there. The final results are pending, but Mayer managed to escape across the border back to Austria, where he was arrested after ramming a police car. Some long distance skiers were also reported to have fled across the border.
It was enough to make one wonder whether Herman Mark, my main professor (doctoral thesis advisor) might have been on performance enhancing steroids. It would be the easiest way to understand how he could have done all the things he did, including an earlier Austrian cross border escape. He had been born near the end of the 19th century in Vienna, then the capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire of legendary Kaiser Franz Joseph; for whose army the even more legendary good soldier Schweik was reported to have enlisted in 1914.
[ To view a larger, more detailed version of this image click on it. If you are using Internet Explorer, click then on the icon at the lower right of the resulting image. ]
Mark had joined that army a year earlier, right after high school, so he wouldn't have to do his military service after university. Then the crown prince was assassinated in Sarajevo, leading to World War I in August 1914. So instead of quickly getting his required one year service behind him, Mark was iin from 1913-19, was wounded three times (first at the Russian front in bitter battles near Lvov; Lemberg on map in November 21, 2005 posting) and became the most decorated soldier in the Imperial army. Along with the whole division, he was later a POW 1918-19 in Italy, got his doctorate two years after that at Vienna, played on the then famous Austrian national football team, started work 1922 at the Kaiser Wilhelm (forerunner of current Max Planck) Institut in Berlin, where he became one of the first pioneers in what was to become polymer science, as much by his efforts as anyone's; reinforced that while directing IG Farben polymer research at Ludwigshafen (now BASF again) until 1932, when the imminent Nazi takeover made leaving advisable.
So he became professor at his old University of Vienna. Until in March 1938 the Nazis came there, too. After Gestapo detention the next day and days of severe interrogation in their special prison, he decided to take off. According to the grapevine during my student days, he just skied across the border into Switzerland.
That would be more than the current Olympian long distance skiers and Walter Mayer are credited with now, sneaking into Austria, but it turns out to have been overdone. The American Chemical Society published a book (see cover below) as part of a series about the lives and work of eminent chemists, which I had just got after first trying to see it through the Public Library. It is partly biographical, partly autobio. Mark's own account is that he put his family into their car with their skis mounted on top and a swastika flag on the radiator and thus drove across the Swiss border(without ramming any police cars there).
If you are interested in his accomplishments to follow, the most thorough way would be to get the book. I ought to have some more to say, but meanwhile a couple of links to what others wrote. The more intimate and best informed is likely to be the one by Prof. Herbert Morawetz. Another, by the American Chemical Society, should also be of interest. Here only that he had a long standing offer to come to Canada to organize a modern research lab for the Canadian International Pulp and Paper Company. With his prompt acceptance now, he got the Canadian visa, thus the transit visas needed.
As a personal aside, I ought to mention that I was a sort of beneficiary of the "Anschluss" that drove him out, since I got to see two of the famous Vienna football teams (I believe Rapid and Austria Wien, who came to tour in their new Vaterland) play against Borussia Dortmund; before we got kicked out later that year. The yellow class card for my last semester of thesis research also shows a phony grade; for research, there was no S+, only S (as the grade is actually entered, see above) for satisfactory and U for unS; but here the intention was just to make me feel good, a characteristic generally ascribed to his origin in Franz Joseph's Vienna (he was fondly adressed and referred to as Geheimrat).
[ To view a larger, more detailed version of this image click on it. If you are using Internet Explorer, click then on the icon at the lower right of the resulting image. ]
[ To view a larger, more detailed version of this image click on it. If you are using Internet Explorer, click then on the icon at the lower right of the resulting image. ]
It is the Monday after. While I was struggling to keep this from getting too long , the long distance skiers and skaters have finished their thing and the Olympic flag has been passed to Sam Sullivan, our new mayor. Austria is in third place (at least for now) in the official medal rankings, which emphasize the gold, with only Germany and US above. Canada is fifth, but with more medals than Russia, #4, or Austria; and one of its glorious women, Cindy Klassen, the star of the Torino Games. They had Andrea Bocelli do what here is a job for a fat lady. We are unlikely to march that (although I know places here with musicians who can play much louder). But I'm ready to bet that nobody saw sunsets like those below in Turin. For those, you'll have to come to Vancouver.
Cittadino
di Torino;
vieni qua!
[ To view a larger, more detailed version of this image click on it. If you are using Internet Explorer, click then on the icon at the lower right of the resulting image. ]
[ To view a larger, more detailed version of this image click on it. If you are using Internet Explorer, click then on the icon at the lower right of the resulting image. ]
posted by solar_sol | 7:36 PM
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