(The old university was renamed Humboldt University by East Germany's Stalinist masters to exploit the great prestige enjoyed by Wilhelm von Humboldt, From 1948 on, academicsįrom the old University of Berlin began to set up new headquarters in idyllic Dahlem. The Free University, its very name a calculated provocation to its East Berlin ancestor, was an institution born or, rather, assembled faculty by faculty, department by department, not long after the war.
Then we turned south to take in cities like Bordeaux, getting slightly drunk at a degustation at Chateau d'Yquem on the sweet local dessert wine, sleeping in double beds guarded by crucifixes overhead. We moved westward at a stately pace through the chateau country all the way to Angers, with its magnificent tapestries, eating and drinking our way across the region. Touring through France had been an unmitigated delight. A colleague in Columbia's German department, Henry Hatfield, was giving a course on Thomas Mann at the Free University in West Berlin and had invited us to hear Weeks touring in France, my wife, Ruth, and I were on our way to Berlin. On June 27, 1961, we crossed the Rhine Bridge from Strasbourg to Kehl, and I was subjected to the most disconcerting anti-Semitic display I had endured since I left Germany twenty-two years earlier.
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