Deutsche Altertumswissenschaftler im amerikanischen Exil. Eine Rekonstruktion by Hans Peter Obermayer (review)

This book owes its genesis to the author’s receipt in December 1997 of the Kurt von Fritz Memorial Prize for his dissertation. Thus was Obermayer’s curiosity whetted to find out more about von Fritz, who in 1934 was the only German professor to decline to swear the loyalty oath to Adolf Hitler. Dismissed from his professorship in Munich, von Fritz managed to emigrate and find employment, ultimately in the Classics Department at Columbia University, where his mentor and close friend Ernst Kapp later joined him. While pursuing this story in Columbia archives, Obermayer discovered other important documents relating to exiled scholars of the period. The project came to include six Columbia scholars. Others were added who had connections to the six, such as Elisabeth Jastrow, who studied with Margarete Bieber before the latter came to Columbia. The last addition was Paul Friedländer, in view of his dramatic story and the fact that his papers at UCLA were close to Jastrow’s at the Getty Center. In all, Obermayer profiles ten scholars who were forced to flee Hitler’s Germany and to relaunch their careers in America. Obermayer’s emphasis is on establishing facts; the problem is still at the stage where this is necessary. In view of space constraints, I will focus paradigmatically on a single case.

Though Paul Friedländer converted to Protestantism at age fourteen, his Jewish birth posed a problem for him in Germany of the time. We will never know to what extent it may have prompted the opposition to his call to a professorship in Marburg (1920). Appointed nonetheless, Friedländer became friendly with a Marburg colleague, the New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann. The Plato, Friedländer’s masterpiece, published 1928–1930, opened the door to a better position in Halle, from which, however, the Nazi regime forced him to retire in 1935 after only three years. Faced with narrowing professional opportunities in Germany, Friedländer took soundings on trips to Italy, England, and America. But it was only when, around the time of the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938, he was interned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp (from which he was released with the help of Bultmann) that Friedländer realized that emigration was his only hope.

If this book has a hero, it is a private organization, the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars and its staff and supporters, who intervened to aid Friedländer and others in their time of need and arrange for them to make the transition to American colleges and universities. This was not easy, especially since this country was still in the grip of the depression, and university budgets, especially for subjects such as classics and archaeology, were tight. Obermayer lays out the process of bringing Friedländer to America in all its excruciating and, for the candidate, often frustrating detail (he had to endure German chicanery regarding his passport). One feels that someone with greater familiarity with American academia might shed further light, for example, on the actions taken regarding Friedländer by R. G. Sproul, president of the University of California, which Obermayer narrates but cannot really explain. Once he reached California (via Johns Hopkins), Friedländer’s problems were not over. He could only teach at UCLA until 1949, when he reached the statutory retirement age. Because of the pension system based upon years of service, his University of California pension was a pittance, and it was not until 1954 that he began receiving a pension from West Germany. Obermayer offers a gripping narrative supported by careful archival research and corrects some previous misunderstandings along the way.

Though the history of classical scholarship is not necessarily just the history of individual scholars (as is claimed in the Introduction), the latter is a major component, and this book sheds bright and overdue light on a neglected aspect. In view of the way this book came...