SIX

Careers: An American Story

As the weaver elaborated his pattern for no end but the pleasure of his aesthetic sense…so might a man look at his life, that it made a pattern.

W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

That first summer in America, Bernie —or Bernat, as Charles Merrill called him—became acquainted with wealth and luxury. From St. Louis, Merrill took his family, including Bernie, to the East Coast to attend the Amherst graduation of his brother, Jimmy. Then they proceeded to Charles Merrill, Sr/s opulent estate, known as The Orchard, in Southampton, Long Island. The family accepted the odd addition of this young Hungarian to its summer gathering as one of those idealistic quirks to which Charles Jr. was prone. Given his cultural and social background, the elder Merrill treated Bernie with a remarkable degree of tolerance and courtesy. The same was true of Charles's other relatives, particularly his sister, Doris Magowan, and her husband, Robert (the latter, when chairman and CEO of the Safeway corporation, was to be instrumental in launching Bernie on his business career). For Bernie, one wondrous experience piled on another. He had walked into an enticing world defined by new rules for living and working. With algebra lessons from Charlie, a summer cottage on Cape Cod, and his first American girlfriend, Bernie was all set, with many opportunities laid out before him.

He worked hard at becoming a typical American teenager, even adopting a midwestern accent to highlight his permanent residency in St. Louis. He was competitive but at the same time guided by a mind-set that was adaptive. Ever ready to adjust to his social environment, he had a great need to be accepted, to fit the mold that offered him a good life. He was committed to the kind of success he saw around him, and he gladly conformed to the standards of this upper-class milieu. His survival skills honed in Europe were transformed into a sharp sense for this new world of possibilities, but at this level of American society there was no room for a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz, Bernie believed. He perceived his past as baggage that would weigh him down, socially and emotionally.

Still, the past did not let go of him easily. The state of Israel came into existence on May 15,1948, and a few months later he received a letter from Simcha Katz. His old concentration camp buddy described the struggle for national survival, including the ordeals and deaths of Selvino comrades in the battles for the emerging nation. The news tore Bernie apart. It left him confused, tormented by guilt and, to a certain degree, by regrets as well. For a time he became preoccupied with this other life that he had rejected in favor of America, but soon he shifted his concentration to goals rather than the past.

Bernie likes to see himself as a tough person, as one who can move ahead without looking back, if necessary. So he surprised me one day several years into our work together when, during an everyday conversation, he remarked out of context, “You know, in one of the letters Simcha wrote me in June 1948, he told me how a girl with whom I'd had a romance in the Selvino camp whispered my name as she lay dying from her wounds.” Barely able to control his tears, he quickly changed the subject to regain his composure.

Should Bernie have followed the call to go to Israel? One might ask who was the more consequential —Simcha Katz, the survivor who participated in shaping a new collective identity, or Bernat Rosner, who opted for American individualism, with its already established playing field. Ever since, Bernie has wondered what his fate would have been had he decided to go to Palestine. But in his early days in America, in the life opening up before him, there was no time for tears about the past.

Bernie graduated from high school and was accepted at Cornell University in fall 1950. On his way to Cornell, he was joined on the train from St. Louis by another preppie bound for Princeton. This traveling companion warned him to beware of fraternities that accepted Jews. Bernie thanked him for the advice.

Once at Cornell, Bernie threw himself into his undergraduate studies. Literature and history were his favorite subjects to begin with, but as time went on he was more and more attracted to courses in business administration. In his social life he did everything he could to be one of the boys. He joined the “right fraternity,” which was, among other things, non-Jewish. The American college creed of the 1950s dictated conformity, and Bernie embraced it. He even came to believe, along with his fraternity brothers, that “typical Jews” were not “his kind of people.” Although his sponsors, Charles and Mary Merrill, both traditional New Deal liberals, were at best ambivalent about Bernie's determined efforts to become a member of the “fifties generation,” he remained focused on his goal of total assimilation.

Calculating as this attitude might seem on the surface, in actuality it provided Bernie with an effective way to shatter the last vestiges of his victimhood—wherein murderers had branded him for extermination because of his religion and ethnicity. In the Auschwitz barracks he had jumped across a wall to become part of the slave labor group destined for transfer out of the camp, leaving behind the group marked for extermination. Now, at Cornell, he made another escape across a wall, this time the invisible wall of racial and religious prejudice, into the safe haven of a prestigious, upper-class fraternity that was integrated into the mainstream of American campus life. By doing so, he had, without giving it much thought, joined those to whom the Holocaust and its horrors had no particular significance. With my German upbringing, do I have a right to a moral judgment? After all, like Bernie, I also followed a fashion of the fifties. I insisted on my individuality to shield me from what Germans had done to the Jews and to the rest of Europe.

Bernie wanted to conform to the course followed by most of his fraternity brothers at Cornell. He also wanted to finish his college education without being drafted into the Korean War, so he joined the ROTC. When, during his subsequent military service, he was promoted to the rank of first lieutenant in the U.S. Army, he thought back with pride and satisfaction to the resplendent Hungarian second lieutenant who had so impressed him as a boy in Tab, whom he now outranked. Aware of his unique background and his success at Cornell, college authorities chose him during his senior year to give the keynote “Personal Values Speech” to entering freshmen. Prophetically perhaps, he drafted this speech on a paper shopping bag.

This evolution toward traditional conservative values, coupled with his growing interest in business courses, caused tensions between Bernie and the Merrills. Though nominally Episcopalian, already in his youth Charles Merrill, who has jokingly referred to himself as a “semi-Marxist,” was less interested in mainstream religious observances than in ethical standards and social activism. He had worked for ten cents an hour as a store clerk in a mixed-race, Christian-socialist cooperative farm in Mississippi in 1941, long before civil rights activism became fashionable. Bernie's talent for accommodation and his lack of idealism in favor of a self-interested pragmatism came up against Charlie's progressive liberalism, or rather his unbending moral stance—terms the young disciple used to compare his sponsor to the stern posture of an Old Testament patriarch. Their warm relationship suffered a chill for a number of years.

While in college at Cornell, Bernie became an American citizen, and on graduation in 1954, he was accepted at Harvard Law School. Aside from his law courses, a work by Henry Steele Commager, The History of the American Republic, confirmed for him the secular principles of individualism that now guided his new American life. He had resisted committing himself to the collective called Israel that came into being on the basis of secular Zionist principles, and he had lost his faith in the Orthodox religion of his family.

But Bernie has always maintained that his early study of the Talmud influenced his interest in the law, particularly constitutional law—which captivated him more and more. A respect for the precision of the written word was not merely a learned professional reflex but an important part of his cultural background. Half jokingly, he explained how his decision to attend law school was influenced by an 1861 legal case he came across while researching his senior thesis at Cornell on the subject of the ex post facto clause of the U.S. Constitution. Hartung v. the People of the State of New York involved a woman sentenced to death for having poisoned her husband. At the time of her crime, a person sentenced to death in the state of New York was to be returned to jail and executed within a fixed number of days following pronouncement of the sentence. After Hartung s commission of the crime, the law was changed to require condemned prisoners to be put in solitary confinement and to be executed only on specific orders from the governor. Through an oversight, the legislature failed to include the usual “savings clause” making the old law applicable to those to whom the new law could not be applied. Mrs. Hartung's lawyers argued that the new law imposed a severer punishment than the old law and that application of the new law to their client would violate the ex post facto clause, which, among other things, prohibits a retroactive increase in punishment. Further, since the old law was automatically repealed by the new law, there was no law under which Mrs. Hartung could be executed. Amazingly, the highest court of the state bought this argument, and Mrs. Hartung was permitted to go free. Bernie felt that a profession that gave scope to such creative use of logic and argument was worth pursuing.

He used the terms “ingenuity” and “elegance” to describe the outcome of this unusual case, and it became clear to me that the formalistic playfulness of the legal maneuvers struck a deep chord in him. On the face of it, I had a hard time accepting that this case may have had a bearing on his choice of the law. But since neither he nor I have much faith in psychological cause-and-effect reductionism, I at first let the matter rest with his straightforward, legal account. Only later, when I went over his story again, did I realize an odd coincidence that had escaped both of us.

During the Holocaust, Bernie came closest to death—from starvation and from the arsenic administered by the departing Germans —shortly before the arrival of the Allies. At this point he existed between two laws, the laws of the murderers who had fled and the laws of the liberating armies who were just arriving. Chaos and the closeness of death marked this suspension in his life between two worlds that operated under radically different rules. When he evoked this dangerous, transitional period for me, his fear of death became more palpable than in any other time of his storytelling. Did the New York murder case represent an existential step for Bernie beyond one of the most traumatic moments of his life? Was this simply a coincidence, or did it indeed constitute a matter of cause and effect? I believe it represents one of those random confluences of events that shapes recall, memory, and the writing of history. But when I mentioned this to Bernie, he thought it was one of my academic speculations, intriguing perhaps but lacking the rigor of proof.

After completing his Harvard law degree in spring 1959, Bernie entered into the “right marriage” when he wedded Betsy Baylies, the daughter of an East Coast Brahmin family. He admits that he decided to marry a girl from the upper class after reading Maupassant's novel Bel Ami. As it turned out, Bernie was deeply devoted to this kind woman, who was “non-Jewish,” as he told me, and also Episcopalian like the Merrills and Magowans. Quite aside from being a dynamic part of Bernie's trajectory up the economic and social ladder, Betsy was friendly and warmhearted. For a wedding present, Charles Merrill gave the Rosners a new Vauxhall automobile, in which they drove west on both a honeymoon and a move to a new home. They settled into a happy suburban marriage in Lafayette, California. As Merrill recalls, there were no signs of his Jewish background in Bernie's new home. Indeed, he kept the fact of his Jewish upbringing even from his wife for a time.

At first, Bernie told me that he hadn't told Betsy about his Jewish background because it belonged to his now-irrelevant “first life.” Later on, he divulged a detailed and compelling explanation for this peculiar fact. When he chose to come to America rather than Palestine, he was determined to break with the past, both in terms of religion and in terms of Jewish nationalism and loyalty. Not just in the concentration camps, but even during his childhood in Hungary, the outside world, the “establishment/' as he put it, drilled into him the notion that Jews were inferior, hateful, and repulsive. That kind of treatment and atmosphere generated self-hatred and feelings of inferiority. The war and its upheavals offered him a new life. Thus, in America, he believed he needed to become a new person, free of his former identity. The upper-class, Ivy League milieu that he entered gave him a powerful incentive to assimilate and conform. Already in St. Louis it became clear from the attitudes of his classmates that being Jewish was not an asset. Bernie drew a parallel between the nonchalance of the beautiful young people he admired in Tab as they strolled to the tennis courts and the tales of his preppie American schoolmates about their adventures at last Saturday's debutante ball. This time, he was determined to end up in the right crowd.

Although Bernie says that he never denied his Jewish origins outright, among his friends and acquaintances he played down the fact. When he talked about his concentration camp experiences, he usually explained that the authorities discovered that his family had listened to the underground Allied radio. The fact that “there was some Jewish blood” in his lineage, he mentioned only as a reason incidental to their deportation. His strategy was to avoid mentioning his deeply Orthodox family life and upbringing altogether.

Charles and Mary Merrill knew, of course, his true background and history. But after leaving for college, then the service, law school, and his career, his contacts with them were less frequent, especially because they spent much of the 1950s in Europe. But the Merrills returned to the United States and settled in Boston in 1957, the year Bernie entered Harvard Law School. Mary then became quite close to his fiancee, Betsy, and discovered the “sanitized version,” as Bernie called it, of the past he had told her.

Following this discovery, Mary Merrill confronted Bernie in harsh terms. When I asked Bernie what he meant by “harsh terms,” Bernie related that Mary had strong feelings against Germans and their war crimes and reminded him that his parents had been killed because they, too, were Jewish. She implied that he was being untrue to himself and admonished him to tell Betsy the truth. He did. He knew that by then it would make no difference to her. He told me that he was “surprised and humbled” by the fact that Betsy s family accepted him for what he was. He has maintained a warm relationship with them ever since.

The conflict with Mary, however, caused some estrangement with the Merrills that stretched over many years. The first step in the healing of this rift came in 1980 when Mary learned that Betsy, at the age of forty-five, was dying of cancer. Innately compassionate, Mary abandoned all reserves and rushed to comfort Bernie s afflicted family. The ultimate reconciliation came in 1999 when Bernie visited Mary as she lay on her deathbed. In wide-ranging conversations they were able to reminisce about how the Merrills had taken Bernie into their family long ago, and he was able to thank them for their generosity. And Mary absolved him of his past “sin of omission.”

As one of the amazing twists in my friend's life, I interpret the odd fact that Bernie, the orphaned refugee with his Orthodox Jewish background, was rescued and given a future by liberal American Protestants as something of a disincentive to seek out involvement with Jewish organizations in the United States. Had he done so, he might have shared his camp experiences with other survivors or found a measure of emotional support and solidarity. But it was his decision not to. He coped with his wounds on his own, drawing the legitimacy he needed to grow and function in the new world solely from his own extraordinary inner strength. He traveled a long road before deciding to reconcile his first with his second life.

After he and Betsy moved to California, the issue of his Jewish background became moot. California culture was more open than the circles in which he had moved on the East Coast. Moreover, the insecurities about his past gradually faded away as he gained in self-confidence and realized that the world in which he now lived accepted him. When his three sons were old enough to understand, he told them the “unvarnished truth.” And since he had lost his emotional ties to Judaism, he raised no objection to Betsy s desire to have their children raised as Christians. Two of them were baptized and christened. But the Rosners attended religious services only infrequently at the Lafayette Episcopal church.

Bernie's marriage to Betsy was the culmination of what he set out to achieve in America, both in his private life and with his public persona. It represented a triumph over a past he had overcome. It was toward the conclusion of our work together when I understood how this fact was connected to the drunken, anti-Semitic diatribe Bernie and Betsy suffered at the Tab railroad station in 1971, and the devastating effect this encounter had on him. We were going over this episode once again when he startled me by breaking into tears. It was one of the few times during our sessions when he was unable to hold them back. Now I finally came to understand the implications of the wrenching afternoon in Hungary. He had assumed he could manage this visit to his Hungarian village from the sovereign distance of a successful American businessman with his wealthy and loving wife by his side, maintaining the separation from his former life as a hunted Jew. But during the awful moments the drunk assaulted them verbally, his defenses against the past collapsed. He told me, “All I had done with my life since being deported to Auschwitz from this railroad station at Tab seemed to vanish. I felt back at where it all had started for me and my family”

In California, Bernie began his professional career in June 1959 at the Safeway corporation, which was originally co-founded by Charles Merrill, Sr., and later run by his son-in-law, Robert Magowan. During college and law school, as tensions developed with his sponsors, Bernie s growing admiration for the “know-how” of American capitalism on the highest levels had drawn him more and more to the Magowan side of the family. Charlie's sister, Doris Merrill, had married Robert Magowan. The Magowans realized that Bernie was more than the human flotsam that Charlie had picked up in Europe, as they had first viewed the young immigrant; Robert Magowan admired his determination, courage, and adaptability. Bernie began work in the legal division of the company and became assistant general counsel in 1980. He rose to become senior vice president, general counsel, and corporate secretary in 1984. By then, Robert's son, Peter, was chairman and CEO of Safeway, and Bernie considers his close personal and professional relationship with both father and son a measure of his success and a source of pride and satisfaction.

As legal counsel for Safeway, Bernie played a central role in a number of prominent cases that made headline news starting in the 1960s. While he battled with all his skills for the interests of the food chain, my sympathies, as an activist professor at the University of California at Berkeley, were with the “anti-establishment” voices on the other side of the political divide. In one memorable case, Safeway was accused of price gouging inner-city customers in Washington, D.C. Bernie told me that he checked out the accusation in person, found the claim to be untrue, and defended Safeway out of both personal conviction and professional obligation. The year was 1967, a time when political activism in American universities defined the values of the young and disaffected against the social order of Johnson's Great Society. Students reacted, not only against American involvement in Vietnam, but also against what was perceived to be an impersonal set of oversized institutions. Safeway, the giant food chain, was for them a perfect symbol of corporate insensitivity.

Also in 1967, cattle growers accused Safeway of violating federal anti-price fixing laws. Represented first by Joe Alioto, Sr., and later his son, the cattlemen alleged that they weren't receiving a fair share of meat profits, because Safeway was involved in a conspiracy with packers and other retailers to manipulate prices. Following a Supreme Court decision concerning price fixing, Safeway “won” the case when it was finally dismissed in federal court in 1984.

Then came the case of the California grape pickers, led by their charismatic spokesman, Cesar Chavez, who accused Safeway of abetting the exploitation of farmworkers for the sake of corporate profits. Anyone even marginally involved at the time will remember that boycotting Safeway because of its refusal to stop making grapes available to its customers became a moral litmus test for progressive political behavior. For a long time I ate no grapes. I had not yet met my friend Bernie at that time, but if I had known that he was one of the principal figures defending impersonal corporate America against the exploited Chicano grape pickers, I am sure I would have participated in a sit-in in his office. Tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis (the time, they are a-changing, and we are changing with them).

In the major case of his career in the mid-eighties, Bernie told how he became an expert on hostile takeovers and leveraged buyouts in the same way a person who is hit by a highspeed train becomes an expert on kinetic energy. He and I knew each other by the time he had to defend Safeway against an attempted takeover by the corporate raiders Herbert and Bobby Haft. Considered all-powerful by grape pickers, cattle ranchers, and university students and their professors a few decades earlier, the Safeway corporation was now threatened by a father and son team of entrepreneur-adventurers. The attempted takeover and its consequences became the most significant single event in Safeway corporate history and the main battle of Bernie s professional life. He slept little and kept inhuman working hours, but Bernie and Safeway's management emerged the victors in this particular game of high financial stakes.

In overseeing the operations of Safeway's legal division, Bernat Rosner proved himself a formidable attorney. Beyond that, his career was dedicated to the family that had given him a start in America. His was not just the labor of a conscientious employee but also the gladly rendered gift of a grateful adopted son. It would be wrong to view a career such as Bernie's as merely a series of “after-the-fact” events, following the great traumatic moments of the twentieth century in which he was trapped in the role of victim. He played the role of an insider at a major American corporation and enjoyed it very much. Once, when Bernie noticed my critical reservations about his business career and the gusto of his engagement, he stopped in midsentence and interjected, “I guess this is not the way an Auschwitz survivor is supposed to feel.” I didn't say anything at the time, but I believe, after all, that a survivor has earned the same right and freedom as anyone else to choose a path from among all the possibilities, whether or not his choice conforms to a particular ideology.

In the middle of his career, Bernie suffered a major blow. Betsy contracted cervical cancer. An operation at Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley failed to stay the disease. A few months before her death, Bernie and Betsy celebrated their life together on a vacation in Hawaii. She died on January 13, 1981. Bernie was now alone with their three teenage sons —Michael, 18, Andy, 16, and Owen, 11. He went into a deep depression, and, as he said, “never since the concentration camps” had he suffered such anguish —sleeplessness, anxiety, chest pains, loss of physical energy—all the while knowing that he had to keep up his side of the bargain in his professional life. With Betsy's illness and death, he once again suffered exposure to a world of deadly chance, to the dark abyss with which he had become all too familiar in his youth. He had climbed out of it before. On the tennis court, Bernie's most common habitat next to his office, he met his wife-to-be, Susan, who helped him out of his depression in summer 1982.

Celebrated as a successful corporate lawyer involved in key legal cases, author of articles in the Antitrust Law Journal, lecturer at numerous antitrust conferences and seminars, executive committee member of the Antitrust and Trade Regulation Section of the State Bar of California, and vice chairman of the American Bar Association Section of Antitrust Law, Bernat Rosner retired in 1993.

The steps that led to my career were much more modest than Bernie's. After my uncle subsidized my junior college education and my English instructor, Ruth Somers, encouraged me to study for the sake of my “inner development,” I was able to enroll at the University of California at Berkeley as a transfer student from San Francisco City College. To me, acceptance at Cal was a step of liberation from the village in which I had grown up as well as from my personal fears about the jarring contrasts between rich and poor I encountered at the Northwestern train station in Chicago. At the university I would be encouraged to advance on the basis of an established set of norms, and it was up to me to live up to them. Consequently, I tried, at least at the outset, to blend in to the general conform-ism of the 1950s.

Walking through Sather Gate onto campus was like walking through the looking glass into an intriguing world with an immense intellectual buffet spread out before me. I immersed myself in a great variety of subjects and rarely took time out for social life or recreation. In fact, Sundays, a time for relaxing, depressed me. I was consumed by a curiosity without limits; at the same time, my studies constituted a grimly determined escape from the “world outside,” which I deeply feared for its hidden dangers, sudden violence, and unpredictability. After General MacArthur returned from Korea to more than half an hour of wild applause at the 1952 Chicago convention, I was convinced that the United States was heading for a dictatorship. But when in the final balloting for the Republican presidential nominee he garnered only three votes, I received my first lesson in American democracy. I felt reassured.

McCarthyism, rampant in the 1950s, lay outside my horizons. I was more aware of the psychological meanness of the televised hearings than of any menace these witch-hunts presented to democratic values. For me, the American pursuit of happiness lay within the well-protected walls of the university. Berkeley represented an intellectual haven, an all-absorbing focus that required no engagement in society at large, at least not during the decade known for its introversion. Some time passed before I realized that the loyalty oath demanded of the faculty had been an assault on the academic freedom that I, the newly arrived immigrant, took for granted.

The Department of German counted among its students and faculty many refugees from Nazi Germany. Most of them brought to America an intense devotion to German literature and culture. Among these academics was Frau Strauss, a heavy-lidded, well-coiffed, and meticulously dressed woman who had escaped before the Nazis had a chance to exterminate her. Her past never came up in our conversations. She was able to recite by heart the entire first part of Goethe's Faust in German. Despite a large age difference between us, I felt close to her, and we prepared for several final exams together. She seemed to have the kindness of my grandmother.

Later on, I teamed up with another graduate student, Franz Bauml, whose Jewish father and Gentile mother had escaped Austria in 1938. Known to everyone as “Fritz and Franz,” a German version of the Katzen jammer kids, we worked through the graduate program together. We both became medievalists, and when it came to job hunting in a tight market, we decided not to compete against each other. Instead, we each drew straws for five of the top ten universities from a list we had drawn up and applied to them for instructorships. He ended up at UCLA, where he had a distinguished career, and I started my academic life at the University of Michigan but was recalled to Berkeley after one year. I believe we learned more from each other than from all our required courses. Our different ethnic and social backgrounds and the war only a decade behind us never played a role in our friendship. The only tensions we had involved manners. He sported a slight British accent and once tried to teach me how to hold a glass of wine without leaving fingerprints. Having grown up in a village with peasant ways, I objected to his uppity condescension, and occasionally we argued over the rules of etiquette.

The only instance when my youth in Nazi Germany came into view in graduate school was in an advanced class on German style required of everyone, native and non-native. I thought this class would be easy for me, but the instructor, a refugee from Nazi Germany, handed back one of my written assignments early in the semester with a grade of “C.” She underlined some expressions she claimed contained echoes of a Nazi mentality—not in content, but in syntax. I was deeply shocked by her accusation and defended myself to her. But privately, to my chagrin, I began to understand what she meant when I reviewed her comments in detail. I trace my enduring interest in the relationship between language and ideology to this incident.

In postwar American universities, the popularity of existentialism well suited my intense introspection. I started to study symbolism in European poetry—Baudelaire and Rimbaud in French, Rilke and George in German. I read Sartre, Camus, and Kafka, staples of the postwar student generation. The text itself counted in the humanities in those days, while the social import of literature was left to the sociologists. That Hannah Arendt was a guest professor at Berkeley in the mid-1950s had no effect on the foreign language departments. In one of my French seminars while still an undergraduate, I spent an entire semester studying one poem —Rimbaud's “Les voyelles” — a sonnet about vowels in which the mad, seventeen-year-old genius of French poetry tried to reveal the deeper secrets of synesthesia, to discover a hidden core in the psyche where all human senses were supposed to be one. Coupled with a course on Nietzsche by Hans Wolff, a refugee from Berlin who committed suicide at the end of the semester, my introverted search for what I considered deeper truths hidden in the language of poetry and philosophy led me up against an impenetrable wall of silence. There were no answers, because I had not articulated the right questions. For several months during the last semester of my senior year, I fell into a private hell of high anxiety and panic. Something unknown in my life had caught up with me, but I didn't have a clear idea what it was, this nameless dread without content. For guidance and hope, I pinned Virgil's tribute to Lucretius above my desk: “Happy the person who could learn the causes of things and who would put beneath his feet all fears.” I had become a person without a skin.

Shortly before graduation, I was able to crawl out of this disastrous state of mind. And soon after I entered graduate school in 1954, I began to be attracted to an ever-widening circle of facts, figures, historical events, and ideas that no longer fed the intellectual introversion of my confused undergraduate period. I enjoyed deciphering difficult texts in older European literatures that represented a fascinating cultural substratum. Luck had it that Archer Taylor, a leading figure in international folklore studies, took me on as one of his last doctoral candidates. He had an encyclopedic memory of historical facts, and he pitted this legendary gift of recall against the invincible force of forgetting. With Professor Taylor's encouragement I embarked on a ten-year study of medieval religious tales that was finally published by the Finnish Academy of Sciences under the forbidding title Index Exemplorum¹ — a collection, summarizing 5,400 religious tales with 44,000 variants. But this devotion to the tangible material of cultural and religious history never quite put to rest the skepticism I had developed about the validity of historical studies. Later on in my career, I became increasingly concerned with methodological premises; these concerns were reflected in conference papers and in a book on medieval German poetry.

Throughout the 1950s and on into the 1960s, German literature at Berkeley was taught and studied as if the Nazis had made no difference to the culture and the language. Even the Jewish immigrants, most of whom were culturally conservative, wanted to surround the literature and culture they so loved with an aura of immunity from the forces of barbarism and preserve its traditional respectability. But by the end of the decade, I was no longer satisfied with exclusive absorption in the study of literature for its own sake.

My dissatisfactions came to a head in spring 1959 as a result of an exchange that took place at the home of a fellow graduate student in German who lived in Mill Valley. Fred, a German Jew who had fled Berlin, married a Danish woman, and emigrated to the United States, was showing me some of his German books when I stopped in front of a photograph of his mother near the door of his study. She had snow-white hair neatly parted in the middle, and she smiled with a kindness around her eyes that Fred had inherited from her. I asked him what had happened to her. At the time, and in this pleasant house, the Holocaust was far from our minds. He didn't answer but led me on to another book and tried to change the subject. I repeated my question, “Fred, what happened to your mother?” Another refusal, but I persisted. “Fred, come on, for God's sake.” He finally told me in just these words: “She died in Theresienstadt.” Several moments passed between us in silence while I sought in vain for an adequate response. It suddenly seemed to me that the literature we had studied in common made no sense. Finally, I asked him why he was so reluctant to tell me about his mother's fate, and he said, “Look, I didn't want to embarrass you.”

I was thunderstruck. He had wanted to protect me from the facts surrounding his mother's death in a German concentration camp. I was stunned by his consideration for my feelings. As I stood there in his home, a deep anger rolled over me against Germany, the country where I had grown up. I remembered the photographs of the atrocities: mass graves, emaciated bodies, and twisted limbs of the victims of Nazism. These images had been both overwhelming and at the same time strangely abstract and incomprehensible when I had first seen them after the war. Now, standing enraged in my friend's study before the picture of his mother, they suddenly became real and tangible for me. At that moment I woke up from the political somnolence that had enveloped most Germans since 1945 in their rush to rebuild their shattered economy and to forget the past, and for me, to build a life in America. It was a moment that defined the end of the conformist 1950s for me and had a profound effect on my political and social ethics.

A year later, in 1960,1 was asked to read a paper at an international conference of Germanists in Copenhagen. At one point, the West German embassy invited conference participants to a cocktail party, while at the same time the East German contingency competed with a bus trip to a memorial honoring Nazi victims. I was the only Westerner at the memorial, showing my solidarity with this antifascist demonstration.

The student revolution that started on the Berkeley campus in fall 1964 while I was on a sabbatical in Munich finally brought together my private values and political convictions. Having already advocated student representation on faculty committees a year earlier, I had a pro-student reputation and was asked to chair the faculty Senate Committee on Student Affairs on my return to California. This new committee assignment put me right between the “firm principles of university governance” articulated by the administration and the conservative wing of the faculty and the “non-negotiable demands” of the radical students and their faculty supporters. It was deeply disturbing to me to see uniformed policemen hitting students with clubs to enforce law and order within the walls of the academy. My sympathies shifted more and more to the side of the students, who began to represent for me a justified attack on the status quo, that is, an attack on the established powers of large, impersonal institutions, even one as devoted to intellectual matters as the University of California. I had come to believe that the university was not just a safe haven for academic study and research, but that it also helped to sustain the corporate structure of the nation, without much concern for humane values —if necessary at gunpoint. Beyond that, the war in Vietnam raised the stakes for all of us. It was no longer sufficient to articulate political objections in committee meetings behind closed doors. One day I confessed to my colleague Bluma Goldstein this discrepancy between my private beliefs and my lack of public commitment. She was an articulate member of the radical wing of the Berkeley faculty, a strong personality who had been raised by her single mother, a worker in the New York garment industry. Bluma said there had been a lot of good Germans who had the right thoughts in private but did nothing in public to prevent the rise of Hitler. That hit home. When I asked what I could do, she told me to join the march to Oakland the following week to protest the war in Vietnam. When she noticed my hesitation she added that I shouldn't worry, since there would be a large crowd. I decided to go.

We congregated next to Harmon Gym, where Allen Ginsberg stood on a flatbed truck in front of us and blessed us with chanted mantras. As it turned out, there wasn't as large a crowd as Bluma had predicted —only about seven thousand, by our own optimistic estimates. As we trekked through Berkeley and Oakland marching in pairs, onlookers jeered and called us communists. I spotted Registrar Gilliam in the crowd and noticed the surprise on his face on seeing me in this company, as if to say, “So, you too.” It was my first political march since the Nazi youth rallies twenty years earlier. No one wore a uniform, except for the police watching us, and we didn't march but ambled. Most important, the majority was against us and did not cheer us on to “bigger and higher goals.” This march was for a good cause, but I felt distinctly uncomfortable by the exposure and by the political commitment it implied for all to see. Ideally, I would have liked to have carried a sign saying that I was for this march but with certain reservations. It became clear that in this political arena you were either for or against. This became even more obvious as time went on and the political struggle intensified. It was not easy to climb up Sproul Steps to sign a faculty-sponsored call against the draft while a government helicopter whirred overhead, presumably to record proceedings. My strong antifascist beliefs had finally found a focus.

Although I remained cautious at heart, events forced me to make choices, not only as an individual, but also as a faculty member. One evening in fall 1966,1 was sitting down to dinner at home when an urgent call came from the administration. The campus was in an uproar. Students were rioting and police were chasing them. The administration asked me, as chair of the Student Committee, to join them on campus in Dwinelle Hall. I didn't go home that night.

At issue was a recruiting table set up by the ROTC that the majority of students didn't want on campus. Chancellor Roger Heyns was in New York, and two of his assistants—both of whom became distinguished scholars and administrators in their subsequent Berkeley careers—had decided to call in the police. When I asked one of them, John Searle of the Philosophy Department, what they wanted to achieve, he started to pace back and forth in the Dwinelle Hall office with the large steps he took when agitated. “We have to transform the revolution of the students into an evolution,” he said. That seemed reasonable on the face of it, but I was doubtful of their power as administrators to manipulate the dynamics of this uprising. Without being entirely aware of it, however, I actually agreed with them. For me, it all came down to the problem of violence, for as much as I sympathized with the students' anger, I was convinced that violence from either side would achieve nothing.

When the student leader, Mario Savio, came to my office a few days later on a mission to muster faculty support, I asked him what his objectives were. He answered frankly, in his usual stammer when speaking in private, that he wanted to break the campus up into smaller units to create a humane community for our studies. As far as the faculty was concerned, he wanted to bring about a clear split between the reactionaries and the progressives, or the conservatives and the radicals, as my colleagues on the right would say. I was instinctively against that. Whatever the University of California represented as an institution of the state, the campus community was too fragile to have it transformed into an arena for dialectic struggles. Consequently, I devoted much of my time to efforts to create a faculty consensus that would neutralize both political extremes and that would in time bring about conditions favorable to far-reaching educational reforms.

Michael Heyman, chair of the Faculty Senate committee, was a master at formulating language that incorporated politically disparate positions. A small group of us joined him in creating a faculty consensus on a centrist position that combined language from the opposing camps—the administration and the conservative faculty on one side and the students and their faculty supporters on the other. When a lopsided vote of 795 to 28, with 143 abstentions, supported us in a major faculty convocation on December 5, 1966, with students and police milling around outside Wheeler Hall, a newsman from San Francisco congratulated us on the “slick job” we had done. It was Caspar Weinberger, who was to gain prominence during the Reagan era. I didn't like the words “slick” or “job,” and for a moment I thought of calling Mario Savio to apologize. Behind all the opaque language contained in the faculty motions was a real and contentious battle over the governance of the academic community. The faculty, split as it was, was caught in the middle and ultimately lost power it never regained.

The student revolt at the time was unfocused and hectic, and all the factions did a good deal of political improvising. Some members of the faculty, however, had clear political objectives in mind. At one point I was asked to present myself for a conversation with one of these highly political colleagues, rumored to be a follower of Mao. I knew his name, but I had never met him, and I did not know what he wanted from me. In his campus office he more or less interrogated me for fifteen minutes before thanking me for my time. I asked him what the purpose of this meeting had been, and he replied that he just wanted to get acquainted with me. I didn't like this meeting. It had political power written all over it that seemed to derive its legitimacy from no obvious context. Since my childhood in Germany, I had developed a sensitivity for personalities with totalitarian traits.

While the student upheavals spread, I began to worry about their consequences throughout the United States and Europe. I wondered whether academia was strong enough to deal internally with political conflicts outside its boundaries. Once, on my way out of the Berkeley campus with Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish author, who later won a Nobel Prize for literature, we found Sather Gate blocked by a demonstration. When I began to wax poetic about the function of such disruptions as a prod to rethink established institutional routines, he looked at me under his bushy eyebrows and grumbled in his Slavic accent, “These are the spoiled children of the American bourgeoisie.” It reminded me of the radical student leader who, after having advocated bringing down the university and society, asked the assembled students on the main floor of Pauley Ballroom whether anyone had found the term paper he had lost in the library. Yet our serious commitment to help bring about an end to the war in Vietnam never wavered. A sympathetic liberal Republican friend helped to arrange a meeting with the newly elected senator from Oregon, Mark Hatfield, an avowed opponent of the war. With Carl Schorske, now a professor at Princeton University, I flew to Washington, D.C., to try to enlist Hatfield in our cause. As we approached the Senate building, Schorske said to me, “You know, to succeed, we on the left have to be a lot smarter than the people on the right.” We were well received by the senator but left without a promise of support. Perhaps the gulf between a liberal Republican senator and two Berkeley professors was too great to be bridged.

A year later, underrepresented minorities organized the Third World Strike to the end of combining community work and activism with university research and studies relevant to their particular needs. Clearer in their objectives than the “value”-oriented rebellion of the white student majority, minority strikers demanded a college of their own. I noted that hardly any of the white student leaders who had enjoyed high profiles in the past now played roles of any significance. Through the Third World Strike, Chicanos, African Americans, and Asians began to define educational objectives that included community building and economic opportunities as an integral part of the academic enterprise. I felt a great deal of solidarity with the minority groups, because it was so obvious that they had legitimate needs not addressed by the university.

While the strike was on, I teamed up with a graduate student in English who had extensive connections with African American, Chicano, and Asian students. They, in turn, together with their faculty sponsors, helped to formulate the content of new courses. With my experience as former chair of the Course Committee of the Academic Senate, I was able to offer my know-how in writing proposals acceptable to faculty committees. It was obvious to me, however, that the university would not move in the direction of the striking students unless it was under duress. Minority student leaders had a finely honed sense for power and its consequences as well as for the lack of power and its disadvantages. One of them advocated burning down the library. When he saw I was horrified, he argued that burning down the library would put the white majority and the minority students on equal terms. I considered his comment hyperbolic speech uttered in the heat of the moment. Yet a few weeks later Wheeler Hall went up in flames. The library remained unscathed, perhaps because the administration took extra precautions to protect it.

The unrest seemed to be turning into a full-fledged revolution of the minorities, when, pressed into a corner, the administration finally made some concessions in regard to minority programs. There were people hard at work behind the scenes — white professors who had supported minorities in the South, leaders from the African-American community, Chicano churchmen, even the Republican Berkeley mayor, Wally Johnson—to channel the dynamics away from violence toward obtainable academic goals.

In the middle of this turbulence, personalities came to the fore, most of them now forgotten, like my English graduate student named Sewell, who had extensive contacts in the various minority groups. The great-grandson of the hanging Judge Sewell of New England, he was also an official U.S. Frisbee champion. He could throw a Frisbee over the roofs of two suburban houses only to have it return to him like a boomerang. And there was a tough and brilliant African-American student leader with the improbable name Charlie Brown. An extremely gifted speaker with a keen mind, he once passed me a handwritten note during a faculty meeting to which he had been invited. To my astonishment, his handwriting and English were that of a child. At one point during the revolt, he and other strike leaders admitted me into the Third World Strike Center on Bancroft Way. When I asked him why they had let me in, I was stunned by his answer: because I had a German background, my prejudices would be against Jews and not blacks.

My period of political involvement came to an end with the People's Park unrest in 1969. I found the strange mix of flower children and political ideologues, of drugs and revolution, beyond my sense of what was important, and by the early 1970s the student revolution had run its course. Its surplus energy and Utopian impulses were reined in by the then governor of California, Ronald Reagan. I left Berkeley for almost three years to become director of the University of California Education Abroad Program at Gottingen, where the politically focused German student revolution, which had considerable support among the general population, was at its height. For me, the American decade of upheaval had brought together private beliefs and public commitments. It also had a permanent effect on my academic career.

On my return from Gottingen, I joined the fight against institutional orthodoxy in the foreign language departments in favor of interdisciplinary studies. These internecine fights, of little obvious consequence to larger social issues, deepened my skepticism about the role of traditional departments of humanities that would rather prove the cohesiveness of a specific field of study than interpret the cultural history of Europe as a larger social and moral enterprise. I came to see teaching, more than research, as my primary purpose. The treasured gift Berkeley gave me was to allow me to instruct and know some of the brightest students of several generations, each with its own set of questions and priorities. I was particularly attracted to undergraduate instruction, since the interactions on that level are less deformed by the power relations so evident in graduate seminars, where students are preoccupied with their own academic careers. On the graduate level, I devoted most of my energies to medieval lyric and epic poetry in order to decipher cultural codes of a mentality other than our own. In undergraduate courses and in a coauthored book on German cultural history from the rise of Hitler to the early 1990s,² I became more and more involved in trying to understand the rise of Nazism within the larger context of German cultural history of the twentieth century.

In the middle of my career, I was struck by a fate similar to Bernie's. My wife, Muriel, died of leukemia on April 23, 1975. The disease showed no symptoms until a week before her death. A cold developed rapidly into bronchitis and pneumonia, followed by coma and death. Her hidden disease had rendered antibiotics ineffective. I went into shock. I experienced her loss as if my family had fallen victim to sudden violence. My two children, Karen, 13, and Michael, 11, lost their mother. When they woke up the morning after she died in the hospital, and I had to tell them the news, my daughter first thought it was a cruel joke played on us by the hospital, while my son fell to the living room floor and wept. I knew I had to pull myself together to raise the children, particularly when I was awakened by them early one morning a few days after their mother's death. Frightened, they had come to my bed to make sure I hadn't died, too. I swore to myself that they would never come home from school without my being there to greet them. I arranged my schedule at the university accordingly. Bernie and I hardly ever talk about this strange coincidence of losing our wives in midlife, but it is part of a deeper understanding we have of each other.

What made it possible for Bernie's and my paths to cross and for us to make our return to the past a joint enterprise? Whatever similarities in rural childhoods we shared, the divide that Nazism drew between us was absolute. We came from the opposite sides of the Holocaust. And after the defeat of Germany and the victory of the Allies, we continued to move in very different worlds, both in postwar Europe and after we came to the United States. In spite of the ballast we left behind in Europe, the values that guided both our lives in the New World were nevertheless shaped in part by what we had experienced and learned in the Old. Having suffered as an outsider during the violent years of Nazi totalitarianism, Bernie made himself into an insider in America. I, however, having lived my early life within the Nazi regime, having been surrounded and deceived by it, found the role of the outsider to be the only morally defensible one to play in its aftermath.

So why did we become friends despite the odds against this happening? There was, of course, the chance meeting of our wives. Then, the casual suburban nature of our early friendship made it possible for a crucial factor to come into play, namely, the sharing of our common European cultural heritage in terms of music, the arts, philosophy, and literature. Beyond that, there was the Bay Area, this great crucible for new ideas, experiments, risk taking, and daring IPOs of all sorts, not only financial, but also of the creative and cultural type. So we came together, and why not us, and why not in this form? Why not explore how two divergent paths might be made to cross?

For Bernie, the freedom that America provided was all the more personal, because it stood in sharp contrast to the totalitarian violence that almost took his life. This explains his cherished belief in reason as a shield against the mythology of Cain and Abel. To be able to enter our friendship with a remarkable degree of ease, he had to travel a long road from Auschwitz to our brotherly dinner table in California. I, in turn, learned that freedom was not just handed me as a gift but something that had to be earned. The Orthodox Jew from Hungary and the Hitler Youth candidate from Germany had become Americans — the fact that made a true crossing of paths possible. In America, working and playing together—and breaking bread together where the ghosts of the past no longer loomed up to join us at our table—finally became normal, everyday facts of life.