Interesting Times: An Encounter With the 20th Century 1924-

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An Encounter With the 20th Century 1924–

Books by George Mandler The Language of Psychology (with William Kessen) Thinking: From Association to Gestalt (with Jean Matter Mandler) Mind and Emotion Mind and Body: Psychology of Emotion and Stress Cognitive Psychology: An Essay in Cognitive Science Human Nature Explored

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An Encounter With the 20th Century 1924–

George Mandler

2002

LAWRENCE ERLBAUM ASSOCIATES, PUBLISHERS Mahwah, New Jersey London

Copyright © 2002 by George Mandler. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by photostat, microform, retrieval system, or any other means, without prior written permission of the author and the publisher. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers 10 Industrial Avenue Mahwah, NJ 07430 Cover design by Kathryn Houghtaling Lacey

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mandler, George. Interesting times : an encounter with the 20th century (1924– ) / George Mandler. p. cm. ISBN 0-8058-4076-1 (acid-free paper) 1. Mandler, George, Psychologists —United States—Biography. I. Title. BF109 .M25 2001 150´.92 —dc21 2001031553 [B] CIP th

Books published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates are printed on acidfree paper, and their bindings are chosen for strength and durability. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Benjamin and Hannah

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Contents

Preface

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Acknowledgments

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Growing Up in Vienna: 1924–1938 Growing Up 1 Family History - Relatives and the New Dispersal School 21 Religion 25 Politics 27 Anti-Semitism 28

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Ends and Beginnings: 1938–1940

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Anschluss 37 Turning Left 41 The Nazis Take Over 43 Formative Years 45 Leaving 47 Bournemouth 48 Holocaust 60

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CONTENTS

Emigre Life in New York: 1940–1943 Life and School 71 Adolescent Writing and Reading Patriotisms and Accents 80 Cowboys and Indians 81

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My War: 1943–1946

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Getting Drafted and Basic Training 88 Military Intelligence Need not be an Oxymoron Camp Ritchie—Military Intelligence Training Military Intelligence Up Front 99 How it all Worked 102 Post-War in Germany 105 Anneliese—and Leaving 113 A Case History 118

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The Veteran: 1946–1949

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Basel and Goodbye to New York Shifting Gears 140

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Graduate School and Some Unfortunate Stumbles: 1949–1953 The “Spy” 151 Moving On 156

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The Trip Through Harvard: 1953–1960

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People 159 Marriages—Bad and Good 163 Working for the CIA and Changing History

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Toronto—A Not So Foreign Country: 1960–1965 UCSD Knocks on the Door

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CONTENTS

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California Beginnings: 1965–1970

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Academic Governance 185 Building a Department 189 The Troubles 199 Getting into Print 203 UCSD Grows Up 206

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Settling Down and Retirement: 1970–

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Psychology Follies 219 University Follies 222 And Everything Else 231 The Festschrift 236 The Book Collector 238 London 240 Work and Play 243 Health 247 1997–98: Years of Death 248 Austria Again 249

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My Psychology—and How I Got There Getting There 251 Starting Psychology 252 The “Revolution” 256 Memory and Organization 258 Emotion and Stress 259 Consciousness 261 Psychology and Philosophy 263 Postmodernism 264 Neuroscience 266 The Joys of Retirement 267 Friends and Students 268

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CONTENTS Consolidations and Reflections

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The Academy Administered 271 Faculty 275 Academic Success 275 Tenure—Good and Bad 276 Teaching 277 Academic Freedom 279 Honors 279 Politics and Economics 281 Race 286 Sports 288 Women 289 Epilogue

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Preface

An ancient Chinese curse says: “May you live in interesting times.” The story I have to tell has two parts. It begins as a telling of cursed times and then becomes a story of a life of interest and pleasure.

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n March, 1995 I had been in so-called retirement for nearly a year. I was finishing the paper on the history of psychology that I had always thought and talked about, and the first draft of Human Nature Explored was done. Looking ahead—more a neurotic symptom of worrying about the future than sage anticipation—I wrote the following: Peter (historian son) has for many years bugged me about doing something autobiographical, or at least doing an oral history with him. I may do the latter, simply to say things about the world rather than about myself. Autobiography I find irrelevant—my life has not been of a piece; it's a patchwork of contingencies, people, and places. There is no theme to the wandering Jew from Vienna, going to England, to New York, to the Army and war, to Germany, to Switzerland, to Academia and Ivy-League-land, to Canada, to California, and back

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to Europe. I have been quite poor and reasonably rich; loved and despised; bright and stupid; kind and cruel; sick and well; insider and outsider; believer and atheist; far left and moderate left; success and failure; in love and out of it; dishwasher and professor. It's just a string of happenings—either useless or difficult to do. On the other hand, I have—at this ripe age—learned something about people and society, about good people and bad people, goals and barriers.

Two years later, I arrived in London and finished off the last bits on the human nature book—and then there was nothing to do. I thought briefly again about fiction, but any ideas were overshadowed by memories and experiences, and so I started writing little pieces—what the German-speaking press calls feuilletons—about experiences and beliefs accumulated over the years. As these accumulated, and some coalesced, I started talking with Peter again about interesting things in my past and at his urging decided to go ahead with the autobiographical style. First drafts of about a quarter of the book were written in London in 1997 and the rest of the first draft was done in La Jolla. In the summer 1998, back in London, I started on revising and expanding the book. By then, I had also overcome my reluctance to talk about the book, and a surprisingly large number of friends and acquaintances urged me to continue and to let them read it. I have often found myself writing in the third person, about GM and his life, rather than from within. That’s the way it happened, and so be it. I also have not done more than occasional and superficial external research—a relief from the past 50 years; as a result, the historical, and some personal, references may be a reflection of how I recall the world rather than how it actually was. But as a psychologist, I am, in any case, more interested in the reality of perceptions than in the perception of some reality. As the book developed and I wrote about life and love, war and peace, good and bad, I tried to give the reader a sense of growing up in central Europe in the early 20th century, some communication of the dread and horror of the holocaust, a brief picture of emigré life and some of its politics, those recollections of the war that seemed important to me, and finally a picture of the American academy as it looks from the inside. In the process I became

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fascinated by the force of circumstance, by the conjunctions of events, by the contingencies of the world that channeled much of what I experienced, where I ended up, and what I did. No more so than what happens to any of us, but the writing of these pages made me very much aware of the contingencies of my life.

Acknowledgments I have already indicated my indebtedness to Peter Mandler whose urging started this enterprise. He also read the first draft and suggested a number of emendations and expansions. Jean also read the draft, corrected some of my factual statements, and improved the manuscript throughout. Michael Mandler countered with some sage remarks about doing autobiographies. My sister, Trudi, read the first three chapters and resolved doubts about some youthful memories. The first people outside the family who read the manuscript were our old friends, Mel and Audrey Spiro, whose friendly criticism and encouraging noises helped the project along. Larry Erlbaum read the introductory chapters and expressed an early interest in the book’s publication, and Sandra Dijkstra gave me good advice about possible venues. In the end, the checkerboard history and disparate audiences for the various parts of the book discouraged many potential publishers, but not Larry. He stood by me as the product matured, and I am delighted that an old friend, publisher of my Festschrift, and director of psychology’s premier publishing outlet has agreed to be the guardian of my memories.

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Growing Up in Vienna 1924–1938

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was born into a rather tranquil period in central Europe. The great depression was still a few years off, though it received a major impetus in Vienna with the crash of the Creditanstalt bank in 1931, which did not keep me from banking there 60 years later. No wars of great importance were underway and the Great War was nearly six years past when I was born on 11 June 1924 at the Löw Sanatorium (a private clinic specializing in minor events like births). My mother, having lost her first child in 1921, had some difficulty becoming pregnant again and her physician prescribed a relaxing excursion with two woman friends to Venice in the summer of 1923. Obviously, it was successful.

GROWING UP Growing up in Vienna for me meant growing up Jewish well-to-do middle class with all the appurtenances and advantages that involved. I don’t think we deviated much from close to upper-middle-class norms: two children, one live-in maid who took care of cooking and cleaning; during our earlier years, a 1

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nanny; and later, a quasi-governess (referred to as Fräulein); summers usually in Italy. As far as the intellectual atmosphere was concerned, neither in the country nor in the age was university education frequent, and our home was not intellectual in any academic sense, but literate. My mother was a fairly constant reader of contemporary literature, whereas my father delved less frequently into fictions; rather he was very self-educated in current affairs and politics and an avid newspaper reader—a family characteristic it turns out. Books abounded. My mother was usually into the latest belles lettres and Galsworthy was a favorite of the house. Like most European big-city inhabitants and practically all Viennese, we were apartment dwellers. We lived in the typical large apartments in the rather nondescript middle-class third district (Landstrasse) of Vienna, at first in the Untere Weissgerberstrasse (No. 49) until about 1933 and then in Löwengasse (No. 3). Both apartments were close to the Danube Kanal, facing it in the second, Löwengasse, apartment, and this “river ” closeness shaped part of my early years. The Kanal is frequently mistaken for the Danube by tourists because the Kanal, in contrast to the Danube that is off to Vienna’s north side, flows through the middle of Vienna and diverts water and traffic from the main river to the south. There are a number of general traffic and railroad bridges over the Kanal and, in my days, small ferries for additional passenger traffic. My first acquaintance with the “river ” was being taken for walks by a nanny or governess; later, it was to play in its shore-side park and to engage in hard fought scooter races up one side, over a bridge, back down the other side, and over another bridge. I have few memories of my early placid years, though I do remember my favorite “toy”—a rocking horse called Schogo for reasons lost long ago. Later, my friends and I played soccer with tennis balls in the park adjoining the Kanal (one or two to a side—the Doppelspitzer, in which each player was limited to two successive contacts with the ball in play). As I got older, my friends and I would, on weekends, go walking and window gazing in the inner city, dominated by St. Stephens and bounded by the Ringstrasse,

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the circular road following the path of the former city walls. We did not seem too impressed by the large Victorian government buildings lining that street, the leftovers of old Imperial Vienna and now, in the absence of an empire, devoid of their original function. We frequently stopped off in the Rotenturmstrasse where there was a seller of cones of chestnut puree topped off with whipped cream—what a delicacy! A less praiseworthy activity took place in later years after school in the Josef Gall Gasse, which was just a couple of blocks from the Vienna Prater—the large park on Vienna’s southeast corner. During the late afternoons and early evenings in the summer, the bushes tended to be a place for trysts of lovers and, more often, for prostitutes and their clients. It was great sport for 12—13 year olds to disturb these poor folk. Sometime during my first 10 years or so, I had the pleasure of being introduced to the firm glories of our live-in maid’s beautiful breasts, which she occasionally allowed me to caress. At another time, our governess had to stop bathing me (as she did my sister) after I complained that she had become too attentive to the cleanliness of my slowly becoming-reactive penis. Sometime later, I started to masturbate and was convinced that my masturbatory activities were revealed by dark rings around my eyes, though I never thought that the activity would drive me mad or otherwise impair me. One time, busily engaged in the bathroom in my manual activities with a copy of Balzac’s Droll Stories at hand, my mother caught me and insisted I hand over the book. Nothing more was said. Another book around the house that was appropriately titillating was a copy of Van De Velde’s Ideal Marriage. At least my masturbatory literature was adequately high toned. While I am on games and sports, there was regular ice-skating at the Wiener Eislaufverein where we adored one of the Austrian figure skating champions, Felix Kaspar, and supported our teams and skaters against the competing Engelmann skating rink. It was a time of Austrian dominance in men’s figure skating, and the Engelmann skater Karl Schäfer won the world gold medal from 1930 to 1936. Kaspar finally made it just in time—in 1937 and 1938 before Austria disappeared. Women’s skating during those years was of course dominated by the legendary Sonja Henie. In between cheering on our skaters, we pretended to be speed skaters

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or ice hockey players. The only other regular sport activity—apart from ubiquitous soccer played wherever and whenever—was at the (Jewish) Hakoah sport club where I went regularly for swimming and diving lessons and exercise. I also have a vague memory of a gymnastics/exercise class sometime before I was 10. Otherwise, in the summer, there was the usual hiking and excursions to the Vienna woods or the Danube (the real one) for picnicking and gambolling in the Wachau and other areas with family or friends—take the streetcar to the end and start walking! Or we would go to the Prater (more a large area of woods and meadows than a park) for coffee and cake in one of its Molkereien (dairy cafes), and, on special occasions, to the Volksprater, the amusement park in the Prater with the Riesenrad, the giant ferris wheel made famous in The Third Man movie. Today, it is full of daring roller coasters and their ilk, but back then, its major attractions were the Grottenbahn, a sometime ghost house but also with large special panoramas; the Hippodrome, a largish arena where I loved going horseback riding, and the miniature real steam railroad, the Liliputbahn. On a recent visit, I was reminded of the Calafati statues, 30-foot wood-carved pseudoChinese statues, that, I believe used to adorn large merry-gorounds. In the winter, in addition to skating, I would in later years go skiing in the Vienna woods with friends. Surprisingly, the skating rink I used was often transformed into an ash-surface for motorcycle racing in the summer, and even more surprisingly, my father took me to several of those events. His devotion to his son’s interests even went so far as to take me to a couple of soccer games, which didn’t interest him at all. My father was a devotee of circuses, and we went frequently to the Ronacher, a building devoted primarily to such spectacles. I encountered some of the great European clowns of the period there, including Grock. There was even one occasion when the whole inner circle of the circus was filled with water for little ships exhibiting marine derring-do. When I turned 11, I was allowed to go to skiing camp with my older cousin, Lotte (daughter of my uncle Louis). I will be forever indebted to her for making those trips possible and especially for pulling me out of a snowdrift in which I was sure I was doomed to

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die during my early skiing days. The camp, in a chalet in Saalbach, was run by the Zerner family, some of whom I met again in the emigré youth groups. They also had a summer camp in Rimini, though I never went there. But their Italian cooking spilled over to the winter activities, and I recall with pleasure the pasta asciutta in Saalbach. My skiing was at best fair to middling, but when my mother took me for a winter holiday in 1937 to Zell-am-See, I was overcome with athletic joy when I came third in the local slalom run. Summer holidays meant that my sister and I were usually packed off with my mother, though I remember one miserable summer at an orthodox Jewish summer camp. Sometimes we went to the Austrian watering place of Vöslau near Vienna; more often, we went to Laurana—on the Italian Adriatic—now Lovran on the Croatian Adriatic—less fashionable than the neighboring posh Abbazzia (Opatija). There, we often met friends from Vienna and spent much time on the beach. I fell in love in 1937—at 13—with a distant relative, Ruth Rosenzweig, an older woman of 16. At one time, I was able to watch her getting dressed through a hole in our cabana. Another time, she invoked a heavenly togetherness when she asked me to come by her Pension early one morning, to whistle under her window and we would go off swimming before anybody else was up. The disaster that faced me—and that I could not possibly confess—was that I couldn’t whistle. I appeared at the house and devotedly watched her window where she finally appeared. She joined me and I nonchalantly remarked that I was surprised that she hadn’t heard my whistle before. Going to a foreign country (Italy) was more complicated in those days, requiring passports, visas, and (instead of the yet-to-be- invented credit cards) a letter of credit to one of the local Italian banks. A couple of times, we spent summers with the large contingent of family and friends that surrounded my best friend, Hans Matzka. They regularly went to Aspang, not far from Vienna. The usual crowd consisted of Hans and me and lots of girls—the Szilagyi family and the woman we all adored, Maria Reimer Haala, known as Mimi. She was four years older than us—a serene, helpful, beautiful older goddess. Mimi was a devout Catholic and caused me one of my most acute preadolescent embarrassments.

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Walking along with Mimi on a hike during our summer vacation, we came across a wayside cross with the statue of Jesus and the usual INRI inscription. Having recently learned a new joke from Catholic school friends, I turned to Mimi and asked whether she knew that INRI meant Ignaz Neugebauer Regenschirmmacher Innsbruck (Ignaz Neugebauer, umbrella maker, Innsbruck). Mimi was quiet—ignored me. It was shortly thereafter that I realized the seriousness of her religious commitment. I learned quickly to be careful about other people’s commitments. Mimi lived up to her reputation as a superwoman shortly after Hitler ’s occupation of Vienna in March 1938. Mimi was a student in the same school Hans and I attended. With the advent of the Nazis1 and for the few weeks before we were transferred to a “Jewish” school, the few Jews in the school were an avoided and isolated island. Mimi went out of her way to spend school intermissions with us, to be seen talking with us. She maintained her anti-Nazi stand in the context of her strong Catholic faith and eventually became part of the religious establishment. When I saw her again shortly after the war, she had become film reviewer (and censor) for the Vienna diocese, and was concerned about the upcoming Kulturkampf between the church and the socialists. She was still the warm and fine person of years ago. I sometimes wonder whether all these girl cousins and other “women” around me on holidays and elsewhere created the atmosphere in which I eventually would end up liking women as friends as much as, if not more than, objects of passion. Others would spend their time in gender regulated camps and with male friends from school. Unintended, my surrounds were different and I benefitted from that. The Jewish middle-class life came equipped with serving girls and nannies and governesses and French and piano lessons. Until my sister was about three, we had a much loved nanny— Schwester Helli (Appenzeller). I remember her as always wearing the “nurse’s” uniform of the Viennese Nanny. She was kind and 1 Here and elsewhere I use “Nazi” as the now usual abbreviation for the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP). Originally, the term was used in contrast to the “Sozi” abbreviation used for the Social Democrats.

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gentle, and Trude and I loved her much. Eventually, she left and was replaced by a governess who shepherded and taught us, and eventually left my life when she was overcome by my sexual magic. The French lessons were fairly successful but the piano lessons were a disaster. It was just not my cup of tea. The magnificent sum of which is that to this day I can still play Für Elise and nothing else. More lasting is my memory of my piano teacher, the rather pompous, flamboyant wanna-be Herr d’Orange, whose real name was Pomerantz. Describing him to friends once, I was asked how I knew that. I don’t remember, but it is likely that my father—in a style that never tolerated phonies—might well have asked “Herr d’Orange—what was your name originally?” Obscure is the origin of my memory that he went on his way because he made a pass at my mother—or is that just a memory instilled by classic Victorian paintings of piano teachers and their vulnerable students? Music returned when in 1936–37 a friend (Kurt Eisinger) and I were given season tickets to the Vienna opera. My first opera was, rather unfortunately, Wagner ’s Walküre, and we were much put off by Wotan’s monologues. Things picked up after that though and I remember clearly the production of Palestrina (by Hans Pfitzner); one of the choruses still wanders around my mind. Whether because of those opportunities or not, I am still a devoted opera watcher and general music listener, though never a performer. Music is always on in my office, a usual mix of operas, piano music (sonatas, especially Beethoven’s), and symphonic music, plus a reasonable mix of classical jazz. In the Viennese tradition, I was taken to operettas and operetta-like musicals from about age 10 on, which has established a whistling acquaintance with Lehar, Strauss, Stolz, and others and an unalterable tie to the Viennese Walzer. In addition, frequent exposure to the music-dominated radio made most of the Viennese operetta music, arias, and so on, familiar, as well as much opera and symphonic music. Partly because of the ubiquitous radio and partly because we had regular music lessons in school where these song were taught, I find much of the Lieder repertory familiar and even remember many of the words of Schubert’s Lieder (Forelle, Ständchen, Erlkönig [I also recall large parts of Goethe’s poem],

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Heidenröslein). I guess it was that kind of background environment that makes a Viennese of one, including an apparent inborn ability to do a formal Walzer. We did have a gramophone that required hand winding and frequent needle changes. I discovered as an adult that—never having taken dancing lessons—I could dance (and dance well) Viennese waltzes. However, the American influence on European tastes was already strong then. The most recent American “hits” quickly became popular. One of the memories of a very painful bee sting and subsequent twisted ankle (that’s the memory!) at age 11 at the Stadion swimming pool was that, just before those momentous events, I was humming and singing “Heaven …” from Irving Berlin’s 1935 musical Top Hat. What I was really singing was a Viennese take-off, Hef ’n, I bin im Hef ’n …—freely translated “I am down the drain.” And in 1937, I was exposed to talk about the new American “swing” style in music. There was also theater—mostly classical German, and I remember going to the Burgtheater for the classical plays of Schiller and Grillparzer. My reading matter was mixed and typical of the schoolboys of the day. When younger I devoured Hugh Lofting’s Dr. Dolittle stories that my Uncle Otto (Goldschmied) brought me on his visits as soon as a new translation was off the press. Memories of the Dolittle animals, especially the push-me-pull-you, have stayed with me. Later on, I graduated to the German–Austrian schoolboys’ mainstay, Karl May, a German who wrote large tomes in the Wild West setting though he had never been out of Europe. I remember the derring-do of the two main characters (white and Indian) Old Shatterhand and Winnetou. I was also devoted to the other contemporary classic of German-speaking youngsters—Erich Kästner ’s Emil und die Detektive, though typically my favorite character was a girl. Do I correctly remember her name as Pünktchen? And later, there were the classic mystery books by Edgar Wallace—now long forgotten. Two topics stand out among other books remembered: the stories of Shackleton’s and Franklin’s arctic voyages and stark stories about Montenegro, of all places. Eventually, school and general curiosity started me on the classical German fiction literature. The street scene of my early years illustrates the rather radical changes in city life in the past 60 or so years. There were no traffic

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jams. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, private automobiles in Vienna were the exception rather than the rule, but the reader may be assured that the world of horse-drawn private carriages had gone. However, there was still a lot of goods transported by horse, though horse carriages were restricted to rides in the Prater and around the inner city, where they are still available today. Horses pulling freight and coal had a particularly hard time in winter. Icy and snowy roads were slippery, and they would frequently slip and fall. A particular sport for us kids was to scour gutters to collect the discarded and broken off pointed studs (Stollen) worn on the horses’ shoes that were designed to keep them from slipping on the ice. In the summer, the absence of refrigerators called for the daily delivery of blocks of ice for our ice box, which came by horse-drawn wagons. The only public transport was by the quite efficient Vienna street car system (still operating today) and the Stadtbahn, an underground streetcar system replaced today by the new subway. For obscure historical reasons, possibly because of some ties to the English (the post-World War I currency in the new small Austria was the Schilling), Austria was one of the few European countries where one still drove on the left-hand side of the street. One of the first acts of the German administration after the Anschluss was to shift to the right-hand side. The major problem was that the Viennese art of jumping on and off streetcars required radical relearning—and streetcars were our major means of city travel. And having mastered the art of jumping on or off a right-hand driven streetcar was an occasion for boasting in school the next day. Air travel was very much in its beginning, of course, and the appearance of an airplane over the city always occasioned craned necks. As far as clothing was concerned, men and women almost invariably wore hats and even boys wore berets much of the time (see my primary school picture). Small boys wore short pants, and the occasion when long trousers were first worn was a rite of passage. More unusual today would be the knickerbockers worn at all ages though, I believe, mostly by the younger men and boys. They were half-trousers tied just below the knees, coupled with kneesocks of course. They have disappeared from the scene today, but they were a very useful garment during the cold winter. There were no school uniforms, though we apparently always wore

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jackets—confirmed by school photographs from both primary and high school. Indoors, the major difference in creature comforts was the absence of central heating. Heat in our apartment was supplied by a couple of large tiled ovens (Kachelofen), and hot water was supplied by small gas heaters. The other major differences at home were, of course, the absence of TV and hi-fi. Even though the first radio station did not open until 1924, radios abounded but radio stations did not. There was, I believe, just one Vienna station as late as 1938. On the other hand, one achieved multi-station availability by access to long wave reception of other countries and cities, an exercise brought to an end in 1939 when the Nazis prohibited listening to foreign radio stations. I did listen a lot to the radio, including children’s programs and a particular popular one that was concerned with simple handiwork (basteln). I also enjoyed the many cabaret shows on radio, probably the reason for my continued enjoyment of these whenever I can find them (most recently, once again in Berlin). In any case the radio was on much of the time. Other entertainment was going to the movies. There was a small theater a couple of blocks from our apartment (on the Radetzkyplatz, and now a supermarket) and I was allowed to go there with some frequency. I remember a few movies and the smell of the air freshener used. The movies were Brecht’s Dreigroschen Oper (The Three-penny Opera), and on the occasion the advertising was done by special 3-Groschen “coins” (the Groschen being the smallest Austrian currency); an early “white-man’s burden” jungle film called Trader Horn; and a Hollywood weepy, Golden Boy. And since I started seeing movies in the late 1920s, I went to both silents and talkies. There were no washing machines, of course, and laundry was hand washed on Mondays. In addition, there were—for us young ones—intriguing large boiling vats on the top floor of our apartment house where, on designated days, special laundresses appeared to wash linens and towels. The hot, steaming environment was, for some reason, a fascinating adventure. And no vacuum cleaners either—in the inner courtyard of our apartment house, there was frequent beating of carpets and rugs. In general, the by-now usual electric appliances were missing from our kind of

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home at the time. On the other hand there was the peculiarly European mode of fast city mail service by special high pressure tubes distributed throughout the city—known as pneumatic mail, the 1920s equivalent of today’s FAX. Cooking was by gas only and shopping was done in the specialty shops in the absence of supermarkets—still a preferable way of finding good food in selected parts of the world, as in most European cities today, and a luxury we still enjoy in our English home in Hampstead. Though how long they will all be able to resist the superefficient market is questionable. My father ’s wholesale leather business involved quite a bit of travel to customers and tanneries in Austria and Yugoslavia and occasionally to far-away places like Sweden. Eventually, sometime in the early 1930s, the firm acquired a car—a small British Standard—for which a chauffeur also was needed. In those days, few people could drive and my father learning to drive did not seem within possibilities. I made the acquaintance of the young man in a long white coat because occasionally the family went out for brief excursions with him—a high point of which was when we once achieved 100 km/hour on the straightway Wiener Neustädter Allee west of Vienna. Daily life was placid and routine. In the morning, I, and later my sister, and my father would be off to school and work after the marginal breakfast of coffee and a roll, though this was supplemented by the 10 a.m. Gabelfrühstück of a small sandwich or chocolate bar. Then we all came home for the mid-day major meal, served in the dining room and consisting of soup (always soup!), a meat dish, and desert. Then, back to school and work and home again (often with friends) for a late afternoon Jause—coffee and roll or sweet. In the evening we had a smallish supper; when our parents went out, it was usually an omelette, pancake, sausages, or the like. In between, there was time for a rather significant amount of homework. If our parents stayed in for dinner, they would often later go out to meet their friends at their habitual (Stamm) coffee house. On weekends, we often used the summer weather as an excuse for an excursion, or in the winter, to go skiing with friends, or—a great treat—for an automobile spin in the country.

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As any Viennese boy, regardless of origin or class, I grew up speaking a middle-class version of the Viennese dialect. Just as much of the Austrian version of German, it incorporated many French words (the influence of a French-speaking Imperial court?) such as Trottoir for sidewalk, Fauteuil, Plafond (ceiling), Jalousien (blinds), and the peculiar (though not French) Starnitzel for paperbags. Despite much adjustment to the normative Hochdeutsch (high German), my German speech today is still clearly identified as Austrian. All of this gives the correct impression of an eventful but unstressful childhood. I was a typical well-behaved little boy. My mother, known like most Viennese mothers as Mutti, used to tell the story of being able to leave me standing at a door or corner when shopping in a department store, and she would be sure that I would still be there when she came back. I never got into fights, nor did I make my parents unusually angry or unhappy. Punishments, usually slaps in the face, were dealt out by my mother. For a man who impressed many people as authoritarian, my father was very gentle, never really punished us, and certainly never physically. I seemed always to be well behaved, though I wonder now whether that was me or a general characteristic of middle-class Jewish boys. Was it me or my culture? In any case, when did I change from the relatively passive “good boy ” who rarely stepped out of line to the sometimes contentious one of the 1940s and the quite contentious adult? Essentially, I believe it started in 1938 with my emigration when I was alone and to some great extent dependent on myself. I missed the adolescence that might have provided a more traditional transition. There were some anxious events that marked those years. One was the continuous awareness of the Germans being next door (starting in 1933 when I was nine). Others included participating in the boycott of German goods (I remember in particular the boycott of Bayer aspirin), and being aware of the sometimes bloody struggle between the socialists and the right-wing state and city governments. The burning of the Justizpalast in 1927—six days after the birth of my sister—is my earliest memory of a political event.

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There are also some mysterious memories of those days. They illustrate no particular theme except the mysteries of memory, and I cite a few here to convey a sense of the times. Viennese were not great ice cream eaters, usually preferring Italian gelato. But at one time there was a rumor going around Vienna about vanilla ice cream making people sick and my mother told me unequivocally that I must not eat it—I have barely eaten any since. When quite little, I read in a newspaper (I feel I have been reading papers all my life) that a lion had jumped from a movie screen into the audience. I found out then, or shortly thereafter, that it was an April fool’s story, but I still remember the image of the jumping lion. At some time, I read that shipments of bananas sometimes become hiding places for poisonous spiders, and one should be careful when buying bananas. That one is remembered but had no effect—I love bananas.

FAMILY HISTORY—RELATIVES AND THE NEW DISPERSAL My father ’s family was from Slovakia where they had lived for more than two centuries, after moving from Moravia in the early eighteenth century. The family came from Senica and Chropov, small towns in southwest Slovakia. Senica, where my father was born, was a typical amalgam of the Habsburg empire. The townspeople were Slovak and that was the language of the town, but during the time my father was going to school, the administration was under the aegis of the Hungarians and Hungarian was the language of the schools. The history of the Czech and Slovak Jews is complex. The earliest Jewish settlers apparently came from Rome and Byzantium, with a small influx from Germany during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries when the Jews who were expelled from Germany typically went east. There was a continuing movement of both Jewish and non-Jewish Germans into Bohemia and Moravia (the current Czech Republic), particularly during the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. The Mandlers came from Moravia, and the oldest ancestor for whom I have any documents was Emanuel Mandler, who was born in Straznice (then Strassnitz) in Moravia in 1760 and then moved to Chropov in Slovakia. The Czech lands were to some extent bilingual, German and Czech, and the Jews in particular had a German linguistic heritage. The Czech Jews had

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moved out of Germany much later than the emigration to the Eastern pale and thus maintained the German language roots. The move into Poland and Russia had created the Yiddish community of the shtetl with its own language that had developed from its Middle High German roots. In contrast, the Slovak and Czech Jews spoke contemporary German at home rather than the new Yiddish derivative of older German. My father ’s generation grew up trilingually. He spoke German at home, Slovak in town, and Hungarian in school. In the Habsburg Austro-Hungarian empire, Slovakia was part of the Kingdom of Hungary. In 1867, a constitutional compromise between Austria and Hungary made Magyar the official language and the only language of instruction in Hungarian (and therefore Slovak) schools. In later years, my father used to sing Hungarian songs to us, communicated to my mother (who had some Czech) in the Czechoslovak lingua franca that the children weren’t supposed to understand. Of course, he spoke German at home and in business in Vienna. He taught me some Hungarian phrases, of which I remember three (in order of importance): Szeretlek galambom (I love you, my pigeon), Köszönöm (thank-you) and Jó napot (good afternoon). I had always been intrigued by my family ’s history of a mixture of straight German names and near orthodox religious Judaism. One of my great grandmothers was Maria Reiniger, and Maria is an unusual name for devout Jewish families. A granduncle was named Herbert Joachim—again unusual, especially in the midst of Slovak culture. All this bespeaks the continuing dominance of German in these Jewish families. The lack of any family traditions in assigning names led to my father to choose my name because of his regard for David Lloyd George, the British prime minister until 1922. There were two family myths: one was that one of our ancestors was a “wonder rabbi,” one of the many mysterious rabbis said to be endowed with special gifts and capable of limited miracles. But more miraculous was the other myth: that one of my great uncles or great great uncles had invented the bicycle. I know no more than that. My grandfather, Simon Mandler, ran a leather and accessory shop in Senica, with his family living in the house upstairs. I remember him as a tall gaunt figure; he died at 76 when I was still very young. I

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never knew my grandmother Franziska (nee Singer) who died in the influenza epidemic during World War I. There were three sons and a daughter in addition to my father, Richard. My uncle Kornel was sent to medical school, and he and his wife survived the war by hiding in Budapest, where I last saw him in 1948. Alois (called Louis), the oldest, went to Vienna, the imperial capital, around the turn of the century and started a leather business. My father left school in 1910 at age 14 and in 1911, was apprenticed to a leather wholesaler in Vienna. He joined his brother ’s firm within two years and eventually became his partner. The business consisted of buying finished hides from tanneries and selling them to manufacturers, as well as buying raw hides and having them tanned to specifications, often for specialty uses. I learned a little of the process from visits with my father to tanneries and his storerooms, and I carry with me the familiarity of the smell of leathers. More attractive was the fact that we were never short of leather luggage and accessories, both in Vienna and later in New York. Louis and his wife and two children, Hans and Lotte, ended up in Israel. Hans, some 15 years older than I, had emigrated to Palestine (as it was then) in the early 1930s and was able to bring his parents there. He was a travel agent there in the 1950s though after his death the family intimated that he had been a Mossad agent. Lotte married a Rumanian and later moved to Israel. My father ’s third brother, Moritz, initially took over the family shop in Senice, then he too moved to Vienna, to return to Slovakia in 1938. He and his wife and two daughters were eventually murdered in the camps. My father ’s sister Irene married a cloth merchant, David Findler, and they and their family ended up in the United States where Irene lived into her nineties. In October 1925, my paternal grandfather wrote in his will (in German script): My dear children, son-in-law and daughters-in-law. Every man’s end is to be called by the good lord into the beyond, and that will also be my fate. May the good lord give you good fortune and health, happiness and long life, so that you may raise your children for your and all of mankind’s benefit, so that you may have only joys from them.

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He then notes that, “as you well know,” that there is not much to distribute: the house, five savings bank shares and two Tatra shares. The house goes to Moritz, who had stayed with the family business in Senica, but he then noted that if any of the others insisted on their share of the house, Moritz may pay out a limited amount. The shares are to be distributed among all the children. Then followed instructions on the apartment and the business furniture, and so on, and the disposition of his ring (to Kornel, who gave it to me in 1948). Finally, there are instructions for payments to the synagogue for commemorating (with appropriate candles) his and his wife’s death anniversaries, and a reminder to trust in God. There is a postscript saying that he would understand if, for urgent reasons, his sons were not always able to say Kaddish (prayer for the dead) for him. My father had been intended for a career in law, but he preferred to go to the big city and follow his brother Louis into the leather business. From 1914 through 1918, he was conscripted into the Austrian army and assigned to the signal corps on the Italian front. I remember being fascinated as a young boy by the fact that he could still transcribe morse code on the radio with ease. His basic gentleness was illustrated by his World War I pistol holder always being filled with candies partly because he did not want to carry a gun. After the war, the dissolution of the AustroHungarian empire meant that people had to opt for one or another citizenship, and in 1919, with my father now well settled in Vienna, he opted for Austrian citizenship. It was in Vienna during this time that he met the daughter of a customer, Hedwig (known as Hede) Goldschmied. My mother was one of five children of Oskar and Franziska (née Herrmann) Goldschmied. There is no resolution of documentary confusion as to whether the spelling was Goldschmied or Goldschmidt or Goldschmiedt. Both of the families had their roots in Bohemia; my maternal grandfather ’s family came from Nachod in northeast Bohemia, my maternal grandmother ’s from Svetla. They had five children: my mother; another daughter, Grete, who married a Czech store owner; Hugo Taussig; and three sons, Jaroslav (Jaro), Otto, and Ernst. Only Jaro had a family and all three sons worked with Oskar in the family business—the manu-

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facture of children’s shoes. Family lore, and the eventual failure of the business, suggested that none of them was a particularly good business man. Oskar had been, in the early years, a successful children’s shoe manufacturer in the Habsburg empire with factories in Vienna and Poland, and possibly elsewhere—the firm was called Goldschmied & Schanzer. The Vienna factory was closed during or shortly after World War I, and Oskar and his three sons and their families moved to Poland. By the time I remember him, the enterprise had been reduced to the Cracow (Poland) factory, which had the advantage that a couple of times my mother took my sister and me on a train ride to visit Poland and our grandparents and other family there. Eventually, the Cracow factory also failed, and the family moved back to Vienna in the mid-1930s. Oskar was prominent in Zionist politics and activities, but, despite my strong attachment to him, I never thought about Jewish homelands nor was I attracted to the fervent and often radical Zionist groupings popular among many Jewish young people in Vienna (such as the sometimes terrorist BETAR organization founded by the radical Zionist Z. Jabotinsky). My grandfather, when able, was a philanthropist of sorts and particularly interested in orphans, one of whom—Lee Lunzer—became part of our extended family. Oskar was also an avid art collector and, during his more prosperous days, an art patron. Part of his art collection consisted of paintings given to him by young artists whom he had helped out. The collection was given to a non-Jewish acquaintance for safekeeping at the beginning of the deportations, but the recipient denied any knowledge of it after the war. This was a not unusual occurrence, and there were undoubtedly fortunes in art and jewelry stolen by people who had originally been trusted. That piece of post-war Nazi dastardliness was bad enough; it also contributed further upset to some members of the family who told tales of Klimts and Schieles being included in the collection. I loved my grandfather dearly; he was wise and funny and supportive. He was the only one who was told of my clandestine activities after the German occupation in 1938. I thought I should tell somebody and his response was that one had to do what one felt impelled to do—as long as I was very careful. Oskar escaped the worst excesses of the Nazis and died in Vienna of diabetes in January 1943.

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I know very little about my maternal grandfather ’s or grandmother ’s families, but for those inclined to fanciful genetic interpretations perhaps some of my left-wing inclinations were inherited from my grandfather ’s family. One of his brothers, Richard, emigrated to the United States in 1890, having been sought by the authorities for his socialist activities. Another brother, Arthur, who later emigrated to Chile, was a socialist councillor in the Vienna suburb of Mödling. Their mother, my great grandmother, was born Flora Pick, but in 1939, when in England, I approached a Pick relative, well settled in London, for possible help for our families, I never received a reply. My grandmother was a little lady of great warmth and dignity; she survived Theresienstadt and joined our family in New York after the war. There she lived a quiet life and died in her early eighties in 1956—the day my first wife and I had decided to separate. My mother grew up as the good daughter of an upper-middle class Jewish Viennese family—essentially waiting to get married. One of the remembered high points of that life was a putative courtship by the composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Her brother, Otto, who had aspirations to the upper class life and went riding and took up fencing, ended up in Shanghai during the war. There he established a dental supply business that he continued in San Francisco after the war. Jaroslav (Jaro) stayed in the family shoe manufacturing business and was deported with his family to Auschwitz. He returned, severely injured, to Vienna from the camp with his wife Martha (née Taussig). Their children, Suse and Hanne, were the cousins I was closest to and they lived with us for a period in 1937-38. I write about their tragic end in the next chapter. My mother ’s brother Ernst was the problem child who never achieved an adequate place in life and lived on the edge of the family, though he did escape to Israel where he died many years later. My mother ’s sister Grete had moved to TÍebi… in Bohemia after her marriage. She had a general goods store there with her husband’s family, Taussig—with whom we were doubly related through Jaro’s marriage to a Taussig. Visits to TÍebi… were high points of my life in Vienna, particularly because it was where many of my girl cousins would be assembled. Frequently, Suse

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and Hanne would be there because brother Jaro and his family joined my mother ’s visit to her sister. In addition, there were Grete’s two daughters, Anni and Vera. In 1937, these great and wonderful girl cousins (14 to 17 years old) introduced me to the joys of sex, with bare-assed cuddles and feelings and stroking in bed late at night—often three of them and I. There I found out for the first time that the vagina was not, as I had imagined, in front! Other, less passionate, joys included sometimes being permitted to sit at the cash register in the store and, having learned to count in Czech, being permitted to accept payments and make change. I learned a few words of Czech there just as I learned my few words of Hungarian from visits to my uncle Kornel in Budapest. Kornel was known in the family as Onkel Tetanus after, on a visit to Vienna, he gave my sister a tetanus shot following her fall on trolley tracks in the Prater. And TÍebi… provided the exotic pleasure of eating pigeons, which, not being kosher, was not allowed when my father was around. Grete and all of her family were murdered in the camps. My parents were married in 1920. In 1921, my mother gave birth to a girl whose umbilical chord strangled her; she died within three days. Three years later, I was born and in 1927, my sister Trude. My mother never made much of the loss of the first child; they had wanted two children and eventually they got them. My sister took a different view and has, particularly in later life, referred to the dead baby as her “dead sister.” Some years ago, she even went on an expedition in an overgrown Vienna cemetery, searching for her sister ’s grave. My father was quiet, somewhat reserved with a strong distaste for pretension and phoniness (Hochstaplerei), but had a fine sense of humor. Sometimes he would quietly listen to conversations and when asked why he was so quiet, he would say, “Somebody has to listen”—a phrase I have sometimes adopted. Unfortunately for their relationship, my mother had a little of the pretentiousness of her father ’s family, but she was well meaning, although limited in her interests. My father ’s business prospered and my mother did whatever nice Jewish middle-class mothers did. My father had the occasional affair, my mother had one (but a long lasting one), generally par for inter-war Vienna.

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What was unfortunately also “par ” for Jewish families of Central and Western European origins was a deep-seated prejudice against Yiddish-speaking Jews from Eastern Europe (primarily Poland). They were considered déclassé, and—worse—as the kind of people who brought Jews into bad repute. A very sorry attitude that I saw still alive in a left-wing old friend who had returned to Vienna and who complained in the 1980s of the influx of polnische Jews. My sister and I were very close and continued to be so for another 25 years. Trude (later Trudi in the United States) went to the private Luitlen school in Vienna. I am not quite sure why some girls were sent to private schools other than it was the thing to do. I never heard of any private schools for boys; public education was superb and was so in my own postprimary school, which was coeducational albeit in separate classes. There were several daughters there from our social acquaintances. Trudi emigrated to Italy with my parents in 1939, where they lived in Milan until early 1940. Trudi went to Italian schools and was young enough to be speaking Italian fluently when she came to New York. In February 1940, they sailed for New York. Like other refugees from the Holocaust, I have an extended family spread by flight from the Nazis all over the world—not counting the ones of which I know nothing. There is a family in Santiago, Chile—the descendants of my great uncle Arthur Goldschmied and his son Kurt; the descendants of Arthur ’s daughter Anni (Kollmann) are alive and well in the United States. There are Israelis, my cousin Hans’ (Louis’ son) second wife and their son Roni (her other son was killed in one of the Arab–Israeli wars). On a visit to California some years ago, Roni treated me as the pater familias of the Mandlers. Somewhere in the United States or Israel is my cousin Lotte’s son (André Schieber), my cousin Peter Findler ’s children, and in Buffalo, there are the descendants of Leni Pollack—my father ’s aunt—including Thomas Dean who surfaced in La Jolla in 1997. Of the TÍebi… relatives, only Lizzi (a cousin by marriage) survived. There are some Singer relatives from my paternal grandmother ’s family in France.

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SCHOOL I have few memories of my very early years, essentially none from preschool days and very few from primary school. Sometime in the 1930s, I brought scarlet fever home from school and promptly infected my sister, which resulted in my expulsion to an aunt’s house and living with cousin Kurt who rode a motorcycle —a most exciting couple of weeks. Even though I have few specific memories, I did enjoy primary school (the Kolonitz school) from 1930 through 1934. Classes were separated by sex, most if not all teachers were male, and they stayed with you throughout the four years. I had thought that the classes were relatively small, but a count of my class picture of 1933 shows 37 boys. Given that the education was first rate, this suggests that class size is not necessarily a crucial factor. My teacher was Herr Joseph Jax, a kind and wise man, whom we adored and who clearly was a fine and successful teacher. He encouraged me and overlooked my major “failure,” the inability to draw much of anything. He had a knack of telling little stories to illustrate bigger issues. I only remember one he used to illustrate a relevant physiological function: the story of a man who was painted with gold paint all over and suffocated. I enjoyed school and did well, but I am mostly amnesic for that whole period. I recall few friends and no path that brought me from home about six blocks to school, nor did going back to the school many years later engender more than a feeling of familiarity. There was one friend, Heinz Fast, with whom I “designed” a huge all-purpose airplane, and an “enemy”, Maximilian Lerner, with whom I had the only physical fight I recall. There was a curious fascination, though not that unusual for a nine-year old in the latency period, that one of my schoolmates was really a girl. A similar, but semantic, concern was coming home early on in my primary school years and asking how come one of my schoolmates—I remember the name René Czaczkes—had a girl’s name. Four years of primary school were followed by a crucial watershed examination (when I was 10 years old)—much like the old English 11+ examinations. I vaguely remember an extensive examination including writing an essay, and very stressful days or weeks, waiting anxiously for the results. If successful, one could continue to eight years of

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Gymnasium-type school, which led to university. If not, one went into the four-year Hauptschule, which did not. I said Gymnasium-type school because there were three kinds available: the classical Gymnasium with required Latin and Greek; the Realgymnasium with only Latin required and with, I believe, French as a second language; and the Realschule with no classical language required, French required, and emphasis on science and mathematical preparation. Because by that time my father had suggested (decided) that I would be happiest studying chemistry in preparation for becoming a chemist in a tannery and taking over the family business, Realschule was for me. The waiting for the results of the examination ended in disappointment for some of my friends from primary school who soon disappeared from my life, victims of a one-shot examination scheme. I enrolled in the nearest Realschule in Joseph Gall Gasse. Fifty years later, I was delighted to find a description of the little street in Cannetti’s autobiography in which he described in detail his apartment in Joseph Gall Gasse (across from the school) and the views from his window. By this time, we had moved to the apartment overlooking the Danube Kanal. My new school was a 15-minute walk across the Kanal into the second district, and I spent the next three and a half years walking and playing on the banks of the Kanal—the high point of which was a “harbor ” we built at water level with earthen breastworks the could provide “protection” from strangers and inquisitive school-mates. Much of the time was spent talking with friend Hans on the bridge while returning home, where my mother could see me from our little balcony as she and lunch waited patiently or otherwise. I thrived in the Realschule. Our teachers were mostly Ph.D.s (of the soft European variety), but all males. The school was coeducational (as we used to say) with boys and girls in separate classes. As we moved from 11 to 14 years old and into puberty, we became increasingly interested in our female colleagues and because classrooms were used by both sexes of course, messages of love and devotion were left and exchanged in and under school desks. I recall some of our teachers: Herr Rommel (no relation), who taught German and French and was our class teacher, was a dour ascetic man of knowledge but little empathy. Herr Lindner

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taught mathematics and was a joy to be taught by—he was also very conscious of trying to be fair to the Jewish students (all four of us) after Hitler ’s accession. There was also a teacher of geography and history—a rabid Austrian patriot and anti-German supporter of Prinz Starhemberg, the leader of the Heimwehr, the crypto-fascist private army that supported the corporate state. I remember a lecture of his on military tactics in which he pointed out that if the Germans ever invaded Austria through the Berchtesgaden gap, the Austrian army could cut them off and isolate (and annihilate) the invaders. Thus was the nature of self-delusion in this little country of 7 million. Because Latin was not obligatory in a Realschule, I had the opportunity to take Latin as an elective, taught by a young man nicknamed Populus, who made the subject fun and interesting. I am still glad that I took that course. We were taught and had to use two different kinds of handwriting—the old German Kurrentschrift (also known as gothic) and the generally used Lateinschrift, the latter the usual handwriting in Western countries. The former had to be used for all lessons and exercises in German language and literature. It was in fact the preferred handwriting mode in Germany and Austria. Years later, I would still get letters written entirely in the old mode. Fountain pens were around but not yet permitted in my school. In contrast to other countries, there were no school uniforms or a dress code—though this was a time when such was not needed. We did, of course, go home for the midday meal, the major meal of the day. I assume that this assured a relatively tight catchment area for each school. There was relatively little fighting and no bullying—in part consonant with the idea that these schools were for the elite. Even though our school drew on a partly working-class neighborhood, this did not affect these attitudes. There were no organized sports in the schools. We regularly played student-initiated soccer in the school yard, but there was nothing organized about these games and, of course, no interschool competition at all. Occasionally we went on excursions into the surrounding countryside and even on one or two train rides to see more of the country—I remember one big trip to Graz. Politically, there was relatively little activity or pressure from the corporate structure of the Schuschnigg regime, just one

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or two command appearances at rallies at the major Vienna stadium (the Stadion). There we madly waved little red-white-red national flags and hailed the government, and only permitted “party,” the Vaterländische Front (VF). Apart from that, political discussions were fairly free though superficial. One’s general political attitudes were known, but one did not express them too loudly or strongly. I do not believe that there was any organized activity by the government to inquire into or restrict political opinions—short of outspoken attempts at criticism, or advocating drastic change or joining prohibited organizations. I should note that this applied to schoolchildren—the VF government did maintain detention camps for socialists and communists. It was in these four years that I met my closest friend of many years, Hans Matzka, his sister Susie, and his admirable mother Bibi. His father had died some years earlier and his mother ’s brother, Franz Massarek, had become a substitute father. Massarek fascinated me. He was a left-wing playwright who continued to write and have his plays performed in Germany under a variety of pseudonyms. Massarek reportedly disappeared in the Soviet Union during or after the war. The Matzka family gave me the background of left-wing politics that was missing at home and we became good friends. I still treasure a set of drawings of Vienna that Bibi gave me. Hans and I continued our association in New York in the Austrian youth organization, and Susie and I became good friends. She died of cancer many years ago, but she came to La Jolla once and introduced us to her daughter and family, Wendy and Patrick Austin, with whom we have enjoyed a continuing friendly association. Hans eventually became managing editor at Plenum Press, from whence he retired in 1995. Walter Starer was another of the four Jewish students in my class. The fourth was Heinz Fast with whom I had been in primary school. The four of us were not particularly close and, until March 1938, class friendships (though not those outside of school) crossed “racial” lines. After that March, we were now generally ostracized, and we became a close group. In September 1938, shortly before I left Vienna, Hans, Walter, and I were walking along the Kanal when we made a pact—we would meet in 10 years at the same spot. Such was the optimism of the young. I

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don’t know whether Walter survived the Holocaust but, in principle, we were right, we could have met on that spot in 1948.

RELIGION I grew up in what would today be called an observing conservative Jewish household. My mother, the daughter of an agnostic Zionist, had no religious beliefs but kept a more or less kosher household. Judaism was a central factor in my father ’s family, and he was a strict observing Jew, which meant dietary laws and the strict adherence to prayer. He “laid on” his tefilin every morning and was in his synagogue for prayers at every holiday service, in addition to Saturdays and usually Friday evenings. The family synagogue was a small congregation on the ground floor of an old house in Schönlaterngasse in Vienna’s first district. I would guess the total congregation numbered quite a bit less than 100. His brother-in-law, Findler, went there as well as some other acquaintances from Slovakia. I, in contrast to my sister, was expected to follow in my father ’s religious footsteps and dutifully engaged in the tefilin ceremony. I went to synagogue with my father and remember with warmth the longish walk from our home to the synagogue, often with uncles or relatives. I have one peculiar association with my visits to the synagogue. Exactly opposite the building that housed the small synagogue was the Basiliskenhaus, dating from the thirteenth century. In a niche on the second floor, facing the street, a small stone statue of a misshapen rooster with toad’s feet can be seen, commemorating a monster that terrified that part of Vienna some 800 years ago. And every time I came out of the synanogue, there was the Basilisk facing me. Whereas I had a primitive belief in an all powerful God and would sometimes be known to ask Him for favors, I never took to the ritual and paraphernalia of religion. Apart from my father ’s morning and Sabbath prayers and the religious holidays, the only regular religious ceremony that the family took part in was the blessing and breaking of bread (called Barches in Vienna and Challe in America) on Friday evening. When away from home, I did not follow dietary laws or engage in ritual prayer. Of course, this was in part due to my mother ’s attitude, who in fact smug-

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gled ham rolls (Schinkensemmeln) into the house on the occasion of my convalescence from pneumonia in 1938. My Bar Mitzvah in 1937 was a major family occasion. Preparation by the celebrant started many months earlier. I was given a special tutor, a near-rabbi, whom I disliked for his insistence on orthodoxy and indistinct speech, who taught me my portion of the Torah (to be sung) and the accompanying commentary to be read thereafter. I was fitted for my first blue suit and other appropriate accoutrements, and my mother started making plans for the home festivities. Then there was the conflict between my father and my maternal grandfather Oskar. My father, of course, wanted the celebration to be held in his little synagogue. My grandfather saw himself as having some social obligations (or pretensions, as my father would have put it) and also I was his only grandson. He insisted on the major old Viennese synagogue in the Seitenstettengasse with the Viennese chief rabbi officiating. I carefully stayed away from the dispute and eventually, my grandfather won out (I guess not really to my father ’s despair). In the end, my immediate family lost out in one sense because—it being Saturday—we had to walk, and it was quite a hike back and forth. I was inundated with presents, but remember only the one most precious to me, a Kodak Retina 35mm camera, which eventually was lost on the beach in Coney Island. One of the better aspects of the Jewish religion that I experienced was that, in contrast to much of Christianity, there is little in the way of threats of damnation or post-terminal punishment—in fact no talk really of an afterlife. I wonder sometimes why I was for so long in dread of not being a believer and paying due respect to God—in the end it was probably fatherly and familial identification and the God I feared was my father. It took me until a serious lung operation in 1940 to break loose. Before going to the operating room I solemnly said, to myself, that I would come through this ordeal on my own, that I would do it without asking God for help, and that my survival would prove that I did not need Him. And so it was. Since then, I have become, on the one hand, increasingly impatient with belief in supernatural religions and rituals and, on the other hand, more committed to identifying myself as a secular Jew—lest my giving up of the religion be

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seen as a submission to anti-Semitic pressures. And with Jean equally an atheist, we brought up two quite morally proper atheistic sons.

POLITICS My earliest memory of a direct political identification was during the brief violent confrontation between the Austrian corporate quasi-fascist state and the socialist paramilitaries in the early 1930s. Fighting broke out primarily in and around the Vienna city housing projects—an exemplary product of the socialist city administration. One of these building was just two blocks from our apartment house and we could hear the guns and explosions. At one point—with shooting going on around us—I offered, to the horror of my mother, to go to the store and get some needed bread and other supplies. Whence came that particular piece of rather untypical heroism, I know not—nor do I know of a repetition later in life. Otherwise, I recall some of the more outstanding political events, such as the assassination of Engelbert Dollfuss by Austrian Nazis in 1934. When Austrians still voted, there was no question but that my parents were voting social democratic—the only real possibility for Viennese Jews in the face of a tradition of the previous anti-Semitic administrations led by the Catholic conservatives (and as exemplified by the Viennese mayor in the 1920s, Karl Lueger). I vaguely remember the last open elections before Dollfuss’ accession to power. Specifically, I recall one of the more pungent social democratic slogans: Ho ruck nach links, denn rechts—da stinkts (Let’s shift to the left because the right stinks). After the accession of Dollfuss, followed by Kurt Schuschnigg, the regime imposed its repressive policies and structure, but did not require active political participation in its single-party regime. Apart from the usual anti-Semitism, it had no particular position toward the Austrian Jews. It did however crack down on active socialists and communists who were confined in detention camps. In school, it was generally known what various people’s sympathies were, but nobody took that kind of positioning—on the center or left—too seriously. My identification with my parents’ politics and the general attraction of the social democrats became radicalized under German occupation into a move left to-

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ward the communists. I will warn the reader (probably in vain) not to take talk of communism and communists in succeeding pages from the stark American point of view and sometimes hardened Cold War attitudes. For Europeans, Communism was a legitimate, though in part feared and despised, political movement. Voting for and with communists was not necessarily seen as a sell-out to Soviet imperialism. In fact, European communists in Italy and elsewhere were often less Moscow-dominated than the hide-bound American party. Even today, in France, Italy, and elsewhere, communists are often accepted as legitimate politicians. In summary, I would say that the liberal, socialist, statist attitudes of the Austrian social democrats (successors of the Austro–Marxist tradition) influenced my political thinking for the rest of my life. In a more general sense, my political awareness was shaped by being part of Mitteleuropa—a concept that went out of fashion after World War II, but is now coming back to describe the peculiar atmosphere of politics and nationalism that is centered around Austria, the Czech Republic, parts of Italy, Germany, and Poland. One embarrassing deviation from my leftish politics, but probably dictated by central European attitudes, was my behavior during the Italian–Abyssinian war. Guided by benighted geopolitical thinking (which I probably thought quite sophisticated), I not only supported the Italians but had battle maps in my room with pins showing the relative positions of the opposing armies. The basis was presumably the belief that Mussolini’s Italy was Austria’s protector against the neighbor on the north. Similar thoughts buoyed me up during the months preceding the Anschluss when newspaper reports spoke of Italian troop concentrations at the Brenner pass against the possibility of a German incursion into Austria. Vienna was rife with rumors of the impending intervention by the Italians. Reality, of course, was different.

ANTI-SEMITISM It was during those first 14 years that I learned about anti-Semitism. I do not remember when I first started being aware of it, since anti-Semitism in Vienna at the time was a fact of life and

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part of the background noise. As a middle-class Jew, it was infrequent, but not unusual, to have non-Jewish friends; middle-class gentiles (or Jews) habitually did not do that. As a result, all of my close friends were Jewish. I did, however, participate in cracks in the divide, whether it was the not very close but still true friendship of some of my schoolmates or the non-Jewish associations, such as Mimi, that my friend Hans’ family had and which I enjoyed in school and on some vacations. But these were the exceptions and typically were related to the absence of middle-class pretensions, as at my Realschule, which served a lower-middle and working class catchment area. Well into college I never failed to wonder how deep or sincere the friendships of non-Jews were. I think that it eventually took my wife, Jean, and my friend, Willi, to eliminate completely the expectation that non-Jews always reserved some basic anti-Semitic sentiments. I never thought about the sources of those sentiments, nor really did I wonder at their irrationality—they too were facts of life. And unspoken anti-Semitism was, after all, better than the Viennese experience of the occasional spitting of the label Jude as an epithet. In school, there was the same background anti-Semitism and nothing worse. In primary school, before age 10 there was, as is usual with younger children, practically none that I can remember. And in secondary school, in the Realschule, relations in my class between Jews and non-Jews were remarkably calm—if there were any anti-Semitic outbursts they were forgettably minor. I remember no major anti-Semitic disturbance during the nearly four years and would have forgotten minor anti-Semitic remarks as being part of the Viennese scene. Everybody knew who the Nazis were, and the one tapped to be their underground leader, class leader Joseph (Pipsi) Glaninger, emerged in March 1938 as a proud and pronounced little Nazi. Sometimes I wondered about the more obscure contents of anti-Semitic belief. Thus, it is mendacious and malicious, but not weird, to call Jews capitalists (or communists), to accuse them of being filthy rich (or poor and filthy), or to ascribe to them dreams of world power. But it is surely weird to accuse them of using the blood of Christian children to bake their Passover bread. It is a most peculiar libel that has been thrust on the Jews—usually in a

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disconnected way as something that was true in the past, done by unmentionable Jewish characters. As late as the 1920s, the English writer, G. K. Chesterton, still believed in the ritual murder myth. My school experience in Vienna was that, most of the time, there was little more than a background of anti-Semitic expression. I knew of, and dreaded, the frequent attacks on Jewish students at the University by the traditional reactionary and anti-Semitic student groups (Studentenverbände). In my school, the few Jewish students were recognized as such, sometimes verbally insulted, but the teachers did not treat us differently from the rest. However, the advent of the Nazi regime legitimized latent beliefs that could be openly expressed by many of my co-students, but there was a respectable number who did not participate in the exercise of Nazi power. When Jews accept anti-Semitism as a unchanging aspect of the social world, they frequently have an irrational reaction, which I sometimes shared. The tendency is to look for Jews in the world of science, entertainment, and sports, to credit achievements and position. Thus, one would (and still does) recognize Jewish names in movie credits, sports teams, and Nobel prizes. In my current family it has developed into a standing joke of assigning daily troubles (such as red traffic lights) to anti-Semitism. Being singled out for special attention as a Jew, I had never understood the meaning of being the chosen people (chosen for pogroms and holocausts). I have now convinced my wife and some of my friends that what God really meant was that it made it easier for Jews to find parking spaces—certainly, I seem to be lucky in this respect. The converse of looking for successful Jewish “names” is the attempt to hide one’s Jewishness by hiding one’s Jewish name. I have already told the story of my piano teacher, Herr d’Orange, and the story feeds into one of my father ’s favorite jokes: “Mr. Goldstein appears before a judge and asks that his name be changed to something like Jones or Smith. He justifies his request by relating that all the people in his business are goyim and, as the only obvious Jew, he has trouble making a living. The judge assents and Mr. Smith goes home. Six months later, he is back in the same court. Now what? Your honor, I’d like to change my name to McCormick. I still have great difficulty in my business because

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people keep asking me what my name was before it was Smith. With the new name, … “ My father ’s moral purpose was to illustrate that you can’t run away from what you are. My friend, Milton Rosenberg, once said that changing one’s name meant “giving in to the shits.” American anti-Semitism was here when I arrived in 1940 and is slow to disappear. In the early 1950s, I saw a letter from the chairman of a major University’s Department of Psychology, which asked for recommendations for a position with the proviso that such a candidate be neither Jewish nor have Jewish mannerisms. And in the late 1950s, Roger Revelle, one of UCSD’s godfathers, had to remind the city fathers of La Jolla that their restrictive covenants on Jewish home ownership had to go if they really wanted a first class university. Coming to America, I had a moment of personal insight about American racism. Seeing the segregation and prejudice against what were then “Negroes,” I realized that the Jews were the European Negroes. African Americans suffer more severely economically and socially, but I think it quite meaningless to compare and measure persecutions and prejudice. It was clear to me then that Blacks must feel about White Americans and their attitudes as we felt about non-Jewish Europeans. One result of that view was that I have never understood how a Jew could ever share the racism of American society. It was as if one truly identified with the aggressor and forgot one’s brothers—any persecuted minority. Except for the very last months before the German invasion, the anti-Semitism that I and my family experienced had no aspect of a gathering storm. We lived relatively unharried, happy lives, considered ourselves good Austrians, and, for most of the time, were quite unprepared for what was to come.

Growing up

With my sister Trudi

"Mutti" with Trudi and me

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1937 - View from our apartment over the Danube Kanal with the Riesenrad (Ferris wheel) in the distance

My elementary class in 1933 (I am 5th from left in last row)

My Realschule class in 1936/37 (I am 1st from left in last row)

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My grandfather, Simon Mandler's passport he is 67 in this photo

My grandfather Oskar Goldschmied

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My grandmother Franziska Herrmann Goldschmied

My grandfather Goldschmied with his mother

World War I - My uncle Otto Goldschmied (on the right)

My grandparents Goldschmied taking the waters in Karlsbad (Karlovy Vary)

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House and store (probably in Svetla/Bohemia) of my maternal grandmother's mother's family (Müller) - very similar to the Mandler establishment in Senica/Slovakia

My mother (at right) and friends feeding the pigeons in Venice in 1923

Exhibition of children's shoes from my grandfather Goldschmied's factory at the Prague fair, probably post WWI

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Ends and Beginnings 1938-1940

ANSCHLUSS

T

he year preceding the Anschluss (the merger of Austria into Germany) in March 1938 was full of forebodings and omens. Confrontations between Austria and Germany became more frequent and more intense. In 1933, the Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss had replaced the democratic Austria with a corporate state, abolished elections, and proclaimed a one-party state. In part, it was an attempt to create strength in Austria to match the looming threats from the north and the one-party structure that was being established there. In any event, it created weakness by isolating the Austrian government from significant parts of the population. In 1934, the semi-private army of the Heimwehr (home defense), an indirect arm of the corporate crypto-fascist government, attacked workers’ housing and crushed the socialist Schutzbund (protective organization) forces. This encounter with authoritarian government was underlined a few years later. On vacation on the Adriatic in Italy, I was in Fiume (now the Croatian Rijeka) and saw the blackshirted fascisti

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quickstepping through the streets singing the Giovenezza. I remember it as a strange experience, outside the real world. The first direct confrontation with the Austrian Nazis came later in 1934 when Dollfuss was killed by a group of Nazi conspirators who had stormed the Chancellery in the course of a failed putsch. In 1936, Germany (represented by Von Papen) and Austria concluded a security pact that was to guarantee Austrian independence. German pressure was becoming stronger and stronger for the Schuschnigg government to “come home to the Reich.” Nazi mobs started to appear in the streets by the end of 1937. The final act of an independent Austria came in February 1938 when Chancellor Schuschnigg was “invited” to meet Hitler in Bavaria, and was bullied and lectured. In the end, Germany demanded the inclusion of the Nazi puppet Seyss-Inquart in the government as minister of the interior. Then, in early March, Schuschnigg played his last card and called for a referendum on Austrian independence. Germany reacted by threatening to invade if the plebiscite was not called off, so it was. There followed a Nazi-controlled government that called for German assistance and the German invasion followed. Rumors of support for an independent Austria were many, some coming from the democracies, some from Mussolini’s Italy. There was—despite the very large support for the Anschluss among the population at large—a significant number of Austrian patriots, ranging from some of the relatively tame fascists of the Dollfuss–Schuschnigg corporate state to the old center parties to the suppressed and illegal parties on the left. The church was generally mute. In the few weeks before the German arrival, there were heady days as the Schuschnigg government tried to rally support from across the political spectrum and effectively lifted political suppression. Suddenly, Socialist broadsheets and Socialist and Communist leaflets appeared on the streets, and amidst the obvious certainty that Austria could not and would not resist German occupation, there was an exhilaration about political possibilities—however misplaced. The reality was that, in those last few weeks, the streets belonged to the Nazi mobs; true optimism was the optimism of the Nazi party members who now emerged in public with the little swastika emblems in their buttonholes. I had been very much aware of and caught up in these developments, and

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the rising threat and excitement of those last few weeks have a palpable existence in my memory. For the Jews, the situation was complicated—we did not know what would happen. 1938 was a few years before the final solution was implemented. Kristallnacht had not happened yet, and whereas we knew that German Jews lived in an oppressive and dangerous state, they were generally not in danger of their lives. Although many German Jews were making well-ordered preparations to leave Germany, many others were accepting the restrictions on life and staying put. After all, for the first few years after 1933—at least until Kristallnacht—many Jews in Germany were able to continue with their small businesses and jobs, and even the Nazi government had not yet decided what to do with the Jews. And yet, the Austrian Jews started making preparations to leave as soon as the Anschluss was accomplished. They did not have to wait for the Kristallnacht or the new restrictive and punitive decrees that came late in 1938. Though there were some in Vienna who still thought, like many German Jews, that National Socialism was a passing phenomenon, I knew of nobody who was willing to wait and see and to adjust to living as endangered lower-caste citizens. There may be many reasons for the difference, among them the facts that many German Jews were more deeply assimilated into German society in all its aspects than were Austrian Jews, and that Austrian anti-Semitism was more virulent. But, as Primo Levi has said about assimilation, “The anti-Semite hates the Jew no matter what.” Indeed, the influence of Austrians and Austrian anti-Semitic attitudes in the NSDAP (the official name of the National Socialist German Workers Party) after March 1938 may have accelerated the rate of Nazi evolution toward the final solution. In any case, for both German and Austrian Jews, the transition from anxiety to horror was slow; it was not until 1941 that Jews were required to wear the yellow Stars of David. I walked the streets in apparent though relative safety, only occasionally and marginally molested. I saw, ate, and bought as before but under a cloud of anxiety and foreboding. At least for an adolescent, this was a transitional period, much of life was unchanged, only the confrontation with the ever present notion that life will have to continue elsewhere was threatening and potentially chaotic. That was the view from the

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ground, the way I experienced those few months; others had different experiences and reactions. I was short of my 14th birthday, and curiosity and excitement characterized my feelings more than fear did. I knew enough about the politics of the 1930s and the Nazis to realize that my life was about to change radically, and the symptoms were all around. Some of the underground Nazis in school burst into activity, many fellow students started wearing the swastika insignia in their lapels. Still, life at school was surprisingly unchanged. The four Jewish students in my class were seated in the rear but still participated in classes. There was little in the way of physically abusive behavior and not much verbal abuse at that. It was an accelerated continuation of Austrian anti-Semitism—and that changed little with the advent of the German armies. In the midst of knowing that we were soon to be part of Nazi Germany, my life continued in some ways, changed in others. I continued to go skating despite the street crowds of Nazi mobs, I continued school as usual, and I spent time with my (mostly Jewish) friends. But I also started taking private English lessons, and after the German arrival, I had a tutor in electrical theory and installation—a rather ludicrous and unsuccessful attempt to prepare me for a useful occupation. The tutor was a young Jewish student whose knowledge of electrical engineering was as limited as his enthusiasm to transmit it was genuine. I learned a little switching theory, but was no more able to install any wiring after the course than before. About a week before the arrival of the German troops, I had gone skating at the Eislaufverein. Winter was breaking and the ice was wet, and by the time I took the streetcar home, I was soaking and shivering in the cold evening wind. The streets were full of marching Nazi formations, shouting their slogans. By March 13th, when the German armies marched into Vienna, I was very ill in bed with pneumonia and pleurisy, though I listened to the radio and watched German planes swarm over Vienna. The transition was a gradual one because we were already living in a totalitarian state. The degree to which the situation was ambiguous is shown by the fact that my parents discussed, in all seriousness, with our physician the desirability of taking me to the Semmering (a popular vacation and convalescent resort) for a proper recov-

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ery from my illness. I recovered on my own and became part of the Jewish preoccupation of planning the emigration from Nazi Germany. I played an active part in this, going to embassies and consulates to queue up, often as early as 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning, for application forms and information. I helped to initiate our slow process of emigrating to America, first of all by picking up registration and application forms from the U.S. consulate. Then, there was the next step of trying to find a sponsor. It all started with copying the names and addresses of all the Mandlers in the New York telephone book, and there were a surprising dozen or so. Later, I searched through trade registers, which is how, I believe, we found the name of David Eisendrath, who eventually sponsored our immigration to the United States. At other times, I went to government offices for application forms for such things as finance statements, without which one could not leave the country, or to the police to request their statements of acquiescence to any possible departure and general certificates of good conduct.

TURNING LEFT Between school, trying to find emigration opportunities, and continuing to be 14, my politics became radicalized as I came in contact with the underground socialist youth organization, the Roten Falken (Red Falcons), and with a Boy Scout front group of the communists. I am not sure whether I had joined the Scouts before the Anschluss, but, if so, it was for a very short time and their major attraction now was the clandestine activity of my particular Scout group. I guess that my first significant contact with communist matters dates to Moscow radio broadcasts following the German occupation. I had previously identified with the Austrian social democrats, one of the more left-wing European social democratic variations. But that was inevitable for most politically conscious Jews in Vienna. Political consciousness was a given as we lived through the Austrian quasi-fascist corporate state, preceded by violent confrontations between socialists and the various incarnations of the right—most recently in Dollfuss and Schuschnigg’s Vaterländische Front. With the advent of German occupation, the

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sources of political street information died out. Although the social democrats briefly flowered just before the Anschluss as Schuschnigg sought support, they did not have the apparatus in place to run a reasonable underground, nor possibly—at this point—enough adherents. The communist apparatus, however small, was in place and underground operations were their bread and butter. Within a few months, I had met some contacts—and by late summer 1938, I was occasionally distributing pamphlets. But more importantly the major source of political reassurance—that there was hope—came from Radio Moscow. In retrospect, we think of the times as the beginning of the full force of the Stalinist terror, but it should be kept in mind that there was no terror on the airwaves, and most of the terror stories then came from fascist sources. Radio Moscow broadcasts to Germany and separate, brief broadcasts to Austria represented the only palpable opposition available. Listening to the radio (not yet prohibited) and thrilling to the Internationale presented a ready-made place of identification—particularly for a 14 year old. My major contribution to the underground, such as it was, was to stick leaflets opposing the Germans into doorways and under doors during my early morning excursions to local and foreign offices. In retrospect I have wondered what moved a typical middle class Jewish boy to engage in such activity. The only echo I find from those days was my feeling that “something had to be done,” that one could not idly watch the German occupation. In all of this activity in the city streets, there was some risk as newly constituted Hitler Youth and SA detachments marched through town and tended to pick up Jews and beat them up. Probably more dangerous (and demeaning) were the loose groups of SA detachments and roaming Nazi hooligans (and there were many of them) who went around looking for Jews to scrub walls and fences to remove the slogans that had been painted on them during the days leading to the Anschluss. Most of them were painted sidewalk signs and graffiti supporting the Schuschnigg regime, and the Nazis wanted to remove all traces of any possible opposition. These scrubbing details could become dangerous as the Jews were expected to work with brushes and water only and were repeatedly physically abused as they worked on hands and knees. Clearly, navigating the streets had become somewhat perilous for

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Jews, but no sense had yet developed that the environment would lead to torture and death. There was no doubt about the fear, the incipient looking over my shoulder, that I experienced walking the streets of Vienna—a memory that still colors my visits there. However, it was obvious that, in the first few weeks and months, the streets of Vienna were most dangerous for people of the left and other declared opponents of National Socialism.

THE NAZIS TAKE OVER There were many instances of Austrian Nazi-stormtroopers invading Jewish apartments and confiscating valuables, though it happened to none of our family. Whether or not that happened often was a function of the good (or bad) will of the ubiquitous Viennese super-janitors (the Hausmeister). In the most serious instances of these “invasions,” the men of the house were “arrested” and ended up in Dachau in Bavaria, the first German concentration camp we heard of. In those early days, it also was a camp from which people frequently returned. In the meantime, my father ’s business was being taken over by the Nazi authorities. It started with the appointment of a commissar (as they were called) appointed by the state who was responsible for the oversight of all operations. In the case of my family’s business, the person appointed was their loyal bookkeeper, Frau Maria Senoner. She made it possible for the expropriation to occur smoothly, and she also helped my father divert some limited funds to business associates in the Netherlands. Eventually, the business was transferred to “Aryan” owners. In many cases, the commissars eventually took over a business themselves and the lucrative practice of expropriating Jewish businesses spread throughout commercial activities. My father was involved in an experience that, in retrospect only, was ludicrous. Some few months after the German occupation, he received a simple postcard requiring him to appear for German Army training exercises (a calling up or Einberufung). The call up was obviously based on the Austrian Army’s WWI records and my father ’s service in that war. Clearly, a mistake had been made because the records would have clearly indicated my

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father ’s religion, but how does one point that out to the efficient Germans without drawing attention to oneself? As I remember it, a simple telephone call to the relevant Army barracks, informing them that he was Jewish, cleared my father from further service! But I remembered the incident as my first inkling about the transparency of the myth of German efficiency. Everyday life continued in a slightly diverted way—we ate as usual, but were not allowed to employ an “Aryan” maid in a Jewish home; my father went to work, but it was not his business any more; I went to school but it was soon a different school for Jewish students; my sister also changed schools, from a private one to a public one for Jews only. With the institution of the Nürnberg laws that required as a minimum “racial” separation in educational settings, the Jewish students from a number of different schools were assigned, in the middle of 1938, to a school (the Radetzky Schule) exclusively for Jewish students. I left there in October when I went to England, but I recall one significant incident. In our German classes, we had been reading Schiller ’s Wilhelm Tell and were required to write an essay on the play and its theme. I received a grade of 2 (B). The teacher took me aside and told me that, whereas my essay was indeed excellent, it was not possible to give a Jew a grade of 1 (A) when the subject was German literature. My parents were preoccupied with getting me out of the country—there was some feeling that young males might be most at risk from Nazi policies. The irrationality of some reactions to the advent of the Nazi state was illustrated by the fear that young Jewish men might be drafted into military duties—certainly not anything that was likely to happen. In retrospect, there was little basis for these fears; when the persecution started in earnest, German and Austrian cruelty made no distinctions of gender or age. In any case, my father in particular wanted to get me out, preferably to England. He had been able to smuggle some funds abroad to his friends at the somewhat grandiosely called INLECO (International Leather Company) in Amsterdam. The owners, the Victor family, were German refugees themselves and I believe the transaction was possible with some assistance from my father ’s ex-bookkeeper, the commissar of his firm. By shipping goods abroad, but having payment stay with the Victors some money

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was accumulated. In the end, it was the Victors who found a school for me in England and who made the arrangements for me to go there. Even the preparations for my departure were, in retrospect, a wonderland of contradictions. Here I was fleeing from the eventual horror of Nazi Germany and my mother took great care to follow the instructions from the school as to the clothes I was to have with me. Because money was no object—we could not take it with us anyway—I was fully outfitted, including white flannels for cricket!

FORMATIVE YEARS Sometimes I take stock of what I lost. In contrast to my parents and other adults I did not lose much in the way of possessions. I mourned the loss of my rather extensive stamp collection, nurtured by uncles and allowances, but do not remember any other “thing.” What I did lose was a country and a faith in belongingness—probably all part of adolescent innocence. I also missed an active adolescence because I had to grow up so quickly. Most important was the fact that after 14 years of being an Austrian—a patriot with a feeling of belonging and an identification with a small country full of symbols and ways of identifying with it—I was suddenly told that I was no longer wanted, that I was no longer part of that entity or idea. I felt betrayed, lied to, and rejected. That sense of betrayal has stayed with me ever since—it became my central fear, my “Room 101.” And I was not to be left with that alone—three or four other major betrayals have been spread over the intervening 60 years and they always tear at my guts, move me to tears. I believe my tendency to be a truth teller, to “tell it like it is,” has been a reaction to that. I inordinately hate being lied to or lied about (the little or big betrayals) and rather meticulously avoid betraying others. The proclivity to come out into the open has made me some enemies, but I believe more good friends. In 1948, in a letter to my friend Evelyn (she of the turtle episode in chap. 3), I wrote: There are very few people whom I consider honestly and sincerely as friends. As a matter of fact there are few who would want to be that. And I am very touchy about the slightest rejection. Real friendship to my mind is the attempt to find a live

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mirror for yourself. Pure Interessengemeinschaft [common interests] is nothing, it leads to pseudo-friendships which must fail and in the course of which we can only lose if we give too much of ourselves. … [W]e must have somebody who under no circumstances will maliciously tear down the [self image] which all of us seek constantly and passionately. Our friends, abstractly seen as a group of ideas and character, are our god. This [is] the god which forgives our sins, determines our fate and is possessor of [our] soul (our character, drives, like and dislikes etc.). Man is a gregarious animal. He does not and cannot exist alone, therefore his social group, his environment, his ties to others of his species are the essence of his life. And thus his friends become his mirror … Not as individuals, but in toto, in a group, as a concept. … [T]he logical conclusion is … that once one becomes part of this somebody, he cannot by choice or accident dissociate himself from it. Especially since any [such] real friendships must be mutual … it is a two-way tie. … I have always been … jealous of giving too much of myself …. Most of the time I feel a basic indifference to most people, and when they begin to feel it they begin to develop a beautiful dislike toward me. I left New York [in 1947] with more people who dislike than like me (not to mention friendships). … And I am not sorry. But it will make me more careful. Because it does not pay to create too large a group of bastards who will try to hurt you whenever possible …

I put this excerpt from the future here because I believe that these attitudes were, to a large extent, shaped in 1938-40. Some of their immaturity embarrasses me today, but I find the feeling about the mutual full acceptance, support, and openness needed in a true friendship still a core belief of mine. Few friendships have fitted this prescription and hope; one or two ended with great disappointment and even betrayal. I still engender some negativity in others because of my arms-length dealings. Most importantly, I have developed a strong need not to hurt or endanger others. Interestingly, that attitude was developed by talking about morals and the like with my adolescent and maturing sons, with whom I developed this notion of not hurting (which does not include any reluctance at intellectual or scholarly criticism). I still may hurt inadvertently, I suppose, but I do not do so deliberately. Our part must be not to hurt—there are too many out there who go out of their way to do so. And so I left be-

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hind my country, my family, my friends—never again to trust fully, never again to feel truly at home.

LEAVING Finally, in October, I was ready to leave. I had obtained the appropriate documents, German passport, permission to leave the country, and minimal amounts of money. My father had a gold ring made for me to take along as a minor financial haven if needed. My departure from the Vienna station was tearful, but by now it was what Jewish people did. I took a through train (not quite that, as it turned out) to Ostende for the ferry to England. Soon after departure, I found several co-emigrants on the train. One was a young woman in her late teens to whom I was drawn—a 14-year-old’s instant infatuation. We were the youngest two in the group and were a comfort for each other. After arriving in England, I wrote to her and she replied, saying that she was as unhappy as I was and responded to my declaration of affection by telling of her own focus of woe. She had left behind in Vienna a relationship with a young man who was not Jewish— and thus, left forever. Just one of the personal sadnesses that I kept encountering in those years. Our train proceeded north through Germany, but, at the border station in Aachen, all the Jewish passengers were told to leave the train with all their luggage. After much apprehension and fear, we were finally assembled and told by a local Gestapo official that the German government had just decreed that the passports of all Jews had to have a large “J” stamped on them. The introduction of the “J” was due to a request by the Swiss chief of police, a Dr. Rothmund, who had complained that without it, he could not tell the difference between Aryan and “other ” Germans who arrived at his border. Because the decree had just come out, there was no such stamp available in Aachen and we would have to wait until it could be procured. With ironic German efficiency, the Gestapo immediately went into high gear by first shipping us back to Cologne where the stamp was to be made on an emergency basis. In the meantime, we were transported to temporary locations, such as the station mission, a local convent and, in my case, to a local

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hotel which on inspection turned out to be full of rooms with no wardrobes or dressers, just beds (what is known in German as a Stundenhotel that rents its rooms by the hour). I spent the first night of my emigration in a bordello! Efficiency triumphed and the next day we were given our passports with the “J” properly stamped, taken to the station, told that we would be inspected for trying to smuggle illegal gold and jewelry, and sent off on the next train. The threat of the inspection made me want throw my gold ring into the nearest waste basket, but one of my companions told me not to be concerned. I did, however, dispose of an illegal £5 note. Within an hour we were on our way out of Germany. In London, I was met by a woman from a Jewish aid organization and put on a train to Bournemouth. I have few memories of this last part—just an accepting passivity.

BOURNEMOUTH I arrived in Bournemouth on a dark October day and was met by Mr. Langdon, the headmaster of St. Mary’s Lodge, and a pupil about my age. As we drove to the school, the other student kept up a continuous chatter (most of which I did not understand, except the query about whether I could drive). For some reason I thought he meant horses, which I thought peculiar. We drove to the school that was situated in a large former home in one of the leafier parts of Bournemouth. It was latish in the evening and I was promptly put to bed in a room by myself. In the morning, I was given tea in bed, but it was a tragicomic event, since somebody had forgotten to put hot water into the tea kettle, and the bowl of yellowish brown sugar was completely alien to me. Here I was with an empty kettle and some mysterious substance as my introduction to life in England. On October 10th, the 14-year-old wrote a report to his family in Vienna (in German of course): Af t e r m u c h e f f o r t a n d d a n g e r s I l a n d e d h a p p i l y i n Bournemouth. Some additions to my first report: [sent from Brussels] We made inquiries [in Cologne] at all possible offices until we finally landed at the Passport Office, where we were

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put off until the next morning. We then slept in parts in a hotel, a cloisters and the station mission. The next morning again nothing (the stamp was not there yet). We ran around until 6 o’clock, went sight seeing in Cologne (a beautiful city, especially the cathedral). At 6 Dr. Schenk [one of my traveling companions] and another gentleman went to the passport office, where a car arrived with the stamp at 6:15. The people were very nice and really put themselves out for us. At 7:15 13 people took the train to Aachen. Fritz Hift had to stay behind, since he had a head injury. In Aachen we stayed from 9:15 until 2:30 since we had missed the train because of the inspection. Only selected people were inspected but those very thoroughly (Luggage and personal inspection). At 2:30 F. Hift finally appeared, who continued on with us, his wound was not very bad. In Brussels (at 6 in the morning) we wanted to post letters and I ran for a half hour through Brussels and there was no open post office. In Ostende we had a 3 hour lay over and I telegraphed to Mrs. Shearer [from an aids organization] that she should meet me. Belgium is terribly dirty and cheap, 1 kg grapes the size of eggs cost 9 francs, but I also refreshed my French. The crossing was somewhat stormy [sic], but I crossed well. On the other side documents were stamped and luggage inspected and on it went to London. Mrs. Shearer met me there, she puts great value to tell you how much she has done for me, she is of course right. London traffic, that is a really unique event, bus after bus in distances of 3m, everybody is running and terrible noise. In Bournemouth I telephoned Mr. Langdon who picked me up by car. After a great uninterrupted night’s sleep today ’s day began. Everybody is very nice and I am surprised how much English I know, I can communicate excellently. The food is terrible, lunch is passable, but otherwise: morning, afternoon and evening hot tea with milk without sugar, without lemon or rum. A Viennese cook is supposed to come here. I have received your first letter. I telegraphed you: “Good arrived.” [I had used those actual English words—not wanting to use German from an English post office. They were a direct translation of the German “gut angekommen”] Tomorrow I start my classes. Of my suitcases one is done for (broke open in Belgium) and the other one is missing two corners. There are 6 boarders here and there is room (beds etc.) for another 10. I am doing great. What is new with you? Trude, how is school? With that I end for today, will write again on the 15th.

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From October 1938 to March 1940, I was a boarder at St. Mary’s Lodge. The school was headed by Donald Langdon, though actually jointly managed by him, his opulent Grande Dame mother, and a Dalmatian named Keerog. Langdon had a rather interesting history—he was a defrocked Jesuit priest and a member of the British Union of Fascists. On the other hand, he was an observing Catholic, nostalgic about his time in school at Rome, and for a large number of the students, the school was run as a Catholic school. But Langdon also accepted two or three Jewish refugees from Hitler as (paying) students. Whatever else his faults—and there were several—I never had the sense of any anti-Semitic sentiments. He actually insisted that in parallel to Catholic observance of mass, his Protestant students also hold services, and the same went for a brief service every Saturday morning for the few Jewish pupils. One of the consequences of my stay with Langdon was a fairly extensive acquaintance with Roman Catholicism, its rituals, beliefs, and practices. I like to surprise my Catholic friends with that. Among the other masters at the school were William Eade and a charming Irishman, Paddy Minogue, who was the French master, though not really a master of French. I find it difficult at a distance to evaluate St. Mary’s Lodge as a school. Given my own success they must have been fairly competent. But in 1938 I was too young and preoccupied with other matters to care about more than my own tasks and goals. But it must have been rather peculiar among English private schools, from its location in a private house to its leadership and the rather mixed nature of its teaching staff. Some of the students clearly were unusual, but most were not, at least as I saw them then. Most of the students were from Bournemouth and when I went back some 25 years later, they were all gone. Possibly the school was cheap and, thus, attracted a reasonable number of students. School activities were the British norm—lots of lessons, much homework, lousy food, and sports. The major intent was for all of us eventually to pass the Oxford School Certificate (OSC), equivalent to current British O-levels, and formally not quite equivalent to an American high school diploma, but requiring information and skills at about that level. Whatever the competence of the teaching staff, the education I re-

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ceived made it possible for me to pass the OSC eight months after my arrival with only superficial English at my disposal. I passed the OSC in English Language and Literature, Geography, French, German, and Mathematics, and I failed Old Testament History and Drawing. These were national examinations, very formally administered, and as I now look over the printed “papers,” I am impressed with what was expected of 14 to 16 year olds then, and depressed when I compare it with what is expected now. Consider that the exam included arithmetic, algebra, and geometry; translations from and into French and German; textual questions on a Shakespeare play and books of poetry and essays; essay questions on the geography, economy, and climate of several countries; and descriptions of terrain based on survey maps. The set pieces in English Literature were Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, the Golden Treasury (Book V), and a book of essays by modern writers. I worked very hard for these examinations and passed the certificate a year or more before the age at which it was usually taken. I have always felt that no academic achievement since then measured up to passing those exams—it has been downhill ever since. Pupils at the school ranged in age from about 8 to 15. Discipline was fairly strict with student prefects and all the usual paraphernalia of British private schools, though not at the level of the upper-class public (very private) schools. Memorable fellow students included a weird exhibitionist Nigel Peploe; an initially bullying Jon Crisp; Denis Fraser, my only political ally, whose family frequently invited me to Sunday dinner; John Maul, who went into the RAF and was badly wounded, and the only one from whom I heard after the war; Maurice Fay, from France; Peter Smith, who came from Argentina with two beautiful sisters in town and the impression of serious money; and also self-styled Pedro Esmit. There were other names, but no real memories are attached to them. There was surprisingly little schoolboy bullying, surprising given that a couple of us did not speak English well. The pupils were more united against the Langdon regime than willing to engage in internecine warfare. Toward the end of my stay, I was even made a prefect, and received a copy of Spenser ’s Fairy Tales as a “prefect prize.” There was, for an English school, relatively

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little in the way of sports, but we did have competitive soccer and cricket games against similar schools in the neighborhood. I even once tried my hand, rather disastrously, at cricket, wearing my specially made Viennese cricket trousers. I started a notebook, not to be a diary but rather to note “impressions and experiences.” I excerpt significant portions, all of which were originally in German, for the present account. The first entry was on 20 October 1938, less than two weeks after my arrival. I arrived here a week ago Tuesday, and had a lot of homesickness in the first week, but I hope that will fade. The people here are very strange and cold; my only consolation is the mail. I already have four letters from home. … A Viennese cook was supposed to come here, but today came the denial by the Home Office. I hope to be able to go to London for the holidays. Yesterday, I gave Franz Kahn [a fellow student] 10 shillings; it’s tough to be an emigrant. I am so very fond of Vienna, whenever I have a chance I listen to its radio. … I hope that Georg Klimt [friend from Vienna] can come here. Next week a French boy is supposed to come and we are supposed to go to a concert. Today, I was best in French dictation with 13 errors (!!!). The weather is great, the ocean wonderful ….

And on the 30th of October: Today the worst day since I arrived. In the morning much homesickness, cried a lot. Then came John [Crisp] and starts yelling at me. Beat as I am, I am not ready in time, and the SOB (Schweinehund) John comes in and declares that if I don’t get ready in time, I won’t get any breakfast. I go down, no breakfast, and after 10 minutes, Bernard fetches me to Mr. Langdon, who says that I didn’t understand John. I cry, and David laughs at me, egged on by John. I feel absolutely terrible, any moment I start to cry again. Chased from home, never able to come back and to be treated here like a cur. I have such terrible longing for my parents and sister. People here don’t understand me. I have no idea how I will stand it here for months on end. … I wont be able to go skating, it costs 1s. 6d each time. In Mathematics and French, I am the best. Today, I will study Chemistry ….

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And on the next day, “John has turned out to be a reasonable boy, yesterday I made my peace with him, told him about my situation and he behaved very properly, we parted as friends.” There are repeated references in my accounts about the girl (Gerda G.) whom I had met on the train from Vienna—an “older woman” who was not answering my letters. In the end, there was no concert and an advertised soccer practice didn’t take place. On November 9th there was news about a likely contact by my mother with a London relative (George Pick), I write as well, but no more was heard from him. Otherwise, there are references of attempts to intervene for visas for my parents, a possible place for my sister with a local family. And repeated letters are written to the rich and famous asking for support to get my parents and sister to safety. Lord Nuffield (very rich and known for his charities) declines and the last one was a letter to Stefan Lorant, immigrant editor and photographer of the immensely popular Picture Post, who writes in February 1940 that he has had to restrict his giving to refugee organizations. Also, there are repeated references that Mr. Eade is the nicest and best person to me, and my unhappiness at rumors that he might be leaving soon. And then came Kristallnacht. On 11 November I wrote, “There is a pogrom in Vienna, if this continues I will go crazy.” In three entries from the middle of November to the beginning of December, I wrote, “In Germany things are truly frightful. Hope that parents and sister can be out soon.… In Germany things are becoming untenable, there are [protest] meetings here …. I believe that Papa has been arrested ….” But then, a telephone call from Vienna and the family is okay for the time being. Back to local problems on 12 December, I wrote the following. I cannot stand it here any longer, every single one is treated better than I am. Kahn, Crisp, all the juniors, every one is somehow preferred, I am the dog, nobody wants me, I have no friend, nothing. I get less to eat than all the seniors, particularly John Crisp gets extra portions, and every evening he goes to the kitchen and gets something to eat. I have to hunger through.

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Christmas was approaching fast and everybody was making plans for the holidays. The efficient Jewish organization that was watching over me also made plans for the holidays, and I was soon told that a family in London had agreed to have me as their guest. But just the week before the holidays, the family reneged, and I had the rather bleak prospect of staying in school over the holidays. At the last minute, I was informed that a rescue had been arranged—with the Isaacs family in London. So, off I went to London to be met by what eventually became my second family. I was greeted with great warmth and acceptance by Gina Isaacs in particular, but also by Alan (my age) and Anne (called Tuffy), the younger sister. The Isaacs had already played host to another refugee (whom I never met), but took on another lost soul and, eventually, a true member of the family. On 22 December my “diary” reads: I am here in London with a family Isaacs, very nice people, wonderful bed, food etc., in short I am doing wonderfully. … We [Alan, my age, and friends] went to West Heath (?) park snowballing and sledding and I met a delightful girl, she is 15 and her name is Daphne … I saved her and her dog from a pond in Hampstead Heath, she is marvelous but it may be difficult to see her again.

Alan Isaacs and I—60 years later—still remember and smile at that episode. Then, some good news: I intervene at the Home Office for my parents and sister and an additional affidavit of support has arrived in Vienna from the United States. Then, there are notes that Barcelona has fallen, that I am enjoying Chemistry at the local Municipal College, and that I enjoyed an evening with a German Rabbi, which gave me a chance to speak German again. No entries after February except the final one on 8 July 1939. The permit from the Home office for my parents should arrive any day [it never did]. … Mr. Eade has turned out to be a SOB [see later] … [News about new masters in the school] Mr. Langdon is much nicer to me. On Thursday we take the School Certificate exams, I hope to pass but do not seem to have good prospects (according to other people’s opinions). Doing fine

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with girls, Diana, Norma Lane, Hetty Wimborne, etc., but I just don’t have time left. … I have now been here for nearly nine months and the homesickness is much better.

Other personal memories are of formative events—one with Mr. Eade. He had taken me under his wing soon after my arrival and would leave notes under my pillow, sometimes candy. In retrospect, the advances must have had the obvious intent, but he never made a move. On the contrary, after about a year, he sent me a note saying that I was a reprehensible and unreliable person and he wished to have nothing more to do with me. In my “diary,” I also noted that he said that Jews were scum. Curious—there had not been any difficult interaction or any memorable event preceding that. But this incident fed into my growing sense of suspicion of personal relationships. Eade contributed to my—still persisting—sense of dread of abandonment and betrayal. Not quite so formative was the time when my friend Denis and I invited two girls from Bournemouth Pier to a tea dance. All went well up to a point; namely, I had no idea how to dance. I shuffled with great embarrassment around the floor—though my date, Bobbie Bowden whom I had met on the Bournemouth pier, didn’t seem to notice much. I was the embarrassed one. I also note that I had no experience of the notorious buggery that was supposed to go on among British schoolboys. The only incident involved a neighbor of the school—a retired army officer, who occasionally invited individual boys to tea. When it was my turn, he and I ended up in front of a blazing fireplace with his hand down my pants. I bid my goodbyes and that was the end of that. More pleasant was my interaction with a German refugee girl, Ursula (Uschi) Mohr (about 18—20 years old), who was employed by the school as a general maidservant. I had been given an attic room, which had the advantage that it was private, and Uschi also had an attic room. Eventually, we ended up in bed together, more an act of mutual support and empathy than of sexual passion, and did it not involve more than mutual stroking, kissing, and stimulation. But it was a fine haven and a good friendship.

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Food at St. Mary’s Lodge, the province of the large and authoritarian Mrs. Langdon, was miserable; more importantly, there was not enough of it. Meals were usually introduced with a thin soup with a couple of indeterminate leaves floating in it. The boarders stole whatever food we could—usually bread from the kitchen in the middle of the night. I bought jars of honey with the little bit of pocket money I had (supplied by the Amsterdam firm of International Leather Co.) and that was my food supplement. St. Mary’s Lodge was located in a leafy upper-middle-class part of Bournemouth, no distractions very close. Only on Saturday were we allowed to go into “town”—often just the nearest accumulation of shops and a movie theatre—and on some Saturdays we even went to see a film (no movies or open shops on Sunday in pre-war Britain). Mr. Langdon had a car, but it was an unusual privilege to be invited to ride in it. I quickly learned to ride a bicycle—not a ready or usual means of transportation in Vienna. Occasionally, I was invited out to a local Jewish family. On Sundays some of the boarders were more adventurous, and we would go to the Bournemouth pier and ogle and sometimes talk to the girls there. I eventually was so brash to invite one of them—Bobbie Bowden—to the tea dance. I do remember though a beautiful blonde shop girl at the local Woolworth’s whom I had met I know not where, but whom I went to see whenever possible. That was one crush. Another, much more intense, was the young teacher of the typing and shorthand course at a local trade school where I had decided to acquire practical skills during my last six months in Bournemouth. I do not remember her name, though I do have a vague memory image—and how I adored her! Throughout those months in England I spent time with the Isaacs. Gina Isaacs understood my need for a family and provided the warmth and understanding of a substitute mother; Stanley was more distant but always supportive; and Anne (Tuffy) four years my junior, replaced the sister in my missing family. But most important for my needs was Alan (my age) and we hit it off immediately. Soon we were off together to the Selfridge’s Boys Club, headed by the former tennis star Bill Tilden. We went to see my first pantomime, and I became more and more an accepted

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member of the family. I spent some time in the summer with them at their house in Stoke Poges (and actually walked in Gray’s Churchyard), and on the beach in Sandbanks/Poole, near Bournemouth. One summer, Alan and I cycled from Slough to Maidenhead. All of this was a marked and congenial change from the school environment in Bournemouth. Alan and I have maintained a friendship for some 60 years. We have met over the years and among the visits, I particularly remember one in 1948 when we went pub crawling in his MG. Over time we watched our families grow and developed some common adult interests. Alan left the family business early on and is now established in running a publishing house that writes dictionaries and encyclopedias; we get together regularly. An outstanding memory of the Bournemouth period was a concert given by the great Austrian tenor, Richard Tauber. I saved my money and went. I actually waited at the stage door afterward to tell him that I too was an exile from Vienna, and received his autograph. Such were the joys of the exile boys, particularly because I was always short of cash. I had a very small allowance—and eventually, the cashflow dwindled to the point where I pawned the gold ring my father had given me for five English pounds. I kept the ticket for years but never redeemed the ring. I decided that was one thing the Nazis owed me. In post-war Germany, I asked my friend Anneliese to inquire about goldsmiths and finally found one who was willing to make a ring if I could supply the gold for an equivalent amount of silver. I then went into my only serious black-market activity and for large numbers of cigarette cartons, eventually acquired enough German silver coins to cover the cost of the ring. The ring was designed and made by a goldsmith (initials MB), reputedly a supplier to the Vatican. I still wear that ring. After my triumph with the OSC, there was some question as to what to do with me. After consultation with our Dutch friends (INLECO’s Eugen Victor and family), Langdon and the Victors decided that I should stay on at St. Mary’s Lodge (what else?) at a reduced rate of 6 guineas a week. I started to study for the Higher School Certificate, which would spell university admission (the

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equivalent of today’s A levels). But more central was my concern about my parents and sister who had been able, in July 1939, to move to the significantly safer Italy under the pretext of going there for a fortnight’s vacation. I was waiting for their departure from Italy, followed by my own U.S. visa so that I could join them in America. In December 1939, my parents and sister, now living with a family named Seppili in Milan, were finally informed by the American Consulate in Naples that their documents were now sufficient “to overcome the public charge provisions of the immigration law,” and that our turn in the Czechoslovak quota waiting list would be reached by January 1940. The whole family’s immigration priority was based on my father ’s place of birth, which was fortunate because the combined German/Austrian quota would have meant a longer wait. I now started writing to the American embassy in London, asking when I could get my visa and if they could help me join my parents in Naples for the journey to America (of course, they could not). And then there were letters to various refugee aid organizations in London requesting aid in finding the money for my passage. After several failures, Cunard White Star informed me in March that the Jewish Refugee Committee had booked me for a late March sailing. On February 20th, my parents and sister left Naples on the Italian liner Conte di Savoia for New York. Sometimes I forget that in these reminiscences I am talking about a 13- to 16-year-old boy. My recall is more of an adult, presumably due to the adult tasks imposed on me. I wrote for visas, help, money, anything that might bring my family out of Europe. My correspondence from those days is full of attempts to find a place for my sister, new guarantors in the United States for the family, financial assistance from the rich or from relatives (unsuccessful). A busy life for a 14 to 15 year old. I have always felt that the emigration and the events surrounding it robbed my generation of our adolescence. Part of that feeling was the sense that I had to work harder than anybody else in school, that success became more crucial. At the same time, I was preoccupied with working at emigration, worrying about my family, about jobs, money, and looking forward to a future

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much more uncertain than that of any of my friends in school. I kept in touch for a while from New York with my friends from St. Mary ’s Lodge, but slowly they peeled off into the British armed forces and we lost touch. My politics during my time in England were determined in a large part by the Spanish Civil War. I was in a school surrounded by the proper children of proper conservatives while I saw the fate of civilization hanging in the balance in Spain. Throughout 1939, my big desire was to go to Spain and my big regret was that I was too young. There was only one other pupil at the school, Denis Fraser, who supported the loyalists, and in my adolescent diary, I had written that I was “standing at a forlorn post.” Foremost among my adolescent fantasies was that of going to fight in Spain. Starting with Christmas 1938, I had frequent occasions to go to London and on a few such occasions contacted one of the Austrian youth emigre organizations. It was, as should have been obvious, communist controlled but my contrariness was coming to the fore, and I soon became involved in discussions about questions of freedom of speech and Stalinist repression. I was denounced as a Trotskyite provocateur and soon stopped my visits to that youth group. School work and my English “family ” were in the foreground. There was one compulsive, neurotic symptom that dated to my initial emigre life and continued for decades thereafter. I kept meticulous and repetitive notes on the names and addresses of anybody who I met and who played any kind of role in my life—fellow students and teachers, passing (and lasting) girlfriends, and chance, but impressive, acquaintances. They have helped me reconstruct part of my life in these pages and, being a pack rat, I still have the notes. My memorabilia overflow with address books. Many of the names I can place and remember, but there are quite a few others who have abandoned my memory banks. I have no idea who they were, except that the context of other people in the address books indicates the period when I must have known them. This behavior of holding on to everybody I ever knew, however slightly, clearly was a reaction to what I had lost. I was trying very hard to rebuild a community for myself.

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The address collecting started with my English sojourn and lasted through my stay in Switzerland in 1947–48, until I started graduate school in 1949. As will be increasingly obvious in these pages, the start of my academic life was also the start of a different life. As my academic life developed, the compulsiveness disappeared. I keep occasional addresses but nothing like that 10-year period. I had tried to create a new life and a new social surround by holding on to all these people, to replace my loss of a home, a place and people of reference. It was only once I had started on a foreseeable career, a time line that had some consistencies in terms of friends and futures that I was able to let go of all the people I met and only held on to the important figures in my life. It was long after I had first written this account of my time in Bournemouth that I was reminded of the importance of 3 September 1939—the day war broke out between Germany and England and France. I had not thought about that event before in connection with my Bournemouth stay and can even now recall very little about it. I believe that the Isaacs family was in Sandbanks/Poole, near Bournemouth, on holiday at the time and I used to visit them frequently, but the major impact was that we were glued to the radio throughout those days after the German invasion of Poland. I believe the event of the state of war itself left no great impression because for me it seemed merely a continuation of the world as it was. My war had started earlier and this was an expected and logical consequence. Air raid drills, gas masks, ration books, and even the building of an air raid shelter at school followed in due course, but otherwise apparently little changed.

HOLOCAUST I don’t know how to start talking about the Holocaust. My sister Trudi once maintained that we are Holocaust survivors, and I argued that such a claim denigrates the true survivors who emerged from the camps. I still believe that is right. The rest of us who did not share their suffering lived under the shadow of the Holocaust, and it has colored our lives. It is always with me as I am reminded of family and friends who perished and as I literally shudder at the thought of my own escape. Every now and then, I live

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through a scenario of not getting away from Vienna and being caught up by the murderers. I wonder where on a range from courage to craven surrender I would have emerged and I do not know. I do not think that we know how we are likely to react to extreme situations—and I cannot judge people who reacted one way or another. But I did escape, and I have been shaped by the tragedy and by my reaction to it. How did one acquire the information and the knowledge about the Holocaust? In my case, and I believe in the case of most German and Austrian Jews, the process was very slow. It started years and generations before the actual events. Living in an at least partially anti-Semitic environment, we were vaguely aware of the potentials of that Central European anti-Semitism. Memories of the pogroms of Eastern Europe were not part of our heritage, not even of the Slovak and Czech Jewry in my parents’ background. But memories of the accusations of blood crimes against Christian children, and the ever-present explicit and implicit accusations by the Catholic church of being Christ killers kept dread and anxieties alive. Implicit in all of this was the thought that Jews were not safe—not from accusations, not from being excluded from academic and intellectual life, not from physical assault, and probably not from being killed. Most of this was implicit and rarely articulated but, in principle, we were ready to believe in the Holocaust. During the five years before the Anschluss, we learned about National Socialism and the Jews in Germany. We knew about their exclusion from civil society, about their increasingly restricted ability to achieve a livelihood, about beatings and other denigrations. However, there was not yet any organized extinction, there were no yellow stars yet and only one concentration camp about which there was general knowledge. That was Dachau, known for its own horrors and cruelties, but not as a death camp. It was also indiscriminately used for political victims of Nazism as well as Jews, picked up for any or no reason at all. Somewhat surprisingly, we did not encounter German refugees in Vienna. I am sure there were some but refugees were quite limited, primarily I think because the emigration from Germany did not start in earnest until about 1938. There was some organized

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opposition to Nazi Germany—collections for the benefit of Jewish victims and the boycott of German goods. Political opposition was more complicated in crypto-fascist Vienna. No political movements other than the government’s right-wing Catholic Vaterländische Front existed, and there was a general tendency by the government not to needle the Germans unnecessarily. There were publications that fought extreme fascism and anti-Semitism; one subscribed to in our home, Gerechtigkeit (Justice), comes to mind. And somewhere in the youthful consciousness there is Karl Kraus’ name and the memory that despite the nature of the government some left-wing books were available. Did I first get to know Traven and his Totenschiff then? The nearness in place and time of the German experience, as well as the increasing tension between Austria and Germany that made a German incursion more and more likely, eased us into the reality of German National Socialist presence once the German troops had come and the local Nazis had taken over the government. But with the arrival of the Germans there suddenly arose the need to get out. Why my parents, and most of their friends, made no attempt to do so before, why they tended to sit more or less quietly by while their world was being destroyed next door is unclear. In part, it was the widely held belief that Hitler could not last, that the conservative/center/left opposition in Germany would get rid of him. In part, it was the example of German Jewry who had survived for five years and seemed willing to try further. So, frantic attempts started only after the Germans arrived. There started a writing of letters, a visiting of consulates, a consultation with friends. When we wrote to all the Mandlers in the New York telephone book, they all turned out to be extremely well-meaning and supportive, but financially unable to provide us with acceptable affidavits of support. They were good people—better than the many who could afford to help but did not. There were three “cousins,” Harry, Carly, and Sam Mandler—garage mechanic, cigar store owner, and chauffeur—none of them related to us as far as we knew, but they tried very hard, unsuccessfully, to convince the authorities that their affidavits of support were sufficient. I think of them with warmth—they were not family and did whatever they could. Other possibilities were investigated, primarily England,

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but also some South American country (Paraguay, I believe). At one time, my father seriously believed that we could emigrate to Iceland. Eventually, we also wrote to leather manufacturers and dealers—an effort that in the end produced David Eisendrath, a tannery owner from Racine, Wisconsin, who sent us successful affidavits of support. Again, a man who deserved many imitators; he bought a cat in a bag—unknown people in need of assistance. More of him and fewer of us would have died. Everybody was scrambling to find a way out, some more successful than others. The very rich already had foreign connections and their foreign bank accounts. At the other end were the people with no commercial connections, no simple way to reach a generally impervious community in the “outside” world. In all levels of the Jewish community, there were those who never made it out, among them some of my uncles, aunts, and cousins. One thinks how easy it would have been to get these people out if there had only been the will in the world and the understanding of what was to come—but then nobody knew that. The feverishness of these efforts and their initial lack of success among the Jewish middle class in Vienna further generated a sense of dread. What would happen to us? We did not yet, I believe, think in terms of death specifically, but more generally in terms of a lack of livelihood, of persecution, of unlivable conditions. I left Vienna before that situation had changed significantly. I do not know how the sense of foreboding, of coming elimination changed inside Germany and Austria—I speak only of my own experience of the coming holocaust. The first shocking intimation of the future came when Krystallnacht happened in November 1938. Synagogues were burned; Jewish stores and apartments broken into, destroyed, and looted; and some hundreds arrested and brought to the, as yet not deadly, concentration camps. Many were killed in the process, but the systematic elimination of Jewry wasn’t yet an active project. I read about it in the English papers and anxiously awaited word from home. It was during that period that I first developed the notion that there was a serious threat of death to my family and the rest of those persecuted.

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From 1938 to 1941, my feelings about Germany were split. On the one hand, my feelings were political, still hoping that there might be an effective opposition in Germany that would avoid the disasters that were becoming increasingly threatening. On the other hand, I was increasingly fearful about the future of the Jews—the German policy of finding a final solution for the Jews was becoming increasingly evident. By the time the extermination policy—first in the East and then for transports from the West—was in effect, I think most Jews outside of Germany knew directly and indirectly what was happening. We were becoming increasingly certain, and I find the attempts by Western politicians to maintain that they “didn’t know” until much later both surprising and disingenuous—the facts were known. Years later, when I saw the excellent German film that reconstructed the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, I was not surprised. That was the way I had imagined an efficient Germany would plan the logistics of mass murder. I have since seen the transcript of that Conference at a lake outside Berlin attended by the leaders of Germany’s bureaucracy in charge of the final solution, as well as by the officials in charge of transport, logistics, and government. It is a perfect example of the banality of evil; the transcript shows a businesslike discussion interlaced with individual defenses of territorial or financial turf. The discussion leaves no doubt what the final goal was, nor that it was intended for all Jews of Europe, including those in territories not yet conquered—such as Great Britain! By the time I reached Europe with the U.S. Army in 1944, the extermination camps planned at Wannsee were in full operation and in full view. I had no direct contact with concentration camps either during the war or in postwar Germany. My unit was involved in the liberation of a couple of small allied prisoner-of-war camps, themselves in appalling condition, but not death camps. With the end of the war, we encountered people who had been released from concentration camps and became personal witness to their tales. It was more important, personally, to find out what had happened to my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. By early February 1946, I was able to go to Vienna and complete the stories of my family’s sorrow. I had lost to the murderers five of the girl cousins of my youth and two adults. My cousin Suse and her parents and my ma-

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ternal grandmother returned to Vienna. Suse and her beloved sister Hanne had been sent to Theresienstadt—the special town used as a camp primarily for the aged and used as a show camp for the Red Cross—with their parents and my grandmother. Hanne actually was married there, but soon thereafter, she and Suse were shipped to Auschwitz and eventually became part of the inmate transport that was sent to Hamburg to clean up the results of Allied air raids. From Hamburg, the two sisters were sent to Bergen-Belsen. The day before the liberation of that camp by British forces, the SS machine-gunned the occupants of their hut. Hanne was killed instantly and Suse survived with her dead sister at her side until British soldiers entered the camp. Suse’s great spirit, sense of humor, and life gave her the strength to survive into the post-war world. She married, badly, in Vienna and lived with her daughter, called Hanne, until 1997. Suse was tragically killed in a traffic accident. I had just finished my book on human nature and was able to dedicate it to Suse and the other dead cousins. The name Hanne/Hannah has since become a family memory, and my darling granddaughter carries on that name. Suse’s father, Jaro, was severely injured in Auschwitz but survived to live a few years with his wife, Martha, in Vienna. His mother, my grandmother, came to New York to live with my parents. My last year in the U.S. Army in Germany (1945–46) was devoted in part to finding the remnants of our family and to learning of the fate of the others. I was able to obtain Army permission to go to Vienna (and through the Soviet zone in Austria) in my own jeep. The journey was interesting, getting grudging acceptance from the Soviets, but being warned by the US authorities not to stop and if possible not to have my jeep break down. The trip was very cold in the partially open jeep. I was curious about the Soviet zone and found the place rather depressing. Neither the Soviet troops I saw nor the population seemed particularly enchanted by each other, and there was little if any sign of any industrial revival. Once in Vienna, there was a joyous and tearful reunion with my surviving relatives, but I also found parts of my family and many friends and relatives missing and presumably murdered. In 1948, during a year in Switzerland, I was able to go to Hungary and meet my uncle Kornel (one of my father ’s older brothers) and his wife Kornelka who had survived in Budapest,

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hidden by friends. Their daughter Eva had died in the early years of the war of a heart disease. Kornel gave me the remaining family documents he had rescued, including my grandfather ’s testament. The documents helped us reconstruct the Mandler family back to the eighteenth century. I was also able to find and meet a cousin of my father ’s, Sandor Baroti, who had survived in Switzerland and lived alone in Montreux. I never had a chance to go to Slovakia and trace the fate of other family members, none of whom had survived. It was not until years later that I realized that the sufferings of the Eastern European Jews were even more severe than of those in Germany and Austria. Only a fraction of the victims of the Holocaust were Germans and Austrians—the vast majority were Polish, Russian, and other Eastern Jews. They had no time to prepare—deportation and death came to them early. In 1941, when German and Austrian Jews were first required to wear the yellow star, Himmler ’s Einsatzgruppen were already murdering Jews wholesale in the east. The shock of those immediate postwar years, when I learned about the death in the camps of my relatives as well as of many friends and acquaintances, shaped me permanently. I do not tolerate confrontation with death anymore. It leaves me therapeutically untouched—I cannot and will not deal with death. Part of my feelings are encapsulated in a story told by two British agents, survivors of a German death camp, who encountered a funeral cortege shortly after returning to Britain at the end of the war. They both started to laugh, “All that fuss for just one corpse!” I avoid funerals and avoid discussing or reacting to people’s death’s. The strategy protects me, though it obviously makes my friends and relatives uneasy, if not unhappy. I am frequently embarrassed, but it is a scar that helps protect the wound. I carry the Holocaust with me and object to being told that I have to be reminded about it. So, I do not read Holocaust books or see Holocaust movies. I know—and that is enough. But I fear that some of the horror of those years may be lost to social consciousness. Others have noted noncredibility of what took place in the camps. That is why those of us who barely avoided them must continue to refresh the memory of what happened and continue to bear witness. I have heard a (Jewish) academic use the term

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Feminazi, coined I believe by a particularly malodorous radio “personality” to refer to some feminist groups. No matter how strongly one feels about any particular political view or attitude, it insults the memory of Nazi inhumanity and murder, and it is disgusting to use it on one’s political opponents. There is a postscript to the Holocaust that has occupied me. My impression of the participants in the national socialist movement, whether early or late adherents, was that they were generally unable to find remorse. I am not talking about the murderers, but rather the average Nazi adherent. Their general inability to apologize, to find some co-responsibility for what was done in their names, defines why it took two generations for German society to be cleansed—when the children and the grandchildren of Nazi Germans were the ones who expressed German responsibility and their parents’ guilt. Somehow we expected to see some sense of remorse. In the 1970s, I went to see the Nazi leader of my 1938 school class. Joseph Glaninger had by now become an eminent professor on the Medical Faculty of the University of Vienna. He immediately recognized my name when I called, and I went to visit him and his wife for coffee. Small talk about the fate of students and professors from our school was exchanged and I soon left—not a word about his past, no apologies. And it was clearly I who felt uneasy. Why didn’t I ask him to talk about his past? Because I wanted and expected him to initiate such a topic. Recently, I learned that Gillian Slovo interviewed the murderer of her mother, Ruth Slovo, a martyr of the struggle against apartheid, and how surprised and shocked she was that the man did not apologize or explain. Sic semper tyrannis? Many years later, in a study of the behavior of German psychologists during and after the Nazi years, I found evidence that one needs to skip at least a generation in order to overcome a society’s sins and misdeeds . With the advent of the Hitler Regime in 1933, the German professional psychological association quickly cleansed itself of any taint of Jewish or left-wing members. I thought that the cleansing was done with unseemly haste—a special meeting was held within a few months of Hitler ’s ascent in order to acclaim their adherence to Nazism and racism. This was done at a time when some German were still, sotto voce, able to

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speak with sense and humanity. With the end of the war, the Nazi-tainted leadership was quickly removed from the organization, and some weak gestures were made in the direction of former Jewish members. But within a few years, by the early 1950s, some of the now “rehabilitated” Nazis were back in positions of influence. It took a new generation, growing up after the Nazi period, to put German psychology on a path where it was able to join the world community again. Of all my ambivalences, Austria dominates. In contrast to Germany where I feel generally comfortable and at ease, Austria, or to be specific the Austrians, makes me uncomfortable and uneasy. On the other hand, I did not see Germany in the late 1940s and 1950s when the Nazi generations still refused to deal with their past. During that period, little was taught in West German schools of the Nazi period, stories of German prowess and courage during the war were readily welcomed by the reading public, and amnesia seemed to be the solution to the past. All that changed as generations changed, and it is the Germany of the 1970s to the present that I find more acceptable. In Austria, it took much longer for that change to take place. The allies in World War II gave Austrians the umbrella of the myth of Austrian liberation, that Austria was a “victim” of German aggression. In part as a result of that status, many attitudes and officials in places of responsibility survived (as seen in Waldheim’s personal history, for example). Today, as I observe the people in the street, they look and dress much like the Viennese who threw me out of their country (thus, being prevented from doing worse). It is only in Austria and by Austrians that I have been subject to anti-Semitic remarks. As I said, in part the continuing fascist tendencies in Austria (as shown by the success of the neo-fascist Jörg Haider in Austrian elections), are in part due to the Allies during and after World War II. They considered and treated Austria as an occupied, conquered country, which surely it was not. The Austrians thus had the gall and privilege to consider themselves as victims of rather than participants in, the Hitler regime. One result was that reparations to the Jews were mean spirited and minimal—certainly when compared with Germany. I received a payment of $120 in the 1950s and not until the 1990s was I accorded an Austrian pension. I call this my Waldheim Fund, since it was not until the embarrassment by the disclosure of the Austrian president’s

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wartime activity that the government tried to devise ways to make some restitution payments. The mechanism used was to give people like me credit for periods of unemployment, schooling, and service in Allied armies to make them eligible for a retired employee’s pension. So, where is the ambivalence? I like being in Vienna, visiting my old haunts, seeing familiar buildings, parks, places. I feel at home then. I like taking trains through Austria and seeing a familiar landscape that spelled home for me once. I particularly enjoy going to Austrian restaurants and eating echtes Wienerschnitzel and Leberknödelsuppe (liver dumpling soup) and, of course, the Viennese pastries, particularly Mohnstrudel (poppy seed “strudel”) and Indianerkrapfen (a chocolate, whipped-cream confection). I will go out of my way to eat real Viennese food. I even like hearing the Austrian–Viennese accents, even though my German has lost much of the dialect intonations (too many Germans in my life). My partial reconciliation with Austria came when I discovered early in 1998 that the Austrian government had made it possible to reacquire (Wiedererwerbung) Austrian citizenship by application, rather than by taking up brief residence as before. Given that I am a “pack rat,” I had all the necessary documents and applied in March at the Consulate in Los Angeles. I was somewhat taken aback by one of the questions posed in the application—What evidence did I have that I actually left Austria in 1938? My first reaction was that the reply should be, “I am here and alive!” Later that year while talking to my friend Felix Landau about the application process, he asked why I had applied. “Because it’s there!” I replied and he agreed. In June 1999, I received the document regranting my Austrian citizenship and soon after, my second passport. Thus, the ingrained wish of Central European Jews early in the century that two passports were always better than one in a parlous world was fulfilled. I had also thought it appropriate to have dual citizenship, to make my peace—and to have an European Community (EU) passport that would remove most of the Western frontiers when traveling in Europe. When I mentioned that to an Austrian lawyer, he was somewhat disturbed that such mundane considerations would motivate getting one’s citizenship back, shouldn’t one also pay some respect to “patriotism.” Austrian patriotism indeed!

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Occasionaly I thought about going back to Vienna and joining in its psychological professional life—a continuation of what other psychologists like the Bühlers once contributed. Through the visit to Harvard in the 1950s of Walter Toman, I became good friends with some of the younger Austrian psychologists, but they have left for other universities or have retired. Today, the Psychological Institute at the University of Vienna ranks at the bottom of that university’s institutes. But it would have been nice to be recognized by the Viennese psychologists as the German psychologists in Berlin, Munich, and elsewhere have welcomed me. In retrospect, I am a little puzzled that the pretentiousness of post-1918 Austria never reached my consciousness while I was growing up there. I surprise myself every now and then by realizing that I was born just six years after the end of the first World War. Just six years after the Austro-Hungarian Empire had been cut up into some real and some made-up countries (like Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia). Austria was real. Within its new boundaries, it had a real history going back to the counts of Babenberg who gave it its red-white-red flag and specific individuality and identity among all the other small German states and duchies. As the center of the empire, Vienna became a major European city, seat of the emperor and the imperial government. Little of this was forgotten in the years following 1918, and the aristocracy and the titles and hierarchies defined this little country of over 6 million people, top heavy with its capital of over 1 million people. But in school I never had the sense that Austria was anything other than a small country with small aspirations and pretensions. This may have been because my school was partly a catchment for a working-class population and had few of the upper class elite. When I returned as an adult in the 1940s and discovered the old pretension still alive I was dismayed. People would still sometimes address each other as Hofrat (actually, court councillor) and the preoccupation with titles—Herr Doktor, Herr Direktor, Herr Professor locutions—still abound. I left the Vienna I grew up in for good in October 1938 and, as I believed, left Europe for good in March 1940. In any case, I knew that a transition to a new life had started.

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Emigre Life in New York 1940–1943

LIFE AND SCHOOL

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n the 22nd of March 1940, I sailed from Liverpool to New York on the M.V. Britannic. I left from a blacked out Euston station in London on a blacked-out embarkation train. I had tickets for a transit from England to New York but did not know exactly where we would sail from or what ship we would be on. Arriving in Liverpool early in the morning, we all went through emigration procedures—including giving up our precious ration books—and then went on to the MV Britannic. It was one of the newer and better Cunard liners that was fast enough to sail on her own, depending on her speed and maneuverability, to outwit German submarines. The ship, armed with two guns and a camouflaged antiaircraft gun, sailed in total darkness—no visible lights, matches allowed—and we carried obligatory life vests at all times during the first few days when we were still within the range of German U-boats. The major event on board ship was that I met Robert Breuer, haphazardly, and we formed a strange friendship indeed. I was not yet 16; he was an aspiring Viennese (Jewish of

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course) journalist in his early 30s. Somehow I came across as quite a bit older—if I recall, my pretension aspired to 18. In any case, we became co-writers of a skit on the emigration experience and the playlet From Columbus to Hitler, in German, was produced on board ship. It was staffed by passengers and mostly was about the emigration and immigrating, Europe and America, poking fun at the German oppressors and at ourselves. How we were able to do all that—write, recruit the cast, rehearse, and stage—in the short time available remains a mystery. I still have a copy of the script. A large number (possibly the great majority) of the passengers were German and Austrian refugees from Hitler ’s Germany and the lingua franca was German. It was also the occasion of a great missed opportunity to hang up my virginity because there were many obviously available young women, but my real age and sexual tentativeness kept me from any adventurous forays. The trip was my high point as a writer and playwright of German “literature”—later adolescent outbursts of poetry and so forth were mainly in English. Robert Breuer and I remained close friends in New York, and the routine was that he would come to my parents’ house on Sundays and we would play chess and listen to WQXR (the New York classical music station then). Robert introduced me to “good” music, to Schönberg in particular (I still remember hearing the Gurrelieder for the first time), in exchange for my mother ’s (rather dubious) cooking. His conversation was marked by his humor cloaking his antipathy toward New York and the United States in general. His emigre experience was not unusual: Robert worked in the shipping department of a radio manufacturer, desperately wanting to continue his Viennese career as a journalist and writer. He worked his way into becoming an occasional music correspondent for emigre publications and finally, after the war, for German and Austrian publications. I was in the process of becoming ensconced in political activities and we eventually drifted apart as he was married within a year or so. Some 50 years later, I encountered his name again: Robert had moved back to Vienna and published the manuscript of his experiences of the March 1938 days of the Anschluss in Vienna—brought briefly up to date. The book surprised me by its commitment to the thought that the Austrian population was unfriendly to, if not victims of, Nazi Germany. It

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appeared that Robert’s inability to accept America had made it necessary to remain a patriotic Austrian. As I read it I wondered what factors had instead made me into a polynational chameleon with varying commitments to different countries in different contexts. I was amused to note that Robert had misremembered the date of our arrival in New York—he thought that it was the 1st of March; actually, it had been April Fools’ Day 1940. I don’t know whether it was due to my association with Robert, but in April, shortly after my arrival in New York, I wrote to the Editor of the Bournemouth Daily Echo offering to write a periodical column on America for them. It was rejected because their restricted supply of newsprint precluded adding a new periodical report. Anyway, there was a budding journalist! My parents and sister had arrived in New York from Italy in February and the family parked in the Manhattan west side, home of so many refugees. We also moved a lot. We lived initially on West 103rd Street, moved to 108th Street, then to 112th Street, and to another basement apartment on 112th. It was not until another couple of years later that we finally settled in on West 106th Street. My father engaged in a number of failing enterprises at the edge of his expertise in leather until, after a year or so, he eventually made the right move on a small scale to buy and sell leather for luggage manufacturers. Eventually he created the Metro Leather Company in New York’s leather district and, with two to three employees, was happy and reasonably successful— enough to support his family in a good middle-class style. There was some question about my schooling, particularly because I was rather proud of just recently having passed the Oxford School Certificate. Still being short of 16, I had to go to school and started at Haaren High School for a couple of months, where I had a memorable leftish political science teacher (in civics). I then went on to the Evening Commercial high school, but not for long. I took the New York State Regents Examinations in January 1941 and did adequately in English, civics, and economics. After that, I constructed a presumed high school diploma equivalence out of my Oxford School Certificate and the Regents’ results, and eventually used that to get into college. I never did graduate from high

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school. On the whole, my educational career while working was rather slapdash. I did go to City College of New York’s (CCNY) evening session for some courses in 1942 and 1943 and passed some mathematics and chemistry courses, but aborted others. Not a distinguished career, but then politics and new friends preoccupied me. Army service was in the offing and college did not seem to be important just then. In the summer of 1940, I was invited by a posh charity-motivated family to spend time at their home in one of the millionaire outposts in Westchester County, but came down with pneumonia and pleurisy within a couple of days and ended up as a patient in Mt. Sinai Hospital on the New York East side. Within a day of my arrival, there was a rush of medical staff to my bedside staring at my left chest and finally finding a small scar there: “What’s that?” “A small scar when a piece of glass hit me,” (from some three to five years earlier while fooling around at home in Vienna) was my dismissive response. As it turned out there was a 2.5 inch long arrow-shaped piece of glass in my lung just to the left of my heart. Unbeknownst to me or anybody else at the time a piece of leaded, and therefore visible in X-rays, glass had penetrated between two ribs and lodged in the lung. Later that year the glass was removed by an outstanding surgeon, Dr. Touroff, and when he wrote up the operation in a surgical journal, it resulted in my first scientific publication. I still treasure the glass piece and will occasionally demonstrate my acquired ability to twitch my left tit—memories of burlesque being appropriately revived. 1940 was still in the remaining throes of the great depression and jobs were hard to come by. My father hardly made any money and probably was losing some that he had borrowed. My mother was working hard as a seamstress, mostly doing repairs and remodeling. One of the advantages to emigration was that an upper-middle-class girl in Vienna in the beginning of the century was inevitably taught how to sew in preparation for marriage. Going through family papers, my sister and I found the elaborate certificate that she had earned in Vienna as a seamstress apprentice. Once I turned 16, it was imperative for me to start contributing to the family, but the depression was still around and it took several attempts and failures before I finally secured a job in the fall of 1940.

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It took pull to obtain even a menial job in those days. Through the Eisendrath connection (the man who made our arrival in America possible), we were able to contact a Mr. Bernheim, a trustee of Mt. Sinai Hospital where he obtained a job for me in the Chemistry Laboratory. I was one of two bottle and floor washers, earning $55 a month (less than $600 in 1999 dollars) for a five day, 48-hour week. I started off in the morning washing the floors and during the day, kept all the glassware and other equipment clean. I learned how to prepare cleaning solutions for glassware using sulfuric acid and chromium salts and the rule of seven rinses. One of the experiential consequences was that I learned how to get glassware really clean and have never been able to tolerate the lackadaisical dishwashing habits of the world at large. I have never tolerated amateurs and so I have always been the dishwasher in the family. I stayed at Mt. Sinai until just shortly before my Army induction in the fall of 1943. Those were good times. The lab was headed by a Viennese emigre, Harry Sobotka, who was married to the famed harpsichordist Yella Pessl (who gave a couple of command performances for the laboratory staff) and uncle to a budding ballet dancer Ruth with whom I fell in love for a long two weeks. The rest of the lab was populated by mostly New York Jewish, left-wing intellectuals. The manager was Mim Reiner, a sharp-tongued woman, but the younger research chemists (Soloway, Oster, Levine, Charney, and Jacobs) let me help with their work after hours and this resulted in my second “publication,” a thank-you for help after work on a piece about kidney function. Some of them also led me into my only significant union activity. Hospital workers were not only underpaid but also strictly beyond the scope of then current labor laws. The State County and Municipal Workers of America (SCMWA)—not identical to but a forerunner of the current SCMW and I believe associated with the famous Local 66—tried to organize the hospitals. A small group of us met regularly in a nearby Harlem home or in a small rented hall. The only agenda—apart from reciting the rather antediluvian character of the hospital’s labor policies—was recruiting, recruiting, recruiting. The employment situation being as tough as it was and with any discovery of labor organizing usually punished with dismissal, it was a hard slog. But I still remember with pride my membership and small monthly contribution to the SCMWA.

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Sometime in 1942 I exploded my way into a big promotion. In those days the ether used in laboratory work was “dried.” In this process, water traces in the ether were removed by first putting metallic sodium into a hand press and producing thin wires of sodium. These wires were then introduced into the large brown glass bottles of ether. The sodium and water interacted and reduced the water traces to constituent (and evaporating) hydrogen and oxygen. Metallic sodium is dangerous indeed and produces great heat when in contact with water, and because the bottles might contain residual combustible gases, it was important to remove the sodium wire from the brown ether bottles when they were empty. One of my jobs was to wash the empty ether bottles. One day, one of them still had sodium as well as combustible vapors in it and when I ran water into it, the heat generated by the sodium ignited the gases and the bottle blew up in my face. One of the consequences of the chemical reaction was that it produced lye (sodium hydroxide) that splattered my face. Luckily we were in a hospital and I was in emergency and in treatment within minutes. My left eye had been scarred by the lye and needed healing and I stayed in the hospital blindfolded for one to two weeks, enjoying my contact with nurses who could only be felt and not seen. Eventually I recovered and my blindfold was removed. Then I had the interesting task of trying to identify nurses without hearing their voices. Once again I fell in love—with one Julie Fleisher, little did she know. Recovered from my explosion, I returned to the laboratory, with the personnel racked with guilt. (Would I have sued them in the litigious environment of today?) Within a short time, I was promoted to become a blood chemistry technician with the princely salary of $125 a month, a shorter work week, and the privilege to have lunch in the staff cafeteria. The fact that occasionally I had to be on weekend emergency call gave me a sense of professionalism and unfounded pride. All this is essentially my work experience outside academia. There were two work interludes with my father. In the late summer of 1940, he undertook one of several ill-fated adventures to break into an income-producing activity. He tried to stay within sight of leather, which he knew well. Unfortunately, he missed the target in the beginning. With a small loan my father first tried a shoe repair store, but knowing leather did not mean that he

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could profit from running a shoe repair shop. He then tried a distributorship for Cats Paw rubber heels. It was the latter activity that I joined, visiting shoe repair shops in Hoboken, New Jersey. That excursion came to an end when I made a huge sale of several gross of rubber heels to a big shoe repair shop who had, it turned out, talked me into dropping my price to below cost. But then I was going to make it up in volume! I never again ventured into commercial enterprise. The second period of work with my father took place in the summer of 1946. Returning from the war and waiting to start college, my father employed me in his wholesale leather business doing office work for a magnificent $60 per week. My father had finally returned to the work he knew, buying and selling leather and hides wholesale, having hides tanned and selling leather to shoe, luggage, and clothes manufacturers. He retired in 1964–65, and died shortly thereafter of his second heart attack. The three years between 1940 and 1943 were good years; we were poor but working, Trudi was in school, and I kept back $5 of my monthly salary for personal expenses. That did not provide for any princely excursions into the night life, but movies were only 25 cents for a double feature and in bad weather, my carfare to work on 5th Avenue and 100th Street was only 5 cents (on the last remaining New York double-decker buses). Most of my dates were “Dutch,” usually with girls who were equally insolvent. I had one comfortable love relationship starting in 1941 and one big love in 1940. Following my pneumonia in 1940, I was sent to the Mt. Sinai Hospital’s Neustaedter convalescent home in Yonkers where I met and fell in love with an older woman, the 21-year-old Grace Hendler. Gracie was a violinist, college educated, and, not unimportantly, able to pay for the few dates we had. My feelings were reciprocated though she did consider me as a “child” and her parents disapproved of both my age and my financial status. But I wrote fervent love letters in what was largely a platonic love affair. We stayed in touch for some years. In the summer of 1941, I took my usual lunchtime walk in Central Park when I met and was enchanted by a little golden-locked girl. I always liked children and was soon a ”friend” and introduced to the girl’s mother, Veronica Wojcicki. Veronica was a single

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mother and had a small apartment on East 101st Street. We became good friends. I helped Veronica round out her life and needs as much as I could and we enjoyed a certain amount of sexual play. Veronica and her daughter became my own secret—my lunchtime and sometimes after work, way of being in a different world. She was a smart, streetwise, and beautiful young woman and I felt very much at ease with her. We lost touch once I left the hospital, but I remember her and her daughter with real warmth. By 1941, I had joined the Austro–American youth group. They provided me with friendship and entertainment with people who also didn’t have much money to spend. By 1943, my greatly increased income and my parents’ improved financial situation made it possible to branch out in my social activities into the left-wing Greenwich Village night life, especially spending some time at Barney Josephson’s Cafe Society Downtown. The “downtown” branch was relatively inexpensive and peopled mostly by left-wing folk. The music was great, the company simpatico, and the drinks cheap. Only once did I go to the equally left but more posh Uptown branch after making friends with their chief and very “red” bartender during my second stay at the Neustaedter convalescent home (following my chest operation that removed the glass sliver).

ADOLESCENT WRITING AND READING I noted earlier that the skit aboard the ship was my last “creative” writing in German. Up to 1939 the entries in my Bournemouth “diary ” were all in German. On my arrival in the United States, all my writing switched to English—it was the time when English became my primary language; it must also have been the time when my “internal language” switched to English. I note though that in the 1950s my correspondence with the University of Vienna psychologists (see chap. 6) was entirely in very good German—and, as I reread it, was probably better than my command of German today. I have saved some written pieces from the early 1940s. The first is an essay for Haaren High within a month of my arrival about my wartime crossing of the Atlantic. And then in September

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1940, I started a series of reflections just like in Bournemouth. The first is a dedication to study and work: “academic shall be my life.” But it is accompanied with a paean to Grace. That continues during the next four days with dreams of Grace and, surprisingly, “wishing for my Bournemouth pals.” There is expressed a fear of losing Grace, and a retrospective passage about the importance of mail, how it sustained me in England and how now, waiting for mail from Grace, I still hunger for it. I should note that I have remained “mail crazy”—always looking for it both at home and in the office. And repeated references appear about the need to find a job, to find friends other than Robert. The last “diary” is in mid-October 1940 reporting the job at Mt. Sinai Hospital— “rather trying and tiring.” That was the last available such entry. There was a reference to a “book” and the first chapter exists—the title is “Four fight for freedom” and it is obviously an attempt to combine anti-Hitler and anti-Soviet sentiments into romanticized people—very emotional and idealistic and adolescent. Later on in 1942, there are some war poems of people busy fighting a war. (The anti-Soviet motif has disappeared!) A couple of naive apolitical short stories also made their appearance. Finally, in that period is an essay on Austria and the United Nations—for which I believe I received some prize in an Austrian emigre newspaper competition. Grace has now disappeared but there are a number of letters from her during that period showing a sensible and obviously devoted (but in what sense) young lady, who knows better than to get involved with a child, though I do remember that she permitted me to kiss her occasionally. There is a footnote to this account. I recently found one piece written in German, apparently in 1943 in early anticipation of the defeat of Germany. It is a poem about German struggles against fascism from 1930 to 1943—a typical antifascist genre elegy. Anyway, my German was still holding up. It was during this period in New York, though, that my reading shifted irreversibly into English. In England I had been too busy with school work to do much “recreational” reading. Now the pressures were largely gone and I had some free time. I was much impressed by Dos Passos but also began a long lasting interest in Graham Greene and George Orwell. Later, during the war, I was a

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constant customer for the Armed Forces paperbacks distributed freely to any GI interested and covering many of the English and American classics. After the war, I always thought that Heller ’s Catch-22 was the prime World War II novel, catching best the ridiculousness and madness of war. I also thought that Eastlake’s Castle Keep was an apposite and well-captured reaction to war. In later years, I switched to nonfiction, particularly essays, current affairs, and political pieces. My recreational reading, after a brief fling with science fiction, shifted to the likes of Le Carré and Deighton and successors.

PATRIOTISM AND ACCENTS There is one theme that is missing from those writings—love of country. I have related how the Anschluss and its acceptance by the Austrians was a deeply felt betrayal and it terminated any genuine Austrian nationalism once and for all. An affection for landscape and language lingered on, but never a love of country. I was deeply affected by my stay in England and as my first country of rescue, it became another source of affection. Somehow that may also have prevented the development of a really American patriotism. I am today very much the American in my language, my academic psychology, my identification with American politics, baseball and so on. But it is not the patriotism of the native born. I feel at home in America, in England, and, to some extent in Europe generally, but there is no anthem that brings tears. Nevertheless my truly formative decades in America have left their mark. I am properly identified as an American in most situations. In England because of my accent, in Austria because my German does sometimes have hesitations and idiosyncrasies, in academia because of my work and attitudes. My accent deserves a little history. After nearly two years in private school in England, I arrived in New York with a pure English upper-middle-class accent. The nurses at Mt. Sinai that summer called me “limey.” But the accent soon disappeared and was replaced by a standard New York City accent. Outside New York, I am identified as having New York connections because of that, and there is no trace of an underlying German intonation or accent. Good New Yorkers, who do not hear the New York accent,

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will often be able to identify the German origins behind it. Whenever I have heard my voice on tape I have invariably identified the Austrian accent, as I usually do with others whose first language was learned in Austria—or Germany for that matter. In some linguistic circles, it is generally believed that the age of 11 or 12 defines the barrier beyond which it is unlikely that one loses one’s native language influence. I guess I am just a little beyond that dividing line.

COWBOYS AND INDIANS During my first year in America, politics receded into the background as illness and then the need to find work preempted time. It was not until I started work at Mt. Sinai that I became actively involved first in political discussions and then with the clandestine hospital union. In 1941, I again made serious political contact. A technician in the hospital laboratory where I worked, an Austro-Hungarian young woman, responded to my ideological persona and recruited me to join the New York Austrian emigre youth group, with hints and suggestions of serious political work ahead. It is a typical sidelight of the interpersonal involvement that communist party work produced that she and her husband used me extensively in the late 1940s to borrow money and assist in their personal finances—ending in unpaid debt to me. They returned to Vienna to participate in party work, but in the end, when I heard of her again in the 1960s, she had become a vigorous and committed anticommunist. The Austrian youth group may have been a political opportunity for me, but in the first instance it gave me the social support I needed. I didn’t have many friends yet and I was still in the transitory period of not being European anymore but was not yet American. A group of like boys and girls my own age was most welcome and attracted me immediately. The Austro-American Youth organization was a classic communist-run front organization. The rumor was that Moscow had ordered all the parties from German-occupied Europe, starting with the German communists, to organize and develop networks in the emigration, primarily with the goal of recruiting and train-

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ing cadres who would return to Europe in the post-war period. The thought apparently was that there might not be more than a skeleton organization in the occupied countries, and new and ready party workers would be sorely needed. In any case, the party organizations responded and in New York there were German and Austrian, and I believe also some other, emigre communist party organizations. Otto Kreilisheim, one of the leaders of the New York Austrian communists, gave some details of this operation in an oral history project at the University of Vienna. He related how, after leaving Vienna in 1938, he was given instructions in Paris by the party leadership to go to the U.S. for educational work (Aufklärungsarbeit). In New York he worked in the front organization, on their paper, and wrote pamphlets before ending up in the United States Army doing prisoner of war and Nürenberg interrogations. From my observations, the emigre Austrian communist party failed to provide the personnel that were to be trained. As far as I know the only people who returned to Austria after the war were people who had been in the party before the war. Most if not all of the others left the party organization at various times as Soviet oppression became ideologically untenable. In Austria, by the time the Soviet Union collapsed, the Austrian Communist Party could hold mass meetings in a telephone booth. But the idea of attaching proselytizing youth organizations to the party apparatus was well taken. For the Austrian and German youngsters at least it offered a place to remember their lost homes, a group of friends who had shared their experiences of emigration and immigration, a substitute for their lost belongingness. My short two-year period at the fringes of the communist party was exciting and instructive. The episode took part on the fringe in part because the youth group party organization was not considered the “real” party. The “adult” party had its own organization and front group, the Austro-American Society, which published the weekly Austro-American Tribune (1943-1948). We sometimes took ourselves terribly seriously, fighting the proletarian revolution as good middle-class Jewish kids. All the structures were in place—there was a political leadership (Pol) and an organizational (Org) one—though many of the same people played the two games.

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I soon advanced to a “symp” (sympathisers not quite ready for the real thing) group and then to an actual cell and admittance to the controlling arm of the group. The whole enterprise was an amazing mixture of playing political cowboys, ideological “education,” and Austrian patriotic nostalgia. One’s life was filled with secret meetings, public demonstrations, group activities, study groups (giving me still a reasonable grasp on “dialectical materialism”), and sometimes specially organized clandestine meetings, such as one with the notorious German communist Gerhard Eisler—a meeting I was sorry to have missed. Of all this, the youthful flavor of playing Cowboys and Indians (CP and FBI—or vice versa) is in retrospect the most lasting and interesting. Trotskyites were discovered, FBI contacts were suspected, secrecy was valued and strictly observed, and all the time we played the main game of manipulating the front organization. The party line politics were mostly observed but presented serious difficulties in the days before the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. In those days, the war in Europe was supposedly a capitalist war between equally onerous foes. That was impossible to sell to a group of Jewish refugees from Hitler Europe, and produced embarrassed silences on the part of the leadership or even transgressions of the party line. After June 1941 and the German invasion of Russia, and particularly after Pearl Harbor in December, much of that changed. This was wartime and the Soviet Union was our great ally and pro-Soviet sentiments were in fashion. The politics of the front organization were relatively tame, and as it matured and we all became more acclimatized Americans, it changed its name from Austro-American Youth to Fellowship Club and the lingua franca became more and more English. Most of the time was spent in weekly and usually politically innocent meetings of the various “Gruppen” that met on designated days in our club headquarters off Amsterdam Avenue. We played old and new youth and left-wing songs, wrote and put on plays, ran some discussion groups, did war work and often were just boys and girls being together. Many weekends were spend at the Naturefriends camp in Midvale, New Jersey, where we would also encounter the fraternal German youth group. In Midvale, there were games and sports, much singing to guitars and harmonicas, and practically no politics.

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After Pearl Harbor, the draft started to drain away the young men in the group and much activity centered on support for “our boys.” On the whole some good and little harm was done, and the organizations provided a home for young people who were still adrift in a strange land. If we were used for Soviet government (spying) purposes, we were not aware of it. Revelations of the Stalinist terror were still in the early stages, and the politics of making life better seemed unassailable. But, as I am sure, if no harm was done by this little red front organization, that was not true of my later involvement with an offspring of the Austrian emigre group. In retrospect, the youth group was not a distinguished group of people and its members did not, as other emigres did, become secretaries of state or captains of industry. Several went into the obscurity of academics and the only public appearances I have been able to log were a successful and able writer and a guru of the oil industry. I insert here a personal episode that illustrates, apart from my sporadic early sex life, the playful nature of our convictions. The memory is of my first genuine—not just pawing and sucking and rubbing—sexual experience, of real life intercourse, a memory that is obscured by the event that surrounded it. An event, in retrospect, more rich in memorial detail than the not-too-muchto-be-boasted-about tumble in bed with a lovely woman, who had more experience than I and deserved better than the rather rushed coupling that took place. She had been a girlfriend for some weeks, we were political comrades, had a good time, and did a reasonable amount of petting and necking until summer arrived. She then took a job as a counselor at a children’s summer camp. I was 17, she, I believe, a year or two older. Off she went to camp and we wrote ardent letters of protestations of love. I do remember that she was funnier than I and continued to be so into a friendship that lasted beyond our sexual encounter. Finally, she invited me to come and visit her at the camp, which I remember to be full of fake cowboys singing real cowboy songs around fake fires to the delectation of good little middle-class children. She had a room to herself and the first or second night out we walked off into the woods and to a small lake, where later we swam bare assed, but the episode I remember was more chaste. On the edge of the pond there were a number of small turtles (about 2–3 inches

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across) and Evelyn had a brilliant notion. Off she went to the arts and crafts cottage and returned with red oil paint and two small brushes. We spent the evening painting hammer and sickle emblems on the shells of as many turtles as we found and who held still enough. Carefully putting them on land to dry before they returned to the deep, we finally surveyed our handiwork, found it satisfactory, and left for bed and the promise of carnal delights. We had significantly advanced the proletarian struggle. Our turtles would, through the ages (didn’t they live for many years?) attest to the importance of the coming revolution. Is it surprising that I have little memory of the actual sex that took place, but never have forgotten my little revolutionary turtles. I often wonder how long they did last and what comments they evoked during their long or short lives. In another 20 years, most of the members of the youth groups became good American middle-class folk and parents. The behind-the-scene people who ran the CP—shadowy except for the few who were the leaders of the youth organization—took the whole exercise very seriously indeed. As did the FBI because it was the beginning of the days when common knowledge had it that the FBI constituted a significant part of the membership of communist parties and their front organizations. The relations between these “foreign” communist organizations and the American CP was interesting. There were several emigre communist front organizations and these were supposedly coordinated by the American communist party functionary, Steve Nelson, who was responsible for relations with foreign parties. However, the European communists had little respect for the American ones because the Europeans had experience as active and sometimes large parties in the struggle against fascism, and also supposedly were soon to be in power in their countries, whereas the Americans were just amateurs. In the end of course, the Austrian communists were as powerless in Austria as the Americans in the United States and Nelson himself eventually left the party. Most of the young people who were recruited into the communist umbrella returned after the war to their middle-class lives. Eventually, the Austrian youth organization started holding reunions in their middle age, now no longer under the direction or influence of the communists. Stories of the reunions reveal a great deal of nostal-

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gia for the happy days of youth in the shadow of the CP. This happy remembrance seems to have been particularly true of those who were unaware of the shadowy background of the organization. On the other hand, with their communist past behind them, I believe there was also a sense of regret on the part of those who participated in the adolescent conspiracy. My own association with the behind scenes movement was suspended for the two and a half years I spent in the Army. This intervening period—free of any real political pressures—made it possible for me clearly to dissociate socialism and the Soviet Union. I had always found the latter as a rather alien land continuing its historical authoritarianism and repressions. When I came back from the Army, I began to complain to and with others in the organization about the lack of free expression and activity and the lack of discussion of party lines and their reasons. I was contentious, wanting to explore and discuss, clearly not in keeping with the official line. I had become independent and aware of how few solutions the Soviet Union offered. I was soon cast out into the real world as an “organizer of factions”—a favorite expulsion method for troublemakers. My associations with some of the individuals, however, continued in the unfortunate business enterprise known as the Central European Press and Literary Agency, which ended up involving me in a miserable little spy story. Did my experience with the communist left in New York shape my later commitment to the left, though a democratic one? Probably not. I consider the episode fairly isolated and, after all, I was raised in Vienna in a social democratic context both by my parents and by the opposition to the crypto-fascist regime. The three-year period in New York was my only real emigre experience. For the most part, it was marked, especially in the beginning, by the classic immigrant withdrawal into the shell of the emigre community. This was certainly true of my parents, who never really made any friends other than Austrian and German immigrants. My father participated in the founding of a conservative congregation, Ramath Orah, on 110th Street and eventually became its president. The spiritual leader was a Dr. Serebrenik, former chief rabbi of Luxemburg. Activities at the

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synagogue partly determined my parents social life; otherwise, they met with old friends from Vienna and emigre business associates of my father ’s. My own shift to non-emigre companions occurred to some extent just before I went into the Army and was completed by the time I came back to New York. I became a devoted Brooklyn Dodgers’ fan fairly early on, and my friend, Hans, and I undertook some pilgrimages to Ebbetts Field. With my induction into the Army in 1943, my integration into American life became real.

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My War 1943–1946

GETTING DRAFTED AND BASIC TRAINING

I

n 1942, I turned 18 and registered for the draft. I was working at the time as a laboratory technician and in the fall of that year, I found out that I had received a deferment of my induction, apparently for vital occupational reasons. I had never requested a deferment nor do I know for certain that it was the hospital position that generated it. Anyway, I took the opportunity to enroll at New York University in anticipation of being drafted, with some thought in mind that this pre-draft registration might make admission after the war easier. I mentioned before that I had taken night courses at City College with rather mediocre results. Why I did not continue at CCNY and instead enrolled at the then academically less challenging NYU, I am not sure. The main reason was probably that everybody I knew seemed to be aimed at NYU, and I had no knowledge or information to consult for a proper sense of educational direction. In keeping with my original intentions—and my father ’s implied wishes—I enrolled with an aim 88

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toward a chemistry degree—eventually, to go toward the leather factory and the family business. I did one more obligatory thing before getting called up—I found a girl to leave behind. I met Roslyn through a coworker at the hospital and immediately imagined myself into love. Roslyn’s boyfriend was overseas and I moved into a rather superficial—certainly nonsexual—relationship. Once in the Army, there were the obligatory letters—in country and once overseas—of declarations of undying love and her support for her man (men) in the armed forces. My first jeep, which I “owned” with Bob Yost, was called JURONOMO—for JUne, ROslyn and NO MOre. That was fine except for the fact that Bob did marry June. Soon after I landed overseas, I received the equally obligatory “Dear John” letter, which started with the canonical: George Dear, This is the most difficult letter I’ve ever had to write. Frankly, I don’t know where to begin and how to end …

Well, I had done my duty, anyway. In October 1943, I was finally drafted and inducted into the Army at Fort Dix in New Jersey, the major center for New York City inductions. After the initial examinations and, in light of subsequent test results, a surprisingly high score on the Army qualification test, the major activities at Dix consisted of waiting for one’s assignment. In the meantime, I was delegated to the coal and heating squad. Our major duty was to spend nights making the tour of the huts that housed officers and to check and fill up the potbellied stoves so that the treasured flower of the American military would not suffer from cold. The major event of that period was that one of my co-stove keepers was the husband of the movie actress Celeste Holm. Never met her though. Eventually, because of my background as a laboratory technician, I was assigned to basic training in the medical corps. Basic training was at Camp Barkeley, Texas—a large training camp outside Abilene at the base of the Texas panhandle. It was surrounded by red dust and mud (depending on the season), which

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made the officers’ white-glove inspections of our huts very perilous. Abilene had few saving graces. It contained a Christian Woman’s college whose inmates had been warned against any contact with soldiers, an undistinguished restaurant outside of town (“Green Acres”), and an attempt to cash in on Eisenhower ’s home town of Abilene, Kansas, by heading a story about Ike in the local paper with “Abilene man chosen. …” Medical basic training was competent, nonstressful, and had the advantage that we received a full Red Cross medical emergency training course—a useful skill in later years. Medical basic training did not insulate us from endless drills—or obstacle courses (my particular dislike). Lots of litter bearing and forced marches, but no guns and, thus, no firing thereof. Another unit training at Camp Barkeley was the 12th Armored Division, which I encountered later in Alsace where there tanks were shot up rather thoroughly on a river bank. However, Rita Hayworth’s brother was a member of that division and that provided one useful interlude of visiting entertainers. A high point of my stay in Texas was my attainment of United States citizenship, conferred on all noncitizens inducted into the Army. There was a short court session at Camp Barkeley and I was a citizen. At the same time, I became a citizen of Texas because state citizenship is conferred by the state in which you achieve United States citizenship—as I understand United States law. I have always had fun making people guess of what state I was a certified citizen. We were in huts of about 15 men each, and assignments to huts were alphabetical. The result was that my hut of L’s and some M’s had a reasonable majority of East Coast Italians (Longo, Lucci) and Jews (Levy, Levine), but also a genuine Louisiana Cajun—Willie Le Comte. One evening Willie was told that several of us were Jewish and he was astounded and would not believe it because he knew positively that “Jews had tails.” I don’t know whether we ever convinced him, but I was surprised how factual rather than prejudicial his belief was. I also learned some useful Italian expletives, and on the whole, basic training was an uneventful 16 weeks—without combat training, but still the need to wriggle through obstacle courses with “real” bullets zinging by. When it was all done, we anxiously waited to find out what destinations the fates has decided for us. The most threatening was to end up as a stretcher bearer on some Pacific Island operation. It

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turned out that my original destination was in fact the Pacific. But sometimes during the preceding 16 weeks I had discovered that one could actually apply for transfer to Military Intelligence. I knew about MI training because many German-speaking refugees of my acquaintance had already been assigned there. I received a form from Washington and to everybody’s surprise, it was actually accepted by company headquarters at Camp Barkeley and forwarded. An unheard of event to have a degree of self-determination in the Army—or at least a try at it. In the meantime, we did the usual Army thing—hurry up and wait. At the end of my basic training, I found myself assigned to the Camp Barkeley base hospital as a laboratory technician—a pleasant interlude. I worked an eight-hour day, had the evenings and Sundays to myself, and enjoyed the company of the hospital personnel—a very different environment than the helter-skelter of basic training. In particular, I was taken under the wing of my laboratory colleagues, a young man and woman who eventually disclosed to me in deepest secrecy that they were married—strictly prohibited for reasons I do not remember. I assume both must have been military employees with some such restriction. The hospital also took in some civilian cases. I remember a patient with meningitis. a rather obese woman of the type that was the scourge of blood chemistry technicians. Trying to find a vein in the fat with a not very sharp needle on one’s syringe was no pleasure, particularly with a highly infectious patient. What a difference from today’s technicians with their always sharp throw-away needles and automatic plungers. Eventually, I received my orders to proceed to a staging center for eventual transport to the Pacific—whereupon I started on a rather hectic set of transcontinental voyages. Shipping out meant that I was given a week at home before proceeding to California. All such military travel in those days was, of course, by train, and so I started out from Texas to New York (and a full week with concerned family and girlfriends), and a week later from New York to Marysville, California. On that trip, my first seat companion was a little girl of about 10. I have always liked children, and particularly little girls (a preference that the current paranoid social atmosphere makes practically dangerous). She told me all about her

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trip, from/to mother and grandmother. She finally left the train someplace near Marietta, Ohio and, after thanking me for my companionship, shook a finger at me and reminded me never to talk to strangers. After that I do recall hours of playing poker with two marines and two nurses—not strip poker though. In Marysville, it was a waiting game again. We were pulled out to help pick the peach crop, resulting in serial stomach aches, and the only other memorable event was that my wallet was stolen. Then, one day I was asked to report to a Colonel in Camp headquarters—I had no idea what I had done or would be asked to do. On entering the colonel’s office—an act not lightly done by a lowly private—the colonel put me at my ease, carefully closed the door, and after sweeping the office (looking for who knows what), he said that he had a confidential message for me, which should be treated with the utmost care. I was to be transferred to Camp Ritchie, Maryland, to the Military Intelligence Training Center. He then handed me my mimeographed travel orders that said, for all and sundry to read, that Pvt. George Mandler was to report to Military Intelligence Training Center. So much for secrecy. Travel orders were one’s passport for transportation, read by curious MPs, police, ticket agents, railroad personnel, and so on. I was off again for a train trip from California to New York—just briefly to greet my happy family and to indulge in some comforting necking and petting, as we then did. Then, on to Baltimore and Camp Ritchie near Hagerstown where I arrived in May 1944.

“MILITARY INTELLIGENCE” NEED NOT BE AN OXYMORON I spend more time on the Military Intelligence Service (MIS) than on other comparably important topics because very little has been written about MIS in the European Theater during WW II. There is fairly extensive literature about the role of Japanese-Americans in MIS in the Pacific Theatre of war, including several books, but my search has not turned up anything about the European Theatre of operations. MIS was an extraordinarily effective organization and in what follows, I hope to give the reader some of the flavor of an unusual branch of service and its activities.

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Camp Ritchie—Military Intelligence Training Camp Ritchie was located near Hagerstown, Maryland, in the Blue Ridge Mountains. What awaited me has been described officially by the United States Army. [Originally the area occupied by the Camp belonged to a large ice company and artificial lakes were created to make ice blocks that were stored for the summer. The area was used originally as a summer training camp for Maryland Reserve Units.] With the onset of WWII the Camp was taken over for United States Army training. Construction was started to convert the summer training camp into a year-round installation capable of housing 3,000 men. Five million dollars was provided for the construction of 165 assorted structures between June 1942 and January 1945. The new building included classrooms, a theater, a chapel, a new headquarters building and many barracks. Many of the buildings from the World War II period are still standing at Fort Ritchie. They can be recognized by their total wooden construction. The mission of the MITC was to provide specialized intelligence training to qualified soldiers. Training was as realistic as the experts, both in military and civilian subjects, could make it. As the war progressed, captured equipment was sent to Camp Ritchie. This was supplied to the Composite School Unit, the training cadres, which simulated foreign, usually enemy, tactics. A trainee interrogator could practice questioning French local politicians, German prisoners of war, Japanese machine gunners in their native languages, or they could observe Japanese cavalry on patrol or a German tank attack using plywood mock-ups mounted on jeep chassis. All these demonstrations were performed by the instructors using authentic uniforms and weapons. All this effort was necessary to train interrogators, military interpreters, translators, aerial photograph interpreters, order of battle specialists, and in 1944, all counter-intelligence corps personnel. A mock German village was constructed from plywood and burlap. This was used to orient the students to the German way of life and let the students practice infiltration. Mock Nazi party rallies in the post theater exposed the students to German propaganda techniques. Twenty thousand students graduated from the MITC at Camp Ritchie. These men proved invaluable in collecting and

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analyzing intelligence information gathered at the front. In 1946, the center was moved to Camp Holabird, Maryland.2

From the point of view of a newly arrived Army private, this place was quite different from Army life elsewhere. Possibly it was due to the degree of dedication exhibited by so many of the trainees who were refugees from Nazi Germany, but the result in any case was a degree of enthusiasm and hard work rarely seen elsewhere—as well as a lack of the usual mindless Army discipline. No parades, no short order drill, just intense work. The Sergeant Major of the Camp was Man Mountain Dean, an ex-wrestler of great proportions and a fine sense of humor. The commanding general was Charles A. Banfill, rarely seen by us but responsible for the peculiar Camp Ritchie work week. We worked seven days and were off on the eighth, thus getting more done and not being shoved into the hurly burly of weekends when we had a day off. This eighth day was named Banday in honor of its inventor. Usually on the eve of Banday, about 5 to 6 p.m., we swarmed out of camp into cars and taxis to get as quickly as possible to Baltimore and a train to New York. Obviously, Baltimore did not, then, have adequate attractions. And late in the evening of Banday, we were back in barracks. I cannot speak of training other than that provided for those of us destined for service in Europe, but that was then the largest part of Camp Ritchie. The men in the 21st MIS class were varied indeed. They ranged from university professors in their 40s to 18 and 19 year olds, all of them from backgrounds that varied from German and Austrian refugees to 2nd to nth generation GermanAmericans to various Americans who had a reasonable command of German or French or some other special skill. There were some tensions—more in the field than at Ritchie—between the younger, Jewish, European-born refugees and the older, non-Jewish, U.S.-born second and third generation German-Americans. But the differences tended to be swallowed up by the common work and the varied people one constantly encountered. Some of my 2 This section was taken from the Department of Defense/United States Army description of Camp Ritchie on the Internet. It has been replaced by a series of informative articles on www.dcmilitary.com/army/standars/archives.

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co-trainees became friends. There was Parke Duncan Massey III, who claimed to be the ranking corporal in the United States Army, having been held back due to his service in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain (though I could never find him in Lincoln Brigade rosters). He taught me to use a submachine gun and the M1 rifle, which I had not encountered in medical basic training. Then, there was Peter Salm, son of an Austrian aristocrat and an American heiress, who, when in Alsace, once lost his solid gold cigarette lighter and said he would write home for a replacement. There was Bob Yost destined for a diplomatic career. Given the varied backgrounds, the command of German also varied, from the colloquial of the refugees to the sometimes archaic of the old German-Americans. Whoever we were or had been, there were no distinctions made in rank among the trainees—another useful Ritchie innovation. During training, German tended to be the second lingua franca in camp. In part because of the amount of German being spoken, I at least had the impression of a large proportion of the trainees being German and Austrian refugees. I do not know what the exact proportions were, but, once in the field, the preponderance was less obvious, if it existed at all. Of the three detachments with which I spent most of my time in Germany, I was in each case the only Jewish refugee in the group, but also the one with the best command of the German language. Whereas the training course was more or less the same for all of us, we were being trained for three different functions: IPW, interrogation of prisoners of war; PI, photo intelligence for interpretation of pictures of enemy front and rear areas; and OB, order of battle teams who were responsible for the accumulation of information about enemy units, their strength, disposition, command, and so on. We were given some training in counterintelligence skills for purposes of defense against enemy infiltration and espionage, but the main body of CIC personnel were trained apart from the MIS personnel. The core of our training was interrogation, photo interpretation, and as thorough a knowledge as possible of German Army organization, nomenclature, and disposition. Much of this was

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done in hands-on practice and through training manuals and lectures. In addition, there were courses in communication methods, booby-trap detection, and others such as orienteering that seemed somewhat extraneous to our basic mission. The most extreme case of apparent irrelevance was the insistence by one of the senior officers in charge of communication that we all take and pass a course in Morse code. I also still have a short manual on Pigeon Communication—another leftover from World War I. On the other hand, the material and instructions generally were superb. One of the manuals I still have covers Germany Army identification with meticulously described details of insignia in all branches of service and at all levels and ranks. The orienteering was tough and fun. Teams of three to five would be taken by jeep into the depths of the Blue Ridge Mountains and dropped off with unlabeled maps and a compass with which we had to make our way back to camp. During the exercise, we would be surprised by mounted “Wehrmacht” soldiers, who would try to disperse us and make us lose track of our map locations. We also had a brief driver training course. I had taken driving lessons in New York prior to reporting to the Army and, with a license in hand, was supposed to be an experienced driver. This was tested in a hair-raising night drive, with dimmed lights, in open jeeps in the mountains. I was sure I wasn’t going to make it, but surprisingly survived. There was also some gun and pistol training, mostly with submachine guns, known because of their looks as grease guns, and the small carbines, which became very useful as hunting rifles in postwar Germany. Thanks to Parke Massey, I even received an efficiency badge on the shooting range. However, the most important and most intense training was in interrogation methods. The basic method was practice, practice, practice. We interrogated camp staff, mostly MIS personnel who had returned from the theatre of operations, and who now played German soldiers, from privates to senior officers. These men were superb, and whereas I learned much about interrogation, leading questions, and pressure exerted and removed. I learned the most from these pretend PWs. When I came away from my first interrogation in the field, my immediate comment was, “Just like Ritchie!”

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The four months training ended in September 1944 with a series of “exams” in which we had to do interrogations, photo interpretations, document interpretations, and so forth for a panel of camp staff. The end result was that nearly all of us were assigned a function and given new Army ranks, ranging from corporal to second lieutenant. In my case, I was made a PW interrogator and document examiner with the rank of T/3 Sergeant. After sewing on our new stripes and a brief leave home, we were shipped off to Europe in a converted tanker—with bunks seven deep. The military intelligence contingent was different from the rest of the personnel on the ship—we had all gone through training together and our “officers” were our bunk mates of yesterday. At one point, we were warned that the water on board was in short supply and that enlisted men were to be severely rationed. We found out that in the officers’ quarters water flowed freely, even for showers, and our officer buddies from Ritchie would smuggle us to the officers’ showers. Our convoy landed in England without encountering any difficulties across the Atlantic. We ended up in Pheasy Farms, part of Lichfield, a suburb of Birmingham, where the United States Army had taken over typical 2-up/2-down English houses and we just waited. I spent some time with refugee friends in Birmingham and on a day’s leave to London, I was able to visit my Isaacs family, except that Gina would not let Tuffy be seen on the street with me, given the reputation of women seen with GIs. Eventually, we boarded an LST (Landing Ship Tanks) on the south coast and proceeded on a week’s trip across the Channel and up the Seine as far as Rouen, and then on to MIS headquarters. Military Intelligence was lodged in buildings in an enclosed park just west of Paris in Le-Vésinet. The installation had an interesting history—originally it had been a Sanatorium for the mentally ill, and it was subsequently taken over by the Gestapo as one of their headquarters. When Paris was liberated, it became MIS territory. In Le-Vésinet, we were also assigned to our teams and I was initially with a team headed by a Captain Schlosser, who had a heavy German accent. His speech led to his arrest in Paris by the Military Police. During the Ardennes offensive, there were frequent alarms about German spies in United States uniforms be-

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ing infiltrated into Allied lines, and here was a United States captain with a heavy accent. We actually had to go into town from Le-Vésinet and “bail” him out. One of the other men on my IPW team was Robert L. Yost, a friend from Ritchie who later became United States Ambassador to Burundi. Bob was the only man with whom I ever shared a sleeping bag. During the very cold winter on the Alsatian front, we frequently had to spend nights in simple tents, and we found that large sleeping bags with blankets, with two to a bag, provided the best protection against the cold. One of my most satisfying experiences was when one of the MISlings, Paul Henissart, took me to midnight Christmas mass at the small church in a nearby village—the service was partly sung in French. It was the perfect Christmas experience, and I thank Paul—since then a writer of espionage novels—deeply for it. Before heading out to war, we also changed our stripes and bars to the simple “United States” insignia worn by MIS personnel (showing no rank whether officer or enlisted man), which we wore throughout the rest of our service in Europe. We thereby had the advantage that we were not subject to rank discipline and could refuse to give our rank in the course of duty. The net result, of course, was that all of us were or pretended to be officers when in contact with military personnel. New Year ’s Day 1945, I was traveling in a semi-open jeep from Paris (Le-Vésinet) to Toul. Military intelligence teams traveled on their own and the six of us (in two jeeps) had been ordered to report to Corps headquarters on the morning of the 1st of January with a clear understanding that we were to travel on the 31st. I have our original travel orders that state that we “cleared” Paris MIS HQ at 1330 on 31 December 1944. Well, how could you tell a bunch of young adventurers not to stay in Paris on New Year ’s Eve. So, we decided to leave at 6 a.m. on the 1st, particularly in light of the delights promised for the 31st! Some of us from Le-Vésinet had discovered the joys of a particular Parisian bordello. Joys of the flesh, but not joys of the usual fleshy kind. Bordello business in Paris at that time wasn’t particularly in demand because much of Paris was welcoming the "liberating" GIs with open arms and legs. On the other hand, bordellos had excellent black-market connections. And good restaurants hadn’t really

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become available—at least not to people below colonel’s level. So, this particular establishment offered an excellent meal with excellent wines at exorbitant prices, but without the usual services of the girls included. The ladies helped as waitresses, hanky panky was discouraged. Anyway, we had a fine New Year ’s evening, good food and wines, and then to bed and up at 6 to a miserable hung-over drive in miserably cold weather. But a great memory. After my experience in Cologne, this was my second (and last) experience in a bordello.

Military Intelligence Up Front We arrived in Toul and reported as ordered on January 1st! The Battle of the Bulge was entering its second phase. With the German thrust having been stopped, the Allied forces were beginning to push back to reduce the “bulge” the German armies had created. We were at the southern edge of the battle. American reinforcements were continually pushed up to the front, and Toul was one of the staging posts. The town was awash with soldiers, vehicles, supplies, and signs on every corner directing one to various headquarters, assembly points, and other places. It seemed like total chaos though, with some diligence one could find the proper headquarters or assembly centers. Toul was a central supply point for reinforcing the Seventh Army, which covered the front south of the Third Army. Our team reported to XXI Corps, which remained our organization of command and assignment. The hierarchical Army organization started with armies (the Seventh Army in our case), which contained two or more corps, which were collections of divisions. The latter in turn had two or three regiments. From XXI Corps, half of the team with me in it were assigned to the 274th Regiment of the 70th Infantry Division. Each regiment had one IPW team or, more usually, half a team assigned to it. PI (Photo Intelligence) teams were at Division level and OB (Order of Battle) teams were at Corps level and higher. The various MIS teams that were under the command of MIS at corps level could easily communicate with each other. That arrangement relieved those of us working in IPW teams from going through regiment to division and then to corps when we needed information quickly. It facilitated communication with OB teams

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at corps level, who used the information from IPW teams and others. We were able to have personal contact with MIS people from the XXI Corps OB team—a procedure that greatly facilitated an understanding of the German opposition both for us and the OB people. The Army’s history of MIS describes Patton’s Third Army Intelligence section as probably the best G-2 (intelligence) section of World War II. It was headed by Colonel Oscar Koch and used (better than others) “all-source” intelligence, integrating all possible sources of information from PWs to photo intelligence, to signal interception and intelligence, and OB information. Apart from the G-2 section itself, it had OB teams at Army and division level and four IPW and three MII (Military Intelligence Interpreter, the equivalent of IPW) teams. In addition, there were four PI teams. The Army’s history claims that as a result of its superb G-2 organization, Patton’s third Army was never surprised. IPW Team 165 was split in two—one half was sent off to the 63rd Division with whom they stayed, never to be seen by us again. Our half, Lt. Hirsch, Yost, and Mandler, was sent off to Luneville for three days and then on to the front where the 274th Regiment had been since Christmas. We walked into the second act of the German western offensive, their counterattack to the Allied push against the Bulge. Operation Nordwind had started on January 1st with an attack by eight German divisions on the seventh Army front in Alsace. Their original intent had been to draw Patton’s Third Army to the south and relieve the pressure on Rundstedt in the Ardennes. And so, in the bitter cold of one of the worst winters in memory and with a fluid front of changing positions and advantages, we went in search of the 70th Division, and specifically the 274th Regimental Headquarters. On January 5th, we found them at Mühlhausen (Mulhouse). We stayed with Headquarters for the rest of the campaign until the 70th Division went off line in Forbach on 21 March 1945. The regiment (our “home” for the rest of the war) was initially attached to the 45th Division and took part in the defensive battles in Alsace in the Bitche and Wingen sectors. We later rejoined the 70th Division when it took the town

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of Saarbrücken. During January, most troops and supplies were drawn north in the ensuing counter-offensive against the German Ardennes offensive. The American lines south of the major battlegrounds, where we were, were quite thinned out and one of the artillery officers told me that at one time they were down to one round per hour in their munitions. At one point in January, our regimental HQ had to retreat under German pressure from Bad Niederbronn in Alsace. Being with regimental headquarters, we received the order to withdraw before being overrun, but also in great haste, just in time to get into our jeeps—but we lost a trailer, tent, and other equipment. Later on, we learned of the impending German retreat in the Saar when we interrogated an officer, who just an hour prior to the interrogation had received a top secret document ordering the withdrawal. On the Siegfried line, we mapped a German defense sector during the interrogation of the German officer in charge of that sector. The Officer in Charge of our IPW team, Lt. Fred Hartman, received the Bronze Star medal for that result. The interrogation schedules and procedures were somewhat haphazard. Any officer who was captured by any unit of the regiment was immediately brought to the IPW team. However, whether we saw and interrogated all the German enlisted personnel captured on a particular day depended on numbers. When there were relatively few, we saw them all; when there were many, the selection was made at some intermediate point based on who looked important. As to the substance of the interrogation, it varied with the situation. Sometimes, we were seeking very specific information that the regiment needed to know about opposing forces, equipment (e.g., tanks), or the state of the terrain (e.g., cover available in town). At other times we were on our own to develop whatever information was available. Some of the time, we requisitioned a small house near regimental HQ and PWs were brought to us there. Mostly we were housed in tents, which were cold and miserable, particularly when we spent hours in interrogations there. Our regiment (and we with it) was deactivated in Forbach. Speaking of Forbach reminds me of the joy of finding coal mines nearby with huge shower halls for the miners—these were our first shower facilities in months. On

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21 March, our team was ordered to Chalons-sur-Marne (now Chalons-en-Champagne) for reassignment. Once there, we were given three-day passes for Paris—a much appreciated R&R exercise. On return to Chalons, I was assigned to the 221st CIC (Counter Intelligence) Detachment, to a group under the command of Lt. Donovan Senter.

How It All Worked I did not get into the real war until fairly late. My account may not, therefore be quite faithful to the military intelligence experience during the early days of the invasion of the continent and later, more important battles. However, I know that my experience was not very different from others involved in prisoner of war interrogation. Most of our PWs were enlisted men, though our major focus was the officers who had the kind of information we were interested in. But officers were not captured that frequently. In any case, interrogating the enlisted men posed little challenge. The major tactic we used derived from the very strict German discipline. We would point out that the soldier was now subject to American Army discipline and that he had to follow officers’ (our) orders just as he did in the Wehrmacht. Most of the time, this tactic worked surprisingly well. When it did not, a favorite ruse was for one of us to put on Red Army insignia, be designated a Soviet liaison officer, and threaten that the PW would be handed over to the Russians if we did not get the information we wanted. With slight variations, we would get the information we wanted, but usually the average soldier did not know much more than his unit, where he had been, and what he had been doing, plus whatever rumors he had heard—in which we were indeed interested. We hardly ever threatened force and never used it. I do remember a Feldwebel (Sergeant) Schmidt who was useful because he had current information about his unit. We interrogated him and then shipped him off—only to have him reappear a week later, after he had escaped and rejoined his unit. Again, he was open with information, which turned out to be accurate. I don’t know whether he escaped again.

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With captured officers, the tactics were entirely different. We greeted them as fellow officers, offered them cigarettes and coffee (and sometimes, when necessary, even some brandy), and then settled down to discussions of their units and the action they had recently been in. Central to this scenario was a body of knowledge about the opposing German units and their officers, and the stories and rumors about them that we could pick up. By having an initial conversation that indicated intimate knowledge on our part, it was relatively easy to lead the conversation into areas where we needed more information. Knowing the names of the officers in those units, knowing about rivalries among them, and particularly having available snippets of gossip was most helpful. Knowing that Major X had an affair with some colonel’s wife in Berlin was the kind of gossip that helped create an atmosphere that conveyed that we already knew everything anyway. Again, with some effort, this kind of approach was successful. Sometimes, though it was impossible to break into an officer ’s knowledge and we shifted to the Russian strategy or, usually, just gave up. I do remember one case in which we desperately needed some information on German tank dispositions and luckily captured a major from a tank battalion. However, he was seriously injured and was at our field hospital waiting to be operated on. I was given permission by the surgeon in charge to talk with him for a few minutes. He was not willing to give me more than his rank and serial number, so I made him an offer, “Tell us what we want to know and you go into surgery, don’t tell us and I can cancel the surgery.” He still refused, and was of course immediately transferred to the OR where he survived in good shape. Sometimes, our activities were more exciting. Colonel Conley, commanding officer of the regiment, suggested that we might want to go up with an artillery observation plane and actually see the area that we talked to our captives about. Artillery observation flights were in Army equivalents of piper cubs and if any German airplane would show up, that would be the end of us. But I volunteered to go up, having been assured that there were few German planes around and the watch for them was most accurate. It was a fascinating experience, actually to see the German units and tanks that had been described to us from prisoners’ stories. My pilot was most concerned that he, rather than I, would

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get credit for whatever we discovered. Because no glory accrued to me from such a discovery I was happy to agree. We did see a previously unreported group of a few German tanks moving into camouflage. A constant companion in our quarters was the regiment’s S-2 (G-2 intelligence officer at the regimental level), Major Joseph Walker. It turned out that Major Walker was not too hot at his job and he was delighted to have our daily reports, most of which were transcribed into his daily reports. Apart from that, he had the disconcerting habit of ducking under the nearest table whenever he heard any German artillery rounds, which happened frequently. In fact, German artillery was the most danger I was exposed to, and the closest I came to real danger was when a German rocket attack hit a street I had just left and killed two of our signal people, with whom I had just talked. Quite upsetting. The “whoosh-bang” of the German rockets was a most disconcerting sound. A couple of times, I was doing quickie interrogations at the front and got shot at, but that was about the extent to which I was exposed to real danger. Once when driving along a road that was under attack from German “88” guns, my jeep hit a shell hole and I got a gash over my eye. The medical aid post that put a dressing on it suggested that I should report it to get a “Purple Heart” decoration—a suggestion I treated as a joke. One day Major Walker came to us with a peculiar request. One of the forward units had been surprised by a Russian man and woman walking into their lines. They had been brought to Walker and it turned out—with limited German as communication—that they were Russian agents (complete with wireless equipment) who had been overrun by the American advance. Walker did not know what to do with them and thought that MIS were the people to take them on. So we harbored the two Soviet agents, fed them and gave them a place to sleep, and found out that they weren’t going to tell us anything even though their German was excellent. All they wanted was to get in touch with Soviet liaison. We used our communication with MIS at Supreme Headquarters to request transport and guidance for our guests, which finally did arrive after a couple of days, and off they went to Paris and the Russian liaison mission.

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As one would expect, life in MIS, with constant contact with other units, was full or rumors. Two have stayed with me. The story was told that the famed German commando Skorzeny (who, among other things kidnapped Mussolini after his first downfall) had arrived at a U.S. PW camp in U.S. military dress with MIS insignia and arranged to have a PW (one of his own men) signed out to him. His German accent was found quite acceptable because by then, U.S. Military Police knew that MIS personnel often had such accents. I can find no substantiation for that story, and it is probably one of the better military “urban legends.” The other, more interesting and persistent, story in early 1945 was that MIS teams, and in particular the relevant OB teams had warned the U.S. high command a week before the beginning of Rundstedt’s Ardennes offensive (the Battle of the Bulge) of German troop concentrations and offensive potential. But their reports were dismissed as not possibly accurate because headquarters “knew” that the Germans could not possibly mount an offensive this late in the war. There is at least partial confirmation in the memoirs of Colonel Koch, Patton’s G-2 (senior intelligence officer). Koch not only describes how the Third Army G-2 knew in early December of German troop concentrations but he also illustrates it with information obtained from interrogations, which clearly showed that at least a week before the German offensive (on December 16th) PW sources furnished knowledge of an impending German counteroffensive. Because Third Army was located to the south and therefore somewhat peripheral initially to the main German thrust, it would be interesting to know how much prior information was available to First Army, which directly faced the German build-up.

POSTWAR IN GERMANY With the end of the war, the MIS teams that had been doing war things were out of a job. I can sympathize with the way the CIA felt when there was no more Soviet Union. From the end of the war until I went home in April 1946, there was a lot of shuffling around of teams and reassignments and all kinds of different jobs. And team names did not mean anything anymore as we shifted from IPW teams to PI teams to the CIC and back.

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The first team I was with at the end of the war remained intact for some time. The 221st CIC team’s CO was Don “Doc” Senter, barely a lieutenant and just short of a Ph.D. in social anthropology before joining the Army. Don was attractive, smart, easy to get along with, and always concerned for the welfare of his team. He was the only one whose post-war life I found out more about. He stayed on in Germany after the war and was promoted to captain in the military government. He went to Mexico in the 1960s where he started on a graduate course in archaeology but didn't finish it. He worked in the field in the Xochicalco Valley, and was as much appreciated there as “one hell of a good worker and friend.” He died, relatively young, in a camper fire at his home in Albuquerque in the late 1970s. The other members of the detachment constituted the ablest group I encountered in the Army. There was Lucius “Smitty” Smith, a Baltimore lawyer who was the most private and reserved of the bunch; Gerard “Brains” Charig, a young New York lawyer concerned that his somewhat left-wing views should not be confused with the communists; Robert Maxwell, a foreign service type; and Andy Olson, only temporarily with us, but another foreign service officer. I was, at 20, by far the youngest. We had a fine time, not the least of which was the opportunity to acquire a French chef. These were the early days at the end of the war, and much work in the field was still to be done. As a result, the 221st CIC team took part in the liberation and reorganization of a German PW camp, consisting mostly of French soldiers. They were all returned as quickly as possible to France via the French liaison, but one man came to our team and wondered whether we could use a cook. He had nobody to go back to, had been chef in a very good Paris hotel, and wanted the opportunity to spend some time with the Americans. Our team immediately grew by one chef and René took over our lives. At the time, we were moving from town to town mostly on liaison and investigative work for the military government. As we moved into a town, René would go ahead, requisition a villa and household help, and then go “shopping.” There was very little food in Germany but we were drawing Army rations, including staples like flour, sugar, and salt, and René was a master at bartering our sta-

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ples for fresh German meat and vegetables. He also was a fine pastry chef. René requisitioned our wine supplies—usually by stopping at local chateaus and inspecting their typically generous wine cellars. Eventually, we were traveling with one of our trailers full of German wines. A few times, we invited local U.S. officers for dinner, but the highpoint was when we ran into an American field hospital and invited the commanding colonel and some nurses. René outdid himself with a six-course dinner on fine china. Our visitors eyes bulged, and I assume there was some productive fraternizing with the visiting nurses. Remember that we were all without rank insignia and could pretend to be anything. Another advantage of rank-less life was that when we did not have René’s services available, we could walk into the nearest officers’ mess for lunch or dinner. Don established a connection with the occupants/owners of the Jagdhaus Rechenau near Oberaudorf in the foothills of the Alps above Munich. Our hostesses were Frau Sachs and her lovely daughter, Yolanda. The whole episode is somewhat fuzzy in my remembrance. Don had some relationship with Yolanda or her mother, but the exact nature of these entanglements is shrouded in history. I also seem to remember some reference to Frau Sachs as Countess. Another companion there was an Otto Simpfendörfer and his small son Michel—much spoiled by all of us. Because the German entrepreneur Gunter Sachs had some contretemps with the Bavarian government over hunting rights at Rechenau recently, I assume they are all connected. In any case, the villa at Rechenau became a frequent, usually weekend, haven for Don Senter and his team, and my friend Anneliese, and I spent memorable days and nights there. Lest all this sounds like a bunch of lazy characters living off the fat of the land, I note that we were always busy during a five to six day (usually 8–12-hour day) week. We were always on call for the local military government for rush investigations. Sometimes we were the military government for a short time, sometimes orders arrived from headquarters asking us to search for suspected war criminals hiding under aliases. And I, as the most fluent German speaker of the team, was probably busier than the others.

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Later on, I was part of a team headed by a Lt. H, a German-American who was not comfortable surrounded by all these young Jewish refugees. His major concern was to hide his German girlfriend; she lived with us, but H. always pretended that she was nothing but a cook. I think he was deathly afraid lest news of his attachment ever reached his Kansas home. Then, there was Capt. Wiederanders, who shot himself in the foot and was replaced by a Capt. Otto Reinemund with Lt. Frank Manuel as his second in command. It was a team of interesting contrasts in background (academics to high school graduates), and with unusual personnel problems. MIS teams usually got along well as a group of equals; Reinemund, however, was a classical martinet. Once when I was in a minor jeep accident on an unauthorized trip to Munich, Reinemund told me that my behavior could not be tolerated and he would have me court martialed—a ridiculous idea on the face of it, but not to be readily dismissed. Frank Manuel, acting like a true MIS officer, put an end to that particular threat. Frank Manuel turned up in academia a few years later as a distinguished historian. In 1999, nearing 90, he published his reminiscences of our war, and I took the occasion to exchange notes with him as a reminder of our distant past; he too had proceeded to war on that cold New Year ’s day morning. A less threatening, but illuminating, accident occurred that winter. I was once again on the road in my jeep from Munich when I ran into a real snowstorm and my jeep eventually landed in a ditch with no chance of recovery without major assistance. It was dark and across the fields I saw a light in a farmhouse. Grabbing my few things, I started to trudge across the snow. I arrived at a small and rather poor farm, and my banging at the door finally produced the rather frightened and perplexed farmer. I was probably the first GI with whom he had direct contact and he just didn’t know what to expect. On top of it all, this particular GI spoke fluent German—what to make of that? I patiently explained my situation and indicated that I hoped they could put me up over night. Well, there was the farmer ’s daughter (truly!) and I could have her room if I wanted it, and she’d sleep with her parents. Done! I spent a good night on a straw mattress and cover, with a hearty breakfast in the morning. The family was clearly relieved that no raping or looting had taken place and I promised

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to return some time soon. I went off to the main road, flagged an Army truck, and was soon pulled out of my ditch. A few days later, I was able to come by the same road and delivered some salt and sugar, real needs at the time, to my farm family. By now, they were old friends and truly grateful—as I had been. Another time, I was with a team in charge of evacuating the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut from Halle. The KWI was one of the great German research institutions— the precursor of the current Max Planck Institute. Large parts of the KWI from Berlin had been evacuated to the relatively safe town of Halle (properly, Halle an der Saale), in a part of Germany to be handed over to Soviet occupation. Just a week or two before the hand-over was to take place, orders came from Allied Supreme Headquarters (SHAEF) that the personnel of the KWI were to be evacuated nolens volens to the west. A hastily assembled intelligence team was given the task of finding the personnel. We were given a few buildings (schools, I believe) to assemble and house the people as we found them using the personnel lists of the Institute. We were also assigned a cattle-freight train “parked” at the Halle railroad station that was to be used for transportation to the west. And so, armed with address lists and sometimes knowledgeable locals to help us locate people in a bomb-damaged town, we spread out all over town. Eventually, our assembly buildings had all the looks of refugee camps crowded with people with the belongings they could carry, but also with baby carriages, research files, and cartons with household goods. It all went relatively smoothly. There was some bickering and bitching but, on the whole, the people involved preferred to have themselves and their science transported to the west. A colleague and I did at one point violate our strict order that everybody was to be evacuated. We had been given a name and an address and found ourselves with the man in charge of the horse stables of the KWI—not riding stables but rather horses used for experimental studies, production of serum and so on. The poor man loved his horses and couldn’t understand why he should be forced to leave them and his home and go to the west and a totally uncertain future—he surely wasn’t going to be flown to Washington for debriefing. What to do? In the end we decided that we could not find the man and left. I hope for his sake that we made the right decision. Then the Institute was loaded on

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to the freight cars—did some of us find some satisfaction out of loading Germans into cattle cars? Shortly after the KWI train left, we welcomed the first Russian troops, arriving on horse transports, into Halle. We never did find out what their reaction was to the news that the KWI had flown the coop. Another postwar assignment evolved in a more personal incident. The U.S. Army was overloaded with POWs and wanted to get rid of them and discharge them to civilian life as quickly as possible without letting any important Nazi figures slip through their fingers. Interrogation centers were set up in the POW camps and some of us conducted discharge interviews. The German POWs would fill out a Fragebogen (a long personal and political questionnaire)—the document dominated post-war German life as people continually were asked to justify themselves and their past lives. Each soldier then presented himself in a hut where one of us sat, was asked some searching (or actually rather perfunctory) questions to elaborate on their answers, and then was discharged. We were given strict guidelines on the ranks in the different German Army and Nazi units that were liable for immediate arrest. For example, the arrest line started with the rank of major in the SA, but with corporal in the Waffen and general in the SS. And of course, membership at any level in the Gestapo, the death head units of the SS, the RSHA (Reich security office), and similar units required further detention. The process of interviewing in the detention camps, where much initial screening had already been done, became rather routine. At one point, as I called in the next prisoner and laid aside the last questionnaire, I did a classic double-take. The man’s name had been Mandler! I called him back—a young soldier in his teens, now quaking lest for some reason he would not be going home. I asked him whether there were lots of Mandlers in Germany. He said there were, and apparently most of them came from the Giessen region. I asked whether young Mandler thought there were any non-Aryan, (i.e., Jewish), Mandlers. Absolutely not! An important response when a positive response or a hesitation could have brought dire consequences in Nazi Germany. I informed him of the contrary and sent him on his way. Many years later, I looked into the matter in more detail and there are in fact a

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reasonable number of German and Austrian non-Jewish Mandlers, a very different strand with a different history and, as far as I can tell, no common strands. So, as far as I know, neither side is tainted with either Jewish or “Aryan” blood! Another episode from that postwar kaleidoscope has always been one of my most treasured reminiscences. At the time, we were located in Bad Mergentheim. We shared a very large villa with a German family—most such families by then consisting entirely of women and children. I became very fond of the family and in particular, a small daughter nicknamed Putz. In the evening, I often spent time talking with the ladies of the house, and they were clearly a family of good Germans. I helped out as much as I could with contributions from our more than ample food supplies and with other small favors. When we left, Putz’s mother took me aside and said she wanted me to have a farewell present. She handed me a set of woodcuts by Hermann Fechenbach—an exquisite set of representations of the old testament. It turned out that my Bad Mergentheim family had been helpful to the Jewish Fechenbach and he had given them the woodcuts on his departure from Germany. Now she wanted to repay my kindnesses in a similar way—the circle was complete. I contacted Fechenbach, who had ended up in England, years later and told him about the woodcuts. He mistook me as another remnant of the Mergentheim Jews, about whom he had written a book, in addition to Genesis—a collection of the woodcuts in book form. The most “rewarding” episode was a call in early 1945 to accompany a patrol to flush out a Wehrwolf nest. The Wehrwolf movement was developed by the German leadership in the last days of the war as a resistance movement in the mountains, to harass the Allies, and eventually to win back the Fatherland. Most of this was fantasy, but rumors abounded. Following up on one these rumors, we were asked to flush out a group in the mountains that was said to include members of an SS unit. Off we went—a combat patrol and three intelligence people including German-speaking refugees from the Nazis. We were led into the woods by officers from the unit that had military control of the area and were warned that many of the paths had been mined. Although they believed they had cleared the mines from the path we

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were about to take, we were specifically told to avoid stepping off the trodden path because it was in the verge that mines would still be found. We were most careful. To this day, I still feel queasy about stepping off a marked path when hiking in the woods. We finally arrived at the advertised hut in the foothills but, after much careful reconnoitering by real soldiers, it turned out that it had been abandoned. Then, it was our turn to check for booby traps and look for any informative papers that might have been left behind. There had in fact been some SS men and officers about, and we found a few unit documents and a locked box that we three intelligence people carefully opened—it held about 100,000 German marks. Never was there a thought that this money should be turned over to anybody at all—we were refugees from the SS and considered the money justifiable restitution. We decided to divide it three ways and I was to turn two shares into movable property—particularly because currency reform was in the air. My friend Anneliese helped me buy some paintings and jewelry as well as an Amati violin, which I shipped off to my old love from back in 1940—the violinist Grace. Fifty years later, I wished I had kept it for my now violinist daughter-in-law Ruth. The money was spent before currency reform occurred. Back in the United States, I contacted one of my partners in “crime” (in Albany, as I recall) and offered him his share. His response was one of panic—he wanted to know nothing of that money and was sure he would be found out and prosecuted for theft if he accepted any of it. In the end, most of the jewelry was stolen in California, but some of the pictures still remind me of my single act of Wiedergutmachung (restitution). There were all kinds of other military jobs: working as a translator at the murder trial of a GI, examining the bona fides of local German officials and military government employees, tracking down German nationals sought for one reason or another, and so forth. My rank rose during these months from plain Sergeant to Tech Sergeant and then to Staff Sergeant (a five-striper). Early in 1945, I had been recommended for a “field” promotion to second lieutenant. In May 1945, I had a physical and an examination by a board that included three colonels (rather intimidating) that approved the promotion. Eventually, the recommendation was returned with the note that “field” promotions had been

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discontinued. It was just as well, because officer status would have prevented my early return to the United States. Sometime in 1946 I applied for permission to go to Vienna and seek out my relatives. I have related this trip earlier, but given the growing tensions between the Soviet Union and the Allies I had been surprised by how quickly I was able to get the permit. It authorized travel to Vienna by Jeep through the Soviet zone with no restrictions or needs to report. With the end of the war duties and the discharge from the Army of most MIS personnel, there were some attempts to continue the Ritchie spirit, especially by Shipley Thomas, the former director of training at Camp Ritchie. A Blue Ridge Bulletin was started in 1948 in an attempt to create a postwar association of MIS veterans. But lack of response apparently brought it to an end with its fourth issue in 1949. As far as I know there has been neither an association nor any document celebrating the Ritchie adventure.

ANNELIESE AND LEAVING The most significant personal event that colored my postwar years in Germany was my relationship with and love for Anneliese Gustke. Shortly before the end of hostilities, we were located in Herrsching, a small town outside of Munich. One day, we were approached by an American lady of some distinction, specifically a Mrs. Madeleine Ruoff (née DuPont). She had been evacuated from Munich and was wondering whether we could be of any assistance to help her return to Munich. She had been married to the German, Mr. Ruoff, who I believe, had been a dedicated early Nazi, and we were the nearest American unit that she thought was likely to be able to help her. I went to her house with her where she introduced me to an Englishwoman who had been stranded by the war and a young German woman, Anneliese Gustke, who had also been evacuated to the same guest house. Could I also help the two young women return to Munich. Why not? We helped the two women get some food and get squared away before taking them back to Munich. I had the opportunity to spend some time alone with Anneliese and we obviously were attracted to each other.

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My jeep was packed high by the next day and we were off to Munich. The English companion was dropped off on the way and by the time we reached Anneliese’s (undamaged) flat, the attraction had become more embedded and we ended up in each others embrace. Anneliese was 21 and a war widow—beautiful and intelligent. We were devoted to each other during the next year that I stayed in Germany. Her flat became our flat—I provided food from Army stores, we acquired a dog, and whenever possible I spent time in Munich. I also eventually picked up a car for my own use—a small 2 cylinder DKW—a fine car to buzz around in. With proper MIS signs and labels, it was safe from interference by MPs or German officials. It also avoided interference by the MPs at a time when fraternization with German women was strictly prohibited. The couple of times that I was stopped with Anneliese in the car, I simply announced that she was being taken for interrogation. I also did not have to use team jeeps for our excursions into the Munich neighborhood and up to the Rechenau chalet that Don Senter had made our holiday base. I was very young, I was in love, and I made (internal) plans for the future. Anneliese was a delight, and whereas I was still sexually somewhat unsophisticated, we had a fine time—physically and emotionally. We played house in her apartment in Munich, where I spent every minute I could get away from Army duties. Our team’s regular supply of food staples served as a means of trading a for fresh meat and other foods. In particular, we were glad for access to American coffee rather than the onomatopoetically well-named German substitute—Muckefuck. I had some of my share of the money liberated from the SS and it still served as legal tender in Germany. I did little trading on the black-market—there was no need. Apart from the gold ring I had made to replace the one I had to pawn in England, I did use German money and cigarettes to have a solid silver tea set made for my parents’ silver wedding anniversary in 1945. Anneliese’s letters, which I still have, in that stilted German cursive script, speak of devotion, as did mine in the beginning. On returning to the United States I announced my liaison with her to anybody who would listen. My parents were appalled that I would have a connection with a German woman, but I never had any sense that she had any racial or political ties with the Germany in which she grew up—with one

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exception. Anneliese knew of course that I was Jewish and she would tell me of her Jewish friends before 1933, when she was 12, and never showed any signs of latent anti-Semitism (and I have all my sensors out for those symptoms). The exception was her belief in ancient Jewish ritual murders—mentioned once and dropped after a brief, but heated, argument. Saying goodbye to Anneliese was difficult; she made it easy on my way out of town by disappearing at a stop at a shop. By 1946 the withdrawal of American troops was in full swing, and we were all eager to find out when we would be able to get back to America. The Army had instituted a scheme whereby each individual was given points for such things as amount of time in service, time overseas, participation in battles, combat experience, decorations, and so forth. The system worked fairly well though GIs were skeptical as usual; many of us were sure that the Army could not be trusted to be either fair or competent. But the problem was in everybody’s thoughts. For example, at a time when the crucial number of points hovered between 40 and 50, any visit to U.S. Army entertainment (usually a movie) inevitably brought about GIs in the audience shouting out, “43-44-45"—to be answered by a chorus of everybody yelling, “Some shit.” Eventually, I embarked in Le Havre for the United States on April 17, 1946, on the SS William and Mary Victory—a classic “victory” ship in which we slept in piles of bunks five or six high. The MIS folk, all of us sergeants of some stripe, were senior personnel, and we also had the advantage that, having lived off the land, we rarely drew any pay. Most of us were paid just as we embarked and had some $1,000 to $2,000 in our pockets. The money quickly was absorbed by or multiplied in the extensive poker and crap shooting on board. I was busy, with three others, putting out the daily ship’s paper. We received badly transmitted news from the radio room of the ship, and, at one point, had the Chinese communists practically winning their war—some two years early. The ship hit some very bad weather and I recall being in the “newsroom” by myself with the typewriter sliding from one end of the desk to the other. I have always been puzzled by why I never get seasick but a mere merry-go-round will be enough to start me off. Something funny about my middle ear, I guess. But doing the

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“paper ”—sometimes with my co-journalists unfortunately disabled by the sea—was fun and gave me some occupation apart from crap shooting. At one point, I was about $1000 ahead on the gambling scene, which shrank to $100 ahead by the time we disembarked in New Jersey. When, at the time of this writing, I tried to check some of the facts in my story by obtaining a copy of my U.S. Army record, I discovered that nearly all the records of U.S. Army personnel who were discharged before 1960 were destroyed in a disastrous fire in July 1973 at the personnel records center. How many other facts affecting millions of people have been temporarily or permanently lost, sometimes to be haphazardly discovered? I arrived in the United States having left behind me important experiences in Germany. In subsequent years, I would return to Germany with new attitudes and feelings. There were several Germanys in my life. There was the frightening, threatening, murdering Germany of the 1930s, there was the Germany of the war, the country of beaten craven Germans and ruined cities, but also one peopled with Anneliese, and, finally, there would be the two postwar Germanies of the 1970s and 1990s. The West Germany where I felt more and more at ease as I met the new Germans that I liked and appreciated, and the East Germany where I felt ashamed and sorry for what their rulers had done in the name of socialism. The East incorporated a socialist past of which my early education and reading had been part—all of which had been betrayed. I felt sympathy with the few East Germans who had hoped for the promise of the defeat of fascist Germany and yet were subdued by their masters, as one of them once said to me, “Why don’t they trust us?” Somehow I thought the Germans in the DDR were less grey and defeated than the Russians in Leningrad. My early education was in German literature and music. I found it again in the new Germany from the 1970s on where I felt increasingly less uneasy—in contrast to Austria whose anti-Semitism is still a contemporary presence. Not surprisingly, the Holocaust produced a highly aversive reaction in many Jewish

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refugees from Germany and Austria—they avoided German intercourse and literature and some even refused to speak German. But I never had any such inclinations and always continued to read German books and magazines, speak German whenever possible, and generally continued to think of German as my mother tongue. In contrast, I have generally avoided any Germans or Austrians around my age and older—I tended to consider them guilty until proven innocent. Today, I am comfortable in Germany and with the vast majority of Germans and with German books, music, and papers—and with German psychologists. With these Germans, I do not find it difficult to discuss the past, to mention the Holocaust, to discuss my role in the war; they accept me as I accept them. Munich has become a welcome place for me as several times I was invited to the Max Planck Institut there and developed a professional friendship with its director, Wolfgang Prinz, a fine representative of the new Germany. With contemporary acquaintances and the memories of my times with Anneliese I have enjoyed revisiting Munich. I never thought much about the question of punishment for the Nazis—even less so for the Germans at large. During my service in Germany, I often dealt directly with Germans for whom some “punishment” was prescribed, such as internment. I made sure that when the choice had to be made their victims were favored over the German populace—on the notion that they did tolerate the Nazi regime. As far as punishment of the true criminals was concerned, I had never understood why the death penalty was the supreme punishment. Apart from my opposition to the death penalty in general, it is joining the criminal mind and—possibly worse—the potential for error, I consider death as a nonevent, it is not experienced. Only the anticipation of its finality is a truly awful and dreaded event. Once executed, a Nazi criminal was done, he could not be punished further. I thought something more punishing than that would have been appropriate—if nothing else, the constant reminders of their failures and consequences of their actions. I thought that the Nazi criminals should be used to make sure that the world—for years to come—would pay attention to what was done and would know of what horrors human beings were capable.

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As with many others of my generation, the war significantly shaped my view of the world and of people. My future professional development and experience was not significantly determined by my war experience, with the possible exception of the curiosity engendered by my interrogation career. I learned much from the transitory but significant relationships with my comrades in the 221st CIC team. Anneliese taught me much about women, and also about guilt. Meeting “good” Germans shaped my postwar rapprochement with Germany. Some of it was me, some was circumstance.

A CASE HISTORY Among Anneliese’s acquaintances in Herrsching were a writer and ex-German Air Force soldier and his wife, F. L. (Franz Ludwig) and Maria Neher. They were older than us—Neher was approaching 50—but we became friends and visited their house on the lake frequently. The Nehers were very kind to Anneliese in my absence. After I left Germany, we started a correspondence that eventually gave me a picture of a particular German experience—in its ambivalence probably not different from the experience of many other Germans of that generation. Neher ’s first mail contact with me was in June 1946, and I translate here from that correspondence. He writes of the difficulties of trying to start a support organization for war-injured people. But the difficulties are such that he wants to give it up before even starting: “Shortage of materials, difficulties between the occupation zones, impotence of the officialdom, political immaturity, denazification, rumors of currency reform, food shortages and hunger, electoral battles, traffic restrictions and a certain inability to learn from experience, these are all things and occurrences that oppose any realization like devious traps and bring down whatever one plans.” There is a tendency then “for self pity, devious excuses and other sentimentalities, but these are not the tools for new beginnings.” He ends with a plea for one of the new CARE packages that they have been told are available for $15, though he does not know how they can ever repay me. (The package I had already sent did not get there until October.)

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In August, he responds to a letter of mine, decries the talk of a possible new war, and also talks of the poor quality of American officials in Germany. (He was of course at least partially correct there—who wanted to stay on when they could go home?) He describes the many people that are visiting the Herrsching lake for holidays: inventors, abandoned wives, film stars, the unemployed. One physicist comes and talks to him (on the basis of Neher ’s book about Röntgen, the discoverer of X-rays) of his invention of ultrasound that would replace X-rays and make possible medical examination unthought of before. (That was all I was told and I have no idea of its relation to current ultrasound usages). But, mostly, they are pseudo-inventors, charlatans and opportunists. He wrongly foresees no economic hope for Germany and a slide into disaster as soon as current stocks of raw materials are used up. Then he writes of the denazification process, with streams of protestations of innocence or confessions of error and hope of redemption (because the “Americans don’t want to hear about idealism”). Anneliese is in touch and is doing all right, supplied with food packages from me. A letter on 31 October has a page and a half paean to the receipt and unpacking and tasting of the CARE package—Neher and his wife are in seventh heaven—and then, “I had never before realized with such intensity how insane it was to go to war against a country that can provide its soldiers such nourishment in such careful packaging, in such richness and diversity, in the care of its selection and composition. What a fantastic industrial power is represented in the food and food preparation arts of this package!” It is Neher ’s 50th birthday and he starts reminiscing about his 50 years. First, he subtracts the five years of World War I, then his 18 months in a concentration camp for public criticism of the SA and the SS, and then six years under the watchful eyes of the Gestapo, and then, from 1940 on, his years in the Luftwaffe—he has not enjoyed enough of his 50 years. Later, he writes a long letter about the sometimes abysmally destructive behavior of the GIs toward the Germans, the food that is destroyed within sight of hungry Germans—and then he balances this with complaints about the Germans who follow what-

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ever authority they can find, whose officials continue the self-important condescending behavior of their predecessors in Nazi and Kaiser times. In the process, he forgets the crimes that were done in the name of the German nation—and by the majority of the German nation. He finds it unbelievable that all Germans are treated as if they had all been Nazis and he writes as if the German nation naturally welcomed the victory of the Allies. He also mistrusts the German emigrants who did not suffer with the rest of the anti-Nazis. Neher claims that toward the end of the war he had been (surreptitiously) collecting information about the Luftwaffe—and their concocted stories about minor Luftwaffe losses and the major number of Allied planes shot down. The Herrsching Nazi contingent suspected him but could not prove anything. These same people, now the new democrats, are after him. He was asked to come to Munich for an interview with the Military Government Special Branch during which he was accused of being a Nazi spy, of having falsified his record of incarceration during 1933–35 (because of his criticism of SA and SS), the interrogation taking place all the time in the presence of his main accuser from Herrsching. He is angry at the Americans for the way he is treated and threatened. Neher keeps ranting about the terrible situation in Germany—the shortsightedness of the Americans in not properly understanding their worth and the need to nurture a new democratic Germany. He complains about the continuing shortages and the decay of civil society—never a word about German responsibilities—and this was a good man!! He is active in the SPD (the social democrats) and works hard for war-damaged people. These letters extend into December, and then pick up again in March 1947. He has been found innocent of political misrepresentation by the Military Government court and, for once, finds the proceedings to be fine and excellent. Then in early December 1947, Maria Neher writes to me in Basel to thank me for the latest CARE package and informs me that her husband has been convicted of being a minor Nazi collab-

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orator (Mitläufer), and she reveals the story behind it. In 1933, Neher was sent to KZ Dachau for 18 months for “revealing military secrets,” (i.e., saying publicly that the SA and SS were quasi-military organizations). He was called in for an interview with the SS head of Dachau and requested to write a popular book about Hitler and the other Nazi leaders. He had previously been approached to write for the Nazi (völkische) Press, and now was caught in an impossible dilemma—what if he refused outright, what would happen to him? Until 1931, he had been traveling abroad and writing and doing various reporting but now, having married Maria (also a budding writer), he was stuck in Germany. Maria talked with his publisher and agreed to write the book in order to get her husband out of jail and to raise money for his legal defense. Eventually, the book was written, published under a pseudonym, Maria was paid, and the SS was told that the author was actually Neher. The same SS head of Dachau now decided that it would be impossible to distribute a book written by a politically suspect writer and had all copies destroyed. Neher was eventually released, but continued to be under Gestapo surveillance for the rest of the Nazi period. While in the Luftwaffe, he was ordered to write biographies of decorated flyers, another service for the Reich. All this was brought up at his trial and no amount of supporting affidavits and witnesses, including American friends from the pre-war days, helped prevent his sentence as a Nazi collaborator. Maria asked me to write a letter to support his appeal, which I did—testifying to the help he had given our CIC unit when we were investigating Nazis in Herrsching. In January 1948, Neher writes to me from the detention camp, describing the sometimes craven, sometimes unrepenting people who are his co-prisoners and bitterly complaining about his fate. By June 1948, Neher is out of prison and writes about his publishing plans; he has a book manuscript nearly finished about the November 8, 1939, attempt on Hitler ’s life by Georg Elser and another one about the Moosburg detention camp that he just left. For the next year, there is a correspondence about my attempts to place the Elser book with American publishers. (It was by now part of an attempt at a literary agency, CEPLA, about which more later.) There are some nibbles, but in the end we are unsuccessful. The correspondence ends there.

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Neher was one of those basically good people, who could neither deny his Germanness nor forgive the victors, but also resented not having been given credit for his opposition to the Nazis, forgetting both his actual (if forced) collaboration, as well as the crimes committed with the acquiescence of his German compatriots.

My Czech cousins Anni and Vera who were murdered in Auschwitz

My cousin Hanne who was murdered in Bergen-Belsen

The obligatory Jewish star (this was worn by my grandmother)

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My father's order to report for Wehrmacht service in September 1938

The M.V. Britannic on which I sailed from England to America

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The loneliness of Camp Barkeley, Texas

Anneliese with our dog, Bärle

Self-caricature by F. L. Neher—Max Maier was the "cover name" he decided to use for me

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Members of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut (KWI) assembled with their possessions in Halle/Saale

Members and family of the KWI before their transport west

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Cattle cars ready for the KWI staff for transport west

Our 1946 Packard (complete with wooden front bumper)

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eturned to civilian life, my first task was to implement my father ’s decision to buy a car for his business, which by now was doing reasonably well. Actually, it was my reward for having defeated the Hun and defended assorted American maidens—or whatever embellishments of and justifications for war were then current. The car belonged to the firm but was primarily used by me and garaged (with the help of a garrulous attendant, Barney) around the corner from our apartment on West 106th Street. Buying a car was difficult business in postwar America—there were many makes but still low production. I was close to buying a Studebaker but ended up with a rather splendid Packard, which had the defect that the front end bumper had not come off the assembly lines yet, and I drove for months with a 2 x 8 board as a bumper. Studebaker and Packard are now long gone and if it weren’t for the Japanese motor industry, so would be the choice we once had in motor cars. I had decided to return to NYU in the fall. It is probably more likely that the decision was simply a way to avoid making a deci128

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sion; it was the obvious thing to do. And with the GI bill providing tuition and support, it was just as easy to go to a private university with its higher tuition as to a, then, better school like CCNY. And I did not really return to an interrupted education, since I had only enrolled in 1943 after quitting my job at Mt. Sinai, being certain I would be drafted any month. I signed up for “52–20" as soon as it was permitted after I left the Army. “52–20" was a quasi-bonus scheme for returning soldiers; it paid $20 unemployment benefits for 52 weeks—a rather nice sum, and one didn’t really have to look very hard for a job. My friend Hans and I used to do our weekly trek to the unemployment office and a beer afterwards. In the last few weeks that summer, my father employed me, presumably to introduce me to his business, though I do not remember being either a punctual, efficient, or industrious employee. But for $60 a week (better than the $20!), it was a worthwhile interlude. After that, I continued to live with my parents while going to college and the monthly GI stipend (about $110) provided both pocket money and some savings. In the fall, I made a short-lived and little considered career decision. I was going to be a journalist. On what basis? I liked to write, I had completed my stint as the “editor ” of the ship board paper on a Victory ship, I could probably write well ... whatever. None of them were particularly convincing reasons, but it was really a place-holding decision to replace the chemistry career my father had convinced me of before. And so I became a journalism major, which wasn’t much of a curriculum, though I do remember a worthwhile course in the history of U.S. newspapers and doing some haphazard writing. In the meantime, I was still marginally active in the Austrian youth group but that was coming to an end as I became more of an internal rebel. I also had become quite active that year working for the ill-fated literary agency. Sometime in 1946, Vera Ponger, one of leading members of the communist front youth organization and a very bright, charming, and active woman, was about to return to Vienna and approached me about starting an international literary agency. The purpose would be nonpolitical, as she emphasized, aimed at

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bringing American books to Europe—in translation—and conversely, contacting American publishers for outstanding European books. As a budding journalist, the idea was most attractive for me and we incorporated the Central European Press and Literary Agency (CEPLA) in New York, hired a telephone and mailing service, had stationery printed, and we were in business. Several of my friends were enlisted as associates, and Vera and I contributed a few hundred dollars as starting capital. We busily started contacting publishers, but not much business was generated. I enjoyed talking with publishers and authors’ agents and several manuscripts went through our hands, such as the German translation of Joe Louis’ autobiography. But we were innocent untrained babes in the woods and in the end no money was made and the agency had a rather ignominious end ( more about that in Chap. 6). My sister Trudi was married in 1948 to Bert Cowlan, a student friend from NYU and kindred spirit in the radio and advertising business, which both pursued after their marriage. The generally unsatisfactory marriage ended some 30 years later but produced two fine nieces for me, Margaret (Maggi) and Janet. For some years, in her 20s, Maggi and I kept up good and enjoyable correspondences, and my sons and I attended Janet’s first marriage in a planetarium—an unusual, happy, and memorable experience. Bert had great pretensions at success in radio and related pursuits, but was too concerned with his personal reputation and successes to make an interesting person or brother-in-law after the first few years of marriage. In the 1980s, my sister remarried a very nice, but financially incompetent man. Unfortunately Sandy died within 10 years. Trudi in the meantime had risen to a Vice-presidency at A. C. Nielsen, from whence she eventually retired. I was really a part-time student at NYU—driving in the mornings down to Washington Square (where it was still possible to find a parking place in those days) and returning in the early afternoon. I did not make many friends and found the courses easy and unchallenging. By the end of that year, I had shifted significantly into psychology courses. Having decided to go back to Europe and to study there, psychology seemed a reasonable focus

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for the time being. At least one reason for my interest arose out of my Army service—the psychological aspects of interrogation and the reasons why some prisoners had spoken freely, others not at all, fascinated me. I should note also that, at the time, indeed until well into my graduate work, I thought that I wanted to become a clinical psychologist—doing good rather than well.

BASEL AND GOODBYE TO NEW YORK The decision to go to Europe to study was complex; my reasons were multidetermined and somewhat self-deluding. I thought that I wanted to go back to see and be with Anneliese—a motive that my mother discerned and that bothered my parents mightily. I also wanted to continue studying psychology, but I didn’t like the American college system of lectures and tests and curricula. And finally I had, for the time being, recovered my Europeanness and my attachment to the German language. The decision to go to Switzerland became obvious, because it was not possible to go to Germany and I did not want to go to Austria. There was a lot of correspondence before it was clear the University of Basel was going to be the easiest to get into and most liberal in terms of requirements. Cost had little effect on the decision—with the war over we had moved from immigrant penury to American middle-class respectability. My father was willing to subsidize the adventure in part and there was the GI Bill of Rights, which paid all tuition and a reasonable monthly stipend—even in Switzerland. Actually 1946-47 was a fine year. I had drifted into a group of people—all of whom have become hazy in memory—who spent much time at Cafe Society Downtown where we encountered Josh White, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and others. At the time, I had some slight contact with one of the Austrian youth people, Felix Landau. Felix had met Seeger in the Army and became the manager of People’s Songs, a left-wing group that included Seeger and that eventually led to Felix becoming his manager. Many years later, after Felix had built and left a career as one of the West coast’s leading art dealers, I reestablished contact, and from the 1970s on, Jean and I frequently visited him and his wife Elga in

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Paris and Tuscany. In these later years, he was one of the very few contacts from the early New York years that I maintained. There was one luxury I enjoyed in those days—a barbershop shave and facial massage; not available anymore, and by now obscure in its motivation. It was also the year I had an embarrassing vacation experience. Partly to reward my safe return from the wars, I decided to go on vacation for a week by myself in upstate New York. The embarrassment was really a sense of shame when I discovered that the place was obviously, as many were then, “restricted” and anti-Semitic remarks popped up every now and then. The shame was my inability then, and my memory of it now, to identify myself as Jewish and to oppose the shits. Never again would I go to uninvestigated places or tolerate anti-Semitic, or any other racist, remarks. If I was slowly withdrawing from political participation, I still enjoyed the social aspect of the youth group. Young people being what they are, I had the opportunity to taste the joys of various female comrades. The most enjoyable was a married friend with whom I experienced some of the most uninhibited and pleasurable sex of my younger years. She also became pregnant at one time, though it was not clear whether I shared responsibility, and with the help of a friendly gynecologist, faked a hemorrhage and escaped the rather severe consequences of a then illegal operation. We enjoyed each other without fuss or commitment, and in the meantime, I kept up a rather intense correspondence with Anneliese, with my impending arrival in Europe being the main theme. In the summer of 1947, I set sail for Europe aboard the Queen Mary. I soon discovered that also on board were members of a year abroad from (still all female then) Smith College’s Junior Year. Actually, they were a rather snooty bunch, though one or two condescended to associate with male traveling companions. Among the latter was a friend I acquired on board with the imposing name of Joaquin Mazdak Luttinger—known as Quin. We had a fine time and continued our contacts for a while in Switzerland. Quin was a brand new physics Ph.D. on his way to working with

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Pauli in Zurich. In 1997, I encountered him again with an impressive obituary in The New York Times—Quin had obviously made major contributions to physics. I spent some time in London with the Isaacs, saw Emlyn Williams’ new play Trespass with Williams and Françoise Rosay and Noel Coward’s Peace in Our Time about a supposed occupation of Britain by the Germans, which impressed me greatly. I contacted a number of old family friends, among them a relative of Lee Lunzer ’s (who had been a protégée of my grandfather ’s) who introduced me to Jack Safir—the most interesting contact of the trip. As I wrote about him: [He is in] the midst of writing three books [though now I cannot find any trace of any books by him], doing some modelling of national costumes ... about to be exhibited in London, Paris, New York. Besides he paints and has a wonderful collection of Chinese and Far Eastern sculptures—earns a living by being a successful fashion designer.

I met Safir again in Paris, where I was appalled by the prices: We went to the Lido nightclub and had one bottle of bad champagne (terrible stuff, tasted like apple juice with seltzer with some left-over cheese flavor), they rooked us 2,500 francs plus 500 tip (at 120 francs to the dollar).

On to Basel where I quickly felt at home. I found a reasonable room, though the husband of my first landlady made me move after a few weeks because he didn’t want his (rather unappetizing) wife to be alone with me in the apartment. I also made friends quickly—first with Murray Spotnitz, an American medical student and, once classes started, with a number of Swiss men and women. I slowly learned to understand the Basler dialect, found my favorite small restaurant, bookshop, and so on. I enjoyed the university very much—one signed up for classes and the signature of the professor at the beginning and at the end of the term signified that one had taken the course—no attendance taken, no exams. With such voluntary participation, it was satisfying how many of us actually faithfully went to lectures. There was not

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much, if any, modern psychology and I took a number of philosophy and social science courses. I particularly enjoyed a course on ethology, the small philosophy seminars, and the curiosity of a seminar with one of the old line psychoanalysts, Heinrich Meng. Intellectually, the students (mostly Swiss, of course) were fairly well motivated. The eventual Ph.D. degree depended mostly on final oral examinations that could (and frequently did) cover any and all courses that one had attended. With a couple of lectures, there was a potential language problem when the lecturer opened the first meeting with the question whether there was any objection if he lectured in Basler Deutsch—the local accent. Knowing German isn’t enough to understand it, the Swiss accents and vocabularies can be opaque indeed; there are even significant differences between Basel and Zurich—one hour away. Luckily, there were enough German students whom I could join in asking that lectures be conducted in Hochdeutsch (standard German). The high point of the year was that the famous German anti-Nazi existentialist Professor Karl Jaspers was to give a series of lectures. I went with great anticipation. The topic was world politics or something like that, and I was very disappointed. The lectures were on the level of a good newspaper column—not particularly deep, not wrong but not insightful. It dealt with high-level generalities about big power relations with little reference to the realities of postwar Europe, and Germany in particular. I remember thinking that the American doyen of political newspaper wisdom, Walter Lippmann, could probably do better. The GI Bill of Rights paid the (negligible) tuition and the usual support funds, and because the official and market exchange rates tended to fluctuate and students had special exchange privileges, there was a busy grey market of shipping money back and forth to the United States The GI Bill funds were not sufficient for my rather rich life style, given frequent trips around Europe and reasonably elevated expenditures otherwise. I drew on my father ’s good will (with support from my mother) and despite occasional long distance tiffs, was able to extract the required wherewithal from him. The structure of the university was in the old-fashioned German mold. There were Ordentliche (ordinary) and Ausserordentliche (ex-

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traordinary) professors; the former were the equivalent of full professors, the latter one rank lower—associate professors. These titles were taken over by American higher education in the early days of the republic when it modeled its universities on the German, rather than the English, system with its single professor and department head. What was different from the current American system was the use of another title in Basel—the Privatdozent. These were exactly what the title implies: private docents (teachers). They were admitted to teach at the university, but not paid by it. Their only university income was a function of the number of students attending their lectures—about $2.50 (or close to that) per student. I believe that the system was a hangover from the days when university careers were reserved for the comfortable classes who could afford to support a younger son to go into academia and for those who had private incomes to engage in such a career. I started with the notion of getting my Ph.D. at Basel, found a sympathetic potential thesis supervisor, and even planned a vacation trip to the United States in the summer of 1949. Through my professor—Hermann Schmalenbach, a German emigre—I met his daughter (Roswitha Eichenwald), an actress with the Basler theater, and her husband, a composer of very modern music. They became my good friends in Basel, and through them I spent a lot of time in the theatre and was enthralled at one time by a fine production of Hamlet in German. My other frequent companion was Murray Spotnitz. He and I had met two young American women, Janet and Madeleine, who worked at the United States consulate and had their own apartment. We started seeing quite a lot of them. Then suddenly over the Christmas vacation, Murray and Madeleine announced they were getting married. Apparently the marriage lasted, as I recently discovered a listing of Murray in a medical practice in Phoenix, Arizona. It was through Murray that I met a girl he had become involved with on the ship to Europe, and who was studying in Zurich. Once Murray had decided to get married, it seemed very natural for his ex-girlfriend and me to get together. Elsbeth and I stayed together for that year and some time thereafter, when I used to visit her in Baltimore. It was clear that my arrival in Europe to be with Anneliese was a rather gossamer intention that soon became

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a problem rather than a dream. I was in touch with Anneliese and promised to come to Munich as soon as possible, but at that time it required permission from the U.S. military government, which took a while. By January, I knew that I would not be able to continue my fantasies about Anneliese and also would probably want to return to the States to study. It all added up to an impossible situation. In April, I finally received permission to go to Germany. I was able to go to Nürenberg and visit the Pongers, who were working at the German war trials (where Curt Ponger had interrogated Simon Wiesenthal), and I sat in on a few trial sessions. I found Germany in dire straits with some revival of nationalism and anti-Semitism. The remnants of the Nazi period would linger on in German public life for another 20 years. On the other hand, the American military government and assistance was dismal—the people involved were less than competent and the aid was sometimes haphazard and often graft ridden (e.g., shipments of figs mixed with dirt and moldy cigarettes). When I did see Anneliese, it was most painful and I was full of guilt and regret. Obviously, she had expected great things from our relationship and I had, until the end, done nothing to disabuse her. We spent a few uneasy days (with uneasy sex) together. To this day, memories of Anneliese fill me with remorse—she was, I believe, the only woman whom I truly treated badly. We corresponded haphazardly for a while, but Anneliese was most unhappy with the state of affairs in Germany and wanted to emigrate. She later married a Hungarian emigre and left for Australia. Elsbeth and I would spend time in Basel or (mostly) Zurich, at a time when one still had to sneak one’s friend into a hotel room for the night—or even for a short visit during the day. We traveled through Switzerland, and she came with me on one of my visits to Vienna—at a time when my uncle and aunt, Jaro and Martha were still alive. Through her, I also had the good fortune to meet the American medical scientist, Henry Siegerist, at his chalet (he had Swiss-American dual citizenship). He was an engaging and instructive man, and I wished I had more time to spend with him.

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Elsbeth and I got along well and are still friends today—now that she is a retired judge of the Maryland Superior Court. 1948 was the year for finding remnants of the family, among them my uncle Kornel in Budapest, cousin Baroti in Switzerland, and, of course, an extensive visit to Vienna where I found the family mostly well. My uncle Jaro still suffered from leg injuries from beatings in Auschwitz, but cousin Suse was getting married, and I became reacquainted with some of the Vienna of my young years. I also made contacts with my father ’s business associates. At that time, all roads toward any reasonable restitution were blocked. Life in Basel was pretty routine, though through the Eichenwalds, I had more access to real life and I enjoyed watching Roswitha on the stage. I think it was in Basel that my book collecting interests started to flourish. I bought some interesting Freud first editions, including one with a dedication from Sigmund to his brother. There wasn’t much drinking by students in Basel, except on Carnival when I joined university friends for a night, a full night, out among the revels. The night ended with breakfast of the traditional Brotsuppe in the morning. My political contacts in Switzerland were essentially nonexistent, but I was able to maintain a personal friendship with Bobby and Maria Jensen—good friends from the Austrian youth groups—who were living in Zurich. And it was through their contacts that I was able to attend the world premiere of Puntila und sein Knecht, and afterwards met Bertolt Brecht—the artistic high point of my stay in Switzerland! Weekends, I frequently took off for Zurich to spend time with Bobby, Maria and little Monica Jensen and their friends. Among them were Wu An, the widow of Bobby’s brother, Fritz Jerusalem, who had served as a physician with the Chinese communists on the long march. Fritz told great stories. Among them the one of the Chinese soldier who had come into his tent and silently taken off his shirt and pointed at his chest. It turned out that all he wanted to point to was his hairy chest, which identified him as having Jewish ancestors. In the winter I went skiing—one trip to Davos with the Jensens and a great run from the Weissfluhjoch and the Strela Pass. In between my active social life, I faithfully at-

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tended lectures, taking with me eventually a reasonable command of German philosophy. I also tried to use my Basel base to advance the rather moribund CEPLA agency. At one point, a representative of the newly started Geneva Transcript flew into town and for a few days, I was appointed its Basel correspondent. But it turned out that they also wanted me to collect subscriptions and ads, so I resigned promptly. In June 1948, just before leaving, I wrote to my sister. During the past few days I have met about 6 people I should have met 10 months ago …. We have one deal cooking on which we stand to make $2000, two manuscripts on my hands which I am supposed to read and try to place, one contract for a 10% representation for a Swiss cartoonist, United States rights to a series on world literature (60 books) which is going to come out in Switzerland, Germany and Austria, and two books from the States which publishers are interested in. Finally found an agent here who is going to take over for us.

I do not recall any of these deals coming to fruition, but I have become amnesic about the whole episode and some results may have been achieved. During the Swiss interlude, I had some illusions about becoming an expert on European psychology and even writing a paper on recent developments in Europe. The only result of that ambition is a notebook filled with remarks and notes about interviews with Swiss psychologists in Bern, Zurich, and Basel, and their opinions and plans for psychology. Most of it was pretty unimportant and, as I must soon have realized, not particularly useful. But the interviews did contribute to some familiarity with people and issues that would persist into later periods. My studies at Basel had given me a reasonable grounding in traditional philosophy—enough at least to convince me that I did not want to do any more philosophy. But my seminars and lectures at Basel gave me a reasonable acquaintance with German phenomenology and existentialism and some of the classics. In return I tried, unsuccessfully, to make the Swiss understand about

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American behaviorism. But, doing philosophy, I always returned to the question how the philosophers could determine how adequate/true/relevant their conclusions were. I was looking for evidence, and as a result, I returned to New York with my mind pretty much made up that I would do more psychology. Some of the time, I felt the effects of living in the shadow of the cold war that was gathering force. With my having been declared persona non grata within the communist front community, but not, in the language of the times, identified as an informant or enemy of the left, I maintained many of my friends and associations on the left. The period also produced peculiar events that I found less than welcome and many of which I never did quite understand. As I said, I stayed friends with the Jensens, who also introduced me to the Friedmans, on the edge of the Communist left associations. They were enthusiastic supporters of Tito and told tales of joy and delight about his Yugoslavia. And it was the Friedmans who took me to the theater and introduced me to Bertold Brecht. On the other hand, unexpectedly there was a letter from an old friend from the Mt. Sinai days who wrote: … I gave a letter of introduction to the man I am working for, Abe Brothman. Since he left we have unearthed things that look very unsavory. I cannot go into detail ... once he has gained your confidence he will touch you for a large amount of money. Do not show any suspicion but … relay back to me as much as possible with the utmost haste.… He may ask you to contact representatives of Eastern European countries ... because he wants to work for them and is afraid to make contact personally. Under no circumstances should you do this because … it might get you into trouble and … because his character has degenerated where he can only bring grief to anybody associating with him.

And so on. Nothing ever happened, nobody showed up, and as far as I can remember, I never heard from the letter writer again. Then, just before I left for Switzerland, Ivan London, a psychologist older than I, approached me once or twice (no more than

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that) and spoke of possible messages I could take to Europe for him. All very mysteriously said, but again nothing came of that. These were peculiar times.

SHIFTING GEARS In the summer of 1948, I returned by ship to New York and, in the fall, re-enrolled at NYU. My last year in New York and at NYU was marked by the realization that I had to make decisions about my life and work. There were opportunities that created some genuine intellectual involvement. Now a real psychology major, I was particularly impressed by a couple of courses, experimental in emphasis, with a graduate student from Columbia University, Bernard Mausner. Bernie was a delight and became my guide into psychology and eventually graduate school. There was also a social psychology course by George Vetter that showed me how one could do a worthwhile leftish social science. I spent more time with the Greenwich Village crowd and also with new friends at NYU, like Stefan Bauer-Mengelberg, who soon started a career in music, and my soon to be wife, Roseanne Zerner. I did more work than I had been used to in order to prepare for graduate school. Amidst all that, there were arguments with and about Sidney Hook, the former inventive Marxist theorist who was in the process of turning red-baiter. Politically, I was not particularly active, having decoupled from politics and being busy studying, with no real political entity with which to identify. By Christmas 1948, it was time to start applying for graduate school and I had little idea where to go—though I was sure I wanted to be a practicing clinical psychologist. I had achieved a BA degree with only two years at NYU, having been given credit for the year at Basel and for “courses” taken at Camp Ritchie. I was really an academic virgin. I was not too optimistic because I had received rather dismal results on my Graduate Record Examination—the test results that were determinate of many graduate admissions. My scores of 590 and 550 in Verbal and Mathematical “ability” were just average and not likely to be enough for a first-rate program, and certainly not enough for such an admission today.

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I was deeply disappointed in my GRE scores, particularly after I had achieved much better results in the Army Classification Test some five years earlier. Many years later, now a sophisticated psychologist, I found some answers. Among the clues was my very low score on the Miller Analogies Test in which three words or concepts, a, b, and c, are posed as follows: a is to b as c is to x, what is x ? (e.g., a simple example: Flour is to Bread, as Eggs are to ?) My son Peter, fairly young, once found an analogy test and discovered that while he and his mother agreed, I tended to be somewhat off target on many problems. When I considered the problem later on, I decided that switching one’s native language requires many years of practical use of the new language before it becomes completely cognitively and intellectually integrated. In other words, just 10 years into my English experience was not enough for a smooth exercise of it—and I have a hunch that there may always be remnants of the bilingual experience. I tested the notion years later (informally) by looking at applications for our graduate program and picking out test scores discrepant from the rest of intellectual performance. When possible, I asked the students concerned about their early language experience, which usually had some bilingual hiccup in it. This insight is also one of the reasons why I later advocated very careful uses of the test scores of bilingual Latino and Latina students. I eventually applied to some half-dozen places and was admitted to the program at the University of Pennsylvania. It is interesting that had I gone to Pennsylvania, I would have become part of the new wave that enveloped the psychology department there. I would have ended up with Gene Galanter, Bob Bush, and eventually Duncan Luce and the first rate department that they created and has been ever since. In June 1949, assuming to be “in love” with Roseanne and ready for graduate school, I apparently started to write poetry again (after a lag of nine years). I found three of them. They are tender love poems—with a sting of rejection and departure. What was I telling myself? It was also during that period that my political attitudes and opinions jelled. Somehow, the attractions of doing experimental

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work (implicit theory testing) and a commitment to democratic practices seemed to go hand in hand. I was fascinated by the notion that hypotheses, tentatively held, could be tested in experiments and, if necessary, rejected. And as the communist attractions and unalterable truths faded into the background, I saw democracy as just another example of such correctable attempts at problem solution. In an experiment, you tried out ideas and that was what democracy made possible—to advance some ideas and try them out and then try others if the initial ones didn’t work out. Democracy was just doing science in real life. As my political thoughts matured in later life, these ideas were both fleshed out and adapted, but the basic notion seems to have stayed with me. I still was concerned with class differences and a rejection of raw capitalism, but the notion that people had the right to try out ideas and to change their minds about them seemed to stick. On the other hand, I never did understand why capitalism and democracy were so often considered to be unalterably wedded. I had become a democratic socialist. In retrospect, those postwar years were, in part, years of closing agendas and years of marking time. I finished with the communist politics, and (badly) my relationship with Anneliese. I tried European philosophy and other interests, but no big decisions were made—a new step in some important direction was needed. So, I was ready to move to Philadelphia, but it was not to be—things were bubbling in New Haven.

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Graduate School and Some Unfortunate Stumbles 1949–1953

I

n late spring 1949, I had received one graduate school admission, to the University of Pennsylvania—at that time a second-rate program, but quite acceptable to me. Then at the last minute, I received an invitation to come to Yale for interviews, where I met several of my later professors. Soon thereafter, I received my acceptance and I was very glad indeed. In the fall, I moved to New Haven and a new life, new goals, new career. I discovered some years later that Seymour Sarason, very much a junior faculty member, had suggested my name but that it was Frank Beach, Professor of physiology and animal behavior, who had convinced the faculty to accept me. My admission file was strange and different enough for them to take a chance. In his warm and much appreciated reminiscence in my Festschrift 3 (see chap. 10), Seymour referred to the admission 3

A Festschrift, obviously of German origin, is an academic celebratory volume, presented latish in one’s career by colleagues and friends who contribute chapters, each somehow related to some aspect of the celebrant’s work.

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meeting as, “luck was a lady that day.” He wonders, as I do frequently, what would have happened if I had not gone to Yale, whether any prediction about personal development is possible. I started to work with Seymour, then a young clinical psychologist, and he became my teacher and friend. The first task of my assistantship with Seymour was to collate references in the literature to what was then called mental deficiency—a boring job on a topic in which I had no interest. Seymour soon realized that and set me to work on his notion of test anxiety—a decision that was a big step in making my name known and starting a visible career. His insightful approaches to both his work and his students combined with his gentle kindness were an important impetus in my academic development, though he was not able to keep me within the confines of clinical psychology. Intellectually, the most important influence at Yale that pushed me toward experimental and theoretical psychology was Carl Hovland. Carl was the ultimate Socratic teacher, his seminars were full of questions and very little lecturing, and he taught us more than many others. He died very young, but many years later, my classmate Roger Shephard wrote a handsome appreciation for the National Academy of Science necrology. Graduate study at Yale was not as dominated by the Hullian tradition as one might have thought. Clark Hull was one of the three major figures in American behaviorism—together with B. F. Skinner and E. C. Tolman. He was committed to a logical positivistic system in which (in contrast to Skinner ’s eventually more appropriate approach) external stimuli were defined in terms of their physical characteristics and the organism’s responses in terms of muscle and skeletal movements. However, the major learning course was taught by the more liberal (and smarter than Hull) Neal Miller, and Carl Hovland was already moving away from behaviorism anyway. In addition, we had the good luck of having Frank Beach teach physiology and Leonard Doob doing social psychology. Both had complete mastery of their field and were able to look at the field as a whole rather than as a subsection of behaviorism. And there was Fred Sheffield—eventually my major thesis advisor—bright and mercurial and always helpful.

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In my first year in graduate school, I married Roseanne in March 1950 and we moved into the proverbial attic. That summer, we went on our soi disant honeymoon. The trip ended in a curious incident. We had booked a charter flight from Luxemburg and when we arrived there, we found out that the charter airplanes had been requisitioned by the U.S. Government for use in the Korean war. A fair number of Americans were stranded in Luxemburg, and we all received an invitation to a garden party at the United States embassy, hosted by Pearl Mesta, the ambassador and a society woman who had been known in Washington as the “hostess with the mostest.” Not the usual garden party that old Pearl was used to, but a nice gesture. Trying to get out of Luxemburg, we had to buy regular commercial tickets. I walked into a bank to find out how to wire money from the States. I was asked whether I had any checks with me and, then and there, without any inquiries to the United States or any other problems, it was cashed for me. Times do change! I did have occasion during the trip to see my London and Vienna families again and established a connection with Hermann Rohracher, the head of the University of Vienna psychology department. A good man, certainly no Nazi, whose attitudes toward the Nazi regime might have given him trouble had he not been protected by his brother, the Archbishop of Salzburg. We initiated a correspondence about European and American psychology. I collected and sent books and journals for his department, and got to know two of his assistants, Erich Mittenecker and Walter Toman, two fine psychologists and eventual friends. We continued a correspondence for some years. During this visit to Vienna, I thought that little had changed since the war and that the general atmosphere was intellectually and culturally unmoving and unexciting. I met a friend from Basel, Florian Kalbeck—an acquaintance of the Eichenwalds, for an afternoon. Florian had been working in the theatre and had now become, or was about to be, Austrian Broadcasting’s man in charge of cultural programming. I asked what was going on in Vienna, and Florian replied that Vienna had finally become the provincial town that it was destined to be in 1918. Nearly 50 years later, talking with knowledgeable Viennese, it seemed that Vienna was

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still trying to become a city comparable to the other great cities of Europe. Most of my first year in New Haven, I lived in a rented room—until my marriage. I spent much time at the Graduate Resident Hall where I met Larry Herson, a political scientist, and Russ Langworthy, a sociologist, boon companions during that year. I also met Ian Waterhouse, an Australian psychology student who first taught me that to be “knocked up” did not have serious parental consequences but rather was the occasion of knocking on the door of a friend. Nearly 50 years, later Jean and I were on a cruise and I opened the passenger list and found that Lawrence Herson was the distinguished lecturer for the cruise. It was great fun getting together again and reviewing intervening decades. Larry had retired from an auspicious career at Ohio State University. Graduate study at Yale was, in retrospect, a period of four years of productivity and generally happy times. Productive because of a generally outstanding faculty and happy because of great student companions who, collectively, had surprisingly successful careers and also produced a fellowship that has persisted over the years. Meeting one of these old colleagues over the years has always produced genuinely warm nostalgic memories. I especially remember Edna Shapiro and Herb Kelman, who had been in school with my sister in Vienna, the Shepards and all the others who lived in a semi-cooperative coyly called “Poo-Haven;” Ed Gordon, who disappeared; Jerry Kagan, masturbating beagles for Frank Beach’s sex research; Enid and her then husband Newton Garver; Ben Murdock, Alan Ross (nee Rosenberg and another German refugee); Mort Mishkin from a neighboring program; and many more. The closeness of that fellowship was most apparent in the spring when Ph.D. theses were due. Many of us joined in a cooperative effort, writing the last few pages, typing and editing one another ’s theses. We also had good relations with the young assistant professors—in those days closer in age to the postwar graduate students. I particularly remember “Corny” Robinson and his escapades, such as being arrested for driving on the wrong side of his car. During the presidential primary season, he and I had buttons with “SPIKE IKE” made up in order to promote Taft’s candidacy, who we thought would be easier to beat in November.

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We failed. But most important was my meeting William Kessen—Bill to most, but Willi to his family. At the end of my first year at Yale, we were told that the department had recruited Greg Kimble, a young professor from Brown University. He was in the Hullian tradition that was the mark of the department, and he was bringing his best graduate student with him. Among the graduate students, there was general unhappiness about the announcement; we did not like the idea that somebody could sneak into our illustrious company without going through the rigorous selection process. But when Willi arrived, it was clear that he was more than bright enough and nice enough and lovable enough. How and why he and I seemed to hit it off pretty much from the beginning is unclear. Here was a Viennese Jewish emigre and a Floridian, son of a seafaring man, who grew up in Key West and Ft. Lauderdale—go figure! Anyway, we started a friendship that only after nearly 50 years seemed to fade as our contact via e-mail became more spotty and haphazard. In February 1999, a brain hemorrhage sadly ended it. From the beginning, we discovered common interests in philosophy of science and, by the time I left Yale in 1953, we were set to do a book together—partly germinated under the influence of C.G. (Peter) Hempel. It was published in 1959 when we spent another year together at the Center for Advanced Study in Stanford. Willi and I had our only major conflict in 1951, the start of his second year at Yale. The chairmanship of the Yale Department Colloquium—where eminent speakers from the outside displayed their wares—was decided by ballot among the graduate students. For the 1951 year, there were two candidates, Willi and I, and I won primarily because he was, in part, still considered an interloper. My chairmanship of the Colloquium led to my initial meeting with George Miller—later one of the major influences in the new cognitive psychology. I met George Miller on October 3, 1951. As the baseball conscious should realize, it was the day of the final game in the pennant race between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants. We had invited the young assistant professor George Miller from Harvard to show us his mathematical learning theory. But at the time we assembled in the legendary Blue Room (of the Institute of Human Relations—now demol-

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ished), the game was in progress and all agreed that we should wait until the end. And the dismal end, for Dodger fans like me, came when Bobby Thomson hit the home run for the Giants that finished the game. Then, I was able to introduce George. Willi and I were best described as friends of our psyches. We were never intimate in the sense of sharing our deepest fears and problems or loves and desires. But we knew how we thought and we shared those thoughts freely and often in extended correspondence. Willi never quite approved of my flirting with attractive women; I had problems with his Pollyanna-like view of his family who, at least in the early days, could never do wrong in his descriptions to me. But we dubbed each other “brother,” and we shared our deprecations of the academic fools to whom both of us were exposed. My other most satisfying personal connection was Peter Hempel. Carl Gustav Hempel, called Peter by all his friends, had come to Yale some time previously from Queens College. Hempel came from a Prussian pastor ’s family and studied in Berlin with Reichenbach, where he became associated with the Berlin branch of the Vienna Circle. He had to leave Germany after the Nazi ascension to power because of his Jewish wife, who died soon after. He eventually was the last surviving member of the famed Vienna Circle, the neopositivistic group around Moritz Schlick and Rudolph Carnap that had captured the imagination of much of Western philosophy during the first half of the twentieth century. Peter was, of course, initially only peripheral to them because of his youth, but eventually became one of their most important spokesmen and a bridge to later philosophical developments. By the time he died in his early 90s in 1997, the movement had played out its influence and Peter was able to speak of its successes and failures with wisdom and humor. He told great stories and anecdotes of Carnap, Hilbert, and others. Peter was a giant intellectually and an unbelievably good and understanding human being. His friends referred to him as a saint—always available, always understanding, always gentle—even with his most vociferous opponents. I met him in courses and seminars that Willi and I took with him at Yale. Some years later, when I

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was at Harvard with a new wife, he was a visiting professor there, and I remember great weekends visiting Peter and Diane Hempel and their children at Rockport. Peter had a son called Peter, known as little Peter, and when Jean’s and my first son was born in 1958, we named him Peter after Hempel, and he became known as littlest Peter. Willi and I took all the seminars and courses with Hempel that were available to non-philosophers. I do not think we were particularly attracted by logical positivism as much as by the common sense and liberal approach that Hempel adopted. In the course of this, we learned how to approach a philosophy of science and how to use logic sensibly. I not only learned logic and philosophy of science, but also met some philosophers who became good friends, associations that continued later at Harvard. Among them was Newton Garver, then husband of Enid, a psychology colleague of mine. We continued a friendship that lasts until the present. Newton is a true believer, both Quaker and Wittgensteinian. He spent a year in jail rather than be drafted into the Army. He eventually ended up in Buffalo, seat of his family’s home and of the state university, where he was a philosophy professor. Newton had gone to Swarthmore and Jean knew him from then—he was one of several people, prominent among them Henry Gleitman, who were our friends and whom we had known independently prior to our meeting and marrying. Henry and Lila Gleitman became good friends later on. There was also Jean’s initial roommate at Harvard, Lotte Lazarsfeld, through whom I met her mother, Maria (Mitzi) Jahoda, one of the heroines of Austrian socialism. She was imprisoned in one of the Dollfuss/ Schuschnigg concentration camps before the advent of the Nazis. Lotte and her husband, Bernard Bailyn, were good companions during the Harvard days. I was nominally in the clinical psychology program at Yale, but, in those days, crossing the lines between clinical and experimental psychology was easy. I eventually did an experimental thesis under the supervision of Fred Sheffield and Carl Hovland. Fred, already then partial to Bacchus who dictated his too early demise, was a brilliant, underproductive iconoclast who kept me

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hopping intellectually and also taught me how to write. The latter happened when I had a draft of a few chapters of my thesis ready, and Fred asked me to come to his house late one evening with the draft and no less than two six-packs of beer. From 10 o’clock until about 4 or 5 in the morning, continuing for two to three nights, Fred kept at me: ”What is it you want to say here?” “Alright, then why don’t you say it?” Whatever skills at exposition I have displayed afterward, I learned in those alcoholdrenched nights. The method (sans alcohol) is one I have used on students of mine on subsequent occasions. Working on my thesis, I enjoyed building my own apparatus for automatically presenting letter stimuli to my subjects, using discarded Bell Telephone switching equipment—the most creative technical thing I ever did. As a clinical student, I also had to do an internship, which I completed at the Clifford Beers Clinic where I was restricted to psychological testing of their young clients—a boring engagement. I also took training in psychotherapy and eventually had one patient who was successfully relieved of minor blackouts. All later therapeutic forays of mine were more minor and with friends only. Roseanne and I had moved into an attic apartment and became part of the graduate student scene. It was an unhappy marriage without being disastrous—no shouting matches but also no passion. In the end, I found my solace elsewhere—for much of the time with a bright, down-to-earth history graduate student who had her own apartment and where I spent the proverbial “many happy hours.” She was bisexual and, at times, enjoyed inviting her lesbian friends to the house and seeing us gently competing for her. It was from her I learned the expression “gay,” which was then used almost exclusively for the lesbian culture. She eventually moved to France where she married unhappily and disappeared. Toward the end of my graduate studies—in early 1953—my life was greatly shaken up by an announcement from the federal government that a Soviet spy group had been arrested in Vienna.

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THE “SPY” One of the two arrested people was Curt Ponger, husband of my “business partner ” Vera in CEPLA. Both suspects had been well known as communists from their activities in New York and earlier, and of course I knew them well. More important for me was my connection with Vera and CEPLA, which was mentioned in the press as connected to the spy case. I have only vague recollections about the immediately preceding activities of CEPLA in New York—I had been busily working at NYU and then at Yale. There were reasonably extensive correspondences and communications; one extended one with the publisher Duell, Sloan & Pearce, the other with a near-miss set of negotiations to publish a German translation of Joe Louis’ autobiography. In any case, no contracts were concluded in New York no money made—and as far as I ever knew, no spies were harbored. When in 1949 I moved to New Haven and graduate school, my activities with CEPLA had become desultory. But I had roped in a number of other people with the hope of editorial adventures and experiences—all of whom became to some extent tainted by the espionage affair. I always felt very bad about having involved these fine people. Then in January 1953, the arrests spoiled any illusions about the agency. It was probably used as a front for some espionage activities, although I never had any evidence that this was the case—either from my own knowledge or anything that was available in the press. I have a vague memory that the case involved approaches to United States civilian and Army employees in Vienna for information and cooperation. I found out about the arrests listening to the radio on a January morning and my life seemed to collapse. The next day, the papers carried the story and here was my name in The New York Times. I was about to finish my Ph.D. and, in fact, was in the midst of negotiations with the U.S. Army Walter Reed hospital in Washington for a position. I informed the local bureau of the FBI that I was available to them at their convenience for interviews, and I spoke with a friend in the law school (her name unfortunately escapes me), who contacted Eugene Rostow of the Yale Law School who

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agreed to be helpful and see me. That night, I had a dream of a garbage can full of maggots having spilled in front of our house and that I had to clean up the mess. Within 24 hours, Rostow had changed his mind. I was fortunate that my friend was able to find out that Law Professor George Dession would talk to me. Dession was a gentleman, a fine mind, and an understanding counsel. He advised on what I could expect to happen, how to handle various contingencies, and made himself available if needed. In the end, not much more was needed in the way of legal advice. After some days wait, suggesting little pressing need for my knowledge, I was called to the New Haven office of the FBI. There was nothing I could do in anticipation other than suffer in great anxiety. What did they expect me to do and say, what could I possibly say that would end me up in great trouble, and, appropriate for the times, what names was I supposed to name? I was ready to tell all I knew about the literary agency, and also about the workings of the youth group and its communist innards, but I wasn’t going to give them a list of names of people involved in the latter without any indication of their criminal culpability. Criminal information, yes; political information, no. I was very proud of that resolve, but not at all sure that I could carry it out. It was in keeping with the then current opposition on the left to inquisitory questions, but also relatively easy because I didn’t have any “criminal” information. In any event, it was all very easy. I had two extensive interviews with two agents (agent Salvatore Ducibella in charge) and, without naming names that had not been previously brought up, discussed the agency and what I knew about the Austrian communists in New York. No pressures, no threats. Obviously, I was not an important source of information. I may even have felt some disappointment at my insignificance, but my anxiety level fell, though it was to continue to some degree for several years. In March, I handed over what files of CEPLA I had in my possession and in April, they were—properly microfilmed—returned to me. I then wrote to the Department of Justice that I was washing my hands of the whole affair and sending the files on to Vienna. A letter from then Assistant Attorney General Warren Olney offered no objection and thanked me for my cooperation. Next, there was a letter from the court-appointed attorney for the two accused asking for any help

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I could offer in their defense. I replied that I did not think I could be helpful and then, there was silence. No public trial, just a sentence of a few years. Obviously, some deal had been reached. Generally, I probably had the correct impression that the FBI knew much more about the two suspects and their associations than I did. It was probably the case that the accused had been under surveillance for some time. Sometime in 1952, Vera had come for visit and I gave her a lift by car a few times. I noted cut cables under my dashboard soon after, and the next year, became convinced, rightly or wrongly, that our conversations in the car had been intercepted. After the two accused men had been brought to the U.S. and spent a few years in federal penitentiaries, they then returned to Vienna. Vera died within a few years, Curt Ponger died on vacation in Turkey a few years after that. During my visits to Vienna, I avoided all contacts with the people involved in the spy case, though others would tell me about the doings of the ex-New York people, some of whom remained in, others who left, the Austrian communist party. And that was the end. I wound up CEPLA legally, the files were sent to Vera in Vienna, and I withdrew from any political expression or activity like the badly burned child I was. In retrospect, I have frequently wondered what these people could have been or thought they were doing. Well-known to the U.S. agencies as communists, whatever they did must have been visible in spy-ridden Vienna—in some sense, they must have been playing Cowboys and Indians. But if my involvement with the Austro-American youth group was innocent and politically really harmless, here was an activity that I had become involved in that was at least potentially not at all harmless but in the service of Soviet hegemony. A couple of years later, the McCarthy circus came to Harvard and I was in a total funk—I was sure to be called, what to do? I decided that I should tell Harvard about my background and made an appointment to see McGeorge Bundy—then the dean of the college. At the last minute, I chickened out—a lucky decision. Years later, I learned that it was alleged and generally accepted that Bundy cooperated with the inquisitors, and had given information about Harvard “communists” to both the FBI and congressional investigators. In any case, I wasn’t called then or later and am

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still puzzled why not. On the face of it, my ties with Soviet spies would have made just the sort of case with which to enhance the McCarthyite theater and to proclaim the extent of the communist threat. Parenthetically, I note that around the same time, my then brother-in-law wanted to wash his hands of any association with my “espionage” history and offered to testify before the Jenner committee—the United States Senate equivalent of the McCarthy committee. His offer was declined. It took many years for me to be able to publicly express left-wing views, support left wing organizations, and even hint at my history to anyone at all, other than my wife and later, my sons. For years afterward, I would expect some inquiry, some book, some article to uncover the Ponger story and to bring me into “view” and perhaps start more investigations. When in the 1960s I was asked to join a Review Panel of the National Institute of Health, I was sure that I would not pass the cursory security-loyalty investigation. It did in fact take much longer than usual, but I was “cleared” in the end. Some years after the “spy” episode came a shock when Mark Zborowski, the writer of an insightful book on the cultural variations in the perception of pain, was arrested and convicted as a Soviet agent. In my state of apprehension at the time, the arrest of somebody close to my field and interests was an unwelcome reminder. On the other hand, I was always intrigued that practically nobody in New Haven, New York, or elsewhere ever mentioned my connection to the spy case, though it was covered extensively in the New Haven paper as well as in The New York Times. Eventually, the fears receded, though the embarrassment at having been used still remains. The spy affair had little effect about my feelings about Soviet communism because I had long ago broken whatever tenuous links ever existed. Eventually, I even had to give up my hopes for some reasonable socialist solutions outside Russia itself when, in 1956 and 1968, the Soviet Union brutally initiated the international obscenities that crushed reformist movements by Nagy and Dub‰ek in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

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By 1998, I finally had overcome all my reluctances and anxieties and had given in to the repeated urgings of my son Peter. I went to the Internet and obtained excellent information (supplied by the ACLU and others) on how to use the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). In March 1998, I wrote to the FBI for my files under the FOIA. I had a quick reply, giving me a file number and saying that the FBI was swamped by these requests and that it may take a year or more to respond to my inquiry. Six weeks later, I received a form letter saying that they located “no records responsive” to my request. I could however file an administrative appeal within 30 days. That seemed peculiar by itself—an appeal against a purported statement of fact? I did so late in April, including a list of my contacts with the FBI in 1953, such as two formal interviews and the receipt for the files of CEPLA. A month later, I received a letter from the co-director of the Office of Information and Privacy saying that his staff had determined that the initial response “was correct.” Because “appeals can be taken only from denials of access to records which exist,” he was “closing [my] appeal file.” If I considered his response a “denial of my appeal,” I could “seek judicial review in the United States District Court.” I immediately wrote back, asking for the co-director ’s forbearance and expressed my puzzlement because there should be some record of the events I had listed in my previous letter. How come those records have disappeared? Were they lost, destroyed? A month later, a reply reaffirmed the previous conclusion and suggested that the New Haven and New York Field Offices might have the records I was seeking. So, I had worried and fretted all these years about my dangerous associations and now it turned out the FBI didn’t know about it? But there is a curious footnote to this story. Recently, I had occasion to tell a friend this story and he immediately related the experience of a relative of his—a supporter of the Chinese Maoist government during the 1970s. This person had decided to write his autobiography and asked for his FBI files under the FOI act. He too was told that there were none. He contacted his congressional representative who intervened with the FBI and, lo and behold, 200 pages of file material appeared. By this time, the target of the FBI surveillance realized that he had been rather closely observed and went back to

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his representative for more help. There followed a letter from the FBI saying that, at 10 cents a copy, he could have photocopies of 20,000 documents. He sent in his $2,000 and received mostly blacked-out material. Even allowing for some story inflation, that tale and my story raise curious questions about “freedom of information.” The final faint echo of the whole affair came with one of the post-Soviet KGB revelations. Apparently, Moscow believed that Ponger was a double agent and that his arrest was arranged to embarrass the Soviet Union. Would that explain some of the silences I encountered?

MOVING ON The spy case occurred at a most inconvenient time—I was in the midst of job hunting and negotiations. Shortly after the case broke in January-February, I went to Washington for an interview with Joseph (Joe) Brady, head of psychological research at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. To my surprise (didn’t the FBI know about me), I was eventually offered the position. I also was asked to come to Cambridge for an interview at Harvard’s Department of Social Relations. I sailed through that with ease; the major interrogator was Gordon Allport, who showed off his German. I had come with excellent recommendations from Yale, obviously sincere because shortly after Harvard offered me the position, Yale also offered me an assistant professorship. The latter was hard to turn down, because it would have meant staying with Willi, who had been offered and accepted an appointment at Yale. But, I thought it best to move to new intellectual environments. I had absorbed most of what Yale had to offer and the most exciting contacts there were my graduate student colleagues, who of course were all leaving New Haven. The Washington job, apart from my fears, was not academic enough for my tastes. Job hunting in those days was clearly dominated by the old boy network. In this case, I believe it was primarily Carl Hovland who

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pushed my candidacies. There were no advertisements to be answered—choices were made by your sponsors and mentors. The result was, of course, Ivy League and network inbreeding. It was not until the 1970s and 80s that the academic job situation was rationalized and the playing field began to level.

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The Trip Through Harvard 1953–1960

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he Department of Social Relations was a typical example of the artificial academic flora and fauna that professors dream up when they believe that they have caught the stream of some interdisciplinary Zeitgeist.4 It was created by the mistaken belief held by three Harvard professors that the fact that they had occasional common interests and could discuss them represented a new science. The men involved centrally were the anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn, the sociologist Talcott Parsons, and the psychologist Henry Murray. Shortly after the end of the war, the departments of sociology and anthropology and the clinical and social wings of psychology were united in the Department of Social Relations. Its psychological wing when I joined it included the mercurial Jerome Bruner, the pedestrian Gordon Allport, the dedicated Richard Solomon, and a number of bright young nontenured faculty. The central idea of “Social Relations” was reasonable; namely that certain aspects of human action and thought are contingent on 4

Contemporary examples are the different flavors, without a core, of Cognitive Science and of Cognitive Psychology, Anthropology, Neuroscience, and so forth.

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and conditioned by their social context, that aspects of psychology such as social and clinical, most of sociology, and those parts of anthropology that are directly concerned with human behavior fall under that rubric. The department was supposed to encourage collaborative research among these disciplines and to train students in all of them to be competent to address the full range of social behavior and relations. In the end, there was little collaborative research, and presumably contrary to the central goal of the department, psychologists like Bruner and Solomon continued their research with dogs and rats—quite removed from human social behavior. Some of the graduates of the department’s doctoral program did in fact go forth, armed and targeted, and became interdisciplinary apostles; however, most clinical psychologists became clinicians, and anthropologists went off into the field. There just were few jobs out there that required their newly won skills.

PEOPLE Harvard was fun and fascinating—not because it was the Harvard of local legend, which it rarely is or was, but because of the people it attracted. They were a bright, sometimes exciting, usually excited crowd. The early couple of years at UC San Diego, which also rarely was what it was thought to be, were like that too. At Harvard, I became acquainted with anthropologists who became life-long friends, sociologists who are usually ignored by psychologists, and many philosophers. There was Henry Aiken, a wonderful iconoclast whose parties were full of bright and loud people and who started cooking sometime after 8 o’clock and invited us all to watch. There were also occasional interactions with Van Quine—wise and relaxed. There were the pleasures of having Peter Hempel visiting, sitting in on his seminar and admiring the bright and beautiful Marcia Schmidt from afar, who later married another philosophy graduate student, the brilliant Stanley Covell (later to divorce him and to marry again). There was Robert Bush and his entourage that included the Shapiros and the fey, beautiful Shirley, who attracted all and favored very few. There were the first Mrs. (Walter) Mischel and Mrs. (Duncan) Luce, both attractive women who have since disappeared into the mists of divorce land. There were also intellectual adventures like getting to know

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Fred Skinner. And then there was my friend, the gay-and-straight graduate student who made it possible for me to endure my failed marriage, and, of course, the pleasure of the junta. The junta consisted of Social Relations’ nontenured faculty who met regularly for lunch and for social occasions to do all sort of things, such as to second guess the somewhat distant tenured faculty, to provide an intellectual environment that the department failed in, and to give each other support as second-class citizens. All the members eventually left Harvard and most were successful elsewhere. The junta included Sandy Dornbusch, Dick Alpert (aka Baba Ram Dass), Walter Mischel, Duncan Luce, Stan Wheeler, Trevor Pierce, and others I remember less clearly. In fact, there was a plan for a book on research methods in Social Relations with Dornbusch, Luce, and Mandler, as well as Bernie Cohen, Ray Hyman, Tom Shipley, and Dell Hymes as prospective authors, all consistent or inconsistent members of the junta with membership shifting as people came and left. Dick Alpert ran an investment club for us with mixed success. Eventually, we all scattered, the junta died and so did the book on methodology in the social sciences. Knowing B. F. (Fred) Skinner was an adventure. I had been entranced by aspects of his radical behaviorism—enough to have it influence large portions of Kessen and my Language of Psychology. However, that attraction had given way to ambivalence by the time of its publication in 1959. In the late 50s I had realized that human memory and learning (not yet called cognition by the field) could not be understood without interesting theoretical fictions. So, in the middle 50s when I had personal contacts with Fred, my interest had been in the man rather than the theory. I was fascinated by a man who was so obviously wise and also, in many ways, so obviously wrong. I did not know then about his rather peculiar predilections, and I resonated to his lefty politics (and even more so to those of his wife, Eve). A fascinating man whose complicated make-up was illustrated by his, most unexpected, devotion to Bruckner ’s romantic music, while he built his own very classical harpsichord. In Skinner ’s public scientific debate with Noam Chomsky, I tended toward the latter though I thought Chomsky approached Skinner rather superficially and

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unaware of Fred’s fundamental difference from the “stimulus–response” behaviorists. I was amused by a Chomsky story that Fred told. He had come to some Harvard affair with his wife and two daughters. At the end of the formalities, a man came over to their table and he and Fred engaged in friendly, animated conversation. After the man left, one of the daughters asked who he was. When Fred acknowledged that it had been Noam Chomsky, the young woman said, “And you still talk to him?” Of course, their politics were much closer than their theories ever were. Jean and I were invited to a party for Fred; it could have been his 55th birthday party in 1959. Anyway, it was soon after 1957 when his book on Verbal Behavior had been published, by then an approach I found interesting but at best incomplete. A young admirer came up to Skinner and asked what he planned to do next, and I interjected cheekily, “Collect the data on which his book is based.” This led Fred to start talking about reasons why people started on particular endeavors. Telling us that he would disavow the tale if we ever repeated it, he explored his reason for starting on socially relevant thought and work. (I insert that Jean and I diverge as to whether he had made reference here to writing Walden Two or to computer-assisted instruction [CAI]). He had always had a fantasy that haunted him for years of building and equipping a rowboat/kayak with which to cross the Atlantic single handedly. The detailed fantasies included how to protect the boat against high waves, how to have enough water on board, and so forth. One day, Skinner related that he realized that this fantasy was basically antisocial. He then decided that he should do something that was specifically socially useful, and Walden Two and the CAI work was born. My home in the department was in the Psychological Clinic, the home of the “clinical” psychologists, except that it was not a place where patients were seen. It was inhabited primarily by psychologists who had interests in personality and individual difference matters, but also more general types like me. The Clinic was located in a rambling, large frame building on Plympton Street. The Clinic at that time was “clinical” as exemplified by the folk around Harry Murray working on psychoanalytic and personality themes. Soon after I arrived, Gardner Lindzey became director of

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the “clinic.” We came to be on fairly good terms, though I had difficulty keeping up with Gardner ’s drinking schedule, including boilermakers at lunch. He was one of those amazing people who could drink and work very efficiently. (Frank Beach at Yale was another one.) Gardner was a man of charm and intelligence whose career was devoted to administrative good works, attachments to the great and good, positions of influence, and attainment of honors. When Harvard would not give him a tenured professorship, he left. I became acting director of the clinic, meaning that I was in charge of the personality wing of the department until David McClelland came to take over that section of Social Relations. I spent most of that time as David’s “advance man,” though it was diagnostic of academic and Harvard pecking-order rituals that, being nontenured, I was never admitted to the discussions that decided budget and some personnel decisions of the Clinic. There was extensive correspondence with McClelland about carrying out his plans for a sub-department in his image, more experimental and less clinical than it had been in the past. David was most concerned to establish his independence of the departmental barons, and especially to distance himself from Bruner and Allport. I too had my misgivings about Jerry Bruner—fascinating to be with, very bright, but also a compulsive name-dropper and Hochstapler (which expresses, in part, an unnecessary pretentiousness). In 1957, the Clinic changed its name temporarily at McClelland’s insistence to the Center for Research in Personality, but David changed his mind when we moved in early 1958 to new quarters at 5 Divinity Avenue and the Center for Explorations in Personality. My first course assignment in 1953 was to teach child psychology—a subject about which I knew nothing—together with the anthropologist John Whiting, who also was ignorant of the topic. But, Johnny Whiting was one of those delightfully wise empathic people who was able to make the task less painful. I kept reading just a day or two ahead of the class and survived. I shall always remember Johnny lying on the table in front of the class with all fours stretched to the heavens and illustrating the essential helplessness of the newborn infant. I always appreciated his wisdom and lore, and it was one of the advantages of Social Relations that it provided contact with people like Whiting.

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That was the long-range benefit to being in Social relations. I met Johnny and other anthropologists like David Schneider and Roy D’Andrade (then a graduate student and later a much appreciated colleague at UCSD) and sociologists of different stripes, not to mention all the vari-colored members of the junta. One summer, I taught summer school and the director, W.Y. “Wild Bill” Elliott, gave a garden reception to ease the burden of teaching through the Cambridge summer. I was introduced inter alia to Elliott’s current protégé, also a refugee from Hitler ’s Germany, which brought him to my attention. But I was most disappointed by the rather pedestrian talks that he gave occasionally on local radio. That was Henry Kissinger then. Apart from the always challenging and companionate members of the junta, the faculty contacts at Harvard were an intellectual pleasure. Through Peter Hempel and others, I became acquainted with many member of the philosophy department, admired the intellect and challenge of Skinner, and met many people who remained lifelong friends and intellectual models. Some few, like the eminent system builder Talcott Parsons, were terminally boring, but the Harvard atmosphere was then what it was supposed to be—exhilarating and stimulating. My early research at Harvard was dull stuff concerned with such things as overlearning (i.e., learning far beyond mere mastery and simple verbal learning, even with nonsense syllables). My first research assistant was Janellen Huttenlocher, later an eminent psychologist at the University of Chicago, and my best graduate student was Clementina Kuhlman, a fine mind, good collaborator, and good friend, who unfortunately died a few years later of cancer. Generally, I was surprised how many of the Ph.D. students at the Clinic were of a level of competence quite below what I was used to at Yale. There were, of course, the very bright stars attracted to Harvard, but the Department tended to accept quite a few mediocrities.

MARRIAGES, BAD AND GOOD After a couple of years in Cambridge, my marriage had become so obviously crippled that it was time to do something about it. Ad-

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mitting that our sexless arrangement was mostly, if not entirely, due to me, I agreed to go into psychoanalysis. My analyst was a classical, quiet, noninteractive man by the name of Silverman. I had the impression that not much was happening until—in 1956—I woke up one morning and found myself ready and able to do what I had avoided for years, that is, to discuss separation and divorce. I am still not quite sure how I arrived at that point, but I have some hunches about the process. There had been long periods of silence during my analysis—usually taken as a sign of resistance. But I do remember that those silences were frequently taken up by an internal monologue (dialogue with an imagined analyst), which handled many of the questions that I was unable/afraid/reluctant/resistant to talk about out loud. One result of the analysis was that my fear of exposure, of being found out, of being defective in my marriage was being faced. In retrospect, apart from contributing to my eventual divorce, the analytic engagement had long-lasting effects on dealing with feelings of inadequacy and exposure. As I have indicated, I still find betrayal the basic fear, but abandoning the fear of inadequacy had general effects and contributed to my late maturing. In part, I was working through an adolescence that the Nazis had postponed, and between the 1940s and 50s, I achieved some degree of adulthood. Finally, I conjecture (with some internal evidence) that the sense of inadequacy was, in part, due to my status as a Jew, a second-class citizen, in Vienna. I now began to accept myself as on equal footing with others. After some initial conflicts, my then wife, who wanted to try to repair things, began to understand my insistence that the break was my doing, not her fault, and as far as I could see irreparable. Eventually, things went relatively smoothly and I moved into temporary quarters. Unfortunately, my ex-wife-to-be obtained the services of a fine and aggressive Boston Brahmin lawyer— Jock Saltonstall—with whom I had previously played poker, which did not keep him from proceeding to pluck me clean. With an income of just over $8,000, I had to pay $2,300 a year in alimony (until her remarriage in 1960), give up joint possessions including our car, and pay for her sojourn in Nevada (the only reasonable way to get a divorce in those days). One immediate consequence of my pecuniary embarrassment was that I had to give up my analysis.

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In the meantime, I had hired a new graduate student research assistant, Jean Matter. One thing led to another and, as the saying goes, we started a relationship. The transition was a great joy for me. Jean and I met when Jerry Bruner asked me to join her thesis committee. Bushy-tailed as I was, I proceeded to give Jean some trouble about the design of her eventually very successful and important study. When she and Jerry left that meeting, Jean asked who this guy Mandler was and why he had given her such a hard time, ”Oh, don’t worry about him, he’s fresh out of Yale and still wet behind the ears,” was the reply. The start of a beautiful friendship! Immediately after my separation in 1956, I took a sabbatical from Harvard and went to Yale to work with Willi on our methodology book. A rather penurious existence followed in a single room with sink and stove, but most conducive to getting work done. And, of course, I had the benefit of occasional visits from Jean as well as Willi’s company. In 1957, Jean and I were married, giving me a mother-in-law who was a member of the DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution) and a slightly anti-Semitic father-in-law, who nevertheless put on a home marriage by a Catholic judge and a fine dinner at the Chicago Union League club where—with May Matter ’s fine sense of civility—the first quasi-kosher meal ever was served to my father. Jean pleased my father by converting to Judaism, convincing me further that not all gentiles are anti-Semitic. Joe Matter had given us a choice between a cash gift or a surprise honeymoon—we chose the latter. In Joe’s typical controlling style, combining control and noblesse oblige, he would not tell us where we were going until the last possible moment, and made all the travel and hotel arrangements. And so, in January 1957, we were off to Haiti, then in the midst of an election campaign. One of Joe’s surprising friends was the emigre writer, Ralph Korngold, who had written extensively on Haiti and who gave us introductions to a couple of contacts. Arriving in Port-au-Prince, we found ourselves involved with one of the minor parties in the election fight. Visiting one of Ralph’s friends, we were feted with tall glasses of rum, sitting in the midst of their parlour as a procession of former and “future” ministers paraded through. As we

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were soon off to the other end of the island, we were given a stack of election material to distribute. It was great fun although probably dangerous because the main opponent, and winner, was the older “Papa Doc” Duvalier. On our trip across the mountainous backbone of the island, we arrived at the peak of the watershed where we encountered a Coca Cola stand manned by a retired French poule—a curious interlude for our trip. The drive was adventurous, together with a flat tire in the primitive wilds of Haiti and also the opportunity to see smaller towns like Gonaive. We loved Haiti and hoped to get back soon, but by the time that was possible, the republic had been engulfed in warfare and terrorism. We could never take a trip by car across the island today, and some of the expatriates we met, like Mac Seligman who ran the Hertz agency in Port-au-Prince, are long gone.

WORKING FOR THE CIA AND CHANGING HISTORY One research project of mine at Harvard resulted in a rather funny retrospection. I had obviously felt the first stirrings of the so-called cognitive revolution that was to shake psychology in its revolt against behaviorism during the next 10 years, and picked a project that challenged a current behaviorist curiosity. The phenomenon that had aroused interest among psychologists involved experimental subjects who were asked simply to say all the words they could produce. If every time, for example, a plural noun appeared in the stream of words, the experimenter interjected a simple “mmhmm.” Subsequently, the class of nouns followed by the “mmhmm reinforcement” would increase in frequency without the subject’s knowledge as to what had happened. I thought that the effect of the “mmhmm” should depend on what the subject thought it might mean—positive or negative. I mentioned that idea to Ithiel de Sola Pool from MIT at a cocktail party, which at Harvard in those days abounded, and within a few days, he called and offered me some small funds to undertake the study. With an undergraduate student, I did and I was right, plural nouns only increased if the subject thought that the “mmhmm” was positive. Now the denouement: Many years later I read that the Center for International Studies at MIT, that had given me the money, had alleged to be a conduit for distributing

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CIA funds. Given the CIA’s mission, inter alia, of subtle manipulation, my study would well have interested them. But given my political attitudes and positions, I found it funny and peculiar that I could claim to have done CIA supported research. In 1956, the Department changed my appointment to Lecturer and, thus, effectively took me off the academic ladder. In terms of actual advancement, this was irrelevant, because Harvard, with very few exceptions, did not advance assistant professors to tenured associate professorships. It was (and still is) part of the carefully nurtured Harvard mystique that appointments are made from the best available people in the field, and the young assistant professors best prove themselves out in the boonies before the Harvard professorships are bestowed. It speaks to the difficulty of making such choices that many Harvard departments rank among the top half dozen of similar departments but are not, as presumably intended, the top departments in all fields. (Yale has similar pretensions—other Ivy League universities are less mystical.) In any case, the change to the lectureship gave me a little more prestige and money and also lifted me, in theory, from the up-or-out limit of six to seven years in operation for ladder-rank faculty. Years later, Harvard (and Yale) threw confusion into the academic brew by advancing their assistant professors to associate professors, without tenure, in mid-appointment, thereby destroying the classical traditions that tenure came with associate professorships and that advancement to the full professorship depended on subsequent research and scholarly performance. In February 1954, I had received an invitation to come to the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) for the first of their then-contemplated five years. Having just started my position at Harvard, I had to decline and Ralph Tyler (its inaugural director) assured me that I just had to tell him whenever I could come. This was a prestigious invitation, particularly for somebody early in their academic career and during the early years of the Center. I have always assumed that it was Carl Hovland (who was on the Center ’s board) who nominated me to the Center, but I do not know who in fact nominated me. In 1958, it looked like Willi Kessen and I would be able to go West together and, by some means I have forgotten, Kessen and I managed for

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both of us to be invited to the center for the 1959–60 year, which came just at the right time. We were in the final stages of our Language of Psychology (which was published in 1959) and were eager to spend time together and possibly start new projects. The appointment would also give me the opportunity to start looking for a new job—I was never quite happy being in a Social Relations Department. I wanted more contact with experimental psychology, and the Center was a fine place from which to be job hunting. Besides, if nothing turned up, I could always return to Harvard. Jean’s work at Harvard was finished, son Peter was born in January 1958, and we were ready for new pastures. With my announced leave for 1959-60 the Harvard Department started looking for a temporary replacement for my position—the money being released by my Center appointment. It is here that I played—granted unconsciously and unknowingly— my only major part in social history. The position was given to a psychologist from the University of Washington, Timothy Leary. Up to that point, Tim Leary had been a work-a-day personality psychologist who had made some impression with an eventually uninfluential, multidimensional personality theory and test. In June 1959, McClelland wrote from Florence about an “unusual personality psychologist” whom he described as “a genuinely original mind, terrifically well educated,” and who was writing a novel, and interested in psychotherapy and interaction in industrial settings—a very appropriate appointment for the Department of Social Relations. With that recommendation, it was inevitable that Tim would end up in the slot vacated by yours truly. Little indication was there that, within a year, the alliance of Tim with Dick Alpert would start the LSD craze and, in part, initiate the drug revolution. Actually, work with LSD had started at the Massachusetts General Hospital in 1951 and frequently used Harvard graduate students as its subjects. It was not until Tim Leary ’s arrival, however, and the “research” with Alpert that it became a widely used recreational drug. What would have happened had I stayed in Cambridge that year and Tim had stayed in Seattle? Of course, by the time the “Tim and Dick show” started, I was in California and never had the opportunity to watch their ascent to the leadership of modern youth. But I do claim that without me (i.e., without my departure from

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Harvard), there might never have been. Well, as usual it is difficult to know what might have been. None of us had any inkling that Dick’s move into the inauguration of the 1960s would completely change his “career.” Richard Alpert is an interesting story of an academic destined for administrative if not intellectual eminence. Dick was the son of a successful East Coast Jewish industrialist—eventually the head of the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad. Dick studied at Wesleyan and then received his Ph.D. from Stanford. He came to Harvard in 1958 and immediately joined (if not confounded) the junta. Dick was a protégé of David McClelland who was primarily concerned with such things as achievement motivation and the importance of market forces both within and without the individual. Dick may not have made an immediate intellectual impact, but he knew that who you knew was important—he was a friendly puppy, made lots of friends, and obviously loved being loved and being a golden boy. I have always thought of Dick as one of those who (more than the rest of us who also share that need) desperately wanted to be loved and accepted. He took all of the junta out to the family estate/farm in New England for a fine weekend and organized an investment club for the junta. Never particularly concerned with the affairs of the world, his life concentrated on collecting and being appreciated and loved by people, including some of the female persuasion. His departure into the world of psylocibin and LSD under the aegis of Tim Leary is consistent with his distance from the “real” world and also embracing and being embraced by a new community looking for the salvation of the 1960s. He and I carried on a close and open friendship and correspondence between 1955 and 1960, when he announced that he had broken with his brother and his parents for good and was going into analysis six days a week. That was the last I heard. By 1963, he left Harvard and continued his search for community in a variety of contexts, eventually ending up in India and, at the feet of his guru, became Ram Dass. He has since been arguably the single most-effective continuation of the 1960s love fest into the 1990s. His major theme is the dispensation of love; the result of which is that Dick is now, more than ever before, loved and adored—now by hundreds of devoted disciples. As I write this in 1997, I learn that he

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has had a severe stroke and I am truly sorry. I really liked Dick Alpert and luckily never met Ram Dass. There was one other encounter worth relating. When at Swarthmore, Jean had been taught by the brilliant (and then young) philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser. Apart from his philosophical eminence, Sidney has become known as the teacher of logic who, when discussing the combination of statements of different truth values, was asked by an inquiring mind why it was that, logically, two negatives result in a positive, but that two positives did not imply a negative. Sidney looked at the student and slowly replied, “Yeh, yeh.” I had met Sidney in some other context and one day in Cambridge, we had all been to a party and, around 2 a.m., were walking home when Sidney realized that it was close to Yom Kippur. At the top of his voice he started singing the “Kol Nidre.” I tried to get him to reduce his volume at that time of night, whereupon Sidney turned on me, “Mandler, you are trying to pass.” In the summer of 1959, we took off for California and the CASBS Center. Our son, Peter, just over a year old, got sick on the way and we were glad to be able to stop in Sedona, Arizona, where Jean’s parents had built a retirement home. Over the year, we had many enjoyable occasions to visit there and Jean, in particular, loved the red rock country. Then, on to Palo Alto. The Center was a gold mine of intellectual challenge, opportunity, people, and collegiality. Willi and family were there, and we started all sorts of plans for joint projects. I met and appreciated the many fine minds at the Center. Nostalgia brings up the eminent historian (of Vienna among other topics) Carl Schorske dangling our little Peter (and later historian) on his knees. I also encountered one of the first copies of the conceptually influential Plans and the Structure of Behavior by George Miller, Eugene Galanter, and Karl Pribram. Knowing all three authors fairly well, I coined an instant description of the volume, “Miller wrote it, Galanter takes credit for it, and Pribram believes it.” I repeat it here since others have claimed this invention as their own and I want, once and for all, to establish copyright and priority rights. Jean also was given some space (shame on us for still treating her

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as an appendage). With Peter starting his third year, we explored San Francisco and Northern California. The Center was run so as to maximize peace and productivity, and it was eminently successful. A great year. I should add that, in 1958, neither Jean nor I (nor most of our peers) had yet been adequately enlightened about the role of women in academia. Both of us thought it normal that we would look for a job for me and “something would be arranged” for Jean. Looking back to that period, we are embarrassed by our “male chauvinism” though we made up for it by later becoming committed feminists. By 1965—our next move—Jean’s position had become important and, by 1971, we made it a touchstone of our continuing in California. There were only two jobs I seriously considered—Toronto and Santa Barbara. There was also something at Kansas and at the New School in New York, and a last minute inquiry by Princeton, but for some reason they never developed into real possibilities. I was interviewed at Santa Barbara, which only then was emerging from its inherited lack of excellence as a Normal School and was busy building toward UC standards. But the implied salary offer was less than I was making at Harvard. When I mentioned this to the chair, Robert Gottsdanker, at his home overlooking the Santa Barbara Lagoon, he put his arm around my shoulder and with a sweep of the other arm said, “But all this is worth at least another $5,000.” My visit to Toronto was different. The department was in the midst of planning its move to a new building, plans there were aplenty for rejuvenating the department. I liked Canada and in particular, Toronto. It was easy to accept. Sometime in the mid-1950s, I find retrospectively that I was at the end point of a rather subtle period of personality change, which I mentioned earlier. I moved from a relatively passive to a relatively active and outspoken persona. I say “relatively” deliberately because I was never a wallflower or a raver. One old friend at that time remarked how much more independent I had become and I date much of my personal antiestablishment views and ac-

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tions to that time. I believe the latter may well explain some of what happened. From 1938 to 1946, I was too busy avoiding dangers and traps and engaged in matters of life and death to worry too much about being passive or assertive—I was busy. Then, toward the end of that period, I let myself be enveloped by a “party line” and as long—though only for a short while—as I took my beliefs and views at least in large part from others, there was little room for individual expression. Early on, I had been shy rather than passive and the shyness gave way to an assertiveness toward the world by the time I left the Army. By the 1950s and graduate school, I was not shy anymore. It was a time when I had time to think, to plan ahead and not be rushed by events. It was also the time when some sort of well-established interest and plan for my future life emerged. That may explain some independence of views, but it leaves clouded the cause of the increased independence and outspokenness. There was, on the one hand, the success of my graduate school career and, on the other hand, the realization of my failures in my first marriage. I have mentioned earlier the influence of my brief analysis on this development as I (I believe) finally matured and had the experience of becoming an administrator at Harvard, responsible for and to people. With all this new personal armamentarium, we were off to Toronto. I went following the stimulation, challenge, and promise of Harvard. The Stanford Center had opened new horizons for me, made it possible to think new thoughts and of professional goals, and to become independent in thought and action. I could do this.

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accepted an Associate Professorship at Canadian $10,500 and in the summer of 1960, we moved to Canada. We had providentially given up our apartment in Cambridge, and short of no jobs being available at all, I had no plans to return to Harvard. So, with pregnant Jean and three-year-old Peter, and the car packed high with our worldly goods, we took off for Canada by the northern route from San Francisco. Our Canadian immigration gateway was at the Detroit-Windsor border where we were posed a fascinating set of questions about profession, background, and nationality. What was our religion? I said Jewish and that was accepted; Jean said she wasn’t sure because she came from an agnostic family, but she had gone to Sunday school wherever the nicest boys were. She gave the immigration officer a set of alternatives and when she came to Scotch Presbyterian, was told that that was the best. As to nationality of origin, we tried to say United States but that was no go—it was Hebrew (sic) for me and on the basis of Jean’s father ’s distant Pennsylvania Dutch origins—German!

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The University of Toronto was not only the best offer going at the time, but it had other attractions as well. Canada was a country gentler and more relaxed than the United States, soon to be a magnet for draft-age Americans avoiding the disaster of Vietnam. Toronto in the early 1960s was a city changing. No longer with the “cow town” reputation of old and not yet the vibrant city it is today, it was nonetheless alive with the new immigration of the 1950s and 60s. Restaurants other than in the old Scotch English tradition of repetitive dullness sprang up, and I particularly enjoyed some of the new Hungarian restaurants fueled by the immigrants of the failed Hungarian revolt against Russian imperialism. Toronto was still provincial with a small-town flavor. We made the acquaintance of the resident Time correspondent and his eccentric wife and soon found ourselves in touch with political folk, including a friendship with the American-born chairman of the Canadian Conservatives. A group of people with whom we would never make contact in the United States—it was fun. Soon after we arrived, we welcomed another newcomer when Michael was born on a bitter cold December morning in 1960. I do not know what marks his first five Canadian years left on him, but I do remember how relieved he was when he turned 18 and determined that he still could call on his Canadian citizenship just in case the draft tried to catch up with him. The Toronto appointment offered the opportunity to be in on the rebuilding of a department in a relatively affluent and prestigious university. Jean and I were still not quite liberated enough to think equally of our two careers, but at least Toronto offered her a research appointment and laboratory space (she was still working on rat studies), and she proceeded to obtain some small grant support for part-time work as she mothered our two small sons. The major driving force behind the rebuilding of the department was the chairman, Roger Myers. A Torontonian of sterling credentials, he had realized that the Toronto department was inbred and aging and not in the major leagues. As it was, there were some five to six senior members who had “been living within shouting distance of the university since childhood, as had their mothers and grandmothers.” They were simply part of the Toronto establishment that “owned” the university. Roger went af-

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ter new blood, which meant in part going to the United States, where he found Abe Amsel and me. Abe and I were within the same age range. He was a devoted behaviorist of the Spence school, working with animals. I was in the throes of the just burgeoning change in American psychology—the shift from a behaviorism that was running out of steam in the 1950s to an older tradition. That old, and new, tradition was a human psychology of a thinking, conscious organism—human information processing as we called it and cognitive psychology as it was soon named under the aegis of a “cognitive revolution.” The “revolution” was a step back to the tenets of a European, to some extent German and French but to a large extent British, tradition that had not abated during the behaviorist doldrums in the United States. Abe never forgave me that, with early behaviorist leanings and a Yale education, I had become part of the opposition. I have frequently thought about the large differences in the way I found my three jobs in 1953, 1960 and 1965 (Harvard, Toronto, UCSD), and the way things are done today. Then, it was the “old boys network” and it certainly was a “boys” network—few woman were seen on the lists. There were no advertisements; one found out about jobs because departments would write about the availability of a position to large number of other departments that were most likely to have good prospects. That created a class system—top departments would write to each other, the not so favored wrote to other like-minded places. The result was a class system of universities, which is still maintained today to some extent. More important, the system inevitably eliminated any significant candidacies of women or the not really represented minorities. As late as the 50s it was possible to write letters that would exclude Jews from candidacies, and as late as the 70s it was possible for a department chair to say that he thought the department might feel uncomfortable with a woman in their midst. The present system—the equal opportunity system—has managed to start a mingling of academic populations, of opening some, though not all doors. The old prejudices do, of course, still linger. Within a couple of years of Abe’s and my arrival, most of the deadwood in the department had retired or had, surprisingly, died. By 1963, we had a fine department. Daniel Berlyne was im-

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ported—an old graduate school friend and one of the brightest people I have met. Dan died relatively young, but I shall always remember his humor, his polyglot abilities (I thought his German was native), his encyclopedic knowledge, and the fact that he collected—subways! When I arrived, Endel Tulving was a self-deprecating young man, whose breaking into print and prominence was in part due to my encouragement. We were ambitious enough to invite Canada’s foremost psychologist, Donald Hebb, for a semester with the idea of recruiting him from Montreal. Don and I became good friends and even though he stayed in Montreal, I appreciated the time he spent in Toronto. Our graduate students were very good and our undergraduates superb. I had the pleasure of lecturing the young Toronto-oriented students about the need to get out of provincial Toronto, and in the end, such fine psychologists as Rochel Gelman and Rose Zacks went forth and prospered. If Toronto was somewhat of a backwater when we arrived, the new wave of European immigration soon transformed it. By the time we left, not only were there decent restaurants but also theatre, and the general ambience had significantly improved. On subsequent visits to Toronto, I was delighted by how the “cow town” had changed into one of the few major truly civilized North American cities. I tend to get homesick for Toronto, after all these years, when I contemplate culturally desolate San Diego. There is another aspect of Toronto that I have since missed—the neighborliness. We bought a house on St. Leonards Avenue in the up-market Lawrence Park area. This was in the years before the housing boom, and we paid about Canadian $30,000 for a house we sold in 1965 for a thousand or so more. Peter, and later Michael, went to the local kindergarten-preschool, played hockey and soccer, and in winter, went sledding in the canyon behind our house—a poor preparation for their later lives in California. Within a year we had good friends in neighboring houses, with whom we visited, talked across fences, and shared meals. None of them was an academic family. In the summer, we sometimes visited in the traditional Toronto “cottages” up north. Nothing like this has happened in California. We have lived in the same house for nearly 35 years, barely know our

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neighbors, and all our friends in La Jolla are academics. We have more friends in the warren that is London. I am reminded of a friend who remarked how alienated he had felt in Palo Alto (at Stanford) and how quickly he felt at home when he moved to New York. Despite its reputed interest in the touchy-feely world, California does not generate neighborly warmth. Among the friends we made in Toronto was Susan Douglas, an actress friend of my sister ’s, whose husband was a fine bass with the Toronto Opera, and Dalton Camp, who introduced me to the complexities of Canadian politics, such as its Conservative Party, which at least then was more grassroots and less conservative than the word conveys to Americans. The looseness of Canadian politics with people switching parties much more easily than elsewhere and the tolerance of left-wing views made Toronto and Canada a joy to experience. It was in Canada that my democratic socialism matured and little changed in my politics after that. I started to support noncommunist left-wing causes and tentatively spoke out for them, though I was still tied to American life and politics. In that connection, Toronto provided me with my reply to the obligatory question, “Where where you when you learned that JFK had been shot.” I was in my office at the University and John Arrowood, my office neighbor, came in and said “turn on your radio.” Sometime later, in a rare display of American nationalism, I wrote a letter to President Johnson to express my sorrow and support. I liked Canada politically. I was removed by a country ’s width from my fear of the consequences of the spy affair; I was in the country that was becoming the haven of Vietnam protesters, and it also had a reasonably established left-wing party. Some of my left-wing friends somehow had troubles with an increasingly “rich” life style (champagne socialism)—particularly after we moved to California. Somehow, there is a belief abroad among capitalist believers who think opulence is their prerogative and among hair-shirt socialists who believe that living well means living evilly. I have never understood that—I thought what equity, justice, and fairness were about was the hope that eventually everybody would share equally in the wealth of the nations and live well indeed.

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Soon after I arrived in Canada, I was pulled into the administrative academic and research scene. I was appointed to the psychology committee of the National Research Council (the major funding source for research in Canada), was somehow on both the Canadian and Ontario Councils for the Study of Education, and, in 1962, was persuaded to undertake a study of research funding of psychology in Canada. I worked on an extensive questionnaire to all the Canadian departments and, in 1963, submitted a report that not only was informative but made a major argument for a steep increase of support for psychological research. I was glad to see that happen in part before I left Canada two years later. Sometime in the 1950s, I had been “elected” to membership in the PRT, the Psychological Round Table, the prestigious organization for Eastern American young psychologists. It was then, and maybe continues to be, one of the more weird organizations around. It was founded in the 1930s as a challenge to the establishment’s “honor society”—SEP, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and originally was called the Society of Experimenting Psychologists, though the name was changed after strong protests from E.G. Boring and others. Its motto was “40 under 40," speaking to an upper membership of 40 (usually all from East coast universities), all of whom had to be under 40 years of age. It is run by the self-perpetuating “secret six,” who usually remain surprisingly anonymous and who make all decisions, including membership. The PRT meets once a year for the purpose of presenting recent research and sometimes raucous fellowship. The research reports are (or at least were) subject to the most severe heckling and criticism and it was a healthy experience for young scientists. PRT was a most useful rite of passage and created contact and collaborations useful to the field as a whole. There was a Midwestern sister organization, the GUV—Gesellschaft für unendliche Versuche (Society for Interminable Experiments), and rumors of a S.O.B. (Society of Behaviorists), but I know little of their procedures and successes. Then there was the annual William Hunt Lecture. It was named after one of the founders of PRT and required a salacious, preferably pornographic disquisition on some vaguely psychology-related topic. I understand that after women were included in the society some years after I left in

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1964, the Hunt lectures given by women improved on the pornographic quality. In 1963, I was asked to give the Hunt lecture and I did so in Great Barrington in December of 1963 (my last PRT meeting since I turned 40 in June 1964) on the topic of Cunnilinguistics. A year or two later, I was elected to the establishment Society of Experimental Psychologists and became a certified “old man.” One of the sidelights of the cold war was the investigation of PRT by the FBI. At least at one of our meetings (in Connecticut) in the late 1950s, we were shadowed by a couple of FBI agents who were responding to reports of a “secret” society meeting in New England with reports of secret activities and a widespread membership. I believe they were allowed to attend part of the meeting and departed satisfied that PRT was no danger to the republic. One of the consequences of our year together in California was that Willi Kessen and I planned a book series on the history of psychology. With the help of Gordon Ierardi, our champion editor at Wiley, the Perspectives in Psychology series was born and eventually produced six well-received volumes. The series was dedicated to take original sources in a particular field and to weave commentary into them. Jean and I published a collaborative volume in 1964 on Thinking: From Association to Gestalt. We worked on a few other collaborative projects over the years but this was the one on which we worked together most closely. The book consisted of the nineteenth century, primarily German, work on thought processes, and, apart from the historical narrative, we included a number of selections we translated. Willi did a brilliant volume for the series on The Child and the other four by George Miller, Bill Dember, Anne Anastasi, and Arthur Blumenthal were also excellent and successful volumes. We should have done more. While in Toronto, I initiated a correspondence with Edwin G. (Garry) Boring, the dean and father of American historians of psychology. In the fall of 1964, I had published (in the American Journal of Psychology) a review of Robert Watson’s The Great Psychologists. The review was rather negative, faulting Watson for being unimaginative, derivative, and unscholarly. In passing, I wondered why nobody was writing histories of psychology from

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a consistent point of view. Then came a long letter from Garry Boring wondering what I might have meant, what would a point of view be for a historian? Either you tell the facts or you give a functional account, how things got to be what they are. Because I had certainly included Boring in my search for a conceptual history, I replied carefully that I meant something that was more adventurous than just functional (i.e., Darwinist, Marxist, Hegelian, Thomist). That such an approach would be on the edges of the history field but would be most useful. He agreed that dissent would be useful and invited me to continue our exchange of ideas. The basic argument we had was his insistence that, within bounds, the role of the science historian was to determine what had happened and when, whereas I was increasingly insisting on the cultural situating of our science as well as on the need for a conceptual framework. Eventually, he wrote that, “This little correspondence of ours is fun …” and notes that two histories (by Kantor and Esper) were more in line with what I had in mind, which we agreed on. I especially liked Esper ’s book—by a man essentially obscure until then. Boring kept writing about his own work and comments on others, but sits up when I call him a member of the establishment: “It’s a neat idea that American psychology might have an Establishment and that I might be of it.” Was he being naive or dissembling? Then, in January 1967, a long letter about the history of History of Psychology in Autobiography and who should be and was or was not in it. Then, a note that he was ill, and shortly thereafter, a letter discussing his plans for an APA symposium and how it might fit in with a book that Kessen and I were discussing about psychology in the twentieth century. Boring also commented most usefully on a draft of the chapter on the diaspora of German psychologists, which Jean and I wrote in the 1960s. That was the end, unfortunately; Garry died in 1968. In 1963, George Miller and Jerry Bruner wrote to invite me to spend 1965-66 at the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard. Between my admiration for George and my ambivalence about Jerry (dating back to Harvard), I decided to accept because their Center was without doubt one of the places where future directions were conceived (if not necessarily born) and I started to make tentative plans. But then everything changed. In early 1964, I received a call from La Jolla in California.

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UCSD KNOCKS ON THE DOOR I had previously visited our old friends Bob and Sonia Hamburger in La Jolla. I knew the Hamburgers from New Haven through Irv and Marj Janis and Elaine Graham, a graduate school colleague (then married to Daniel Bell). In New Haven, Bob had been a practicing pediatrician, but now was doing research in the new UCSD biology department. I visited them in the spring of 1963 when I went to the biennial Arrowhead meeting on verbal learning and memory, and wrote to the Hamburgers that I would like to stop off in La Jolla and visit. I did and Bob made an occasion of it by inviting some of the senior UCSD people (actually there were only senior people at UCSD at that time), including Jon Singer and David Bonner, to an evening of discussion of what I thought they ought to do in psychology. At the time, UCSD had an offer out to Charles Osgood (from Illinois) to start the department. I gave them some reactions to their tentative plans and names of people with whom I thought they should be in touch, such as George Miller, Neal Miller, and Carl Pfaffman. I offered to help whenever I could. I left promising to bring Jean to beautiful La Jolla on the occasion of the next Arrowhead conference two years hence. A year later, I received this call. The caller was Leonard Newmark, who started the Linguistics Department at UCSD, and who suggested that we might explore my possible interest in La Jolla at a meeting in New York. The meeting took place at the Rockefeller Institute and I was essentially hooked by the end of it. The follow up was by Keith Brueckner, Dean of the UCSD faculty, who offered to come to Toronto and talk with me about a planned psychology department at the new campus of the University of California. I knew from my previous visit and from general Academic scuttlebutt that the new San Diego was to be the state equivalent of the prestigious California Institute of Technology, oriented toward graduate study and research. UCSD—started in 1958 with the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, dating back to early in the century as an established base—had originally offered the chair of a new Psychology department to B. F. Skinner, the Harvard behaviorist. Skinner eventually declined, and the subsequent story was that he told Harvard that he would not leave if they would give a tenured pro-

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fessorship to his arguably best student, Richard Herrnstein. In any event, Herrnstein was promoted at Harvard and tried to achieve prominence in a variety of fields ranging from Skinnerian behaviorism to the history of psychology, and, eventually, to speculations about the genetic basis of intelligence. In his co-authorship of The Bell Curve with Charles Murray, he presented a rather shabby defense of the preeminence of educated white folk and their intellectual predominance. I don’t know how my career would have gone, but I wish Skinner had gone to La Jolla. It would have given him the opportunity to work on the practical aspects of his behaviorism with better students than he was able to attract in the East. After Skinner declined, UCSD approached Osgood and also Irving Janis, a Yale social psychologist, who had been suggested to the psychology search committee by Bob Hamburger. I do not know who else was consulted but the eventual outcome was the contact with Leonard Newmark and Keith Brueckner. I have sometimes wondered, “why me?” I was relatively young, 41, and just three years into a full professorship. I was becoming visible as one of the engineers of the so-called “cognitive revolution.” I had also been active in the rejuvenation of the Toronto department and information about the latter may well have found its through the grapevine to La Jolla. I showed the potential power of my organizational abilities when I picked up Keith from the airport and promptly lost my way on the drive to our house. The day was spent sitting on the floor of our living room and hearing about the promise of UCSD—first just faculty and research, then graduate students, and eventually undergraduates. We would “accept graduate students as colleagues and undergraduates would be like graduate students.” Money was no problem—and indeed, in the 1960s, California state and federal funds were plentiful. We then raised the question of Jean’s professional possibilities in La Jolla; the Toronto position being quite inadequate as a professional career. Nepotism laws were fully in force then and she could not be appointed in psychology as long as I was chair. Eventually, the university appointed her as a research psychologist in the Department of Biology, paid two-thirds of her sal-

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ary with the remainder to come from grants—still not yet a regular faculty position. By the time Keith left, I was sold, and Jean always had a hankering for California. Soon, the process of appointing me to UCSD was on its way. On my birthday in 1964, I received the informal offer from UCSD and, eventually, I was offered a professorship at $18,000 and given a free hand to start my recruiting efforts. There was no question about accepting this offer. Psychology was on the cusp of a rebirth of energy and theory, as the new cognitive psychology took hold and the behaviorist grip on theory and research was about to disappear. I was given the opportunity I might have dreamed about had I dreamed of such things then. I accepted as a matter of course, Jean looked forward to a new and fabulous land, a place that had the potential for her entering a proper career course. In thinking back on my own reaction at the time, I have the sense that I went to California with the same matter-of-fact approach that I had shown since leaving Vienna. I had to start a department and help build a university, and I would do that. But before we left Toronto, there was much partying and good wishing. We rewarded ourselves with a long planned summer in Cambridge (England) and a visit to the World’s Fair in Montreal on our way. The latter was good fun and with a newly acquired babysitter-nanny, we were off to Europe by our favorite mode of transportation—boat. In later years, we went to Europe on the QEII, a fine ship and a fine company, which we then abandoned when Cunard canceled their British union contract and our favorite stewards and waitress were replaced by new personnel unfamiliar with the traditions of British sea travel. It was the first time I had been back to Europe in 15 years, and in the meantime, I had become a very American psychologist and citizen. But the minute I was in England, and then France and Austria, I felt at home. As Jean said, ”Like a fish back in the water.” So, it seemed that you could take the boy out of Europe but not Europe out of the boy. It was clear to me, as I enjoyed Oxford and London, Paris and Vienna, that I would not again stay away

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that long. I had become an American, but I had not stopped being a European. Donald Broadbent and the APU (Applied Psychology Unit)—then the largest and best psychology research institute in Britain—were good hosts while I wrote my first extensive paper on the organization of memory. In Cambridge, we made many friends: Richard Gregory and John Morton, and Donald Broadbent and his future wife Margaret. It was also the occasion of two embarrassments occasioned by my reintroduction to British ways. The first was an invitation by the Mortons to their house “about 8.” For us that meant an after-dinner affair and we used the occasion to go out for a fine dinner, only to arrive at the Mortons to discover a laid table and the need, eventually, to confess our inability to do justice to the dinner. John’s wife was furious and they divorced shortly after—a causal sequence still not fully explored. The other memory was occasioned by my being not quite used to either left-hand driving or the ironclad use of zebra crossings in England—the only country where the pedestrian has unquestioned priority on the zebra. Driving into town on our arrival, I came close to violating the crossing and running over a woman pushing a baby carriage. These emotional memories do hang on. Our stay in Canada had been a good sojourn and the friendships made there last to the present. But on our return from Europe, it was time to get to work and we were off to California.

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e arrived in California with great anticipation and also with concerns about how we would fit into this strange culture after leaving Toronto, with a town, a university, and people and friends who had made us feel comfortable and at home. We had spent a year in California in 1959–60, but Southern California was different, a fabled lotus land where the work ethic was said to be subverted by laid back fun and games. But those concerns were soon swamped by the realities of getting to work.

ACADEMIC GOVERNANCE I need first to introduce some basic concepts about the way in which university departments are governed and how decisions are made. Although I primarily use the model of the University of California, this description is generally applicable to most American universities. The basic unit is, of course, the department, which is also usually the only place where faculty members have an effective vote. There are university faculties and faculty senates, but they vote relatively infrequently and sometimes on is-

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sues quite removed from the immediate concerns of the individual professor. On the other hand, faculty senates do have powers of governance in many universities that affect much of the conditions of employment—one reason why efforts to organize the faculties of universities (such as by American Association of University Professors and the Teacher Unions) have not been too successful. However, I joined the AAUP, the most effective of the university faculty associations, early on. The department is headed by a chair who is usually appointed by the university administration after a vote of the departmental faculty or after consultation with senior members. I have frequently encountered opinions by nonuniversity people that the achievement of a chair ’s position must be considered an honor and a step toward greater recognition—and salary. At research universities today, this is decidedly not the case. The position requires much time, hassles with prima donnas within the department and often with self-important senior officials outside of it. As a result, senior professors are usually reluctant to give up precious scholarly and research time, and they will only accept the position for limited periods of three to five years. However, in universities where there are heavy teaching duties and little time for or encouragement of research, the post may well be sought after because it involves fewer teaching hours and offers other perks. Under these conditions, administrative posts are seen, and exercised, as powerful positions deserving of proper respect. In the large research universities, there is little respect and practically no sense of subservience to administrative posts. Administrators are often seen (and sometimes properly so) as time servers who are past their productive careers or never really had any. Because there is no desire to rise in the administration, there is no real sense of hierarchy, except of course by some senior administrators who like to see themselves as important and powerful. Departments are ruled by a democratic mixture of collegiality and individualism. For many members of the professoriat, departmental governance and decision making are seen as steered by a sense of mutuality and scholarly respect. Decisions take into account more than personal predilections and often are made for

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the good of the department, and thereby for the good of its students and its research productivity and quality. But the occurrence of prima donnas is not a rare event, and quite a few professors see the department as a venue for acting out their personal prejudices and serving their individual needs and opinions. The tranquil department, and the successful departmental chair, can balance these tendencies without arousing conflict or resentment. But, it ain’t easy. Departments generally decide directions of growth, though administrations may at times intervene. Actual growth is determined by university policies and facilities, frequently driven by enrollment in the particular subject. At the University of California, promotions are usually recommended by the chair expressing department wishes in terms of strictly governed votes normally at specified intervals of service at a particular level. At the other extreme, there are many universities where such decisions are entirely in the hands of the chair and often secret. I don’t like that system because it obviously invites cronyism and favoritism. The division of departmental facilities and assets is often in the hands of the chair but is subject to publicly expressed screams and recriminations. Teaching assignments, within university rules and needs, are usually in the hands of the chair, and, of course, subject to negotiation. The university bureaucracy beyond the department consists typically of a layer of deans, and then a higher layer, called Vice Chancellors in the University of California, with the most important and powerful being the VC in charge of Academic Affairs (VCAA). The VCAA deals with all faculty matters, and other VCs are in charge of things like Medical Schools, students, and bookkeeping. At the pinnacle is the campus Chancellor, and in California, the President, who heads up all the various campuses combined. All of these high level officials have high salaries and special health benefits and who knows what other perks, though it is difficult to understand the rationale for all these goodies. One could justify additional salaries and perks as a function of superlative achievements, but it would be difficult to know how

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to measure those. In any case, there are few, if any, rewards or demerits in remuneration once an individual has been “elevated” to an administrative post, and may in fact turn out to be good or bad at the job. Unless the errors are stark and embarrassing, inept administrators are rarely removed from their posts. Within the department, there is theoretically no hierarchy; committee chairs typically operate with no special powers. On the other hand, there are selected faculty, usually full professors, who think they deserve special treatment when being assigned space, or reducing their teaching duties, or increasing their secretarial help. Department chairs, or those sometimes more powerful and called heads, are not a particularly powerful lot, particularly as they become increasingly hemmed in by university, local, state, and federal regulations. At the top, they are governed by either barons or time servers who tend not to be particularly concerned over shrinking departmental powers. I have counseled those aspiring or succumbing to the position of chair or head about characteristics that are valued by most administrators. First, always respond to memoranda and similar documents in the shortest possible time, preferably within a day. You will then have a reputation of efficiency and competence, which is not bad as a starter. Also, remember that the contents of the memoranda you send upstairs are not particularly important. Deans or whatever have probably made up their mind anyway and will only glance over your masterpiece and remember little of it, if any. And finally, whenever concerned with the consequences of some rebellious act or edict of yours, remember the mantra, “What can they do to you?” I have found that one particular useful because the answer is “very little” and they ’d rather not take any action anyway. So much for some bare outlines. I must note that much of this did not apply to my first five years in creating a new department. I had a much freer hand in the first year or two and also benefitted from the collegial sense of building something new and valuable in concert.

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BUILDING A DEPARTMENT Recruitment started as soon as I had made up my mind after Brueckner ’s visit. It started with some vague ideas of mine as to the areas and individuals I wanted to go after and its high point was a November 1964 meeting with some of my “targets” at the Algonquin Hotel (of Round Table fame) in New York. Present were Bill Kessen from Yale, John Lacey from Yellow Springs, Stanley Schachter and Bill McGill from Columbia and I. We had a fine time planning our own UCSD, but in the end, only McGill moved to La Jolla. One of the significant aspects of the Algonquin meeting was that money was flowing freely. We had no difficulty with travel, phoning, and meeting entertainment expenses in those days— how times have changed! All of my senior candidates were shipped out for a visit to La Jolla and the small faculty there was just great in making them comfortable and recruiting in my absence. In the end Schachter could not leave New York; Kessen agonized but, as I had feared, was unable to abandon his ties to Yale; and Lacey, a fine psychologist and infinitely knowledgeable about the autonomic nervous system and behavior, came very close. He had an extensive interchange with the incoming neuroscience chair, Robert Livingstone, and at one time they sounded like a potential package. But it was not to be. I had wanted a first-rate psychophysicist (i.e., sensory psychologist) in the department and had originally approached Duncan Luce at the University of Pennsylvania. In fact, when I called Duncan, I first spoke with his wife Gay whose first response to the possibility of going to California was encouragingly positive. Unfortunately, Duncan thought otherwise—he wanted to stay on at Pennsylvania and continue their rebuilding of the department. He suggested, however, that I try to get McGill then at Columbia and a major contributor to psychoacoustics—hearing research. I had known Bill for some years—primarily through PRT—and thought very highly of him. He was immediately interested and, after protracted negotiations Columbia finally came through with a counteroffer; they offered Bill a deanship. His re-

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sponse was to call me to accept the UCSD appointment saying, “Who wants to be an administrator at Columbia?”—a remark I would remind him of a few years later when he became president of that university. Bill was my first recruit and we remained good friends for the next 30 years. He and Ann and the children arrived in 1965, but his stay in the department was not to be long. In 1968, he was a member of the search committee to find a new Chancellor at UCSD, the successor to John Galbraith, and the committee’s final decision was to ask one of their own, Bill McGill. But even that was to be short-lived. By the following year, he was approached by Columbia as to his availability for their presidency. Bill used me as a sounding board and I used to join him at the Chancellor ’s residence overlooking the Pacific—usually on a weekend—and he would tell me about his desires and hope and doubts. As time went on, it became clear that Bill was mightily impressed by the galaxy of industrial executives present on the Columbia board. After he had met the full board for his more or less final interview, he came back to La Jolla and recited the board to me without pause—going round the table as they had faced him and remembering as well their, usually industrial, affiliation. My response was, “I guess you are going, right?” He did and was elevated to the Columbia University Presidency in 1970. It was, in part, a case of a middle-class Irishman not being able to resist corporate blandishments. He returned to San Diego in 1980 where he stayed until his death in 1997, working on his memoirs and even co-authoring a book on his old research interests. My other initial appointment was Norman Anderson. I had not met him before I approached him, but he had a sterling reputation as an expert on method and statistics, and also being a creative social psychologist. He was then at UCLA and I had to get permission from the sister campus before approaching one of their faculty. Anderson proved to be invaluable as the backbone of methodological knowledge in the department and in the early years, was our mainstay in the planning and construction of the new building. Early on, he had the unfortunate tendency to threaten to resign when he felt slighted, but McGill was superb in

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talking him back into the fold. Over the years, Norman Anderson has been a buttress of the department and became a good friend. By the time I arrived in La Jolla, Keith Brueckner had, to my regret, been moved aside. Keith had recruited me, as well as others, to UCSD and had a major hand in building the university. He is a man who is impatient with incompetence and administrative folderol. He helped build the university but did not make many friends among the powers. He had a style (and success) that the pedestrian powers at the time did not like and in the usual academic power struggle, Keith finally gave up and resigned his position as Dean in March 1965 before our department had even started. We had to be content with Carl Eckart as Vice Chancellor, in my opinion, an unimaginative, bureaucratic, and noncollegial pencil pusher, no matter what his scientific credentials; and John Galbraith as Chancellor, who I found to be well meaning but without vision. In a university that has named its buildings and roads after both obscure and visible, competent and incompetent administrators, there has been no room to remember Keith Brueckner ’s contribution. Our first year was indeed busy. We had been given some five or six slots to fill, had to start planning the teaching program for the department, not to mention undergraduate and graduate degree programs, had to plan for our own building (jointly with Linguistics), had to get research space built and equipped (temporarily until our own building was done), and, in between, helped (and repaid) other departments in their recruiting. And on top of all that, the three of us taught an undergraduate introductory psychology course. Recruiting went smoothly. Our first coup was getting Dave Green, a star on human hearing, from Pennsylvania and he suggested we also hire his colleague Donald Norman, which we did. I had met Tony Deutsch at Stanford in 1959 and was impressed by his intelligence and innovative thinking. We hired him and I agreed to take on his wife Diana as a doctoral student. I wanted a Skinnerian, a radical behaviorist who was nondogmatic and the name George Reynolds kept popping up. We met in the bathroom of a hospitality suite at a convention and Chicago lost one of its

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lights. Eckhard Hess, the chair at Chicago, called me to say that it was terrible how new departments tend to strip old established ones naked! Bill Kessen suggested Harry Munsinger, a postdoctoral associate of his, and I wanted to get Peter Lindsay, a new Ph.D. at Toronto whom I had targeted before I left Toronto. On the whole, a very successful year, though in the long run there were, then and later, appointments I should have passed on given what I experienced in pain and troubles with them. So, in September 1966, these eight members of the department held the first departmental faculty meeting. I was in the midst of raising federal money for our building and thanks to Sputnik, there was lots of it around. There was a sense that America needed to “catch up” to the Soviet Union and, under the aegis of national defense, much money was spent on building, research, and student support in higher education. But UCSD and its psychology department were also in a hurry. Less than a year after starting at UCSD, in May 1966, I was able to submit an application for $1.3 million under the Defense Education Act, which was eventually funded. We wanted to go ahead with the new building, which was also to house linguistics, before the federal funding was approved, so the architects prepared a plan of two buildings -the larger one to be built with state funds and the small, connected annex to be built with federal money when it arrived. So, we increased the building by one-third with federal money and were able to occupy it in 1970–71. But, it took a lot out of my hide in trips and communications with the Washington bureaucracy. We also, surprisingly, had a reasonable number of graduate students and made three further appointments. Bill McGuire came from Columbia for 1967–68 to give us a major figure in social psychology, though he left in 1970 because “Yale needed him more.” McGuire was a quirky bright man, concerned with proper recognition and easily propelled into a huff. We also appointed two young men who later turned into stars, David Rumelhart and Edmund Fantino. And then, we lost McGill to the chancellorship. The following years were taken up with fine tuning graduate and undergraduate programs and two appointments were made, Wilhelmy and Russo, who were not given tenure in the long run. However, I note with some nostalgia that with 13 faculty members, we had 57 graduate students! I believe the current depart-

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ment with 24 faculty has fewer than that now. It was truly a large group, very much a family for both faculty and graduate students. A contrast to today when graduate students are sometimes seen as useful assistants and even dogs bodies rather than colleagues. Late in 1968, the department considered the length of a chair ’s tenure, and I insisted that I would not serve beyond five years. The department then voted for George Reynolds as the incoming chair. At the same time, we were deeply involved in the “troubles” of the late 1960s. I describe here briefly just one departmental involvement which started when Harry Munsinger presented, in class, Arthur Jensen’s position on the intellectual inferiority of blacks. At a delicate time in campus politics and in race relations, when the casualties of campus conflicts elsewhere were being mourned, he was asked to reschedule his lectures. Harry resented any attempts to rein in his approach, and I was careful to protect his free speech and academic rights. The Black students and their allies protested, and we were involved in a contentious series of discussions and demonstrations. The right wing in the state and university implied all sort of interference with Harry’s rights to the point where the President of the University, as late as 1974, requested a campus response to a Wall Street Journal article (four years after the events) that repeated the charges that we had required prior censorship of lectures and tolerated continued harassment of Munsinger. Vice Chancellor Saltman replied for Chancellor Mc Elroy that the evidence showed that Munsinger ’s academic freedom and other rights had been protected and that no violations had occurred. And that was that. I tried to arrange departmental activities to avoid reigniting any confrontations. Eventually, Harry resigned, in the early 1980s. Following these incidents, I had extensive discussions with the Black students, but with a department that was in part diffident and in some small part hostile to any accommodations for the Black students, little could be done. The following year (1969–70), we decided to interview candidates for a minority appointment and did so, but no appointment was made. In part, the African American candidates involved were reluctant to come to our department because of its newly acquired reputation, due to the real or implied attitudes of some department members.

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Next we appointed Ebbe Ebbesen in social psychology (still with us) and had a commitment from Howard Leventhal to come in 1970, but he backed out at the last minute. Then, Peter Lindsay decided to go back to Canada. After much pressure from our graduate students, and against my own judgment, we abandoned the foreign language requirement. On June 16, 1970, I chaired my last department meeting. Those first five years of building a department were exhilarating indeed. I have never been as busy before or after, what with developing department policies and traditions; hiring people, arranging curricula, being a part-time contractor, architect, equipment buyer, and budget adjudicator; and being a co-recruiter for other departments and the medical school, and at the same time, running a laboratory with a half dozen graduate students and several assistants. But, I had the sense of doing something worthwhile, building for the future and doing what I wanted, what was good and right. Despite setbacks and disappointments, I was generally on a “high,” and I value my memory of that period. My family suffered from my absences and Jean and I went through a rough time, though I am not sure that it was necessarily due to the demands of my various jobs and obligations. Participating in building UCSD and its excitement was heady indeed. From our first arrival in La Jolla, we were involved not only in building a department, but also a university. With fewer than 100 faculty when we arrived in 1965, recruiting in all department was a task shared by all. We built relationships with all manner of folk across the disciplines, went to each other ’s recruiting and dinner parties, and boosted UCSD, whether it was psychology or physics or eventually for the Medical School. The latter was itself, of course, a major enterprise, but with the vision of David Bonner and his biologists for a research-oriented school that would mix medics and non-medics, it was a real joy to participate in the Medical School committees and recruitment decisions and activities. Then, there were less formal activities, such as the UCSD poker game, started by the physics faculty around 1958, host to many visiting academic stars, and still going strong today. I joined within a month of arriving in La Jolla and stayed with them for some 20 years. Poker for me was as much a social as a

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gambling activity and as death removed such good friends and stalwarts of that game as Bob Elliott from literature and Bernt Matthias from physics and when I found their replacements less than enchanting, I lost interest and eventually left the game. Looking back at the first 5 to 10 years of the department, I had essentially achieved what I wanted; to build a new department that was in the new spirit of American psychology—concerned with human thought and action and the processing of information. We had started just as the so-called cognitive revolution, which began in the late 1950s and had now reached its most creative period. New approaches in memory, problem solving, and attention provided a theory rich in psychology that replaced the rather dry years of American behaviorism. And we were in the midst, and maybe in the vanguard, of all that. The department represented what I thought the future of American psychology would and should look like—no more middle-of-the-road mainstreaming. I should have known that that success was to be savored when it happened. Within another 10 years and surely by the 1980s, the department was well on its way of becoming another all-purpose mainstream department, serving various interests, old and new. The original spirit, though, was still alive in the joint enterprise of the LNR (Lindsay-Norman-Rumelhart) group. Of course, a shift by the department to some conceptual center was to be expected. As some of the founding members of the department who shared the original vision left, the central aims of the faculty became diluted. With the departure of McGill to higher office, David Green to the irresistible chair at Harvard, David Rumelhart to his beloved Stanford, Bill McGuire to Yale, Jay McClelland to Carnegie Mellon, with George Reynolds’ untimely death, and Don Norman leaving first to a new Department of Cognitive Science, then to Apple Computers, and eventually to the world of business, we not only lost many of our original stars but also various strands disappeared or changed. There is a lesson there that one should not recruit people who are likely to be courted and hired away by other universities! On the other hand there were continuing pleasures in the “products” of our department, as David Rumelhart, unfortunately stricken early in life by Pick’s disease, was honored by a biannual $100,000 prize in his name.

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Among the consequences of these changes; the emphasis on auditory processes shifted to visual ones, the number of people interested in memory dropped drastically, the original behaviorist accommodation with cognitive psychology disappeared, and, maybe more importantly, with individuals without some central direction being recruited, more people came into the department with little interest in any departmental direction or vision. In part, this was a function of the successive chairs—after Norman and Reynolds—being people who were willing to be caretakers or to do their “duty” for short periods of time. These were not people with “wrong” ideas but they were a different group of people. Some of them used the position of chair for their own advancement and purposes. Some were helpless in the face of internal dissension, so that things, like retreats, took place to find a common direction, but were useless as subsequent events showed. At one of these, a self-proclaimed eminence and savior suggested that departmental conflicts could be solved if “we only got rid of George Mandler,” primarily because I would not be still about some of my destructive self-serving “colleagues.” Telling it like it is was not on the menu, and I just could not and would not “go along to get along.” There were others like Laura Schreibman, who took her role as caretaker seriously and, as a result, was badly served by some of the more aggressive and vituperative members of the department; and David Swinney, hampered by micromanaging but trying hard to keep a department together against contentious, non-collegial prima donnas. And so, we drifted into the mainstream without any central theme but still maintaining a reasonably high degree of quality. I was good at administration; I was a good chairman. There were several characteristics that go into that role, among them was what McGill once said, “ You are a good anxiety absorber.” One needs to take a bunch of academic prima donnas and understand, or pretend to understand, their concerns and anxieties, help to alleviate them whenever possible, and not to create new ones—unless demanded by events. All this is difficult, particularly if one pairs it with the conscious desire and intent to be impartial, not to treat anybody preferentially or, more difficult, disadvantageously. And also not to use the position too much to one’s own advantage. I have seen chairs with all those foibles,

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luckily no single one with all of them, and I tried to avoid these traps. The most difficult one to avoid is the additional perks that one can create for oneself, the access to moneys and services that are not given to the average faculty member—more secretarial help, computer funds, equipment support, space, and so on. I have seen chairs build up a neat computer system or research support. Of course, I have been guilty to some extent, but I hope it was just the very small amount that I perceive it to have been. In fact, I am sometimes surprised at the misdemeanors of which I have been accused. For example, at my retirement, I donated my journal library to the department and gossip had it that I had paid for bindery costs out of departmental and CHIP budgets—which I had not. When I volunteered to teach the large introductory course for five years (a task generally seen as onerous), I was told that I only did it in order to prepare an introductory text that would be most profitable. Academic administrators need to be leaders and followers in balanced amounts. The worst kind of chair is one who believes that he or she has the answer to all the problems, the royal road to success, the secure knowledge as to what is and will be important—and all that without really paying much attention to the faculty. The second worst administrators in academia are those who believe that their function is to carry out the will of the faculty and nothing else, who cannot act without authorization and consensus, and who will not take responsibilities seriously. In contrast to a military, industrial, or political leader, the academic must interpret the consensus of the faculty, encourage the shaping of such consensus, present preferences and alternatives, and then proceed on the basis of such deliberations—as George Reynolds once put it, “You have to keep walking the corridors.” What makes it doubly difficult is that one sometimes has to deal with psychopathic liars, self-glorious racists and sexists, and raving narcissists. The difficulty of dealing with nasty people in the academy is sometimes exacerbated by the belief that universities should be places of reason and light. But I found narcissism and its flipside, paranoia, a not unusual symptom of academic deviancy. Apart from the sprinkling of psychopaths, the narcissist in particular

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exemplifies academic malfunctioning. The temptation to believe in one’s own infallibity, in having cured the nation’s or a profession’s ills, produces the self-glorification and pomposity so often characteristic of the breed. For example, I had one colleague who was so sure of her strident incursions in all issues and the rightness of her positions that I once suggested that she was “her own worst enemy,” which earned me lasting disdain and hatred. In the end, I was successful because, to some degree, I submerged other interests and desires against the demands of being the chair of this nascent department. Maybe it was because I did have a personal agenda, but that was the reason I came to UCSD in the first place—to build a first-class department. In the process, I realized another truth that goes counter to much public belief: Just because you are good at something does not mean that you are going to like it. Eventually, I did not and was glad to leave the chairmanship and not take on any similar task after that. Over the years, as the department slowly became just another general psychology department, there were a number of colleagues who became friends and mainstays of collegiality. There were new colleagues in 1970s (now long gone) such as Lissa Newport and Lynn Cooper, called “cousin” because she was vaguely related through Jean’s great great uncle, James Fenimore Cooper. Laura Schreibman joined us later and became a good friend even though our psychologies kept us apart theoretically. We had been wildly successful in building a department. For the first 5 to 10 years, it was among the top few departments of experimental psychology in the country and also independently rated as such. Attrition, regression to the mean (becoming like other departments), and some bad faith eroded some of that but the successes had been heady and rewarding; and the department still ranks among the top score in the country. I did, and gladly, take on another task in the mid 60s, and that was the directorship of the Center for Human Information Processing. As part of the justification for federal funds in our building program, we had proposed a research institute to further the new cognitive psychology—and gave it the title that provided the fortu-

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nate acronym, CHIP. With a training grant for graduate students and faculty research from early on, funded by the National Institute for Mental Health, and lots of space, the Center was an immediate success. We had both young and eminent visitors from all over the world, regular brown-bag lunches to present our research informally, and a long list of speakers on topics of current excitement and importance. Starting in 1970, I was joined by Arlene Jacobs, a hard working and devoted secretary to CHIP, who stayed with me until 1990. Some of the major achievements of CHIP came in its later years and I will detail those in the next chapter. There was an unpleasant consequence of all these successes some 20 years later when Richard Atkinson became Chancellor at UCSD and Bill McGill returned from Columbia. At the time, UCSD had decided to name all buildings and many roads after the contributors to the founding and growth of the campus. McGill came to me one day and said that Atkinson had suggested that the psychology building be named McGill Hall, but that he, Bill, had demurred and said he could not accept given my role in building the department—and that building. I said I appreciated the sentiment and although it would be nice to have a building named for me, it was not a crucial and driving aim of mine. But Bill insisted that he could not accept—they could find another building for him! Some time went by and on the occasion of my going away on sabbatical in the 1980s, Atkinson called me and said that he had decided that he had no choice but to proceed with the naming plan as originally conceived. He assured me that, by the time I returned, there would be in place an appropriate way to honor my contribution to the campus. I said that would be alright, and that was the end—nothing every was said again or done, by either Atkinson or McGill. I thought then and still do that I was subjected to mirrors and smoke, that unnecessary disavowals and promises were made. They could have settled it in the beginning without leaving a bad taste.

THE TROUBLES In the 1960s, the Black students on campus, supported by the much less radicalized Chicano students and some of the varied

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groups of white radicals, started to campaign for a minority college on campus—Lumumba-Zapata college. The UCSD division into colleges—partially defined residentially and partially by basic curriculum—provided a ready-made niche for such a development. That campaign, eventually successful in that the faculty senate supported them but unsuccessful because the administration refused to go along, was part of the 1960s “troubles.” But that particular aspect of the passions of the 1960s failed in part because of the evaporating fervor of the white radicals. I had the impression, in general, that the 1960s radicals in the United States had less staying power than their European counterparts, who seemed to disappear more slowly. In part, of course, this is due to the fact that American college populations are more or less completely renewed every four years. In the 1960s, a call from a small Black minority for a truly radical college that would incorporate Black leftist traditions failed. The then “third” college is now an appropriately liberal Thurgood Marshall College. I will not play amateur historian and pretend to understand all of the factors that produced the student activism that started about 1964 (with the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley) and reached its peak in 1969–70, but I believe there were three general factors that supported it. One was the one already mentioned, the press from the Black community (and in part the Chicano community) for recognition and for a university that they could call their own. The promises of the civil rights movement were extended to the universities but were too slow in being fulfilled, thus the Black revolts on campus. Secondly, and symptomatic for the white student population was the Vietnam war—opposed by the large majority of the student population. The third factor was the opposition to the Republican led resurgence of right-wing ideologies—most notably exercised, though not really understood, by Ronald Reagan as governor of California. However, this tripartite background does not properly predict the difficulties the movement would have. There were two major ones: One was the lack of staying power of the white students, powered in part by their ignorance of the traditions and beliefs of the left. Their innocence of socialist and radical politics deprived them of an ideology and a commitment to what was at best a rather fragile “cause.” I remember, for example, the many students who called themselves

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Trotskyists because they wanted to be Marxists without being Stalinists, but had little knowledge about Trotsky or any of the other major figures of the socialist traditions. They also had little, if any, contact with more sophisticated student movements, like the French one in 1968. The other factor that undermined any efforts at real change was the lack of any productive coordination between the Black student movement and the rest. Sure, they cooperated frequently, but in the end, they were never an integrated movement. The liberal professors were partially afraid of the Black aims and methods and also lacked any significant core of possible leaders that could act for the students to achieve real changes in negotiations and even compromises. I recall the deprecating remarks made by liberal professors about Angela Davis as she led the students’ intellectual left while smoking her ever-present Gauloises. As if smoking French cigarettes disqualified you from any true radical position. The focus of the troubles was at Berkeley, where the administration was unable to rein in police excesses and did not understand the students’ needs. The final blow up came about the occupation and closing of the People’s Park and the following riots and demonstrations. At UCSD, Herbert Marcuse, one of the icons of the movement and a member of the faculty, pontificated about the troubles, which were better understood by our Nobelist Linus Pauling. The presence of these left-wing luminaries at UCSD and the attacks on the establishment by the students and some other faculty fired up the antagonisms of the reactionary San Diego environment, consisting of the Union Tribune paper, the local American legion, legislators, and sundry right wingers. McGill, the new Chancellor, was in the midst of and has written about it in his The Year of the Monkey, his personal apologia pro vita sua. Our local UCSD branch of student radicalism was the SDS—generally ably led and partially supported by the Black student movement represented by the charismatic Angela Davis. My sympathies were of course with the students, against the repressive movements from above, against Vietnam, and for the need for Black recognition. But by now, I was also an academic and I was trying to find a middle ground. In the end the faculty was useful, though McGill does not give us credit in his book—the

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only faculty he lauds are his friends who supported his often stubborn, though on the whole relatively mild establishment positions. But behind the scenes, and not mentioned in McGill’s book, there were busy faculty people led by James Arnold. We met repeatedly trying to defuse matters, often long into the night. We bargained with the radical faculty, led by Tony Wilden in literature, for positions that would give students opportunities for stating their case and exercising their rights and opinions. I remember one incident that was central to the UCSD troubles, the recruitment drive by the Marines. McGill and the Marines insisted that they should come in and recruit, the students resisted any such solution and the Arnold group negotiated with Tony Wilden. We suggested that the Marines be allowed to come in through a path lined by the faculty with their backs turned toward the recruiters—a sign of protest and rejection that would make the TV news and the papers and make the situation better than a violent confrontation. But in the end, Wilden turned us down. The Marines were spirited more or less secretly onto campus, the students were outwitted, and McGill had maintained “order.” At the height of the troubles, as the students called for an extended strike and the faculty was split, the faculty senate at UCSD called for a day ’s discussion of the Berkeley situation and for a 5-man (sic) delegation led by the Physicist Norman Kroll to go to Berkeley for a fact-finding mission. McGill vigorously opposed any interruption of the normal UCSD activities with discussions of the Berkeley problems. He was furious at the discussion proposal but supported the delegation, of which I was a member. We spent about three days in Berkeley with whiffs of tear gas around us and the excitement of a “revolutionary situation” at hand. In the end, we returned with a report that condemned the violence of the police and the excesses of the students—it was factual and useful. Eventually, the situation cooled off and we returned to some degree of normalcy. On the whole, we had less violence and disruption than many other UC campuses. In part, I believe, this was due to Herbert Marcuse’s influence, who wanted a typically German, disciplined “revolution.” I remember one meeting of the faculty senate when we faced a SDS sit-in and the senate officers refused to start until the students withdrew. In the end, there was a heated finger-wag-

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ging exchange between Marcuse and the SDS leadership and the students withdrew! Ever since then, I sort of thought of him as the Herr Professor in revolutionary drag. For me the troubles were a period of liberation. I had finally came out of the funk induced by my commie-spy experience and I was able to take political positions. In part, I thank the students of 1968–69 for that. And in part, I think back with some nostalgia of the heady days of 1968 in California, in France, and elsewhere, when one possible hope for true social change disappeared into the distant future.

GETTING INTO PRINT Sometime during the later 1960s, I intensified my interest in academic publishing. My first publishing experience had been my book with Willi Kessen The Language of Psychology and under the aegis of Gordon Ierardi at John Wiley, it had been a happy one, as was my second one when Jean and I published our book on the early history of modern psychology, From Association to Gestalt. Ierardi was the ideal editor—thoughtful, considerate, decisive, and a man with taste. He is the only academic editor as far as I know who was given a special reception (in New York) by his friends in academic psychology. Ierardi gave me the freewheeling position of advisory editor at Wiley. It gave me extensive experience in the world of publishing and taught me to be both editor and, practically automatically, a copy editor. To this day, I cannot read a manuscript without making editorial changes. The position was also quite lucrative. I received a 2 percent override royalty on books published on my advice or recommendation. I very much enjoyed that association. But Ierardi’s retirement and early death was a symptom of the decline of publishing into the hands of the bean counters and money changers. Recently, I was asked why a psychology manuscript highly praised by one and all could not be published and the answer was simple—it’s potential sales were small and publishers today are interested in quantity not quality. Wiley, in its halcyon days, had the good sense to publish as many books as they could that would sell but used that inroad also to publish important books that were not going to sell (e.g., Duncan Luce’s Individual Choice

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Behavior). By the time I left Wiley after some 20 years, I believe there was not a single senior executive who had any editorial experience, they all came from marketing or accounting. It is unfortunate that the Wiley psychology list, which was the leader in the field, has drastically declined. I was fired by Wiley ’s Tom Gay—a product of the bean counters and himself fired a couple of years later—in a hilarious lunch in La Jolla where martini after martini could not bring Tom to say the fateful words even though I had guessed why he was there and egged him on to say them. Finally, he said, “you should know that as part of some reorganization ....” and I said, “Bravo!!!” There was another episode that brought me face to face with the new look in publishing. I had made friends with a young editor-executive at Academic Press—Larry Erlbaum, and he came to me one day saying that the Press was thinking of a new journal on human thought, tentatively called Thinking and would I be interested in the editorship? Not really, but Larry convinced me to come to New York and meet with the board of the Press. And so, I went and met Walter Johnson and Dr. Kurt Jacoby, the lions of the firm, and two men who had come from the Press’ predecessor in Berlin—the Akademische Verlagsanstalt. Eventually, there was a meeting with most of the editorial board. Early on in the discussion, I raised the question of remuneration and whether the editor, particularly of a new journal, should not participate in its profits. I suggested that, instead of a stipend, I be given a royalty, which would vary with the number of copies sold, or possible stock options with a bonus for particular milestones of copies sold. The horror at the meeting was palpable—an editor to participate in profits? Never. Eventually, gentlemanly old Professor Jacoby said to me, “But Professor Mandler, don’t you think you should do this for the good of the field?” Whereupon, I countered that I would when Academic Press would also publish books or journals solely for the good of the field. And that was how I did not become the editor of Cognitive Psychology. The episode illustrates in part the tendency of publishers and other commercial enterprises to believe that academics should work for nothing or nearly so. The most recent example was an offer from Wiley to pay for a lengthy chapter with a copy of the handbook for which it was intended.

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A rewarding outcome of my interaction with Academic Press was my friendship with Larry, which has continued to grow through the years both professionally and personally. Eventually, I also became an editorial advisor for Erlbaum for a number of years, though by that time overrides were becoming smaller and rarer. Larry published and was present at the presentation of my Festschrift, which I was delighted to have published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. My final training in the business of editing and publishing came when I was editor from 1970 to 1976 of the Psychological Review, the main theoretical journal of the American Psychological Association with a circulation of nearly 10,000. With Jean as associate editor, the process went smoothly and I was able to complete my editorship without too many prospective authors (or readers) being outraged. We even managed to transfer operations to Oxford in 1971–72 when we were taking a sabbatical. I also learned not to rely too much on established opinion and position. The path-breaking work of Kahneman and Tversky was rejected when I sent it to an overrated elder statesman of psychology for review. At the same time, I saw the large profits of the journals swallowed up increasingly by activities of the APA that had little to do with the interests of the readers of the journal, while also supporting an overstaffed publishing empire. My many years of experience as a senior advisor at Wiley gave me the knowledge to become a competent adversary in contract negotiations. I have used my understanding of publishing in my negotiations with publishers and have been useful to many of my colleagues. I have successfully held on to copyrights and given away as few rights as possible in my contracts. In particular, I have been able to hold on to most of the foreign royalties. In the process, I have been impressed by how innocent academics are in dealing with publishers, and I have enjoyed advising my colleagues, if they wished, in their negotiations as well. I even helped my father-in-law, a bond lawyer, negotiate a contract for one of his post-retirement books. I think nothing I did impressed him more than that! A consulting agency for academic authors might have been an interesting side business to go into—to try to save academics from the depredations of the publishing world by es-

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tablishing myself as an agent for academic writers. But I guess I was either too busy or too lazy to do so formally. It was during my first few years at UCSD that Willi Kessen and I also engaged in our last attempt at a joint book project. With Roger Holloway (Ierardi’s successor at Wiley), we planned a volume on Psychology in the Twentieth Century to celebrate the new vigor and excitement in the field. We wrote to psychology’s luminaries and invited them to participate. In the end, there was not enough interest on the part of our target authors and by the summer of 1967, we had commitments from only six (Jean Piaget, Gordon Allport, O. H. Mowrer, Alexander Luria, Harry A. Murray, B. F. Skinner, and S. S. Stevens) and cancelled the project.

UCSD GROWS UP Soon after my arrival in La Jolla, the committee on the Social Sciences continued its work on finding more social science chairs. The committee consisted of Leonard Newmark, the economist Seymour Harris, Roy Harvey Pearce from Literature, and Herbert Marcuse. The next year was spent on discussions of the kind of social science they wanted—experimental or policy, with Marcuse wanting interpretive social sciences. However, my major impression of Marcuse in that context was that he was not particularly involved or interested in shaping university policy, and he soon left the committee. As is usually the case with such esoteric issues, there was no definite outcome of that discussion, and we generally appointed the best people we could find. The other issue was the organization of the social sciences in the college structure of UCSD. Originally, the thought had been that different colleges would house specific departments that would serve as the themes for the colleges. Though much time was spent on this issue, in the end, it didn’t make much difference because departments served campus-wide functions, as most of us had expected. Colleges still have different themes and emphases but not based on specific departments. After Marcuse left and new people joined the committee, there were constant changes and much bickering and argument. Finally, after a six-month period with a new chair, the historian Gabriel Jackson, I was put in the chair spot. By then, the

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committee had offered the anthropology chair to both Harold Conklin from Yale and Eric Wolf, and had been turned down. When I came on the committee, one of the major candidates was Mel Spiro. Mel was an old friend whom I had met at Harvard when he was at the University of Connecticut. I called Mel immediately and tried to undo some rather lackadaisical attention that had been paid to him by my predecessors. Eventually, he visited us from a temporary stay in Hawaii and many years later, he told me that the thought of going back to cold and distant Chicago finally convinced him. After some heavy bargaining, he finally decided to join us, and we were delighted to have Mel and Audrey as neighbors. In the meantime, on the advice of David Riesman, the sociology chair was offered to Joseph Gusfield, who also accepted. By fall of 1968, our work was done because we agreed that we could not decide what to do about Political Science. I resigned, but it took until 1969 for Chancellor McGill to accept my resignation and to appoint a new committee to find a Political Scientist. But that was not done for another two to three years. During McGill’s first year as Chancellor at San Diego, he appointed me to a committee of three to recruit Black faculty to the campus as soon as possible. The other two members were Joe Watson, an associate professor of chemistr y and later Vice-Chancellor for students, and Ken Hicks, a young Chemistry post-doc. My innocence of race relations and arms-length acquaintance with racist language made me pronounce my most embarrassing and racist faux pas ever (in retrospect and with time, also very funny)—when I once in a discussion started to say, “Now let’s call a spade a spade ....” Some time later, Ken and I went out for a drink and I tried to communicate my somewhat distant understanding of the race question—and was delighted with how well he understood this weird European Jew’s account. Unfortunately, our committee was a dismal failure— Black academics were rare in those days and those who were around had many opportunities to go to established or developing Black studies programs—we had nothing like it to offer. We interviewed a few people with backgrounds such as master ’s degrees in community relations but agreed in the end that ours was a hopeless task without massive support and departmental efforts. We disbanded after a dismal year.

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The first few years in La Jolla had an interesting side light. Having not really been overwhelmed with job offers in the preceding year, there was suddenly a rush of inquiries that persisted for a few years. Roger Myers inquired whether, after the election of Reagan to the California governorship, I might be interested in coming back to Toronto to accept the chairmanship of my old department. Herbert Simon came to visit to ask whether I might be movable to Pittsburgh and the chair of the Carnegie Mellon department. There were other nibbles and also an appointment as a consultant on Guggenheim fellowship appointments—an interesting interlude over the years, seeing who was wanting to do what and why. After I gave up the chair at UCSD, there were more elegant inquiries including senior university posts. But I was tired of administration and liked my department, and Jean loved La Jolla; there were no reasons to leave. Mentioning Simon reminds me of an exchange with him that might well illustrate how one has enough time to do the thinking and work that ends up in a Nobel Prize. At a conference in Pittsburgh, I was reading the morning paper while waiting for proceedings to start. Herb Simon comes over to me, “What are you doing George?” “Reading the paper …” “I never do that—waste of time. If anything important happens, my friends will tell me about it.” There were the usual meetings and conferences on memory during those years, but one episode in the 1960s sticks out. I had, for some obscure reason, been invited to a conference on nonverbal behavior in some bucolic place. To my surprise, one of the invitees was Noam Chomsky already by then the most creative and innovative linguistic theorist around. But, why to a conference that had a virtual sign saying “This is not about language as you know it.” I was curious what he would do. He obviously was trying hard not to talk about verbal language usage and theory, but being the ultimate theorist of pure mentalism, he finally broke out to discuss the behavior of a baseball outfielder catching a fly ball. For Chomsky, this was a complex computational problem because the task obviously involved the “solution of several simultaneous differential equations.” Tell that to Joe DiMaggio! Over the years, I had puzzled about Noam Chomsky’s curious juxtaposition of his left-wing, anarchist political views, and his

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nativist (typically not of the left) view of language, treating it as some miraculous event, rather suddenly given to mankind. But then I realized that both positions have a truly romantic view of the world—a dreamy hope for humankind. In 1968 and 1969, I chaired a committee that assigned faculty positions (FTEs—Full Time Equivalents) to departments in the Humanities and Social Sciences. We had to supervise not only the growth but also the composition of these departments. It was probably the touchiest and potentially most important assignment. I worked hard at it and to this day treasure a note from Bob Elliot, chair of Literature, saying, “I think you have done a magnificent job ... [and that] we have been able to come out of our meetings with no blood on the walls, on good terms with each other, and with a rational order of ... priorities is due in good measure to the clarity with which you have seen the issues and the good sense with which you have ordered our proceedings.” Among the duties that fell to me as Psychology chair was participation in the planning of the UCSD Medical School. I served on the council of chairs as representative of the social sciences and also on the curriculum planning committee. If nothing else, I had my eyes opened about the difference between a university and a medical school, and in particular about the role of the department chair. Typically, though not always, an academic chair serves his department and is to a large extent a creature of its faculty. I use the male designation deliberately because in the 1960s there were at best very few women as department heads and none at UCSD. It was a very male society. The medical chair is a baron and rules his baronetcy according to his tastes as a leader and ruler. The faculty is “his” faculty and neighboring departments are threats to his domain. Funds, positions, and space are his to demand and to dispense. There are of course exceptions, but because this mode is the rule, the exceptions do not survive for long. There is no sense of temporariness in a chair ’s tenure as there is in academic departments, he rules for as long as he can hold on and as long as his alpha status is not seriously threatened from within the department. Social and behavioral sciences were given a significant part of the first-year Medical School curriculum in the late 1960s and it

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was a disaster. I arranged it initially as a lecture course in basic positive information—perception, social behavior, behavior control, and so on. Psychology faculty gave lectures and demonstrations. It was not what the medical students had expected or wanted, it obviously did not help them be physicians. Our faculty were not highly motivated for these lectures and I failed to coordinate and “cross reference” the various topics. The end was a mishmash of relevancies and irrelevancies to a medical education. The medical faculty smelled our obvious weakness, and the various department chairs saw the potential of moving in on unclaimed territory and resources. In the end, we proposed to shift into a school of applied behavioral science as an adjunct to the medical school and that proposal was savaged by Arnie Mandell, the new chair of psychiatry. One of my tasks as a member of the planning committee of the Medical School had been to chair a search committee for a department of psychiatry (the mainstay of the committee was its consultant, David Hamburg at Stanford, who supplied me with the knowledge and know how). By 1969, I was delighted to have found Ar nold Mandell, neuroscientifically and psychoanalytically sophisticated, innovative, young, and a good human being. Now, he was temporarily on the other side of the fence. Apart from this episode we were good friends and I treasured his knowledge and attractive idiosyncratic approach to the world. In any case, it was clear the social science course was going to be the domain of a psychiatry department. By 1971, I was informed that the curriculum committee had appointed Lew Judd (later chair of the department of psychiatry) to head the social science course. They were right in the sense that our psychologists were not ready to spend the amount of time and energy that a decent course demanded; most of the faculty treated the course as a few obligatory guest lectures. I spent hours with student complaints and faculty indifference, but it was in the end a waste of time. As part of the creation of CHIP and the Center for Research in Language Acquisition (CRLA, later shortened to CRL), we envisaged an Institute (one level up from research centers in the University of California). Extensive plans were made, J.C.R. Licklider from MIT was nearly hired, and I suggested that the Institute be tentatively named the Institute for Information Systems, which

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would cover most eventualities, information theory and information-based approaches being very much in the air. I had originally suggested the IIS abbreviation tongue-in-cheek because it would also be useful, in the version “$,” to raise extramural funds. The Institute existed mostly on paper, some space was provided but it never functioned as anything more than a holding operation. Eventually, it changed its name several times until it was taken over by the connectionist community as the Institute for Neural “whatever you want to do with it.” Lest I should be thought of as a habitual naysayer, there were administrators whom I both liked and admired. Obviously, Keith Brueckner, as long as he lasted, was one of them. Others were Herbert York, Paul Saltman, and Kathleen Douthitt. Herb was actually chancellor at UCSD when I was being recruited but had been replaced (I believe for health reasons) by John Galbraith when I arrived. Herbert was a no-nonsense, unpompous pleasure to work with. In later years, I had occasion to interact with him as a dean and briefly as head of the Physics department. He then was coopted by Washington politics and became Ambassador to the Geneva Disarmament talks. We also had the pleasure to take his daughter, Rachel, to Europe with us in 1966 as a friend and baby sitter for our young boys. Rachel was then 17, and we gave her her first legitimate alcoholic drinks. She has since then been considered an honorary member of our family. Paul Saltman, a biologist, became VCAA after McGill’s departure for Columbia. Paul was another no-nonsense administrator, dedicated to being fair and open to all the various academic interests. His office was always open for discussions, beefs, and suggestions. He introduced the notion of a program-review committee, dominated by faculty, and in charge of all major funding and policy decisions. Unfortunately, that committee became another rubber stamp agency for the administration. Paul was the best senior vice chancellor I knew during my active years at UCSD. The other superb administrator was Kathleen Douthitt, assistant vice chancellor for academic affairs. That was and continues to be a staff position. Its incumbent is the academic vice chancel-

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lor ’s right hand and assistant and also heads the Academic Personnel department of the University. Whenever we had a problem in those days, with handling appointments, running grants through the university, finding the extra few dollars for a faculty member, or finding a temporary position for one or the other itinerant academic, Kathleen was there to help. Her classic response was, “Let me get back to you on that, Dr. Mandler.” But if one screwed up, Kathleen was not reluctant to let you know and put you in your place. Unfortunately, her successors were nothing like that; they were guardians of their prerogatives, who often considered the faculty their enemies, fed the VCAA uptight unimaginative positions and policies and always went by the book, never trying to be extra helpful. But as I write this, we have a new VCAA, Marsha Chandler, who may change those attitudes. I had learned much during my first five years in California. By the very nature of the UCSD situation, I was thrown into positions of responsibility for which I was not quite prepared. One of my mistakes was not to delve more deeply into the background and competences of people I appointed, helped to appoint, or recommended for appointment in the academy. I have become much more careful and maybe mistrustful since then—situations and people are often not what they seem to be; a truism I should have been aware of earlier. The politics of the 1960s and the student revolts did not dim my commitment to left-wing causes. The situation did feed into my patience with acts, or rather the absence of action, that do not move the situation along. With the political ends in sight, I became even more convinced in the 1960s that one should take what is achievable. Lofty goals without real achievements do not advance one’s cause nor do they benefit the people one wants to assist.

Jean with the boys in early days in La Jolla

Don Norman and Peter Lindsay argue as Bill McGill and I (and others) look on (March 1967)

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We are off to Europe (June 1967)

Jean and I trip the light fantastic on our way to our 1971 sabbatical in England

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With grandson Ben in Venice,1990

Granddaughter Hannah with her mother Ruth, 1994

With sons Michael and Peter at my 75th birthday party in 1999

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uring all those busy years, Jean and I had been able to build and hold together our own family. Jean had brought forth two fine sons—Peter in 1958 and Michael in 1960. Their early years were spent in an environment that gave them Jean’s interests in history and architecture and mine in politics, its left varieties in particular. Retrospectively, we were rather unexpectedly successful in hiding our marital difficulties in the late 60s and early 70s (when the boys were from about 7 to 15 years old), and the marks of a happy and busy early life can be seen in their lives today. Both sons benefitted from the very successful gifted program in the San Diego public schools. Jean’s interests were imprinted in Peter very early on. He knew, in response to years of French and English Gothic churches, English parish churches, and early English history, that he wanted to be a historian. To his surprise, he passed the written entrance exams to Oxford, and today, in his 40s he is a fine (and English) historian. Michael did not know early on what he wanted to do—his rationality and unyielding argumentative powers once moved me to suggest that he might want to be a lawyer, which he rejected with some vehemence. He found his inter216

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ests in economics as an undergraduate. In later years, I realized that his attempt to understand what makes the world work was expressed in his microeconomic interests on the one hand, whereas his concern with economic history (partly out of an interest in political economy) motivated his macroeconomic ones. As the pressures of the very early years abated, we were better able to enjoy our biannual trips to Europe and some of the pleasures of UCSD. I remember in particular our dinner parties, and especially a couple where the fine pianist Rosalyn Tureck, artist in residence at UCSD, came and sometimes even favored us with her virtuosity. And once, she was able to invite the Romero brothers, fine guitarists destined for greatness, to play at our house. And in between, Martin Kamen often came to take advantage of our grand piano with his faculty chamber quartet. Having divested myself of the chairmanship of the department, it was time to enjoy a well-earned sabbatical. After a decompressing year in 1970–71, during which I saw the completion and move into our new, plush Psychology-Linguistics Building financed by the Sputnik-inspired flood of federal money I was able to divert to San Diego, we took off for Oxford with the aid of a Guggenheim Fellowship. There we were cordially received by the Experimental Psychology Department and found fine schools for the boys, Peter in Magdalen College School and Michael in the Dragon School. The English atmosphere clearly “took” with both sons. Peter did his undergraduate work at Magdalen College, Oxford, before his history Ph.D. at Harvard, married an English woman, and moved permanently to London. Michael followed his mother ’s footsteps and did his undergraduate work at Swarthmore College, and then took a year out of his graduate work to spend in Cambridge to earn a M.Phil. before going on to a Ph.D. at Yale in economics. He is also now teaching in London. And so, the family all ended up in the academy business—and in London. During the sabbatical, the family enjoyed England, took trips to London and the continent and made good friends in Oxford. But behind the scenes, important matters were being hatched.

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UCSD’s administration had indicated that they wanted to use the year to “normalize” Jean’s position in the university. Jean, in an untenured research position with only partial pay from the university, had by now started to become interested in developmental matters and, besides, it was high time to have her career take priority. After much to-and-fro, UCSD suggested she could be placed in a position in the TEP (Teacher Education Program) but that the appointment would be in the psychology department, which had to approve her appointment as an associate professor. We were gratefully absent from La Jolla as the department agonized about the appointment. Just as things were hanging in the balance, Columbia University put together a tentative package and inquired whether we would be interested in a “his and hers” arrangement, with me becoming chair of the Columbia psychology department and Jean taking the chair at the sister college at Barnard. My immediate reply was that I had no interest in another stint as chair and that was deemed acceptable—I would not have to do that. Just as we planned to stop off in New York on our way back to California, word came that Jean’s appointment at UCSD had been approved and with a sigh of relief we went back in the summer of 1972. A sidelight of this happening and a portent of things to come was an encounter with a psychologist from UCSD. He assured Jean that he was one of her strongest supporters, though we learned soon afterwards that the exact opposite was in fact true. Just another example that sometimes academics are no different from bad people in the outside world. Jean’s career took off once she had a regular faculty position. She found her niche in the area of cognitive development, doing experimental work with infants and developing influential theories, particularly on the emergence of conceptual thinking, and soon became a major figure in her field. With Jean’s position regularized, we were settled once and for all in San Diego. We saw no reason to leave an excellent university and a department still very good. Besides, Jean loved her garden and the California weather and I was willing to settle for the California life for the time being. But I never took to San Diego, apart from its weather, its setting, and sometime tranquillity—which I appreciated. But by my standards, it is far from its claim as “America’s finest city.” My repetitive bitch has been that this sixth largest American city with well

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over a million people has as its major cultural claim a truly fine … zoo. It is a city that is below the American level of cultural support—its moneyed classes do not support the arts and letters the way other cities do. There is no ballet, an on-again-off-again symphony, a reasonable opera, and good theatre in the summer. It is not a city for try-outs. It lags behind the much smaller San Francisco, not to mention Seattle, Montreal, Toronto, and other cities where people and street watching (my major city occupation)—seeing the world at play and work and love—are a source of unending variety. Of course, London and Paris and New York are masters in that respect.

PSYCHOLOGY FOLLIES Starting in 1972, I became active in the Washington life of the American Psychological Association (APA) and its central administration. These were parlous times for the academic–scientific psychologists as a struggle between them and the practitioner–clinicians came to a head. After the war, clinical psychology, at first mostly concentrating on testing and evaluation, but later also a major player in psychotherapy, truly blossomed as the Veterans Administration started to hire these psychologists, and universities committed themselves to major training programs. Clinical psychologists had slowly become the majority of the APA membership and their—frequently justified—resentment at having been left out of the governance of the organization now was paired with the increasing power of their votes. Traditionally, the big gun departments and “eminent” scientists dominated the committees and the presidency of the organization, and as late as the 1950s, its conventions were still held on college campuses. Whatever the imagined slights and problems, the real difficulty lay in the fact that the organization had done very little if anything about the economic interests of the practitioners—their fight with the psychiatric professions, desire for licensing legislation, entry into defense and other medical contracts, and so on. In the end, the organization had to represent the economic interests of the practitioners as well as its traditional concerns. But the academic–scientists had no interest in the economic activities of the APA—their economic concerns were presented by university and college faculties, by teacher and professorial organizations. The

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struggle between the two kinds of psychologists was protracted and sometimes bitter and, eventually, the inevitable split came about with the creation of the American Psychological Society (APS)—a scientifically oriented organization. The majority of the academic–scientific group left the APA though, in the long run, the APA held on to a reasonably large academic constituency and many academics maintained memberships in both organizations. APS has now become big and successful in the halls of Congress—and is beginning to be concerned with the professional and economic problems of practitioners. Despite the split, the APA maintained its image of representing all of psychology. My own disaffection with the APA was only partly related to the clinical–scientific split. There was increasing wheeling and dealing and behind-the-scenes maneuvering in the operation of the organization; partly, this was due to the increasingly large amount of funds that were being collected and spent. At one point, I overheard a conversation in a Washington restaurant between two highly visible members of the practitioners’ faction in which the question was raised: How much it would cost in terms of publicity for one of the members of the pair to become president of the organization—the talk was of manipulation and vote swapping, quite unusual for a previously reasonably pristine organization. Eventually, both of those gentlemen became president of the APA. At another point, an administrator was allowed to resign from the organization because of alleged administrative irregularities, and yet, a few years later, he was hired again at a senior position. On the whole, there was apparently little graft in the organization. A friend once explained to me that we were dealing with people who had few evil aspirations. Being transported to Washington, bedded in a fine hotel, and given excellent restaurant fare was, he assured me, all that was needed to keep a lot of APA members quiescent in the belief that they had in fact managed to squeeze goodies out of their organization. I have maintained my membership in APA under a grandfather clause that permitted me not to pay any dues, while also keeping an eye on an increasingly “professional” organization looking more and more like some medical association primarily concerned with competitive position, increasing incomes, and per-

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sonal visibility. It only marginally concerns itself with matters of knowledge and perception, theory and experiment, which were the topics that raised temperatures in 1952 when I joined the APA. Gone are the days when the presidential addresses at the annual convention dealt with some of the most interesting problems in psychological theory and research. I do not wish to deal in any detail with the problems of the psychological practitioners, primarily clinical psychologists. Despite my clinical degree way back in 1953, I do not know enough about the field to be able to be an informed and constructive critic. I do have enough contact with some of its members to believe that the field trains young people without the depth of experiences and self-knowledge that I believe to be important in the psychological helping professions. Often, after very few years in graduate school and a couple of years as an intern, out comes the shingle. Whatever the status and future of the profession, I believe—as I always have—that their training has no business in Arts and Science faculties of universities. At UCSD, we successfully established a good training program in clinical psychology under the aegis of the Department of Psychiatry. Liberal arts faculties have neither the facility nor the information properly to train practicing clinicians. As long as such training was intricately wedded to scientific training it made some sense, today it does not. And the worst part of the current situation is the free standing independent schools of clinical psychology that award doctoral degrees to people who are marginally trained as clinicians, but are mostly rather superficially introduced to the mainstays of psychological science. These programs exist frequently in educational institutions that have little of the research and library facilities so necessary for the adequate doctoral degree. When they are part of larger universities that control the quality of the program and provide the necessary facilities, they do go in what looks to be the proper direction for a responsible psychological service science. Before the split became inevitable, I tried hard to maintain the role of the “scientists” in the APA—they did not wish their field to be dominated by the often self-serving interests of a few powerseeking clinicians. I tried to push through the notion of a federation of the various interests and debated on and off the floor of the

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APA Council, often long and hard, but it was not to be. In the meantime, I tried to contribute to the real needs of field; I headed a working group on a submission to the federal government about the proper protection of human subjects and edited the Psychological Review from 1970 to 1976. Prior to the big split in the APA and in response to the increasing need for a separate identity for the academic–scientific psychologist, a new organization—the Psychonomic Society—was born, determined to stay small and restricted to active research people. I was active in the group from the beginning, was at one time chair of its governing board, and worked on the publication committee. Their meetings were always well attended and full of scientific fun and games. Toward the end of the 1970s, I was asked by the Board of Governors to explore and eventually create a federation to act in Washington on behalf of behavioral and related sciences. A series of meetings, mostly in airport hotels, created the federation, and most of us were neophytes at this game. For example, in the process of putting through the legal incorporation of the new organization, I employed a much too expensive, fancy Washington law firm, but was easily convinced by a personable charming young lawyer of refugee ancestry by the name of Eule. I was formally the first president of the Federation of Psychological, Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences—and I am delighted to see that now, nearly 20 years later, it is still alive. However, the federation has unfortunately become identified with the APA by accepting their assistance and housing in the APA building, and old attitudes die slowly. As a result, the APS, wrongly I believe, never joined the federation, which became to them a symbol of APA domination. The APA continued to throw its weight around, as I found out later, when in the late 1980s, I served (as a delegate of the Psychonomic Society) on the U.S. National Committee to the International Union of Psychological Science. Once more, I saw the APA and its representatives trying to dominate the psychological scene.

UNIVERSITY FOLLIES In the mid-1970s, I joined the UCSD Committee on Research, the major function of which was to disburse university funds for

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faculty research and travel to scholarly meetings. These were relatively small amounts of money intended to help new faculty, provide seed money, and replace or substitute for extramural funding. I soon noted that the committee did not have as much money as it used to have, that university research funding was drying up. I became chair of the committee in 1975 and ex officio a member of the university-wide committee on which all UC campuses are represented. I was elected chair of this committee and immediately started a survey of current practices that revealed that over five years research funding (in constant dollars) had gone down about 50 percent, that different campuses varied in the amount of funds (per faculty member) that they received, and that nobody was doing anything about it. I drafted, and the committee endorsed, a memorandum to the administration, including the incoming President David Saxon, in which we requested an immediate per faculty increase in funds, as well as a distribution that assured that each campus received the same amount per faculty member. The following year, much of our recommendation was followed and for the next few years, university support for research and travel increased significantly. I recount this tale to illustrate two typical academic symptoms. First, faculty tend to be generally timid (except in emergency situations) and accept the status quo without taking action easily, and second, in universities, the squeaky wheel does in fact get greased—particularly when an issue can be addressed that is not self-serving on the part of the petitioners, or just serving a particular campus or discipline. Twenty years later, when the university was following industrial practice and outsourcing many of their nonacademic activities, I discovered that the janitorial services—provided by an essentially entirely Latina workforce—were paid way below the minimum wage, given no vacation, and no health insurance. After discussing this with my friend Pat Kitcher in the philosophy department, who was well-connected in the upper reaches of the administration, she offered to initiate some action. Within a year, at least some of this discriminatory and substandard employment practice was repaired. Again, it took faculty action—and it was listened to.

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In May 1979, I participated in one of those personally important, exciting, but sub specie aeternitatis rather evanescent, events. For some time, there had been growing unhappiness with our Chancellor William McElroy, McGill’s successor. McElroy was a prominent biologist and I had served on the search committee that developed and presented his candidacy. But Bill was increasingly erratic in his actions and, more importantly, essentially dismissive toward faculty opinion. Among the concerns were a disastrous mishandling of the day-care center and removal of faculty children from the center, plans to lease university lands for condominiums, and interference in faculty concerns in the School of Medicine. In 1976, our department had an unpleasant run-in with McElroy when he sent an intemperate letter about space utilization (one of the holy icons of academics) to our Chair Don Norman, and the whole department (save Tony Deutsch) signed a letter of protest. But the breaking point with the faculty as a whole came when an increasingly tense relationship between McElroy and Paul Saltman reached the boiling point. Saltman had been academic vice chancellor—the senior VC post—and enjoyed great popularity with the faculty because of his openness and fairness. The breaking event was when McElroy decided to exclude supervision of research from Saltman’s office. There had been no consultation, and McElroy publicly said that he did not think it affected academic programs and “I didn’t see any need to consult with them.” (Los Angeles Times, 5/25/79). He remained unmoved despite several interventions by faculty committees and groups asking him to reconsider or to consider compromise plans. Saltman resigned and the faculty senate’s governing body proposed a resolution of “no confidence” based on McElroy’s failure to consult faculty “on issues of deep concern to them, and thus ignoring a traditional custom of shared governance.” (Los Angeles Times, 5/25/79) The faculty met for three hours on May 29th in its best attended meeting ever. Senior faculty spoke on both sides of the resolution and after a heated debate, the faculty senate eventually voted “no confidence” by a decisive 2 to 1 majority (231:116, 21 abstentions). I then moved a request that Saltman withdraw his resignation, which he did the next day, I believe. It was the first, and as of now, the only time that a UC faculty had voted no confidence in its chancellor, and UCSD thus reinforced its reputation as a feisty bunch of academics. The central UC administration, of course, did nothing immediately, but

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within a year Dick Atkinson became our new chancellor and both McElroy and Saltman were gone from their posts. One of the obvious symptoms of the McElroy affair was the attempt by senior professors and administrators, both at the local and state level, to keep the whole business from being publicly aired. To their unhappiness, they failed, but they demonstrated to me the rather pervasive attitudes within universities not to make waves. In part, it is shown in the inability of university and administrative committees to come to some conclusion on how to discontinue incompetent faculty. The slogan seems to be to “protect our own.” That may be appropriate elsewhere, but it should not be practiced in universities where openness and frankness should be the rule. I had another relevant experience in 1980 when I was appointed to chair a secret committee to evaluate the chancellor of another campus. Following very hard work and sometimes ludicrously secret meetings in the back rooms of a local bank, we recommended that, despite superior past service, it was time for the chancellor to recognize his loss of contact with the faculty and his administrative weakness. It took two years before the president of the university acted on the recommendation. The general principle at the upper levels of administration is not to make waves, not to let any scandal, dispute, or strong disagreement come to the surface. My favorite example occurred in a dispute in which a self-important faculty member accused a junior researcher of stealing an idea. There was no substance to the charge, but it was brought to a senior academic administrator for adjudication. After hours of fruitless discussion and an obvious admission by the administration that there was no case to be brought, the sterling administrator suggested a “compromise” and admitted to the junior faculty member, “I am concerned with bringing about a resolution, not justice.” I made one other attempt in the 1980s at influencing university policy when the VCAA Harold Ticho instituted four offices of decanal authority—deans in the four disciplinary areas of the general campus, humanities, natural science, social science, and

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engineering. Up until then, we had a system where department chairs had direct access to the vice chancellor for their needs, comments, and direction. Ticho found that to be too much pressure and interposed the deans. The institution of deans in different areas of scholarly concern is a well-established tradition, but I believe that to be in error. It is in part responsible for the artificial separation of the various fields and is harmful to better interdisciplinary cooperation. I argued hard, though not long in the absence of support in the faculty senate, against this traditional method of pitting faculties and areas of instruction and research against each other. Departments would fight for goodies with their dean and the deans would fight for goodies for their disciplinary areas. I suggested that functional deanships (for space, appointment slots, promotions) made more sense, with departments and their chairs having access to all of the deans. In that fashion, we would achieve broader and better ways of having educational and research needs influencing the full range of university policy. In the end, the important functions in a university lie in the departments. It is the most direct way for faculty to express and formulate opinions, and I did not think that they should lose their power. But I lost and they did. My major exposure to university affairs came in the 1980s when I was appointed to the Committee on Academic Personnel (CAP). At that time, all faculty appointments and promotions (both regular campus and Medical School) had to be evaluated by CAP. Later on, some of the less contentious appointments were handed to the deans. During my service on CAP, the deans were given the files before we saw them and added their comments, a step that I saw as possibly prejudicing later actions—both of these were developments that gave me more reasons to justify my earlier action in opposing the decanal structure. Anyway, CAP is without doubt the hardest working committee in the California universities. The committee meets once a week, but the files to be discussed are available for the preceding several days and have to be carefully read for the forthcoming discussions. In fact, CAP is only an advisory committee to the VCAA, but that person rarely goes against the judgments of CAP, and when they do, it’s usually with some discussion and, frequently, hand wringing. I found service on the committee fascinating. Its discussions revealed the

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structure of departments, often their relation to each other, and also the administration’s values and strategies as one found out where the appointments went and which departments were fat or lean with good or not so good faculty appointments. CAP ’s discussions also revealed hidden and not so hidden prejudices and biases—including racist ones. Actually, the most obvious case of the latter I encountered some years later when my department made an affirmative action appointment that was first bounced by CAP with the assent of the VCAA. When a friend and I took it on ourselves to challenge the action, we came up against a bald-faced attempt to make excuses when nothing stood in the way of the appointment other than racist opposition to affirmative action and a craven VCAA. It took much pressure to have them agree to the appointment, which should have been made—on the evidence of the file—without much ado. At one point, we were told that affirmative action appointments needed extra scrutiny, specifically to try to evaluate the likelihood that they would eventually be given tenure. Pointing out that such a judgment—how a candidate might do eventually—was never made in the case of other appointments, we suggested that the reason for this course of action was obvious racism. The response from the VCAA was to deny ever having said any such thing! I also made good friends on CAP; Helen Ranney, one of the stars of our Medical School and a wise and often funny academic medic; and Gerry Doppelt, a veteran of the radical 1960s and now a judicious philosopher of ethics. CAP often illustrated the clash of principles between faculty and administration. It was no better illustrated than in the case of Joe Watson—our African American VC for Student Affairs. Joe had come to UCSD in the early 1960s as a young chemist, but as one of the few Black academics on campus, he soon became entangled in administrative duties. By the 1980s, he was a vice chancellor and still an associate professor of chemistry (which he had not professed for years). Dick Atkinson wanted to reward his unquestionably valuable service to the university and proposed him for advancement to full professor of chemistry. CAP balked and said that it could not give somebody such a title when he had done no chemistry for years. We suggested, for example, some new professorship, such as “of administration.” But Atkinson wanted the original title and came

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to a meeting of CAP—a most unusual event for the chancellor. In a break in the discussion, he asked me why he was having all this trouble. I pointed out that there really wasn’t any trouble, that the faculty was doing their thing and he was doing his—there really was no middle ground and he would have to do what he considered right, he wasn’t going to persuade the faculty. He didn’t and he did override our recommendation and promoted Joe, which was probably the right thing to do, but Dick wanted our support, which he couldn’t have. Dick Atkinson stayed with UCSD for 10 years. I had more contact with him than would be usual because I had known him as a psychologist, we had shared common research interests going back to the late 1950s, and Jean had been in high school with him in Oak Park, Illinois. Dick had a fine career ending up as head of the National Science Foundation before coming to UCSD. His selection was something of a surprise, but we were very pleased to have a psychologist as head of the university. In the end, that did not make much of a difference. Dick was a superb “outside” chancellor—he knew how to communicate with the conservative San Diego community, he enhanced the position and reputation of the university, and he was a first-rate money raiser, establishing a large number of endowed professorial chairs in addition to significant donations, (e.g., from Dr. Seuss’s widow, Audrey Geisel, for our library). But he had made the decision to leave the running of university entirely in the hands of the senior academic vice chancellor and here his choice of people let him down. His first VC, Harold Ticho, came from outside UCSD as did his second, Marjorie Caserio. They were strangers in a feisty tight-knit community. Ticho was a physicist and he did well by the physics department, but showed little understanding for the humanities and social sciences. Under his administration, our outstanding literature department lost its lustre. His successor Marjorie Caserio was a chemist, a passive administrator apparently dedicated to the status quo. She was followed by Atkinson’s third choice, Robert Dynes, who within a year or so became chancellor when Atkinson ascended to the Presidency of the University of California. It is too early to make any judgements about Dynes, but he has decided to continue an illustrious research career and, apart from significant and important efforts on behalf of diversity, is little in evi-

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dence. Atkinson’s refusal to interfere with his ill-chosen vice chancellors also made him not particularly useful to the psychology department. He refused to intervene when we might have held on to Jay McClelland with an appointment for his physician wife Heidi in the medical school, and we subsequently lost David Rumelhart, one of our own home-grown stars. In general, the quality of UCSD faculty declined on his watch, I believe primarily due to his outside—inside style of administration. But then, his background in Oak Park, Illinois, had him destined for the boardroom and he brought a boardroom style to academia. I had not given up the directorship of CHIP when I stepped down from the chair of the department and in fact kept it until 1990—after which the Center went into a general decline due to the lack of interest, incompetence, or self-interest of succeeding directors. When CHIP eventually became the private research resource for its director, it had lost all reasonable functions. It is unfortunate that successive directors could not work up any interest or concern for the Center, failed to make CHIP a common enterprise and used it to pursue special interests, or did not accept the collegial and educational responsibilities of the post. We had attracted a sizable NIMH (National Institute of Mental Health) funded training grant back in the 1960s and 70s that variously supported graduate students and post-docs and some collaborative research. I was always careful to use any CHIP money for general faculty and educational needs, well-spread among the CHIP membership. By the time the decline of CHIP set in, the grant stopped being a common enterprise, the amounts shrank from year to year, and eventually, the latest director couldn’t bother even to try to renew it. One of the interesting aspects of University of California policy, which usually controls its subsidiary units quite strictly, is that ORUs (Organized Research Units) such as centers, laboratories, and institutes are potential personal fiefdoms of their directors who can make appointments and create subunits without any checks other than the usual appointment and promotion boards. There was no “faculty ” to consult. As a result, I was able, literally by the stroke of a pen, to create the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition for Michael Cole when he joined UCSD

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and also the Cognitive Science Laboratory (CSL) as Don Norman and David Rumelhart’s work expanded and needed better institutional grounding. The latter had originally been the LNR (Lindsay, Norman, Rumelhart) group, but then was renamed to CSL as large grants and post-doctoral fellowship poured in from the Sloan Foundation, the System Development Corporation, and others. CHIP was becoming more and more a holding corporation for a number of very successful enterprises. In the meantime, plans for the IIS (the Institute for Information Systems that existed primarily as a holding operation on paper only) never matured, and we had essentially an empty institute waiting to be peopled. As Don Norman’s operation grew in size and importance, we needed a more embracing institution, and again, by a quirk of UC regulations, all we needed to do was to change the name of IIS to Institute for Cognitive Science and there it was. Years later, the name was changed again to Institute for Neural Computation with a quite different direction and different personnel. One of the most pleasing consequences of the grants raised by ICS was that I was able to offer Geoffrey Hinton a post-doctoral position with us. Eventually, Don left psychology to start, together with several psychologists including Jean, the Department of Cognitive Science. Rumors at the time were flying fast as to the reason for the “split,” but while there were personality conflicts between Don and some other psychologists (not me!), the reason was that psychology did not offer the opportunity for the kind of free-floating exploration of human and machine minds that a combination of psychology, anthropology, computational and artificial intelligence, and neuroscience provided in a new department. The only real conflict Don and I ever had was in 1983–84 when he concluded an agreement with the San Diego branch of the Office of Naval Research to make their AI section part of the ICS. It included automatic university research positions for the ONR folk, and the draft document lacked safeguards against the ONR mission and practices (military and classified) from intruding on academic prerogatives, such as free research and development. I succeeded in having the document amended (with the help of Don Gentner) and Don called a discussion meeting, which was marked by more heat than light but didn’t stop the plans. In the end,

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nothing happened about the proposed affiliation; I do not know why. I found the behavior of one of our “left” voices most disappointing. He claimed to oppose the ONR move, but never said a word at the open meeting, and six months later, was said to have accepted ONR funds for his own work abroad. Inevitably, I made some mistakes, usually because I misread some people as far as character was concerned. The few included one who would support appointments in the department and then oppose them to the administration. He did not realize that saying one thing in one situation and the opposite in another misreads the social fabric, that people talk to each other. This kind of duplicitous behavior could eventually be properly diverted, but it took a lot of extra work. At one point a spouse came to my office for advice—she could not stand her spouses’ lying anymore and was planning to leave him. But she never did. In another case, sheer disagreement led to a threat of dire legal action and multimillion dollar law suits. I failed to see the incipient signs of such character defects, as I failed to detect prejudicial attitudes that would eventually spill over into teaching. On the other hand, I succeeded fairly well in predicting research and teaching abilities—important characteristics. If some of this makes me sound like a curmudgeon—so I was. But hopefully always with a sense of humor as flavoring. Years later, I discovered that during the late 60s and early 70s there arose a term in university meetings and committees—“to mandlerize” (i.e., to cut out the bullshit and get down to brass tacks).

AND EVERYTHING ELSE In 1972, I was invited by the Karolinska Institute to a conference on emotion in Stockholm. It was a watershed conference, not so much in content, which had more to do with running up flags and taking positions than with genuine scientific exchanges, but in significance for the study of emotion. The period in emotion theory that started with William James and the James–Lange theory ended in the 1960s. The end came in large part due to Stanley Schachter ’s novel work integrating cognitive factors into emotional experience and its determination.

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Clearly, many changes were taking place and, in retrospect, the Stockholm conference marked the beginning of the flood of emotion studies and theories that grew to a tidal wave by the 1990s. The conference also marked the end of a period as it was the last appearance together of some of the important men in the study of emotion of the preceding decades, such as Delgado, MacLean, and Rioch. An interesting part of the conference was that it was financed by the Swiss drug giant, HoffmannLaRoche, and, for the 1970s, no expense was spared. We ended up on an excursion boat touring the Stockholm harbor, with food aplenty and wine and liquor flowing very freely indeed. I found myself in the early hours of the morning sitting on a grand staircase with Joe Brady—who had offered me a job in Washington 20 years earlier—drinking the last bottle of B&B on board. The conference also gave me the opportunity to spend time with the Swedish (though originally Finnish) psychologist Marianne Frankenhaeuser, a personable and inventive psychologist who made some of the important contributions on emotion and the autonomic nervous system. After I gave up my editorship of the Psychological Review I had the time and the inclination to accept appointments to the editorial boards of psychological journals in emotion, cognition, and related topics. I enjoyed reviewing manuscripts. It gave me the opportunity to find out what was new and exciting, as well as what was boring and hackneyed. At least journal editors seemed to believe something like that as the number of journals for which I reviewed manuscripts reached 15 at its peak. As I approached retirement, I was, quite properly, “phased out” though I remained on the board of several journals. Just as I started to lose interest in the current research scene, the current research scene receded from my reach. In 1983, Jean was invited to become a guest lecturer at Beijing Normal University for six weeks. At the same time, CHIP was host to a productive and very able young Chinese researcher Chen Lin. Lin offered to inquire from his home university about the possibility of inviting me. And so it was. In the fall of 1984, Jean took off for Beijing and I followed some three weeks later on my way to

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the University of Science and Technology (UST) at Hefei.5 At the invitation of Tokyo University, I stopped in Tokyo for a few days. My stay in Tokyo was most disappointing. I had admired, and still do, several aspects of Japanese culture but found contemporary university life disappointing. It was in part a reflection of the Japanese custom of deference to authority, which is what primarily turned me off. After my lecture, I asked for questions and called on a graduate student who had raised his hand. It became apparent that I had made an error because questions must first be asked by senior professors, and so on down the line. I don’t know about other fields of knowledge, but one of the accompanying symptoms is that Japanese psychology is not particularly creative or interesting. However, the Japanese have translated several of my books, and I shouldn’t complain. But then, I was only there for a few days. Jean met me at the rather dilapidated Beijing airport and we proceeded to our two-room “suite” at the foreign consultant’s residence. The building itself was a leftover of stolid Soviet unimaginativeness, but the population was something else—a true rainbow of people and professions. Here were all the specialties and generalities that China wanted to import into its culture, especially university culture. There were architects and photographers, computer specialists and writers, as well as academics in dozens of disciplines. We had the motor pool at our (actually Jean’s) disposal and all one had to do was call up and a car with driver would pick us up when we needed it. Outside the building was the never-ending stream of 10 abreast cyclists, a road one crossed with trepidation, although in the end with little damage. We enjoyed high Chinese cuisine on our trips around town, though the cafeteria at the residence served good food. Eventually, I was off to Hefei. The University of Science and Technology was off in the “sticks,” having been moved there during the cultural revolution in order to bring the university out of the Beijing concentration and “to the people.” My trip was by Chinese sleeper, which 5

I do not intend to repeat the usual fine encounters with people and structures that the tourist finds in China. I will discuss primarily those events that were specific to my visit.

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meant sleeper cars with short beds and thin blankets and bitter cold, but also friendly people and even translating volunteers. In the morning in the dining car where the Chinese ate their usual broth and meat, I was offered a European breakfast that consisted of two fried eggs and bread with a real cup of coffee. Chen Lin met me in Hefei and I was off to the rather primitive guest house at UST. Again, I found a small band of foreigners—American, Japanese, Brits, Scandinavians—many of them there to teach foreign languages, but also physicists and computer specialists. Hot water was only available for an hour in the morning and evening and heating was sporadic. But the group of foreigners had adapted, had contrived an ingenious method of spicing up the morning gruel, and the spirit was buoyant and cooperative. The student body at UST was highly selected; some were as young as 13 (who came with their mothers), others were from all over China, self-conscious about having been selected for this elite institution. I lectured on human memory and thought and had an enthusiastic and attentive audience. The English speakers would throng around after lectures and ask and argue—including one young man who was incensed when I had indicated that the human mind/brain was not literally a computer. One evening, I was given a dinner by the vice chancellor with good conversation about China’s plans after the cultural revolution. There was the usual Chinese procession of dishes and the abrupt end to the dinner as soon as eating was done. Another evening, I was taken to the local Chinese opera (Hefei was a town of 1 million plus and therefore had its own opera). There I sat among chatting, eating Chinese trying hard to make sense of the opera, which was a visual feast as well as a new auditory experience. Hefei was the only place in China where I would be stared at (as a foreigner) when walking in town. And always, there was Chen Lin’s help and hospitality—a fine experience. Back to Beijing via a sojourn in Nanjing (the most European of the Chinese towns I saw) and its sightseeing stops. After Jean finished teaching, we were handed a wad of money and a ticket to Xian and then on to Guangjou (Canton) and Hong Kong—our tourist rewards from the Chinese government. Xian (the town of

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the buried terra-cotta army) again provided a Soviet-style guest house but no immediate plan to have us leave—our sometime guide thought we would probably have a better chance of getting a seat on a flight out through the Chinese travel service—and he was right. In the meantime, we wandered around by ourselves for a week, went to Chinese rather than tourist restaurants, and waited. Eventually, two seats on a flight to Guangjou were found and we were on our way back. One of the more rewarding chores was my membership in the committee that wrote the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) in psychology for the Educational Testing Service (ETS) in Princeton. The GRE is a testing instrument for admission to graduate schools throughout the university system. Primarily, departments use the Verbal and Quantitative scores (though biased against minorities), but the subject tests (such as psychology) are sometimes used to assess undergraduate preparation. We had a fine committee most of the time and the attempt to make the test represent current psychological knowledge was serious fun. The visits to Princeton also gave me the opportunity to spend an evening with my ego ideal, Peter Hempel. During the same general period between the 1970s and early 1980s, I made several trip to East Germany (the DDR—the German Democratic Republic). The highpoint was the International Congress of Psychology held in Leipzig in 1980, well organized in good German fashion and surprisingly free of political censorship or influence. Though there was one incident I remember well. We were driving with the Rumelharts on the Autobahn to Leipzig when we were stopped at a classical speed trap (usual speed limit suddenly broken by a steep reduction in the limit). We were halted by the appropriately dreaded VOPO (Volkspolizei). After first telling me (the driver) that I had broken driving laws (speeding), they then started worrying about a Berlin-registered (rented) car and our right to drive it. I first reacted by pretending not to speak German and insisting on our status as honored guests of the International Congress. When that didn’t work, I lapsed into German and argued the speed trap. The Rumelharts were quite intimidated and David kept urging me to stop arguing lest we end in a Stasi prison. When I was asked to either accompany the VOPO to their nearest station for

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further “investigation”, or pay a fine of about $50, we paid. Just like an old-fashioned Georgia speed trap—plus ça change! The Congress went very well; obviously the regime wanted to make a good impression. However, my major contacts in the DDR during those years were with the folks at the psychology department of the Humboldt University in Berlin. Under the leadership of Friedhart Klix, they had become, if not the best, certainly one of the major experimental departments in Europe. Balancing his political contacts with a religious devotion to keeping his department first rate and free of politics, Klix was masterful without making any important political compromises. I had the impression that he outplayed the party in the political chess game. The few times I visited there, I always enjoyed the company of my psychological colleagues. I was struck by the contrast of political repression and the claim to inheritance of the German left tradition and the sometime hope of some of my German friends that the regime might be reformable. Alas, they were wrong and I often wonder how they fare in the depressed East Germany of today. In the 1980s, we went through the disastrous Reagan tax cuts and deficit spending, which indirectly led to the cuts in social programs in the late 1990s. But we had to do something about the windfall of money that we, in a reasonably high tax bracket, experienced. We decided to give the money saved on our taxes to left–socialist organizations, which were ITT, In These Times, the best of the left-wing weeklies and to DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America, that I had joined some years previously when they were still DSOC, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee.

THE FESTSCHRIFT In 1989, I turned 65, and Jennifer Dorfman, my last Ph.D., finished her thesis. The University of California had instituted a partial retirement plan that allowed Jean and me to work for two quarters and to be off for one quarter and the summer (six months in all), and thoughts turned toward retirement. I closed my laboratory, though I kept on writing (can’t stop!) and teaching, but clearly my academic life was slowing down. The culmi-

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nation of this move toward retirement was “my party.” My old friends Rochel Gelman (whom I had advised to leave Toronto back in the early 1960s and who went on to a distinguished career in child development) and Randy Gallistel announced that, with my retirement nigh, they would have a party in Los Angeles on the occasion of the Society of Experimental Psychologists (SEP) meeting there in March 1991. At that time, SEP still attracted a great many old friends and acquaintances of mine and it seemed a perfect idea. Good and close friends like Anne and Gus Craik, occasional visitors from Toronto and later British neighbors in Edinburgh, joined us as we hunkered down with them at the Bel Air for the festivities. Rochel even promised to lay in a good supply of my favorite Hungarian salami. Both Peter and Michael showed up, Willi traveled from New Haven, my ex-Slovak compatriot Andrew Ortony came, and many other old friends, such as Lynn Cooper, Dottie Jameson, and Leo Hurvich, appeared on the scene. But, as the saying goes, little did I know that the party really was the occasion of presenting me with my Festschrift, lovingly put together by Craik, Kessen, and Ortony and, of course, Jean; not to forget my favorite publisher, Larry Erlbaum, who made sure the book was done and ready and also presented me with a leather-bound copy. The party and the unexpected presentation of the book was a huge success. The book covered the three areas of my interest—cognition, memory, and emotion—and was written by a true galaxy of talents, though more importantly good friends. Many of the contributors could not make it to the party, among them, Ellen Berscheid, an old friend and a welcome fan of my emotion work, and the Pattersons and Gleitmans. I appreciated all the good things my friends and colleagues said about me in the midst of a serious intellectual presentation, but probably no comment more than Henry Gleitman’s tribute to my bullshit detector and my readiness to laugh at myself and at the world. It was all indeed a fine crown to a good academic life. Finally, in 1994 when I reached 70, I retired under the terms of my phased retirement contract. I started my quite reasonable University of California pension as well as my social security pension. Other bits and pieces of pension, including $35 a month (my University of Toronto pension after five years of service) and over $2,500 a year, which I had started at age 55 from my five Harvard

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years, all added up to a reasonable retirement fund. The University of California automatically gives its retiring professors emeritus status which continued all my university facilities, including my office; just no teaching, no committees, and no voting on personnel matters. Easy losses to sustain. I had no more graduate students though, and I missed that—the companionship and the collaborations. And despite my ambivalence about teaching—I did it well but was not enamored of it—I also eventually missed some of the undergraduate contacts. In particular, I felt the loss of an undergraduate course I had taught for the last 15 years or so. I had decided that undergraduates were too often treated as receptacles and I wanted to view them more actively, more like graduate students. The seminar took in some 15 students who could choose any topic related to any aspect of psychology, but then had to do their own library research (with guidance and direction available from me, if wanted), present a talk, write a paper, and participate in discussions of their and other seminar presentations. The students loved it, and the seminar convinced me that undergraduate teaching could be much better if we only had the inclination of the faculty and the funds to make such small courses the norm. For large courses, I did not really mind the lecturing as such, though I never got rid of some initial “stage fright.” I always encouraged and enjoyed the give and take of question periods. And there were always a few very bright students in my classes who challenged me and reminded me that the future of American intellectual life was not all bleak. I was going to miss that.

THE BOOK COLLECTOR Retirement gave me the opportunity to spend more time on a continuing hobby—more of an avocation—collecting first editions. Collecting is integral to the pack-rat syndrome, evidence for which pervades and partly motivates this volume. It is therefore no surprise that I was a stamp collector when young and am now a collector of first editions. I had picked up stamp collecting anew in the late 1940s, but my interest petered out within 10 years or so. The obsession with books—for what is a genuine collector if not obsessed—started slowly. I have been attracted by old, not currently

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available, books ever since I started buying books on my own. I liked antiquarian bookstores and every now and then would pick a book that interested me intrinsically. My serious collecting started sometime around my early interest in George Bernard Shaw and George Orwell. When buying their books, it seemed reasonable to buy first rather than later editions and that extended then to Graham Greene, the history of psychology, and various occasional volumes. Going through bookstores in Switzerland in the 1940s, I found several first editions of Freud’s works as well as an author well known to every European left winger, B. Traven. He was the author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre—made famous by the film, though his Das Totenschiff (The Death Ship) is the earlier and literarily more famous book. He was a left-wing writer, but not a proletarian one in the “socialist realism” style—at first sensitive to working people’s experiences in the West and eventually writing his evocative novels of the Mexican peasants, particularly in the Chiapas province. Traven had been a participant in the radical workers movement in Germany of the early 20s and took part in the “Bavarian Soviet.” Condemned to death in absentia, he fled, eventually to Mexico, and he always denied the earlier incarnation. I started to collect Traven in earnest once I had more space at home after I remade Peter ’s room into a study lined with bookcases, and when Jean’s father ’s demise provided an inheritance of a haphazard collection of some first editions. I now specialize in German and English language first editions of Traven’s, while still keeping my eye on my other authors. In the process, I have acquired a pen, or rather e-mail, pal, Ed Treverton, antiquarian book dealer in Asheville, North Carolina, who owns the most extensive Traven library—over 1,000 different editions in many different languages. My collection of over 200 pales. I was very pleased when I could offer some German language assistance to Treverton when he was preparing his definitive bibliography of Traven. When the bibliography appeared in early 1999, I was delighted by his generous note of acknowledgment—I had finally broken out of the narrow confines of psychology monographs! Actually, my initial book collecting efforts took place during the war in Germany. I ran across some Nazi literature and thought it a good idea to pick it up to preserve the lunacy of that movement. In the process, I also picked up a first edition of the

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first volume of Hitler ’s Mein Kampf and a couple of other interesting volumes. The most fascinating was something called Kultur in USA, subtitled The reality of a mass hysteria and published in 1943. It has chapters on everything from medicine to film, including several chapters on the influence of the Jews. The authors were primarily academics, including some who had taught in the United States. I have been able to locate only one other copy in the New York public library. I added to this collection some German leaflets addressed to U.S. soldiers urging them to desert. Altogether, there were some two dozen volumes and some of this material should be of interest for purposes of serious research. It is the only part of my book collection that I was interested in selling. However, there is a danger with this material because neo-Nazi groups are always on the look-out for such stuff. In the end, I donated the collection to the UCSD library’s rare book department.

LONDON Since 1965, we had regularly gone to Europe in the summer— first every other year and then, from the 1980s on, every year— more or less. Our base was usually London and we lived in a variety of rented flats and houses. In 1981, Jean had become tired of setting up a home in a different place every year and started sniffing around London. The very first week, she came home and said she had found the ideal place. It was so and by 1982 we had a house in Hampstead—where we have been ever since. We took a mortgage on our La Jolla house, which by now had gone up more than 12 fold in value since we bought it in 1966 and bought the leasehold in London outright. We have been very lucky that my old and now eminent student and friend Karalyn Patterson and her husband Roy, living in Cambridge, have been looking after our house when we are in California and using it as a London pied à terre. So, I had a place to live and to work, in a city I loved and with many friends around. I learned early how to enjoy and benefit from retirement and have—sometimes tiresomely—communicated my conclusions to my aging friends. Essentially, I found two important components: Letting go and not looking back, but have something to look forward to. As to the former, I was able to cut off from my past research and involvements, without aban-

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doning or forgetting them. But I soon realized that, as one stops contributing to a field, one is soon part of the background for the younger generations and that one must never ask, “Don’t they know who I am?” Some do and some don’t and having done the best one could in the past, one enjoys that and easily forgets about as it recedes. On the other hand, particularly for an academic for whom retirement may mean little change except no more teaching, it is useful to have a task at hand. I had at first the completion of my human nature book at hand, and then the present undertaking, which is good for another year as I write in 1998. After four years of retirement, I have been rarely bored and look forward to more of it. The partial retirement plan of the University of California seemed to fit us perfectly. It made it possible to retire to twothirds time. We went from three quarters to two quarters of teaching, but the UC pension system was activated for the third quarter so that the effective loss of income was very small. And the summer quarter was now free, in the past it had usually been spent doing research at UCSD, and with my laboratory closed in 1991, I had stopped applying for research grants anyway. These developments in our UCSD arrangement thus made London a second home. We felt at home in London from the beginning. Hampstead had the great advantage that it still had a little “neighborhood” feel, with everything—post office, bank, supermarket, grocer, fishmonger, pharmacy—just around the corner, and the center of London 15 minutes away by underground. And there is our enjoyment of the superlative multiplicity of London theater with opera and ballet generously sprinkled in. Apart from the fact that my more than 60 year attachment to England was still going strong, we have good friends here. Alan Isaacs and I have continued our friendship from the 1930s without interruption and he and his family are old friends. There is also Tuffy (Isaacs) and her husband Adrian and eventually, our son Peter in London. Peter is now an established historian at Cambridge University, mostly of Victorian England. He married Ruth Ehrlich, a London free-lance violinist and with all the virtues one

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can ask of a daughter-in-law. After a brief sojourn in Princeton, they moved permanently to London and presented us with our two delightful grandchildren, Benjamin and Hannah. There are many other good friends: Tim Shallice, whom I had known as a fellow cognitive psychologist and lefty for many years, and his psychoanalyst Italian wife Maria Tallandini who live just a couple of blocks from us; Brian Butterworth, whom I met at University College, and Diane Laurillard from the Open University and their great children, Amy and Anna, who adopted us as grandparents on the occasion of a visit to La Jolla; Jean’s colleague Annette Karmiloff-Smith; William Marslen Wilson and Lolly Tyler, who moved to Cambridge but maintained a pied à terre around the corner from us; John Morton and his psychiatrist wife Guinevere; Tony Marcel who drops in occasionally from Cambridge and affords high level talk about consciousness; and Celia Heyes, my good friend from UCL; and many others. We had indeed found a home. Actually, more of a home than La Jolla because we have many more good friends in London than in California. In the summer of 1999, our son Michael announced that he had accepted a professorship in economics at London University’s Royal Holloway College. Now, the whole family lived in London. One very rewarding relationship was and is with Geoffrey Hinton. Probably one of the best two or three minds I ever met, a problem solver par excellence, a lefty in politics, and a joy just to talk with, and in some sense an adopted son. I first met Geoffrey on the phone when we were appointing post-doctoral positions in cognitive science in the 1980s and I was asked to call him at Sussex University. His first response was that he was heartbroken that he could not accept because he had just, within the last day or so, accepted a position at the University of Maryland. I convinced him that calling them after such a short interval and informing them that he had changed his mind would not be bad form, so he did and came to La Jolla. We became good friends and he was one of the builders of the new connectionist movement, though he was less committed to its reductionist program than some of its more fervent defenders. Geoffrey was intrigued by the problem solving and puzzle solution aspects of neural modeling. After he left California, we met frequently in London and elsewhere. He married Roz, an unfortunate union of two fine people who just

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didn’t quite jell in the end; she died tragically in Toronto where Geoffrey had moved after stays in Baltimore and elsewhere. When Geoffrey had expressed some interest in Canada, I called an old buddy, Gus Craik, at the U of T and Hinton ended up there with a big modeling shop of his own. Eventually though, he came back to Britain and I was a spectator in the comedy of British academic deferences. I had heard from friends in Toronto and elsewhere that Geoffrey was negotiating with University College London, my English home base. Not a word was whispered about this in London. One day I was chatting with the head of the department when he mentioned that some space soon to become available had to be reserved for some very important possible appointment. And I said, “Oh, you are reserving it for Hinton?” Consternation, and then, in practically a whisper, came a warning not to mention this to anybody. I asked how far negotiations had come and was told in strict confidence that Geoffrey would come next week to talk with the bigwigs at the university. A few days later, I saw Tim Shallice, a major cog in these negotiations and asked him how negotiations with Geoffrey were coming along; “WHAT?” was the response and Tim insisted that no more should be said about this. I pointed out to Tim and others that the projected move was open gossip in the States but that didn’t help. I had broken the ring of secrecy that makes British academics able to play the game of being important and government-like—and now increasingly aspiring to be comparable to the best of corporate life. Geoffrey came to London and started his own unit with Tim Shallice’s new Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience, arguably now the best organization of its kind.

WORK AND PLAY Academic salaries have not generally kept pace with other professions. The exception seems to be the starting salary for new Ph.D.s. For example, my starting salary at Harvard in 1953, adjusted for inflation, would today be about $30,000. Today, that salary at the better paying universities would be well into the $40,000s. On the other hand, my starting salary at UCSD in 1965, adjusted for inflation, would be over $90,000 today, which is well above the salaries for young professors today.

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I don’t remember money ever being a major problem after I stopped paying alimony in 1960. We never had any extravagant habits or needs, were always able to adjust to our reasonable incomes, and starting in 1965, were able to take biannual and, soon, annual summer trips to Europe. Restricted early circumstances can lead to a preoccupation with finances or to a sense of relief and release. I often think of my father ’s Dickensian response at tax time once he had a comfortable income, “It feels very good to be paying taxes again.” I tended to experience the relief of not worrying about money anymore after the 1938 to 1942 period of relative poverty. In later years we lived very well indeed. By the late 1980s, we had a consistent income over $200,000 per year, in the beginning with the help of annual nontaxable gifts from Jean’s parents. But most of our income, consisted of university salaries, some small book income and eventually, the reasonable university pensions. We both pursued all available salary increases and promotions of course. However, we have never adopted the strategy of using and even actively obtaining outside offers in order to make our university match the higher offers. I have always thought that this kind of competitive behavior belongs in the world of commerce and not in universities. Our incomes permitted expensive vacations and restaurants and, to my peace of mind, no need to play the stock market. Even though those years were accompanied by the continually rising market, I never felt tempted by it. I always felt relieved not to have to worry what the market would do, to study the very boring business pages of the newspaper every day, to investigate the often unsavory doings of big companies, or to invest in those activities. Our savings went into low yielding municipal bonds and similar investments, and our major financial enrichment came from the passive ownership of two houses. The La Jolla house appreciated nearly 2,000 percent over 30 years, and our little house in London grew in value some 700 percent over 15 years. The end result had the pleasant consequence that whenever I had trouble falling asleep at night, I would start thinking about our finances. I have returned to Vienna occasionally and regularly since the death of my cousin Suse to look after her retarded daughter Hanni. Hanni is very well cared for by the Austrian welfare system and a legal guardian, a local lawyer. With some money left by

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Suse from her business activities in women’s clothes, I make sure that Hanni gets any luxuries she needs. When I am gone, my son Peter will continue that last family duty in the wake of the Holocaust. On my visits, I try to spend an evening with old friends from the New York Austrian youth days, Thomas and Mia Schönfeld. Thomas has retired as professor of chemistry from the University of Vienna and between the two of them they recreate old memories of both New York and Vienna. Jean and I have done a lot of traveling since money stopped being a major barrier and since partial retirement gave us more freedom of time. In particular, we have enjoyed cruises aboard the three ships of the Seabourn Line. Luxurious, small, and all that without being pompously posh, or being hassled by tour directors and other busybodies. Some of our trips with and without Seabourn stand out in particular, and I comment briefly, being a tourist and not an expert. A safari in Kenya gave me one of my few positive nature experiences. Seeing the herds of animals, and experiencing the embracing and promising quiet of the Savannah at night—accentuated by the occasional animal cry—was nearly mystical. Visiting and running with Shirley Strum’s baboon troops at her research station was a rare insight into how this kind of work is done and seeing real animals in real environments (rather than zoos). Her and David Western’s home outside Nairobi was a fine contrast. We visited Leningrad—a stunning city, grand and grandiose, but then (in the 1980s) inhabited by grey and dour people. We truly enjoyed Costa Rica at an enchanting ranch hotel overlooking the beautiful country. Bali, which we have visited twice, is a beautiful place with attractive people, wonderful Gamelan music, dances, and tableaux. We have been to Australia a couple of times, and we truly enjoy Sidney, a city to live in if it weren’t so far away. One trip went to an island in the Great Barrier Reef followed by a trip to the rainforests, Cairns and Darwin—a different Australia. In 1992, we went to Jerusalem to reward ourselves for having stopped smoking. I found the city and its overwhelming number of historical, religious, and architectural pointers absolutely stunning, trying to reconstruct what Jesus’ path and role might really have been and wondering about the primitiveness of David’s castle. I was appalled at the photo opportunities that went with a priest carrying a cross on the Via Do-

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lorosa, but I was both appalled and embarrassed by the behavior of the Israelis, and particularly the Israeli police, toward the Palestinians. It was condescending, sometimes cruel, usually dismissive. There wasn’t much I could do about feeling ashamed of being a Jew except to increase my contributions to the peace groups in Israel. Through a number of friends, we were able to make our academic and office basis in London at the Psychology Department of University College London. University College is the largest component of the very large University of London and its Psychology Department always one of top two or three in Britain. In the early 1990s, Bob Audley, chair of the department, suggested that we might benefit from visiting professorships at the college. These are appointments without term that had to go through a regular appointment process, and made us full members of the faculty with all the privileges, such as library use and computer access. We have greatly benefitted from this arrangement. In October 1997, the Department of Psychology at University College celebrated its 100th anniversary. It was a well-done occasion with reminiscences and good stories, old pictures and new people, and I offered a toast on behalf of its many grateful visitors over the years. The one jarring note was accolades for a recently deceased product of the department, H. J. Eysenck. Despite the fact that the group had come to terms with Cyril Burt’s conjuring of data and coworkers, they were unable to do the same with Eysenck. I found it embarrassing to listen to appreciations of a man who had a well-deserved reputation for manipulating his and other people’s findings to fit his theories, whose “missteps” were even admitted by his admirers, whose theories of the genetic basis of racial and individual intelligence were questioned even by defenders of the genetic foundation of intelligence, and who claimed, in research funded by the tobacco industry, that lung cancer was caused by an inherited personality characteristic. I had encountered his machinations as early as the late 1950s when he changed data from a research paper of mine to fit his theory, and as late as in the 1980s at a conference in Bad Homburg when he presented “evidence” for certain correlations between brain

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functions and intelligence that had to be made up. Many people were taken in by Eysenck’s apparent quiet rationality that deceived the innocent. And so, we have been going back and forth between La Jolla and London every six months. I have kept my office in La Jolla, with computer and stereo system. The latter is and has been my constant companion at work. In contrast to many others, I like input while I work. Usually music—and these days that means opera, some symphonic and chamber music, and selections like Dietrich, Piaf, and Trenet for nostalgia. In between, I tune in to newscasts or PBS talk. In London, I have a desk in the department, but I work at home where I have my computer and a radio. And then, in contrast to La Jolla, a city full of life and theatre.

HEALTH With retirement inevitably comes the concern with one’s health. I am quite healthy today, and considering the serious bouts of ill health I had early in my life, that sometimes comes a surprise to me. It has left me with a slight residual hypochondriasis, but more than that it has made me think about health care more than most others. I started life with a milk allergy, which made my father take trips across Vienna to obtain goat milk, but after that—except for the usual children’s diseases and removed tonsils—all was quiet until just before the German entry into Austria when I had pneumonia and pleurisy. Then came another hiatus until 1940 when I had pneumonia again, as well as hepatitis—both assigned to the newly discovered two-and-a-half inch glass sliver in my lung, and then the operation to remove the glass. Three successive hospitalizations—all at Mt. Sinai Hospital and two of them followed by recuperation at a hospital-connected convalescent home. There followed the aftermath of the lab explosion—also at Mt. Sinai—and then peace and quiet until the curse of the old men (presumably God’s attempt to make up for the menstrual inconvenience done to women)—an enlarged prostate. It was handled by a laser operation as an out patient at the UCSD medical school hospital and, a year later, by a more radical “reaming” at the private London Clinic hospital in England.

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I recite all this in order to make the point that, except for the last event, none of that cost me anything. Well, not quite. In San Diego, I pay an additional monthly premium (increasing ominously year by year) to top up Medicare and my university insurance, and the same insurance paid my cost in London. But how had I been treated in New York with very expensive hospitalizations, including surgery for my glass sliver by one of the best thoracic surgeons around? That kind of “charitable” treatment (including convalescent homes) is unthinkable today. Why? As usual, I assume the problem is multidimensional and lots of causes are involved. The major one, of course, is that our society today has been hornswoggled into believing that the use of taxes by the government to insure the health of the whole nation is somehow unethical and uneconomical as well as socialist and illiberal. In addition, there is the greed of the insurance companies and to some extent—I can think of no other word—the greed of sections of the medical profession—more so than in other industrialized countries. Legal and medical greed are absorbing much of our money that might otherwise go into taxes and benefit the country as a whole. A further cause of the current American health crises is that we provide poorer and less adequate medical services for the nation at large, and more people are sicker and more in need of medical care than before. I believe that I am relatively healthy today because I received more than just adequate treatment before. America missed its opportunity to provide decent health insurance in 1993, and as I watch the kind of care my son’s family in London receives—from the much maligned National Health Service—I wonder whether public and informed access to how such insurance does in fact work might not have produced very different results. But that feeds back to my concerns that democracy is impossible as long as access to communication services is in the hands of the moneyed and privileged.

1997–98: YEARS OF LOSS As I turned 70, I gradually became aware of obituaries, of the number of people in their 70s who were dying, of the number with whom I had crossed paths who were dying, that topic of death that I found so aversive. But it was not until 1997–98 that several people close and dear to me died and made me more aware

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of my vulnerability to loss and death. First, it was my cousin Suse, killed in a traffic accident in January. Then, in late spring, it was Stanley Schachter who had inspired some of my work on emotion and was a good friend. Then, in the fall, William McGill, my right hand and backbone during the early days at UCSD, and shortly thereafter, my beloved ego ideal Peter Hempel. Then it was Roger Brown with whom I started as an assistant professor at Harvard in 1953, Charlie Cofer from the days of early cognitive psychology, and Dave McClelland for whom I played acting director of the “Clinic” at Harvard. In April 1998, Dottie Jameson succumbed to lung cancer. She and Leo Hurvich had been at my Festschrift party, and Dottie and I had battled the forces of the State Department (and evil) at several meetings of the International Committee for Psychology. The New York Times failed to provide her with an obituary! Toward the end of the year, our old friend Stuart Sutherland at the University of Sussex died at 71–unexpectedly for us who had not seen him for some time. Then in February 1999, Willi Kessen died of a cerebral hemorrhage shortly after his 74th birthday. He had had a couple of minor cerebral accidents in the preceding years, and our contacts had dwindled as he tired of e-mail correspondence. I lost a companion of the mind of 50 years, a “brother,” as we called each other in our correspondence. At this poignant encounter with death I could not, once again, face its consequences—I could not go to the services in New Haven.

AUSTRIA AGAIN After my cousin’s death, I regularly made yearly visits to Vienna to look after her daughter Hanni. I became more interested in Austrian affairs and I applied for, and eventually received, my new passport. With my new EU (European Union) passport I fly across borders, somewhat bemused by my “new” status. Another reason for the increased interest was that the 1990s produced new developments on restitution. Restitution (Wiedergutmachung) generally became a mysterious business. Whereas Germany was relatively generous in financial assistance to its former Jewish citizen, in Austria matters were slow indeed. Most survivors received a notional sum in

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1950. Then in 1990, the Austrians discovered that they could pay state pensions to survivors, which all of us received in due course. A couple of years later, money was found for a more generous payment of 70,000 Austrian schillings (about $5,500). And then, rather suddenly in the late 1990s, when most of the affected people were dead, bank accounts were “discovered” in Switzerland and elsewhere. Since then, a class action was opened against insurance companies (in particular Assicurazioni Generali) for unpaid life insurance policies for Jews killed in the camps or deceased in emigration. Then, the Austrian state started another fund for the reimbursement of bank accounts that “disappeared” with the advent of the Nazis. Miraculously, the Austrian post office savings branch (Postsparkasse) “discovered” records of blocked accounts that had been generally cleared out after the Anschluss. I claimed my family’s deposits, was told that the funds had absconded with the Germans, and was given $100 for my efforts and expenses! Then miraculously, in 1998, the Austrian Staatsarchiv (state archives) “found” the lists of assets (Vermögensverzeichnis) that Jews had been required to submit to the Nazi state in 1938. Here was specific evidence for assets that were inexorably stolen by the Nazis in Austria. All of that information has been available since the 1940s in various archives, but not revealed until some 50 years later when the generation of those most affected (my parents’ generation) was mostly dead and gone. Here is some real substance for conspiracy theorists—to wonder why all these goodies had been left undisturbed for 50 years, and why nobody had disclosed the existence of these records until their owners were dead and restitution became so much less expensive!

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he title of this chapter is ambiguous, though it in fact addresses both the kind of psychology I was working on and, indirectly, the psychology of the writer. I liked schooling and education from the beginning in primary school and was a diligent and searching student in my years in the Viennese Realschule. However, until I started graduate school, most of my education was essentially in a passive stance. I went where situations, requirements, and people led me and not until the watershed in my personal development did I truly start out on my own.

GETTING THERE Early on, in 1934 at age 10, I had a choice to make. At the end of the fourth year in primary school, we took entrance examinations to be accepted to the eight-year “Gymnasien.” To repeat, there were three different higher schools, one with Latin and Greek, one with Latin plus a foreign language, and one with French and English, pointing more toward the sciences. I ”chose” the last of the three, but my parents, and in particular my father, made the decision for me. And so, I started on French in the first year (English would have come in the fifth year) with additional

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emphases on mathematics and the sciences. In 1938, after the first four years, the world made choices for me, though I did take, rather desultorily, night courses in chemistry and mathematics before entering the Army in 1943. Coming back from the war, I first made sure that I was getting a year ’s worth of college credit for my Camp Ritchie experience and other bits and pieces. Then, I was sure that I wanted to get back to Europe (and Anneliese) in a year. That meant Switzerland, and I presumably must have had in mind some subject that was likely to fit the kind of curricula offered in Swiss universities. In any event, I was somehow convinced that I was a budding writer and wanted journalism courses, but was also intrigued enough by my interrogation experiences to want to find out more about psychology. Still, I wasn’t sure where I was going and what I wanted to do with my life. In Switzerland, I was intrigued by philosophy and the very philosophical European psychology but not enough to pursue philosophy. Sometime in that period, I decided that I was going to be a clinical psychologist, but the push-pull mechanism interceded again when I took an experimental psychology course with Bernie Mausner and became enchanted with the idea that one could actually find out about people experimentally. I think that by the time I went to New Haven I was ready to be convinced that I wasn’t going to be a practicing clinical psychologist after all.

STARTING PSYCHOLOGY I discuss my research and writing in ways that I hope will be accessible to the nonpsychologist and still be of interest to the professional academic. I started at Yale as Seymour Sarason’s research assistant and he soon set me the task of looking at the problem of test anxiety—as he coined the problem. To what degree does anxiety about test taking influence the outcome of tests and examinations—an excellent problem question for a budding experimenter-clinician. I was very pleased in the trust expressed and the problem posed—I could start doing test construction as well as set up experimental studies. Seymour and I constructed the questions to be asked, and I devised the questionnaire about people’s feelings while anticipating and taking tests. The enter-

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prise was most successful—the Test Anxiety Questionnaire (TAQ) did what it was supposed to do. It showed that high scorers on the TAQ did significantly worse on tests than low scorers and a variety of ancillary findings supported the idea of the TAQ. Between 1952 and ‘53, we published some half dozen papers and Seymour was gracious to give me senior authorship on the first defining article. The topic became very popular and test anxiety research is still, nearly 50 years later, a common topic among the “experimental” approaches to human personality. In retrospect, it was a worthwhile effort that should have died eventually because the relation between performance and test anxiety is demonstrable but rather weak. It can easily be demonstrated when using groups with extremely low and high scores on the TAQ, but within the population at large, it accounts for less than 10 percent in the variation in performance. I find it puzzling that the concept and its investigation is still important, even to generate a book on its “state of the art” in 1998. In the meantime, I started thinking about topics for my thesis and had an initial interest in a current topic—the relation between learning and intelligence. Being at one of the strongholds of stimulus-response behaviorism, the problem of learning—in human, rat, and pigeon—loomed large. The question then was whether some aspects of the way people learn fairly simple tasks were related to intelligence—the answer to reflect current thinking should have been in the affirmative. I tried a number of approaches, looking particularly at the learning curve (the way individuals progress in a task trial by trial) and at the slopes and shapes of the learning curve. I consulted people all over the country, but in the end, it was clear that if there was an interesting problem, it did not reveal itself to me. Today, I know that “intelligence” is a multidimensional concept, complexly embedded in human genetics, experience, and social context and not reducible to any simple measure. I do not know how I arrived at the thesis problem that was to occupy me for the last two years at Yale, but it was a harbinger of my departure from behaviorism. Rather than sticking with the strict stimulus-response formula, with responses tied to specific stimuli in the environment, I explored response learning,

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the fact that organisms learn how to perform acts and behaviors independent of the situations in which they might be used. In particular, I became interested in the way that overlearning—the acquisition of actions beyond just mere mastery—would affect learning and the transfer of actions and responses to new situations. I needed rather complicated equipment to present signals automatically and record responses so I—with the help of a knowledgeable nonacademic friend, Stan Charren—set about building an apparatus that consisted mostly of discarded telephone company switching equipment. In any event, I showed the importance of independently learning just the response required in learning a task (and not necessarily the stimulus-response units dear to the Yale behaviorists). I showed how such response learning was important in later being able to discriminate between different situations and the ease with which overlearned responses can be transferred to new situations. I had introduced the concept of “response learning” and it lasted for another 10 years or so. More important was the fact that I was able to publish my results within a year of my degree in the most prestigious journal around, Psychological Review. I was on my way. I believe that it was at Yale that I became seriously interested in psychoanalysis, partly because of the general environment there being favorable to an interest in Freud, and partly because Willi Kessen was seriously working with Käte Wolf on psychoanalytic aspects of early childhood experience. With my own, though shortened, analysis in 1955–56 and my ongoing conviction that observable human actions and foibles were always the expression of some underlying dispositions, I kept up a continuing interest. I even published a brief paper on the effect of parent–child relations on oedipal development in 1963. In the 1980–90s, there was a monthly faculty–practitioner psychoanalytic study group at UCSD, which I enjoyed, because I learned from case histories and learned how to avoid the internecine warfare and more extravagant theoretical excursions of the field. I still believe that the evidence for early childhood influences, repression and similar mechanisms, is persuasive and that such concepts are important for understanding our species.

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The first couple of years at Harvard were relatively unproductive. I am not sure of the reason, except that I was looking for a topic and had, for the time being, done little more than think about problems in the human learning and memory field. Eventually, I followed a lead generated by the test anxiety research. Among the questions we had asked our subjects was the extent to which they were aware of their gut reactions in test situations. So, I applied for and received a grant to work on what I called “autonomic feedback”—the perception of autonomic or gut reaction and its importance in behavior and emotion. It seemed worthwhile to find out whether actual activity of the autonomic system was accurately perceived by people. Parenthetically, I note that John Lacey used to remark that I should have taken credit for initiating the biofeedback movement, as we found some relation between indicators such as heart rate and people’s reaction to and perception of those gut reactions, and developed the Autonomic Perception Questionnaire. My relationship with Jean, who had been a graduate student since 1951, started in the context of those studies as I hired her to work on the project and we regularly drove out to Quincy, Massachusetts, to the Grass Instrument Company, which developed their first polygraph to our directions. I was glad to see that their polygraph business blossomed after that. Our work expanded into exploring people’s responses to threat and to in-depth investigations of the role of the autonomic nervous system. Michael Kahn, an ex-actor about my age, became a student in my lab and a good friend. Eventually he became a successful research and practicing psychologist at Yale and UC Santa Cruz, ending up with his own group in San Francisco. Michael also understood my relative unhappiness with my own work during the Harvard days. Apart from the work on emotional reactions and the autonomic nervous system, I found the rest rather pedestrian and, as I expressed it, piddling. Michael and I developed the notion of Piddling Research (PR) and coined the teasing reference to “PRinkmanship,” which made it possible for me to laugh at all this busyness and to move on. I do remember, though, my reaction to Michael’s womanizing at the time. It led to a shouting match when he was behaving miserably toward Carol—another graduate student (later the influential feminist Carol Gilligan!). Toward the end of the Harvard

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period, I had begun to make noises about the dullness and emptiness of the verbal learning field (memory in the behaviorist mode) and actually did some work with nonsense syllables. This in part generated my invitation to the two Gould House conferences (in upstate New York), which contributed to the cognitive revolution and the abandonment of the behaviorist model. Gould House was also the setting where Jim Deese, Jim Jenkins, and I labeled ourselves as the young Turks of the movement. On reflection, I believe that the work on threat and the autonomic system, and subsequent excursions into anxiety, were probably visible enough to make UCSD notice me, together with my role as a young Turk in the memory movement. In any case, by the time I went to the Center for Advanced Study at Stanford, I had established my dual track interests in memory and in emotion. In the meantime, Willi and I had finished our book, The Language of Psychology, which appeared in 1959, and at the Center, we wrote a much ignored paper on anxiety.

THE “REVOLUTION” There has been much talk in academic psychology circles about the so -called “cognitive revolution,” the shift from the behaviorisms of Hull and Skinner to the study of a thinking, intending, organizing human mind. I have generally maintained that it was not so much a revolution as a return to an ancien regime. In the first place, behaviorism as a preferred way of thinking psychology was pretty much confined to the United States. I remember a knowledgeable British psychologist asking me in the 1950s whether American psychologists really believed what he had read in Hull. In later years, writing on the history of psychology, I noted how that behaviorism of the early twentieth century was part of an earlier American puritanism and the rejection of complex “fancy” European attitudes and inventions, and that its abandonment was a natural result of general postwar developments. In any case, those of us working on human thought and memory found the existing theoretical and research tools inadequate. We were interested in all kinds of different memories, other than the recital of carefully prepared lists (often of nonsense syl-

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lables). We were interested in how people solve problems, how they determine courses of action. All that was difficult, at best, within the straightjacket of behaviorism. There were of course lacunae of resistance, whether of the Gestalt variety or around the later Nobelist Herbert Simon, or in occasional forays by isolated researchers. By the late 1950s, the trend surged and became—with another five years—the dominant approach. It was all a part of the general changes in the culture toward information usage and technology and it is difficult to assign priority to the “initiators” of the new cognition. Those who ascribe it to Noam Chomsky ignore the historical fact that he was too late, by the time the “revolution” was under way, he was only beginning to be read. Other claims, such as for the MIT scientist Minsky, are also for people who are products rather than causes of the cultural changes. Although behaviorism—the study of behavior under the control of external, environmental stimuli and situations—reigned in the United States, in England and France, psychology continued its earlier trajectory. In Europe Frederick Bartlett, Kenneth Craik, Jean Piaget, Alfred Binet, and Edouard Claparède were busily doing a psychology that was “cognitive” in the sense that information and its use was an important part of human psychology and that internal events, like thinking and consciousness, were important to our understanding of the mind. By the time the “revolution” in the United States was complete, sometime in the late 1960s, many American psychologists believed they had discovered something new when in fact they had returned to the psychology of the 1920s and 30s, albeit in more modern and usable clothing. But, nolens volens, I was tagged a major player in the revolutionary movement, though the actual revolution was tame enough. Sometime between 1955 and 1965 more and more young psychologists changed the research environment and fewer and fewer of the younger generation followed in behaviorist footsteps. Journals that had previously rejected “cognitive” and Gestalt oriented papers opened their doors to the “new” approaches. I was lucky to have the opportunity to start a new department at the peak of that renaissance.

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MEMORY AND ORGANIZATION If the Harvard scene had put emotion in the center of my attention, in Toronto I shifted into high gear to work on memory. Endel Tulving and I had a fine five years of cooperative thinking even though not doing any extensive collaboration. In honoring the f o u n d e r o f ex p e r i m e n t a l w o r k o n m e m o r y, H e r m a n n Ebbinghaus, we instituted the Ebbinghaus Empire, naming both the active group of people working on memory and our regular meetings. I believe it is still active in Toronto today. It was in Toronto that I rediscovered the importance of organization in memory—how we remember things, not because they are well rehearsed or powerful but because they are related to and connected to other contents of the mind and memory. The work started with my chapter on “Organization and memory,” and reached its fruition at UCSD. We found that people always imposed either their own or common sets of relationships on to-be-remembered material and that such organizations determined whether and how much they could remember. It also started my association with Zena Pearlstone, my most competent and productive research associate, who later joined me at UCSD before leaving for a career in art history. Unfortunately, we became estranged in later years. Together with my graduate students such as Arthur Graesser, the demonstration of the basic structure and necessity of organizational factors proceeded apace. I extended the application of organizational factors when, in the late 1970s, I made the point—theoretically and empirically—that recognition was not just a matter of matching existing templates or patterns but usually included retrieval and recall processes as well; thus, initiating the two-factor theory of recognition. My paper on recognition became by far my most widely cited publication, and is still going strong 20 years after its birth. I also became interested in the problems of amnesic patients, and the peculiar “implicit” memories they display—knowing for example how to get to the bathroom or being able to identify words they had previously seen without being aware that they had such knowledge. In part this arose because in London I became friendly with the ingenious Elizabeth Warrington, whose insights into her clinical patients

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produced many significant advances into our knowledge of how memory works. Peter Graf, originally Swiss and now from Canada, joined me at that time as a post-doctoral student and was a most creative and ingenious experimenter. Graf and I became very productive and I was glad to yield senior authorship to him in much of our joint work. Peter initiated a collaboration with Larry Squire, which was short lived because of Larry’s tendency frequently to change positions. In the 1990s, and in part due to the interests of my last doctoral student, Jennifer Dorfman, I became more interested in how nondeliberate processes, such as incubation, produce thoughts and memories popping into mind. I also became interested in how dreams are constructed, not in the Freudian sense of their underlying “meaning” but in the more mundane matter of their construction out of existing mental contents. An introduction in England to a young Georgian, Lia Kvavilashvili, led to one more participation in research on memory in the late 1990s when we looked at the peculiar phenomenon of totally unexpected and situationally unrelated thoughts seeming to pop into mind.

EMOTION AND STRESS I had maintained my interest in anxiety and emotion during the Toronto period, publishing occasional speculative essays, but it was not until after I was settled in California that I went back to those concerns in earnest. Mostly, I became interested in theoretical expositions of what emotion was about. “Emotion” is a term from the natural common language that is too slippery for serious scientific analysis, which suggested that a search for what emotion “really is” was futile. I proposed that one should investigate psychological processes that are more easily handled and that might in the end produce something like human emotion. One critic responded by saying that “Mandler does not believe in emotions.” Subsequently, I pursued my line of thought further without being as obvious or vulnerable. My main focus on “emotion” was to look at the importance of autonomic, gut reactions—how one’s heart and stomach produce the subjective upheaval of fears, passions, and anxieties. I fol-

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lowed William James in stressing these factors, but the major inspiration came from the work of Stanley Schachter in the 1950s and 1960s; he had made the point that subjective emotional experiences are the result of a joining of physiological arousal and evaluative thoughts and cognitions. I tried to contribute to that position by asking what it was that produced the arousal in the first place. There had been no principled account of what the occasions were that produced such arousal; usually, one was presented with lists of events. My first suggestion in 1964 was that whenever ongoing behavior, thought, and action are interrupted, arousal would occur. I expanded that later into the more general notion of discrepancy, the difference between expectations and reality, including intended action or thought, expected perceptions, unsuccessful goal striving, and similar disjunctions. These were the occasions for the initiation of autonomic, specifically the sympathetic, nervous system reactions. When the individual’s “world” is unexpectedly different from what was usual or habitual, the emergency recruitment of resources by the autonomic nervous system clicks into place. I thought it had been one of my more useful insights, but it has not readily been picked up by others. The idea entered into the themes of my two books on emotion in 1975 and 1984 where I emphasized the nature of the evaluative cognition—essentially the expression of values—that together with autonomic reactions produce subjective emotional states. As far as the cognitive contribution to the emotional experience was concerned, I used the increasingly accepted notion of the schema. I am not sure when I first became aware of and attracted to the notion of the schema. It was probably in the work of Jean Piaget and Frederic Bartlett. I was finally convinced of the lasting importance of the notion of the schema when I discovered that Immanuel Kant, some 200 years earlier, gave us a prototype that is still valid. To illustrate the concept, Kant gave a description of the schema of a dog, which is a mental pattern that specifies the figure of a four-footed animal in a very general manner, without any limitation to any single specific representation of any dog we have actually experienced. Schemas are the basic building blocks of everyday thought; they are the major representations (and abstractions) of both our cultural and our individual experiences. Thus, we have schemas of people, animals, landscapes, of how to

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cook, how to write, and so on. Eventually, I was able to use the schemas notion as a central concept in a discussion of how values develop and how they motivate both conserving and changing patterns of human action and thought. I became increasingly interested in and committed to the notion that these schemas (and the values they represented) determine what is liked and why, as well as the cognitive contents of our emotions. Finally, in the area of emotion, I was struck with the vagueness of the notion of stress, despite its increasing importance in explaining and understanding human illness and disease. Despite some valiant effort by pioneers such as Hans Selye, in the end, the stress concept was what arousal had been–as a list of events that lead to “stress.” In my later work from the 1980s on, I suggested that it was the occurrence of discrepancies in the world, when life is not as expected, that defines what we often mean by stress. There are other aspects such as work pressures and interpersonal conflict that contribute to “stress” but even those are not far removed from the discrepancy notion. I also made explicit how discrepancy, leading to sympathetic arousal, could produce pathological conditions and some of the stress symptoms and diseases.

CONSCIOUSNESS A new broad topic entered my interests when I wrote a chapter in 1975 on the need for introducing consciousness into considerations of human cognition and information processing. I concluded that consciousness made it possible to bring order into thought and behavior by reducing the mass of simultaneously occurring activations of thoughts and actions in the mind and brain. With a few others, that was the beginning of a dramatic increase in work on consciousness, which the philosophers—up to then rather superficially interested in the topic—made into their own bailiwick. I had repeated occasions to express much unhappiness with philosophical writings on the topic, particularly with the fact that philosophers never seemed to be able to decide whether the mind was a catch all for various conscious and unconscious processes (as the term was used by most psychologists) or just another name for consciousness. Philosophers kept inventing new names and new ways of speculation and also fell

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back on old ones without advancing our knowledge significantly. Whereas many are in the mainstream of current cognitive science, many approaches to consciousness range from behaviorism to mysticism and science fiction. As part of my attention to consciousness, I became particularly interested in the limited capacity of human conscious thought, which is where my interest in consciousness actually branched into a number of experimental studies. The best of them was an extended study of the phenomenon of “subitizing”—the fact that people can gauge the numerosity of assemblies of six or fewer objects at a glance, whereas larger groups have be counted. With Billie Jo Shebo and her fine experimental skills, we lifted some of the mysteries of that process. I had initially noted that consciousness reduced the “blooming confusion” of mental activity to manageable proportions, and by the 1990s, I ended up with more precise notions how such reduction was a sign of complex minds. Essentially, I suggested that consciousness was a data-reduction device and conversely, the position suggested that less complex animals had less need of conscious mechanisms. I wrote a number of chapters that discussed these approaches and their ramifications, and the books on emotion summarized that work. I tried to put it all together by an excursion into problems of human evolution, intelligence, social organization, and related problems. The result was the only book with which I ran into publication trouble—Human Nature Explored. At the suggestion of Philip Kitcher, my philosopher friend at UCSD, I had written a very satisfactory contract with Oxford University Press. I also liked their psychology editor, Joan Bossert, whose comments on the manuscript were insightful and most useful. But once the book was published, there were a number of problems, most of which I ascribe to a rather fluid staff and haphazard organization. First, the book was advertised under the wrong title, then with the wrong affiliation noted for me; the U.K. end of the company did not seem particularly interested in promoting a book coming out of New York. Finally, promises were made by a marketing director who finally left the post. Much of what he had promised didn’t happen. Oxford Press’s people in New York were overworked (and probably underpaid), and the

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Press had probably taken on too many books to do justice to them. As of this writing the book, which expressed many of my thoughts and conclusions on questions of evolutionary as well as social sources of human action and thought, is not going to reach anything like the sales of six to ten thousand copies of my other books.

PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY I have an itch that needs scratching and that has colored many of my intellectual products over the years. To illustrate: For many years now I have had a quotation of Cicero’s posted on a card on my desk. “Nihil tam absurde dici potest, quod non dicatur ab aliquo philosophorum” (De Divitatione, ii, 58) Best translated as: “There is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it.”

The quote embodies much of my basic distrust and allergic reaction to philosophic writing, particularly when philosophers wrestle with psychological issues. I am irritated by their unwillingness (or inability) to deal with empirical issues empirically. But mostly, I find the tendency to accept that anything that can be said must also be analyzed and given the benefit of doubt that it might contain some kernel of truth. Jean Piaget wrote a little book about the illusions of philosophy that embodied much of my distrust, though it is rarely read or cited. With the advent of cognitive science and the resurgence of interest in matters of mind and consciousness, a fairly unimpressive philosophy gained a new ground to justify its existence. In one of my last publications, I was given the opportunity to show the lack of discipline and lack of consensus (or even attempted consensus) when philosophers tackle such important concepts as consciousness and mind. As I saw it, there were few if any philosophers engaged in those areas who were not the bearers of their own particular theory of mind and consciousness. Similar idiosyncratic confusions were sown by philosophers who continued to romanticize and personalize concepts of emotion.

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Without any doubt, I was imprinted into logical positivism by Peter Hempel. I kept little of it except for an important dislike of verbalisms and the postulation of imaginary entities. But I have also found some of the earlier, more thoughtful, and scholarly philosophers like Hume, Kant, and Hegel, giants to today ’s pygmies, appealing and useful. Philosophers of science like Philip Kitcher have always been of interest to and an intellectual guidance for me. On the other hand, I might just have begun to be interested in philosophy during the final death throes of the discipline. As it has lost discipline after discipline to more rigorous and disciplined practitioners looking for good theories and better evidence, there is little left for philosophers to do. There will probably always be a need for creative analytic and constructive thought on ethics and aesthetics and on analytic approaches to logic and science, but beware of the philosopher who wants to brings his talents to a field already peopled by trained practitioners. I talked in an earlier chapter of my friendship with philosophers and I should here add a “Some of my best friends …” note. Because, in fact, when not talking philosophy, some of my better companions and friends have been philosophers such as Sidney Morgenbesser in the 1950s, Henry Aiken at Harvard, Newton Garver at Yale, the Kitchers at UCSD, and of course, Peter Hempel. Having said all that, since writing the 1959 book with Willi Kessen, I have been fascinated by the analysis of the psychological endeavor as well as in its history, in part paying homage to my European background. In 1962, Jean and I published our book on the Gestalt psychologists and their forerunners and in 1968, the extensive chapter on the diaspora of German and Austrian psychologists following the accession of Adolf Hitler. My first retirement publication was a history of the psychology of the past 100 years, setting it in the culture and societies of the times.

POSTMODERNISM Psychology has been relatively untouched by the postmodernist trends in contemporary social science. But still, there were enough attempts to confuse fact and fiction to be troublesome. In

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one version of Postmodernism and poststructuralism, historical accounts should be seen as stories rather than accounts of some impossible reality. That is, of course, true to some extent because all human interpretations of events, whether natural or artificial, human or divine, are human stories situated in the tellers’ culture and background. This approach, sometimes called situationism, views all human events, including scientific ones, as somehow situated in their culture and their cultural history. I have always accepted that position and used it when discussing the history of psychology. But in the end, all established facts and values owe their utility to some consensus, some vague relation to a often unknown but also frequently knowable real world, established historically or contemporaneously. That is true of science as well as of moral values. When we are faced with competing stories, as in postmodern stories versus structuralist ones, for example, then we must choose which are more useful, more likely to achieve consensus, and to contribute to the good life (consensually defined). On that basis, I find postmodern indecisiveness and lack of consensual values to be fatally lacking. In addition, and apart from the practical reality of and our dependence on such things as bridges and airplanes, and the joy of shared aesthetic pleasures, there are some social realities that must not be thought of as variable stories. Foremost for me is the reality of the camps and the Holocaust, a reality that starts off as being often incredible and that must not be degraded by the word games of the postmodernists. If these are just “stories,” then how could one possibly dispute the revisionist deniers of the Holocaust. I find it particularly unfortunate that much of postmodern writing and thinking comes from a sometimes reformed, sometimes putative group of left-thinkers. Postmodernism and deconstructionism is frequently seen as a challenge to the establishment, as a potential threat to dominant conservative thought. In the end, postmodern movements are mired in analysis and incapable of action; when action should be the defining characteristic of the left. In the course of their antiestablishment journey, some postmodern thinkers come to applaud the “challenge” of UFO beliefs on the one hand, while others might uncritically accept claims of repressed memory on the other hand. Imaginary aliens are useless allies against predatory capitalism, and the fact

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that the attack on the realities of repressed memories tends to come from the right is no reason to defend the manufacture of such memories in therapy. There is a real world in which children are abused, memories are repressed and charlatan therapists induce imaginary memories. The proper response must be a rejection of the latter and proper support for the victims of abuse, whether it is repressed, or not. Deconstruction and the telling of stories fails because it cannot, by definition, arrive at a consensus. Just as philosophers frequently are uninhibited by any need for consensual focusing, so can deconstructionist thinkers embrace any and all versions of some target event or story. Deconstruction cannot, in the long run, serve the purposes of justice and equity without action. What is needed, for example, is not a deconstruction of the welfare state but a fight against its destruction. In the end, postmodernists, often trying to forget the past, also have trouble with the future. They cannot answer the question: What comes after postmodern- ism? Either they must say: Nothing, that this is the final insight into and accounting for history, science, and literature—which is silly, presumptuous, and delusional; or they must seriously consider a next stage of development, which would violate their own assumptions.

NEUROSCIENCE I had never been able to work up any particular enthusiasm for the material basis of the mind. I accepted the dictum that “the mind is what the brain does.” I am a thoroughgoing materialist, but I leave the investigation of the neurological, neurophysiological domain to others. Luckily the flood of interest in the brain, the emergence of a “cognitive neuroscience,” occurred mostly after my retirement. The notion that a thorough knowledge of brain function would solve most, if not all, psychological problems or questions became common belief. I still wondered what would happen when the neuroscientific community ran out of psychological phenomena for which they wanted to find exact neurophysiological equivalents. The mind-brain relation is a two-way street. Yes, Virginia, there is a brain, but what does it do?

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I was pleased (and amused) by the metaphors used by other cognitive science people to express their unease with the unbalanced emphasis on the brain. Arguably only approximate they were: Jonathan Miller comparing some of the work to the Lilliputians scientifically examining and describing Gulliver ’s watch without knowing what it is for; Jerry Fodor noting that carburetors were important for a functioning automobile, but that their location was of minor interest; and Geoffrey Hinton, comparing some of the imaging work to an alien sattelite circling the earth and taking continuous pictures of selected infrared emissions over one-square-mile samples, and concluding that an explanation of automobile production had something to do with Detroit and southern Canada.

THE JOYS OF RETIREMENT My first project after I retired in 1994 was to do the book on human nature. Once that was done, I followed my own prescription about successful retirement; that is, that one should plan, plan to do what pleases one, whether it is fishing or playing bridge or writing. Retirement is not like falling in love, it needs planning. In my case, I had to keep doing what I had been doing—and the next projects were first of all this book, and secondly, some papers on topics outside my usual professional interests. One was on the problem of teasing genetic characteristics out of research with adopted twins. After running into the behavior genetics mafia in trying to get it published, it finally reached publication status in 2001. Another project was the story of how German psychology was taken over by the National Socialists immediately after Hitler ’s ascent to power. Then, I was asked whether I might be interested in weaving my consciousness paper into a book and, at this writing, that project is still being done. On the horizon—if time does not run out—are attempts to understand why psychology was relatively immune from the depredations of Postmodernism and a short historical paper on the so-called “cognitive revolution” in psychology.

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FRIENDS AND STUDENTS My best times were with my graduate students, my only consistent and true coworkers and collaborators. I rarely collaborated with colleagues but was glad to work with and to share credits and authorship with my students. Somehow, collaboration was not in my make-up and except for a couple of projects with Jean, I pursued my own interests—together with my students. I had soon realized that collaborative or solitary work were matters of personal style. I had seen at the Social Relations Department at Harvard that just because collaboration is made possible and encouraged, does not mean that it will happen. I eventually felt strongly enough about the topic to meddle with a British problem. In 1997, the APU (Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge—the best psychological research operation in Britain) appointed a new director, William Marslen-Wilson, who had previously been at Birkbeck College. We had known him and his wife Lorraine (Lolly) Tyler for some years, and I was very curious as to how William would adjust the APU to the demands of the Medical Research Council mandarins for a shift to neuroscience and toward collaborative research. In the course of my discussions with William, I had occasion to express my feelings on the matter of collaboration once again. Research styles obviously differ among all scientists, including psychologists. Some people prefer to work with collaborators and are only truly productive and creative when they do so; many others prefer to think and develop ideas mainly on their own. I should declare an interest here, since I am one of the latter. All this does not mean that both types may not benefit and enjoy interacting with their colleagues. However, to enjoin (explicitly or implicitly) somebody to do all or most of their work collaboratively can be seen to be injurious to the development of genuinely creative work and ideas.

There were many academics who became friends and with whom it was fun to talk, exchange ideas, shmooze, and visit. I have mentioned most of them in the course of these memories, and there were many others. Among the several resident visitors to my lab, I kept contact with Terry Purcell, and we visit with him and

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Catherine in Sydney whenever possible; Nico Freyda at Amsterdam (another escapee from the Holocaust) is a theoretical adversary and a good friend and companion, and whenever possible, we spend time with Anne Treisman and Danny Kahneman. As far as graduate students (and some undergraduates) were concerned, I tended to be lucky to have so many very bright ones and to become friends with most of them. Of the many who passed through my laboratory over the years, I can only identify two as failures—of both my efforts and theirs. Several have built distinguished careers and become important contributors to scientific advances; others made their mark on other academic and professional pursuits. I wish I could talk about each of them individually, but the reader must indulge my at least listing them here: Rita Anderson, Larry Barsalou, Phil Cowan, Lola Cuddy, Arthur Graesser, Janellen Huttenlocher, Michael Kahn, Irv Kremen, Yoshio Nakamura, Karalyn Patterson, Guy Van Orden, and Pat Worden. Others, like Peter Dean and Kathy Uyeda have left the academy, and still others are lost in the mist. My last two Ph.D.s, Jennifer Dorfman and Carmen Overson Hamson are still to be heard from. Among the many who peopled my laboratory, there were two outstanding research assistants, Zena Pearlstone and Billie Jo Shebo. Most of these fine people are still good friends, though I have lost contact with some. Many others labored true and hard in the academic and psychological vineyards, but I have lost track of them altogether. Peter Graf was my most prolific post-doctoral student and I was glad to have assisted him on his way to visibility. I mourned my first true Ph.D., Clementina Kuhlman Hollenberg, who died a few years after her degree and two whom I lost to AIDS—Jan Rabinowitz and Dick Meltzer. The most unusual graduate student was Bill Greif, a big lanky Texan who showed up one day to inquire about applying to do graduate work in the department and working with me. His test scores were outstanding, and he was obviously highly motivated to work on one of my more latent interests—motor behavior. He indicated that he would not need any financial support because he had just been signed to pitch for the San Diego Padres. He would be pretty inactive during the baseball season but could work all the rest of the year in my laboratory. We were going to look at the

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conscious and unconscious aspects of pitching, among other things, and my sons were most pleased to know a regular on the Padres and to have occasional free tickets to games. Unfortunately, Bill was a better psychologist than he was a pitcher and after about a year or two, he left the Padres and I never heard from him again.

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he last 10 years of work and the years of retirement provided lacunae of quiet and relaxation that made possible reflections on various attitudes and beliefs. I summarize here some of these musings of the later years.

THE ACADEMY ADMINISTERED I have now spent 50 years in the embrace of the academy and 35 years at the University of California, and I still look for our elders and betters—our presidents and chancellors—to address the academy and the world at large about the functions and role of a university. If they have sometimes done so, they certainly have not done it very loudly. The days of Clark Kerr, the last California university president who was willing to address such issues, are gone, as is the old tradition of writing and arguing about the functions and roles of universities. Our outposts to the rest of the world speak often and clearly—about numbers and money. The typical way to discuss our achievements is in terms of the quality of the applying students, the numbers of their test results, the amount of federal money achieved or beggared, the macho comparison with other universities. Rarely, if ever, do we hear that large numbers of

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those sterling undergraduates have very little idea what a university is about or, more importantly even, why they are here. It would be relatively simple to tell parents and students alike about a university. For example, that it is a finding out place where people find out things and tell others who want to know what has been found. That it is, first of all, about knowledge, not about jobs or money or doing what you are told. The latter have their place and utility but they are not at the core of a university. Then, administrators could point with pride to a wide range of academic achievements rather than almost exclusively to achievements represented in terms of numbers that tend to focus on such sexy fields as nuclear physics, medical biology, evolutionary biology, or material sciences. It would be difficult to discover from the boasts of the administrative heads about significant scholarly achievements in the humanities. The emphases are clear—on my campus, it took 40 years before an academic vice chancellor, the university’s CEO, was appointed who was not a natural scientist or identified entirely with natural science goals and attitudes. The distinction between the more valued natural (and even social) sciences and the humanities was made early on by the federal government. I believe it was in the 1950s that governmental granting institutions such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation started the policy of providing scientists with additional salaries. This consisted of two or three ninths of their salary that was paid for by working on research during the summer months. Such grants were very rarely accessible to humanists, and thus, with one stroke, the American academy established a differential salary system. Similar movements are discernible in Europe. One of the results of these various attitudes and policies is that the tax-paying public, who shoulder a significant cost of the university, has little understanding of the purposes, goals, or life of the university. Internally, the process transforms the university from an institution sui generis to another example of corporate and governmental bureaucracy. When I entered the academy decades ago, administrators were—blessedly and appropriately—little seen and little heard.

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They administered; they didn’t reign. There was, equally appropriate I believe, little respect for the academic who became an administrator, and on the whole, few academics thronged to apply to be administrators. The academic turned administrator was, rather benignly, considered to be bored or played out or uninterested with the life academic or, at worst, to be a loser who had nowhere else to go. In my other academic environment—Great Britain—the general tendency was to appoint administrators for short terms of very few years so they could return to the proper life of the academy. All this has changed, and changed maybe most markedly in Britain. British life has, for good historical reason, —always had a tradition of forelock tugging, of respect and submission to authority. But recently, it has become worse in the British academy. Even more than in the United States, administrative opinions are seen as dicta and dicta are seen as commands. Surely this is not always the case, but the trend was obvious to me. The presence of a provost or president or vice-chancellor at a meeting of an appointments committee was a signal that authority was going to participate in the choice—paying lip service of course to old-fashioned academic goals. Even within departments there is a tendency to restrict one’s thoughts and reactions to private conversations. I have been the recipient of the serious doubts from the senior members of a department about an impending major departmental decision, but none had any inclination to voice this publicly or to energize some concerted action. Most American academics would be more reactive. Similar attitudes are emerging in the United States. Administrators often have lifetime appointments, the winners of struggles for prestigious posts, the receivers of salaries noncommensurate with academic ones and justified by an artificial “market”—created by the congeries of administrators across the country. None of these valuable executives are ever eagerly sought by the more volatile corporate establishment. But they sometimes emulate their corporate models by intricate deals for more salary, more perks, and adequate recompense on their departure—mostly in the service of a nonexistent market. These administrators like to think of themselves as leaders, though, as

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I have noted—they often lead by reciting numbers not scholarship. The university president has become a corporate officer. The healthy disdain for administrative positions that existed many years ago has begun to disappear. Driven in part by academics who have adopted the corporate mode, they receive deference and respect. Administrative bullshit tends to be exposed as such by students rather than faculty. New problems have arisen in a search for profitability, among them the increasing use of part-time faculty. They are much easier to hire and fire and represent a useful pool of cheap university labor. But because they are only given partial facilities and university access, they tend to be inhibited in their research and scholarly work. If administrators often welcome part-time faculty (though it must be said not yet seriously so at the University of California), they have difficulties in administering and fostering affirmative action. There are many dedicated university administrators who are committed to increasing the diversity of our faculties and student bodies through affirmative action, but there are also many who find the effort too demanding and who are–implicitly or explicitly–opposed to the effort to increase minority representation. In a New York Times book review of several books on higher education on 4 December 1997, Professor James Shapiro of Columbia University wrote: The danger today is that the administrations that now set policy at most universities are increasingly tempted to act as if they are running a business—letting profit motives drive educational policy. … [R]evenue-generating programs and inexpensive part-time professors are winning out over a committed faculty, good libraries and small classes.

The result is the adaptation of the university to the corporate or government model; the academy has become another example of running a large corporation or a government department. Lines of command, demands for secrecy, and insistence on arcane rules have become frequent. A university that, I believe, should have a tradition and policy of free internal access now has lines of access to the administrators and frequently protects such ac-

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cess. The academy that should be as open as possible now frequently enjoys secret agreements and undertakings. Many years ago, I suggested that “everybody knows everything” is the best rule for a university department to avoid little conspiracies, hurt feelings, and cabals. It was difficult even then because the habits of the society are difficult to overcome, but today such an approach would be impossible. I think it might still be possible to rescue the academy, or at least to establish islands of resistance. The university needs administrators who have contact with students and faculty in the classrooms and corridors. Thus, my own university has a senior administrator who has been in his position 18 years and makes decisions about faculty and students activities. It would be interesting if a university were to adopt a three to five year limit for senior administrators, of open access to these persons, of open discussion by the faculty and staff of finances, budget, personnel, and other administrative issues. Together with a student body that really knew what a university was and why they were there, it might be interesting.

FACULTY Most of my colleagues in the past several decades have made it a pleasure to be part of the professoriat, to enjoy the company of scholars and even some very wise people; in any case, people open to ideas and discussions and mutual support. In the sections to follow, I will speak primarily about the warts of the professorial profession, but that should be understood to apply to only a small proportion of our field.

Academic Success I have made a number of remarks about some good, some bad, and some peculiar characteristics of university faculties. More generally, they suffer under a general problem of how to evaluate an individual’s or organization’s worth and what criteria are used to define success. I shall discuss in more detail my thought that corporations and public institutions are judged on different criteria—bottom line versus visible competence. Similarly, university

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faculties cannot compare themselves with other professions (e.g., medicine and law) in terms of their salaries and incomes, and they tend to be thrown on much less easily defined criteria, such as fame and recognition. As a result, greed exists to some extent and in the usual excesses in some faculty, but their lusts tend to be directed to local, national, and international recognition. At the local level, this tends to create a hypersensitivity to slights and privileges, descending to such matters as size of offices (and desks), locus of parking places, and deference by office staff. At the national and international level, it extends to collecting as many major and minor honors, invitations, and citations as possible. I know of one nationally recognized psychologist who still lists on his CV every talk he has every given, every grant he has ever received, every office he has ever held, and even all the conferences he ever attended—a rather long document. There are, of course, large variations in these behaviors and most faculty people fall into a reasonable middle, but the places where recognition is found are clear–they are the sources of fame, not of fortune. I believe that the overdone drive for fame, awards, and honors is related to the excessive seriousness with which the academic enterprise is sometime approached. But the joys of research, and of teaching good students, are part of the playfulness that the academy should, and sometimes does, encourage. When we realize that scholarship can be a wonderful game for grown-ups, we become better academics and avoid one of the pitfalls of the earnestn e s s a p p r o a c h — p o m p o s i t y. T h e u n f o r g i v i n g p u s h f o r recognition and status sometimes produces this terminal academic disease. Pomposity can be exhibited toward students, colleagues, or the general public—it is an inflation of one’s own worth. As an identifying symptom of the disease, I once heard a colleague say after a sabbatical visit to another university that he had received little in the way of personal invitations or attention, and “Don’t they know who I am?”

Tenure—Good and Bad An academic issue that continues to concern me is the inability of the academy to rid itself of its timeservers, hacks, deadwood, cheats, and exploiters. I hasten to add that there are not many of

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these, but I have seen a few in each of the four universities on whose faculties I have served. I was tempted to call this the academic “shame.” The problem arises to a large extent out of the very important institution of tenure. Starting typically with the associate professorship in American universities, faculty are appointed for life. The major reasons are to enable free unfettered speech, to prevent political considerations from determining who is allowed to pursue knowledge, and to advocate positions and beliefs, no matter how outrageous or contrary to current mores. Tenure is designed in part to prevent orthodoxies from becoming the criterion for academic membership. Yes, I know, we still have orthodoxies and we are still under pressure from political considerations, but tenure attenuates such pressures significantly. Frequently, there are hedges attached to tenure; it is asserted that gross misconduct or moral turpitude would be reasons for dismissal. But these are rarely invoked. I was on a special committee at the University of Toronto to define reasons for dismissal and by the time I left, we were still bogged down in a discussion of the meaning of “moral turpitude”; did it involve sexual intercourse with an undergraduate, and if so, what else? The Committee on Academic Personnel, on which I served for a couple of years at UCSD, considered system-wide recommendations for a basis for dismissal, and the several campuses having finally worked out a reasonable, well-hedged system. The proposal was turned down flat by one of the campuses, and it was back to the drawing board. In another example, my son Michael, then a nontenured member of the Harvard faculty, was surprisingly asked to join a committee to evaluate cases of misconduct by tenured Harvard faculty. He was immediately reassured that membership on the committee was quite harmless because it had never met and was most unlikely ever to meet. As indeed it did not for the next five years of Michael’s sojourn at Harvard.

Teaching In 1967, I wrote a letter to the Yale Psychology department in connection with their failing to reappoint my old student Michael Kahn. I wrote because everybody agreed that Mike was a superb

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teacher and I was annoyed that the university had no place for somebody like that. As far as I can tell, that was my first foray in that direction. But as a chairman of a department and later as a faculty member, I have repeatedly been both vocal and emphatic on the importance of teaching as part of our profession. Both university administrations and faculty are at fault in underplaying teaching. Administrations of first-rank universities are culpable because they will—as far as I can tell–rarely, if ever, give tenure to a person who may be a superb teacher but is less than outstanding as a researcher. Research productivity is the major criterion, no matter how much lip service is paid to teaching. Faculty simply too often try to avoid teaching. A frequent, and to me unacceptable, practice is to “buy off ” teaching; that is, to use money from research grants to get “relief ” from teaching, with the intent that the money be used by the university to employ a substitute teacher. I refused to allow such a practice in the beginning of our department at UCSD and have protested it since. The implication is that “in contrast to my colleagues, my research is too important to engage in something as lowly as teaching,” or that teaching can be left to part-time substitutes—it is not for the lofty ones. Too often, senior faculty try to shift large courses on to junior faculty when, in particular, introductory and basic (large) courses should be taught by senior people. Finally, and particularly in state universities, we are paid inter alia by students and by their parents to educate their young—in part to teach! It violates our civil contract to avoid it or to give it less than our best. I have seen faculty who subverted teaching by filling their lecture course with practically nothing but films; others who simply did not show up for many lectures; others who refused to lecture because the students were, after all, reading the text; others who dutifully gave their, rather boring, lectures and then went home, doing nothing else but some 6–10 hours of lecturing a week; others who used their university office and budgets to further some commercial or political enterprise; and others who never participated in university governance, never going to a faculty or department meeting. But the main reason for my dismay is the lack of attention to teaching and its duties, which are considered secondary by

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many faculty and by many administrators; they tend to be slighted when promotion time comes around. In contrast, there is the small group of prima donnas who insist that their scholarly and research efforts are so outstanding and superior to that of others that they must “released” from teaching obligations, and therefore, their teaching skills need only be partially used—or examined. Of course, the university teacher who does not keep up with his field, who does not engage in research at all is indeed little better than useless, but that is no reason to always give research prowess priority in evaluating the university professor.

Academic Freedom Tenure was designed to protect academic freedom, the ability to express ideas however at variance with public or aristocratic or governmental arrogance. In its early days in Europe, the academy often served as a safe haven for the dissident. With academic freedom go some of the responsibilities I have previously described. But academic freedom also implies that the academy must present an even playing field for the interchange of ideas. I usually defend the need for the representation of all varieties of positions, however weird, on that basis alone. I also argue that murderous and frivolous positions do not fall into that category, essentially on the basis that freedom of expression must follow Oliver Wendell Homes dictum that it does not include the right to yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater. Nor does it confer the right to justify killing or bald lies—a difficult line to draw, but draw it we can and must. I have another reason for the defense of a level playing field. As a man of the left, I expect my ideas to win out in the battle for public approval, but I also want my ideas and politics to stand the test of competition. And presenting arguments from the right to my students either shows any defects in my position or inoculates the listener against future arguments and discussions. I would assume a person of the right does and should make similar arguments.

Honors Another topic about which I have had many thoughts and no real resolution concerns the question of honors—professional and so-

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cial. It is difficult in our culture not to be sensitive to the rewards of honors and recognition. I was properly appreciative when I was elected to the selective Psychological Round Table and, after that, to the elite Society of Experimental Psychologists. There followed things like the William James Prize for one of my emotion books, citation in Who’s Who in America, and eventually, election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. All this is sort of the B+/A- of public recognition and short of things like the National Academy of Science and the American Philosophical Society. I am realistic enough to know that my achievements may have fallen short of the standards employed for the latter societies, that I had chosen to be a sometime dilettante—which I enjoyed and would not give up for anything. But I am also aware in my 70s of the politics involved, of the recognition bestowed on some who had primarily the right friends, and of how my tendency to be outspoken and frequently not “one of the boys” gave me freedoms that prevented other kinds of recognition. More important is the fact that, in retrospect, most of these honors are minor decorations of one’s life, and yet there are academics who lust after them with a passion. I have known people who spend an inordinate amount of time recruiting friends and acquaintances, followers and hangers-on to nominate them for this prize or that, or work on getting themselves nominated for honorary degrees and other public honors. I recall one psychologist who, upon being elected to the National Academy, immediately announced that he would spend the following year getting his favorite student elected—and he did. Sometimes these endeavors spill over into such trivial pursuits as CV constructions. I have already mentioned the tendency to include in one’s CV every little effort one has ever made. Such effusions are not rare, as desperate attempts are made to be remembered in the annals of our fields. All of us want to be remembered but sometimes the attempts become feverish. But I should not be too harsh, after all I did write this book! In the end, a scholar wants the recognition that comes with a lasting contribution—way past one’s death. We cannot know about that and therefore, I am now frequently quite content not to hunger for honors anymore and to let the future take care of what is really important. Of course, none of this approaches the kind of eminence I once enjoyed for about an hour when, during

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an air journey, I was being fixated by the couple across the aisle. Eventually, the man leaned over and asked, “My wife was wondering whether you are somebody?”

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS When challenged, I have—since my early teens—always identified myself with the left, eventually with social democracy and democratic socialism. Sometimes I think that my current beliefs are best covered by an old term—anti-fascist. It includes opposition to all tyrannies and exploitations (including those from the left) and asserts that opposing them is a prime political end. Of all the writers of my century, I am closest in attitudes to George Orwell in his opposition to totalitarianism of whatever stripe. Orwell’s Animal Farm concludes with the wry observation that in the end “it was impossible to say which was which.” And he vigorously denied that 1984 was an “attack on socialism.” He was a true democratic socialist who, in addition, had little patience with obfuscation or bullshit. Which are enough reasons why he was one of my earliest (book) collecting targets. But socialism is not a twenty-first century term. I know that socialism and social democracy cover a variety of virtues and sins, and an extensive range of beliefs and commitments. Their adherents range from unreconstructed Stalinists to reconstructed communists to independent socialists to mainstream European social democrats of the left and then, those of the not quite right—the socialists who are liberals and very often with a tinge of center-right commitment (to be found in Europe from Portugal to Britain to Italy). I assume I am somewhere in the middle of that continuum, but I also acknowledge the senses in which the term carries meanings that often are out of date and often inappropriate. The enshrined working proletariat, living in misery and needing association and action, to which the early socialists appealed, has changed under the revived capitalism of the late twentieth century. The major, although not the only, exploited groups today live in Third World countries. The old goals still stand in terms of justice and fairness, and not letting privilege and wealth determine one’s role in life and that of one’s children. As the greed of modern capitalists, the search for cheaper labor, and the domi-

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nance of globalization begin to create a new underclass, there will be new movements arising, developing new politics and new programs. I wonder whether current labor policies will, if not changed, create a new Lumpenproletariat that will have to be “controlled” and a more active labor force that will not stay quiescent forever. The increasing discrepancies in income in the Western world, the export of labor, and the decreasing social services cannot be sustained for long without creating inevitable reactions. Eventually, a new way of looking at some combination of social equality, reasonable market forces, and abandonment of exploitation will emerge. It has been some 200 years since the triumph of capitalism and over a 100 since influential new economic and political theories have been proposed. Somebody, somewhere surely has some new ideas. I will not see most of these developments, but I have a strong belief that there are enough people of good faith and determination to make a better society. I believe that public ownership, or at least supervision, of major direction-determining industries, such as the rails, utilities, and land is probably necessary because the necessities of life should not be an important source of profits. Some kind of socially responsible market is necessary for most of the economy though I do not know how this is to be done. Parenthetically, I might note that even old Karl Marx did not have the faintest idea how a socialist economy was to function, though he certainly knew how capitalism works. We surely do not want a command economy—and even publicly owned goods should be subjected somehow to market forces. To recognize the importance of the market in economic industrial matters does not mean that one also endorses the extension of market ideologies and thinking to other areas of society. Commodities should be treated like commodities, but people and their noncommercial activities should not. In other words, one would want a market economy but not a market society. I have no coherent ideas of economics, just some connected but independent notions about various issues: There is now enough evidence that worker or employee run enterprises, properly structured and administered, can function well and efficiently, both in socialist and capitalist economies. The next redistributive

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movement for social justice will determine the specification of what a reasonable economy will look like, and hopefully, it will not be corrupted by another quasi-Soviet horror. That should be preventable by insisting on democratic structure—decisions must be made from the grassroots up, access to the media must be open to all, and an American First Amendment right must be balanced with an absolutely even playing field. Public corruption should be one of the most seriously punished crimes. Inequalities of income that generate both injustice and social unrest,can be tolerated as long as there are agreed on limits, or by guaranteeing a floor on incomes. If a few make (hopefully, deserved) large incomes, society can tolerate that as long as nobody at the other end of the scale fails to have enough food, shelter, and those things that make life worthwhile. I read with anxiety about the future of the constantly increasing ratio between top and bottom incomes. But most important in the panoply of just and fair practices should be the idea that nobody should be exploited for the benefit of others, that a person’s fruit of their labor should not be the mere property of their employer, it should be partly their own and partly redound to the benefit of the community. Part of that belief and my own history with unionism in New York when I was 16 and joined a clandestine union has made me an unalloyed supporter of trade unions. I will not cross picket lines and I support democratic unions whenever possible. Behind all this is the fact—so badly understood by libertarians—that humans are social animals who cannot get along without communal efforts. It must be realized that the worst aspects of capitalism will take some generations to be overcome—greed and selfishness are not a necessary part of human nature, but they are if the alternatives are not available. I am not at all sure how all this is to be accomplished, but I do know that the scourges of poverty and racism can and must be eventually eradicated. I resonated to the cry sometimes heard after the collapse of the Soviet Union: “One down—one to go.” One of the reasons for my finding myself sometimes in a no-man’s land between socialism and capitalism—to simplify things—is that many of the things that one is accused of, one may also find in the other. I have no problem with publicly owned institutions—well-run post offices and railroads and even police forces have not historically been a

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problem. Inefficiency in the public and private sectors produces incompetence (and vice versa) and large private companies are as badly served by incompetence and inefficiency as are public services. Incompetence is often assigned to government enterprises, but I know of no private enterprise that is as efficient as either the U.S. or the British post office. I have never lost a piece of mail—and for six years as editor of the Psychological Review, I handled hundreds of such pieces. My bank has made more mistakes than my post office. I do not have to train my mail carrier, as I have found myself repeatedly having to train bank tellers in matters of foreign money transactions, and that is the Bank of America! Recently there was public outcry over the presumed fact that 5 to 8 percent of school teachers are not competent. I can think of no private corporation who would not be happy if their level of incompetence were so low. Particularly for employees who are as grossly underpaid as our teachers. The costs of misguided privatization has been demonstrated in the British rail system, which, since it passed into private hands some years ago, has had mounting problems in quality of service and, most seriously, its safety record. Private corporations can fend off criticism of their internal workings by pointing to the bottom line. If they are profitable, they do not need to change—“if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” There is little need to look at the actual workings of the company if it consistently shows a sizeable profit. For public corporations, there is no such financial bottom line of profit and loss that can justify their operations. Public corporations like post offices and the National Health Service in the United Kingdom have their competence, their actual detailed working practices, continuously exposed to the public—that is their bottom line. Public services that fail do so because they are badly run, not because they are bureaucracies or inherently unmanageable. On the other hand, I am convinced that the production of goods needs Adam Smith’s invisible hand to be sure that a market condition checks goods (and even some services) while assuring that the workers on the factory floor not only are not exploited but share in the profits of their work. There is the complex problem of assuring adequate investment capital for a society and I don’t know how to assure adequate supplies of capital that is not either acquired at

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the cost of cutting wages or under the control of a government bureaucrat. At the same time, I see no problems in having basic social needs—health and life insurance, support for child rearing, and other aspects of the so-called welfare state—run by an efficient state apparatus. I guess I differ from most people in that I rather like the idea of a life where basic needs and problems are taken care of by the state and the individual is free to engage in more leisure, education, and whatever-pleases-you. Safety net income, adequate health insurance, a progressive income tax with a minimum of exemptions, and free access to education might lure more people to encourage theaters, orchestras, football games, tennis, rock festivals, poetry readings, playgrounds, museums, fisheries, mountain holidays, operas, and even non-stupefying television. I am uncomfortable about democracy as an icon, which may elevate the practice to a defense of the swayed masses, to a threat to minority rights, to blurring the contrast between arguably moral as against popular positions, and the right of the privileged and moneyed to have primary access to democratic communication. Once we start with some basic essentials, like free elections, expression, and speech, then what more is needed? These rights need to be protected by making access to public opinion not dependent on financial power, or making access to the electorate similarly dependent. I do not believe that other desirable or undesirable social options are invariably tied to a proper exercise of democracy. In particular, no economic system is a necessary consequence of democratic politics, and recent developments in Eastern Europe have demonstrated that democracy paired with unrestrained capitalism has many undesirable consequences. Obviously, I personally would prefer a democracy that extends democratic rights to the economic sphere. Similarly, consequent on the mistreatment of a Chinese dissident in and out of prison, some of the comment suggested that such mistreatment had to do with the failure of the Chinese government to advance democratic rights. But do democratic rights directly deal with human rights in general? The latter have to do with being treated humanely, justly, fairly, not to be physically or psychologically abused—and the thrust of the comments was

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about such abuses. Democracy has to do with a form of government—which may or may not tolerate such abuses. One can imagine a totally undemocratic absolutist form of government that does not engage in any violations of basic human rights. It permits people to say or do what they wish—in conformity with a reasonable set of laws; it just does not permit the nation at large to participate in the choice or exercise of government. Such a government is not democratic but it also would not be guilty of any violations of basic human rights. Unless one wishes to add the democratic participation in government to a list of human rights, and argues for such an inclusion convincingly, we should keep arguments and complaints about the two separate, and they need to be defended separately.

Race I do believe that Americans of recent European origins—and certainly those of my generation—have a special set of attitudes toward problems of race and therefore, a special set of responsibilities. When I arrived in America, I had never met any Black people before—short of an exhibition of an African village in the Vienna Prater. My first reaction to seeing Black and white relations was that I had met the American equivalent of the European Jew—Blacks were the Jews of America. That can be seen as an immature, adolescent response—and surely I did not see the enormity of the American dilemma, but it did have one effect. I did not understand how Jews in America could ever be racists—and I realized later that when they were, it was often a classic example of Freud’s notion of identification with the aggressor. In the end, my attitudes were formed in part by my politics and in part by rather uncomplicated conclusions, such as Russell Baker ’s some years ago that “it is their turn.” Assertions of beliefs in justice and equity and democratic ideals are frequently mouthed by some of the most violent (and virulent) opponents of affirmative action and other meliorative attempts. They come from people identified with conservative and often reactionary political attitudes. For the left, antiracist positions are part of their credo, going back at least to liberty, equality, and fra-

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ternity. On the right, assertions of opposition to racism often come from highly respectable members of the conservative establishment; but they are in the minority. Assertions of the inutility of welfare, the “socialist” aspects of decent health insurance, advocation of a regressive flat tax, and other issues of the right are found in conjunction with the assertion that affirmative action programs violate civil liberties. Minorities are said to be “not ready” or even genetically disadvantaged. A colleague of mine, an outspoken opponent of affirmative action on moral grounds once was offered a position in an Eastern city. He opined that he didn’t want to live there because there were too many Blacks there. The right asserts that the free market of jobs and opportunities will regulate all those shortcomings, though it is unclear why giving advantage to the advantaged is an example of the free market in opportunities. In the end, the right is the party of the status quo, or privilege, of inherited position and wealth. It cannot but help itself to fend off the newcomers and intruders: “Them that has gits”—certainly in the area of economics and economic opportunities. I know of no alternative to affirmative action that will be truly effective in bringing under-represented minorities into the mainstream of economic and professional life, and eventually into positions of power. If these goals are not achieved, the American race problem will create more social disasters. Having lived a reasonable part of my life in Britain, I am struck by the basic difference in the way the ruling classes organize the pecking order there and in the United States. In Britain, the major distinction is one of class and the distinction is most obvious in the way language distinguishes class membership. Lower-class and upper-class people speak differently and race is divided up by these class distinctions—lower-class Black people speak lower-class English, upper-class Black people speak upper-class English. In the United States, the dialects are race tied and the basic discrimination is one of race. In Britain, the basic discrimination is one of class, both for Black and Jewish people. Granted that both kinds of divides are being increasingly ameliorated and that, in the United States, class distinctions frequently dovetail race distinctions, still the difference is both instructive and important.

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I end these reflections with two topics, one somewhat frivolous, the other important, or vice versa—depending on one’s attitudes.

SPORTS I have always been a moderately active sports spectator/listener/watcher across a fairly Catholic selection of sports. My multinational history has developed a fan who—depending on the sport—supports and cheers on different teams. In Vienna, I was a devoted soccer fan—as were all my peers—and my team was the Austria FC (known as the Violetten for their violet uniforms), and of course, I cheered for the Austrian national team. In the early 1930s, Austria enjoyed particularly successful international soccer seasons—their team was known as the Wunderteam. I still remember their center forward star Sindelar and the goalie and defenders—Hiden, Sesta, Schmaus. In retrospect, I find it surprising that Austria had a Jewish soccer team, Hakoah, which generally gave a good account of itself in the Austrian second division (and even once became champions in the 1920s) and occasionally contributed a player (like Donnenfeld) to the Austrian national team. The Jewish kids’ attitude toward the team was one of benign neglect; we always needed a major league club to cheer on. Despite everything that has happened since then, I still have a warm spot for the Austrian soccer team—as well as, of course, the English team—soccer is still my favorite spectator sport. Watching the 1998 World Cup, I was pleased to find that the Belgian national team was still the Red Devils that I remembered from the 1930s. Because I saw international ice skaters at my skating club, I still like figure skating. I have been enchanted by the Russian skaters, as I have been by the Russian woman gymnasts. My Austrian roots have kept faith when it comes to skiing, where I cheer on the boys and girls from Austria. In athletics. I have been partial to the British participants, but generally I like watching athletic games. In baseball. I have become a skeptical but constant fan of the San Diego Padres—usually hoping against hope. American football I find only of occasional interest—too many pauses, too much muscle. I am slowly beginning to understand the intricacies of cricket, but still find rugby confusing and boring. I follow the Tour de France, Formula One racing, and enjoy

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show jumping—with varying national identifications. And, yes, as a participant I have been a dilettante at best, apart from skating, skiing, and soccer playing in Vienna, but I haven’t done much since. But watching is a lot of fun—and so much less demanding.

WOMEN I have always liked women better than men. Given that fact, I have sometimes wondered why I could not overcome my cultural sexism, both in Austria and in the United States, faster than I did. But I guess culture is a tough taskmaster. In any case, I clearly followed all the attitudes toward women that were accepted in the first half of the century. Not only was it clear, in this specific case to both Jean and me, that men’s careers and professional advancement must always have priority over those of their wives, but all the other prejudices were there too. In the field of academics, it was the opinion held by many and still by some that somehow women were intellectually inferior to men, particularly in such areas as mathematics and conceptual thinking. I remember believing that women tended to think more concretely, less abstractly, than men. There was no sudden transformation, no abrupt snap that made me from a sexist into a reasonable human, and eventually a committed feminist. Obviously I was, as so many others, slowly convinced by feminist arguments and persuasions. But by the 1970s, the change was complete, so complete that now as I read papers and manuscripts I am jarred when coming across language that is not gender neutral. I have tried to trace back my preference for woman. Certainly, it was there in adolescence, in the 1940s, when I had woman friends with whom I had friendships and no loveships. The adolescent hormone rush for female bodies showed itself with one set of women, while others were only friends—the latter were not Madonnas while the former were not whores. I had the adolescent dream that all my objects of passion were in fact Madonnas. As should be apparent from other passages, there were many Madonnas in my early life, Ruth, my companion on the Italian seashore; Mimi, the saint of my early adolescence; one of the Szilagyi girls on holiday in Austria; my co-passenger on my journey to London—to name the ones that immediately come to mind. Is this more or less than

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the usual quota of adolescent infatuations? I do not know, but I do know that the Vienna atmosphere and background made falling in love a natural thing to do—and do often. There is one other Viennese, or European, legacy: I love to flirt. And it is clear that over the past 50 years increasing numbers of attractive American women have learned how to enjoy the game—which is neither serious nor harassing, a symmetrical game to be played at parties, lunches, and other informal occasions. The lack of practice for American women has provided a couple of occasions of embarrassment for me. After an entertaining evening flirting with a—usually married—lady, I would say goodnight, or even kiss her hand. Then, I would be drawn aside with the question, “Where do we go from here?” “What now?” The evening was taken seriously and my natural answer, “Nothing and thank-you for a pleasant evening” would have been cruel; that reply had to be adumbrated and prettified. But no harm done—and on top of it all, Jean always understood what was going on. Since my adolescence, I have had many woman friends, some of them ended up in mutual passion, and with one exception, they all remained friends. More relevant during the political period in particular, where the two women friends who were the recipients of my doubts and queries. One in particular spent hours on the phone with me with never a hint of any other interest. When we met again some 40 years later, I asked her in puzzlement why we hadn’t ended up in bed. The question remained open, we didn’t know. Most recently my best friend was a woman, and my wife is a good friend. How about the men—where did I find them wanting? Essentially I believe—or I hope—that I was unable to join in macho attitudes, or, as I learned to call it later, testosterone poisoning. When—in primary school, I got into a near bloody fight, my teacher was glad I was at least once capable of such behavior. In early boyhood, I was keen on participatory sports (soccer in particular and also scooter racing!) and of course I was also competitive, but could never work up any enthusiasm for pointless fighting. As I look at the important male friends in later life, we were close, but never as close as with my woman friends, never able to

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discuss intimacies I was able to reveal to the women. There is an empathy, a degree of understanding and trying to understand that I share with women and never completely found in men friends. On reflection, most of the women friendships that ended up in bed had a tendency to let the heat and the passion overshadow the friendship, which then recovered when the sexual relationship was ending. Not all, but most.

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end with a sense of incompleteness. There are many episodes I had to leave out. Mainly because they would have identified and embarrassed people about whom I still care. I apologize to the reader who hoped for more titillation that most of any details of my sex life had to be omitted. But I don’t think such omissions seriously impair the total story told. After all, everyday life is a reflection of one’s hidden life, and the reverse is true as well. When this story was about finished, I was told about and eventually read Ruth Klüger ’s book, Weiter Leben, about her experience of growing up in Vienna, but ending up in Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. Ruth was a few years younger than I and eventually was a professor at the University of California at Irvine—just up the road from us. She has written the most honest, open, frank book about the Holocaust and its experiences and consequences that I have read. There may be other equally accessible accounts but I was embarrassed after I read this one—and when I keep rereading it. Embarrassed because of my inadequacy in writing the early part of this book, and presumably in part because of the guilt that those of us Jews who were spared the camps all feel toward the true victims. If 292

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one really wants to understand the experience of the Holocaust, Jewish consciousness in Germany and with Germans, and with poetic lucidity about it all, one must read this book. It has not yet been published in English—surely it will and must be. In retrospect about my life, I took circumstances as they came, rarely depressed, though occasionally anxious. I never reacted overly intensely to failure—or to success. In a sense, I carried with me an Austrian attitude illustrated in one of my favorite stories. An Austrian and a German army were fighting side by side. At a crucial point in the war, the commanding generals of the two armies were called to headquarters to report on the situation at the front. The German general concluded his remarks by saying that the situation was “serious but not hopeless.” Whereupon the Austrian general added that he thought that it was “hopeless but not serious.” Apart from the Holocaust, that was my attitude most of the time when faced with difficulty. And I was helped by another Austrian aphorism, taken from one on the songs in Strauss’ Fledermaus: “Glücklich ist wer vergisst was nicht mehr zu ändern ist.” “Happy is who forgets what is beyond correction.” I believe it was Thomas Hardy who once wrote of the “persistence of the unforeseen.” My life was full of the unforeseen. One might have predicted the emigration, but who could have known about the beneficious David Eisendrath and the consequences of his action? What unexpected circumstance brought me into the Langdon Jesuitical domain and the excellent education that propelled me intellectually? What change in direction occurred when I was the victim of an exploding ether bottle that changed my income and daily habits? How fortuitous was my application for Military Intelligence and my subsequent experience of interrogation, which may have led into an interest in psychology? And then there are the related “what ifs.” What if Frank Beach had not picked up my application to graduate school at Yale? What if Fred Skinner had accepted the chair at UCSD and I did not go to California? At one point, Jean had decided to decline marriage and removal to Brazil, and instead went to work with me back in 1955, what if she had decided the other way?

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In the end, the story of a life is a story of contingencies. But the forces of circumstance and contingency are complex—they do not act in a vacuum. As one situation propels you in a particular direction and shapes particular views and attitudes, these very attitudes will determine how the next force of circumstance will affect you. Contingency always impinges on a previously formed and active individual. Which brings me full circle because I now look at much of psychological happenings as being contingent too, as is most of everything else, from the sublime to the ridiculous, from evolution to grocery shopping.