Rude Awakenings: An American Historian’s Encounters with Nazism, Communism, and McCarthyism by Carol Sicherman (review)

When the author of this review interviewed Harry Marks, the subject of this biography by his daughter, she was mainly interested in his experiences during the McCarthy era. He had been called up by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1953. Questioned in an executive session, Marks described his brief sojourn in the American Communist party, named a few names, and then discoursed at length about the evils of the Soviet system. Marks anticipated that HUAC would keep his testimony secret, as it did with many of its friendly witnesses, but this was not the case. But because the committee did not publicize the release of its transcript, few of Marks’s colleagues at the University of Connecticut, where he taught European history, knew about his brush with the Cold War Red Scare.

Though distressed by the prospect, Marks had felt he had no choice but to answer the committee’s questions. By 1953, the academic establishment had made it clear that college and university teachers who refused to cooperate with the witch hunt would lose their jobs. In fact, the University of Connecticut had already dismissed a number of politically tainted individuals, including a highly regarded and tenured professor of physics. Marks retained his job, serving the university as a popular and widely respected faculty member until his retirement in 1978.

What Carol Sicherman’s account of her father’s life reveals is that Marks’s appearance before HUAC was not his first encounter with political repression. He had lived for a while under the Nazis. An assimilated American Jew from a solid bourgeois background, he had grown up in New York City during the 1920s in the comfortable world of German Jewish professionals and businessmen. After graduating from Fieldston, a private school catering to that milieu, he went on to Harvard, where he found his intellectual vocation as a historian. Determined to gain a deeper understanding of the culture of the country about which he was about to write his dissertation, Marks took off for Germany—just at the moment when the Weimar Republic was about to collapse.

Young and somewhat naïve, Marks was nonetheless a quick learner who soon grasped the significance of what he was observing. He recorded his impressions of the early months of the Third Reich in a diary, as well as in the many letters he exchanged with correspondents in both Germany and the US. This trove of sources forms the core of the book. They not only offer yet another firsthand glimpse of the way in which the Nazis shattered the affluent and cultured world of German Jewry, but also help us understand why someone like Harry Marks would then gravitate to the communist orbit.

Marks was both an outsider and an insider. Once he reached Berlin, his family and academic connections brought him into a circle of upper-middle-class assimilated Jews, not all that different from the folks back home. As his command of the language improved, Marks found himself ever more comfortable in this environment, one which prized the highest forms of German culture. Most of the men and women Marks associated with were on the left politically, sympathetic to the social democracy of the SPD, though not (with a few exceptions) to the more rigorous Marxism of the German Communist Party.

What seems most striking about Marks’s experience, at least as Sicherman has portrayed it, is that, for all his Berlin friends’ enthusiasm for German culture, they remained a group apart. Though they saw themselves as preserving the finest elements of their nation’s intellectual and artistic heritage, they were actually developing a separate German Jewish culture—one that the rest of their countrymen did not share. Since Marks seems to have operated within an almost entirely Jewish world, he was in a good position to observe how the Nazis set about...