Fritz Marti : Immigrant, A Biographical Memoir 9780761865995, 9780761865988

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Fritz Marti: Immigrant A Biographical Memoir Judith Baumrin

University Press of America,® Inc. Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

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To my Family

Contents

List of Figures

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

xi

1 Family History Winterthur Bern 2 Military Service Infantry Motor Corp 3 Zurich Medicus Note 4 Search for a Job 5 Oregon 6 Going East Goucher University of Maryland 7 Washington D.C. Gertrude Austin Gertrude and Fritz Notes 8 Chevy Chase Invitation to Chicago University of Maryland: Overview v

1 1 4 9 9 12 15 16 17 19 23 29 30 35 37 38 41 44 45 56 57

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Contents

University of Chicago Notes 9 Brinklow 10 Ohio Berglihof 11 Fritz Marti: American

60 66 67 75 80 95

Appendix: Gertrude’s Story: “House on a Hill”

99

Bibliography Sources References

105 105 105

List of Figures

Figure 1.1. Elise Sibler-Netscher, “Grossli,” 2 Figure 1.2. Uncle Fritz Marti, 3 Figure 1.3. Gottlieb and Lina, 5 Figure 1.4. Swiss Marti Children, 6 Figure 6.1. Portrait of Fritz, c 1926, 31 Figure 7.1. Fritz and Gertrude, Wedding picture, 1937, 41 Figure 8.1. Judith in outfit, 47 Figure 10.1. Barn Painting, 82 Figure 10.2. Whole family in front of barn, 86

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Acknowledgments

I am deeply indebted to all who availed me of their personal recollections and documents. At the earliest stages of my research I visited my brother Felix, who had shared his and his wife Holly’s home with Fritz several times while he was living with his daughter Moira and her husband Charles Geoffrion in Tucson, Arizona. Felix’s recollections included a critical event in Fritz’s military years that Fritz had never shared with anyone else. Felix also put me in touch with others in Switzerland with whom I later made contact. Of course, Moira and Charles made sure I got every stray bit of paper that turned up there in Tucson. Arthur Sanders who spent many years with the family, at the end of his life sent me his files, including Gertrude’s story “House on a Hill” (Appendix A) that he himself must have typed up since Gertrude did not type. Stefan, my husband, also had some letters from Fritz that are unique. And my sister Rebecca copied the contents of all her “Papi” files for my use. She also took care of me when I was in Corvallis. I am particularly indebted to my sister, Vreneli, and her husband Paul Farber for their readiness to read the final manuscript, and their help from that point on to securing a publisher. They have hosted me in Corvallis more than once as I worked with the files in the Oregon State University Library there. They are always there when I ask for guidance. Georg Sibler, Fritz’s sister, Lisel’s son was (is) a Notary living in HonggZurich, Switzerland, one of whose responsibilities it was to keep detailed town records in Hongg, put together a detailed family chronology with financial details including the details of Fritz’s inheritance from his grandmother. Georg and his wife, Doris, extended a week’s hospitality to me that included conversations about the family.

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Acknowledgments

Stefan and I made a tour of the relevant sites in Switzerland in 2005 that included a visit to the house in Winterthur where Thomas Gehrig and his family afforded us warm hospitality. I want to thank Jonathan Cole for talking with me about the situation at the University of Chicago in 1943–1944 when Fritz was a visiting professor there. I must acknowledge the opportunity to discuss the business of publishing with Stefan’s and my friend David Rosenthal who brought to bear his experience in publishing his own scholarly works in philosophy. He gave me courage as I pursued the goal of publishing. Finally I must speak to the genuine encouragement from my children, Seth and Rachel and from my grandchildren Rurik and Mikah.

Introduction

This is my story of my father. It is about who he was, what he did, where he came from and where he went over the years before I knew him and while I lived at home. Of course, the story is longer than that. He was born in 1894 and died in 1991, lived for almost the entire twentieth century and almost all that time in the United States. He came here as an immigrant, became a naturalized citizen and worked as an educator for his whole life. Like most immigrants he came to America with dreams. He dreamed of a larger life; he found it here and he kept it always growing. It was, after all, not the larger life of his early immigrant’s perspective, but, more importantly, it was the larger life of his own profound discovery, a life in philosophy. Looked at merely from the chronology of life events one might well miss the “life in philosophy” and that is what I want to tell. This story could only have happened here. His absorption in philosophy, pursued in Switzerland, his childhood home, or anywhere else in the world would not have become a way of being as it did here rather than just a way of thinking. I hope the story I tell will not be unrecognizable to those who knew him; particularly I hope my siblings will see their father in my story. I love to hear their stories, and of course on many occasions we have shared our favorite narratives of growing up with this father. But they do have their own stories—mine is mine. We, none of us, should have been surprised at the staggering number of documents our father left at his death. His library alone consisted of more than 2,000 volumes at the last inventory—but much of that library had previously been given to the library at the University of Notre Dame before he moved to his final home in Tucson, Arizona. We all knew he saved everything. He was frugal, but he also was offended at material waste. I once xi

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Introduction

caught him snipping the glued strip from unused envelopes to be used instead of expensive Scotch Tape. He made his daughter, Moira Geoffrion, executor of his estate, and so it was left to her to manage the distribution of his papers. Among the first challenges was to reduce the volume by discarding the astounding number of duplications in the files. There were anywhere from 5 to 10 copies of each of his published journal articles, and even more duplicates of significant unpublished papers, lectures, and drafts of published material. The reason I know this is that ultimately I accepted a shipment of his work from Moira. Other work was distributed to the other four children, Ursula, Felix, Vreneli and Rebecca. Most of what was left over, after the initial distribution, 19.4 linear feet, went to Paul Farber, Vreneli’s husband, in Corvallis, Arizona. Paul is responsible for creating and sustaining the Fritz Marti Papers in the Special Collections Archive in the Oregon State University Library in Corvallis. The Notre Dame Library eventually was not prepared to continue storing the files that had been left there so I also accepted those files. And so, no one of us children really knows where everything is. I did not open the files I had stored until 2000. Like Moira, my first objective was to reduce the volume by disposing of duplications, of which there were many. I decided as I went along that after Fritz had saved some of these papers for well over 50 years, I too should save more than one copy of them. I did get rid of a lot of the surplus, but I also began to absorb what I had before me. Though I always knew what my father’s work was about (I had even taken a course with him when I first went to College) I now began to understand what he was about in his work. I became curiouser and curiouser, and so began over ten years of learning who this man was. Along the way I bothered all my siblings for anything that would fill in the pieces of his life. I had all his diaries from 1923 to the mid-80s except for the critical 1943 diary (never found by anyone). My brother, Felix, had recorded Fritz’s translations of his own youthful diaries for 1913, 1914 and 1915, and sent these transcriptions to me. There is no part of my research more important than the diaries. They were appointment books and used for that purpose, but they also contained reactions to and observations of himself, others and the world around him. For example, he entered on the precise date of their occurrence the major, military events of World War II. Deciphering the diaries was a long, challenging business. All but one was at most 2”x 3”; many were smaller. The daily entries were in pencil and necessarily written in a kind of personal code. Though he wrote more and more of them in English as years went by, his handwriting was full of Germanic script and he often used German words for the sake of directness. For instance, instead of “went to Sarah’s”, he would write “bei Sarah”. Throughout all of them there appear small passages that were written entirely

Introduction

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in German. I only very occasionally could make them out. The combination pencil, German script, and tiny writing was usually more than I could transcribe, for that is how I released the information from the diary entries. Both for the self-translations Felix recorded and for the later diaries I read myself, I copied them out in my own hand so I could use them while writing. In the end it was a job of detection, which is what sustained the effort; each page of each diary was a revelation. On some occasions it was a confirmation of my own memories and then again it was the answer to some mystery. For me it was fun. The entries themselves indicate what the diaries were for Fritz. The only inked entries were the birthdays and deaths of people. Each year he copied from the year past each of these notations. Over the years the number of these entries grew; these alone would make a biographical frame. Not everybody was recorded in this way and some of the omissions are very surprising and revealing; there is no record of his father’s birth date or date of his death. He often kept track of his expenses, but not always. These included expenses for gas, oil, and other car expenses; movies; train tickets; clothing items, but rarely for food. When he travelled he recorded each step of the way, when he arrived somewhere and when he left. He mentioned the name of the movie he saw on each occasion he went and with whom he went. What we are looking at if we read these diaries are his personal, private notes on his day-to-day life. One never senses that they were intended as a public record. He did write for others about his life in such documents as “How I Got all my Jobs: Providence or Happenstance”, and the charming pamphlet, “A Winterthur Childhood” where he describes his childhood in Winterthur. Another challenge was the philosophy. I thought, as I think did all his children that I knew what he was teaching. He was always teaching us – by example, by lecture, by discipline – but what was his dedicated philosophic work? I knew his commitment to philosophy was not purely scholarly in spite of his scrupulous dedication to the scholarly work of others, but to understand what he was doing I had to understand the work of those he wrote about, in particular, Schelling. I could not have done this without Stefan’s help, and even then I was really on my own because Stefan had no affinity for German Idealism. I do not regret having done the work; it helped me understand what Fritz Marti was about. Judith Baumrin New York March 2015

Chapter One

Family History

WINTERTHUR My father was born into a thoroughly middle class Swiss family. At his birth, January 1, 1894, the family was living in Winterthur, a small, industrial town just northeast of Zurich. The household consisted of Fritz’s father, Johann Gottlieb Marti (called Gottlieb), his mother Magdalena (called Lina), and her mother Elise Netscher-Shappi. Elise, always referred to and called Grossli (grandmother), was responsible for acquiring their house on Heligbergstrasse, a very nice, tree lined street overlooking Winterthur. She was the wife of a Dr. Netscher, which gave her an elevated status that apparently had gone to her head. However, the couple did not have children and in 1876 they adopted Magdalena Rothesbreuer, an orphan in the town. Dr. Netscher died in 1882. Elise’s only living relative was her brother who used up all her money to maintain and run a playhouse. She and her daughter, Lina, had a number of very rough years until her brother died in 1892 when she inherited the playhouse. She sold the playhouse and bought the house on Heligbergstrasse in 1893 for her newly married daughter and her husband Johann Gottlieb Marti. A spacious room overlooking the garden was added onto the first floor for her, and she lived with them for the rest of her life. She was known by all as a powerful woman who dominated the household. The house itself was, and still is, a fine three-story house with a large back yard and an attic and rooftop where laundry then was hung to dry. Fritz had memories of heavy baskets of laundry being carried all the way up from the basement to the roof by his Grossli or by their maid. His memories of life there were vivid and cheerfully shared with us, his children. He was cher1

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Figure 1.1. Elise Sibler-Netscher, “Grossli”, adoptive mother of Lina, Fritz’s mother.

ished and protectively supervised by his grandmother. When his brother was born, Fritz was moved out of his parent’s bedroom into his grandmother’s and stayed there for several years. He said that when she played affectionately with her newborn grandson, Hansli, he, Fritzli shouted possessively that she was “meine Grossli”. She kept him from playing with the local boys who were dirty, and in general persuaded him to stay indoors where he spent time reading and playing with her and with his mother until he went to school. He loved school. In this household and this house Gottlieb’s role seems to have been simply “breadwinner”, and that he was. He was head of the farm machinery branch of his Uncle Fritz’s business–—“Fritz Marti, Winterthur”. Fritz Marti, Senior, established his business in 1875 (the age of the foundings), and by

Family History

3

1895 he had 50 employees and 90 agents on the road. He was very successful, particularly in railroad stock, but saw that he needed someone to inherit the business. He was not married and had no children. His brother, Niklaus, on the other hand had seven children. Niklaus, a watchmaker, was not succeeding and decided to move to Argentina to see if he could do better. His plan was to bring his wife and children over later, but when that time came he could not afford the passage and asked his brother Fritz to help. Fritz, ever the business man, asked Niklaus in exchange to leave two of his sons to be taken into the Marti business. He got one— Gottlieb. Gottlieb himself had by 1881 worked himself up to an apprenticeship under a master saddler and was working as a saddler when he received a summons from his Uncle Fritz.

Figure 1.2. Uncle Fritz Marti, Founder of “Fritz Marti – Winterthur”, the Marti family business.

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Uncle Fritz saw potential in Gottlieb and took it upon himself to make a businessman out of the skilled young craftsman. Though Gottlieb was proud of his accomplishments, a few hours in his rich uncle’s world easily persuaded him to accept the opportunity offered. Uncle Fritz cleaned him up, dressed him, fed him, paid all his expenses and got him enrolled in an institute for teenage boys to be educated in preparation for entrance into the business as soon as possible and also into the Technicum. Gottlieb spent any time he was not in school at work in the office – homework happened at night. He remained in the business for the rest of his life. When, in 1892, Gottlieb announced his engagement to Lina, Uncle Fritz was disappointed because he had wanted to send him to Argentina and Spain to sell agricultural machines. However, he danced at the wedding and declared, “If they are boys, they will be engineers.” This declaration steered the lives of both Fritz and his brother, Hans, born in October of 1895, almost two years after young Fritz. Lina also had a baby girl, Elisa, in 1899, and, including Grossli, that completed the family living at 26 Heiligbergstrasse in Winterthur. BERN In September of 1906 Gottlieb brought the family to live in Bern. Uncle Fritz, who died in 1902 at the age of 58, had started a major project on the Gurten, Bern’s mountain. It was still being developed when he died. By 1906 Gottlieb had inherited his uncle’s entire estate – he was a rich, young man – and he was left to finish and run the hotel on the Gurten. He could not oversee this project from Winterthur. Using the same architect, Adolf Gerster, Uncle Fritz had engaged to design the Hotel Gurten, Gottlieb built a villa at 74 Kirchenfeldstrasse for the family. Kirchenfeldstrasse is a major avenue lined on both sides with beautiful old homes most of which have been turned into embassies. Number 74 now consists of four flats, but in every other way it is still a magnificent house, with a front gate and a stone entry plaza where the Fisher car Gottlieb bought in 1914 would have been parked. There is a very respectable back yard with gardens and a little pond. It was designed in the new architectural style, “Neurokoko-Villa in Sichtbackstein”, in Switzerland. Fritz, who was 12 years old, actually moved to Bern six months before the rest of the family so he could begin his first gymnasium year at the beginning of the term. During this period he lived with a local family and was otherwise on his own. This isolation from the family drove him into a semi-reclusive state. He read a lot, but in retrospect he thought it had been a waste of time since no one was directing his reading beyond adventure tales.

Family History

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Figure 1.3. Gottlieb and Lina Marti, Fritz’s parents.

Throughout his gymnasium years he regularly attended a church of the Calvinist persuasion; he was the only member of his family to do so. He remembered the “comfort” of the story of Jesus and his love of children. This seems to have been the only spiritual or intellectual frame of reference at that time in his life. He and his fellow students at the gymnasium were expected to go into some line of business as adults; in his case the family assumed he would come into the family business trained as an engineer. The curriculum included German and French some literature and history and intensive devel-

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Figure 1.4. The Swiss Marti children: Hans, on the left; Lisel, center; Fritz, on the right.

opment in mathematics. He was an exceptional student and earned the highest honors throughout his gymnasium years. The family’s social and financial situation by this time afforded him a life of privilege, which he happily embraced. He had no reason to stray from the well-ordered, Bernese, upper middle class world in which he lived. He belonged in this world and he knew it. Over the years of his long life one can frequently find wistful references to his Swiss-ness, his European-ness. He said of 1913, the year he graduated “This was a beautiful year.” In April of 1913, between school terms, he took a trip down the Rhine with Papa and Hans and a Mr. Hertzel. Their first stop was in Mannheim, Germany where one of the many representatives Uncle Fritz developed in Switzerland’s neighbors, worked in a machine factory. These representatives were

Family History

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the early guarantors of his success, and, clearly, as this trip shows, this connection with the German engineering industry remained strong on Gottlieb’s watch. The high point of the trip was the visit to Krupp works in Essen. Everyone, including Fritz, knew who Krupp was and what the Krupp works produced. The director told Fritz they wouldn’t show the big guns because of “industrial spies”, but they were shown Panzer plates and other guns of which Fritz mentions the current field artillery 7.5 cm pieces. They also went to Dusseldorf where they witnessed “Bessemer’s steel pouring—white hot steel”. Fritz’s diary record of this trip is highly detailed; dates, times and places recorded faithfully as they would be for every trip he ever made. It is notable that his record of this trip includes no historical sites, museums or architectural monuments that his later travels always included. They did visit a Tulip Nursery in Holland where Fritz observed “mountains of tulips”. They brought some home to plant in the family garden. Over the course of the year he records bicycling with Lisel (his sister), horseback riding, football, gymnastics, painting, photography, dance lessons, dances and balls, traveling and girls. Truly, a life of leisure. He seems to have had no need to have a job or help out in the family business. In fact he recalls never having known or been curious about the family’s financial matters. His Grossli made it perfectly clear that his father’s cigar smoking friends were not really welcome in the house, as she would closet them away in one room for the duration of business. Fritz was never allowed in their company, and therefore never overheard business being discussed. The Gurten was a central focus of family life during the spring and summer of 1913. It is called, “Bern’s local mountain”. At its summit it commands a comprehensive view of the town. The hotel Uncle Fritz built was, is still, fabulous—very rococo. In its day it was one of the select, mountain hotels people escaped to for their health. The manicured grounds invite easy strolling on footpaths planned and built by the establishment. These amenities remain available to the citizens of Bern, but now the hotel is remodeled into a conference center with many outdoor recreational opportunities for children and adults. The trip to the top takes only a few minutes by way of the bright red funicular installed all those many years ago by Uncle Fritz and Gottlieb and, after his university years, driven by Fritz Marti Junior. It is clear that the Gurten was an important center of the family’s social life. In Fritz’s diaries there are frequent notes about going to the Gurten for dinner, taking a guest up to the Gurten, going to a fancy ball at the Gurten. In fact, both Fritz’s and Hans’s graduation balls were held there. It was on these occasions that Fritz’s flair for theatre found him organizing the decorations for their dancing parties. Fritz remembered an evening when the funicular had closed down for the night before he and friends had stopped dancing. He

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describes a Bergmanesque full-moon scene with girls in their white dancing shoes and boys in their white jackets running and tumbling by foot down the funicular’s tracks in the very early morning. Later, much later the family lived there. 1913 was also the year Gottlieb bought a “Fisher car”. Fritz was totally absorbed with the new car; they took it for test-drives, there were trips to the mechanic’s garage, and family outings in the new car. Fritz’s involvement with the car and learning to drive played an important role later. He did volunteer work which he calls “practice” in the foundry of Bern (von Roll) from October of 1913 until March 1914, where he says he “learned how to file off a piece of metal straight.” It was clear he was intended to go to the engineering school of the Polytechnic in Zurich and then into the family business. He never missed a day in his diary entries. Every day was significant for something: getting a haircut, going to the dentist, visits by the tailor from Winterthur who would come to Bern to fit him, his father and his brother for new suits. He recorded hardly any books read, plays or movies attended or letters written—a sharp contrast with his later diaries. His immediate present world was perfect; he sought no other absent people or better stories. There is not the slightest hint of difficulties in the family or in the community. Given the rest of his life it is hard to see the seeds of that life in his account of his life as a young Swiss citizen. It is significant that he was such an excellent student. Possibly his academic prowess trumped the attractions of becoming one of the heads of the Marti Firm. He certainly witnessed his own father working long hours, and perhaps did not find that attractive. It is also possible that the women in his life, his Grossli and his mother had different expectations for him. It is unlikely that his father chose all the tennis lessons, dancing classes and piano lessons he appears to have had. He was to cut a different figure than his Uncle Fritz and Papa Gottlieb. None-the-less these were not the precursors to a philosophic life.

Chapter Two

Military Service

INFANTRY The first real dissonance in his life came when he was “summoned” in January 1914 to begin his obligatory military service. Being from the upper middle class ordinarily he could have looked forward to being an officer before being called up for duty. This privilege was for those who could afford to take the year’s training to be an officer. But his 20th birthday was on the first of January of 1914 and there would not to be a full year before he was needed on the front. He was in England when he heard the “first rumors of war”, June 1914, but he had planned this trip together with Hans for a long time and he was cheerfully taking English lessons and enjoying the independence from home to “promenade on the Strand with Hans”, go “swimming at high tide after dark; very beautiful”, and “dancing at the pier pavilion”. However, when war between Germany and Russia was announced his father sent a telegram informing his sons that the Swiss were mobilizing and that they had to come home promptly. Now, he and Hans were personally impacted by the “rumors” of war. They went to the Swiss consulate in London on August 2nd, but were unable to get a return pass. By August 3rd Fritz wrote that there are rumors that Germany will invade France. They went back to the consulate, but there was no more news. They also could get no money because the banks had been closed for fear of a run on the banks. So they went to the “the cliffs”—a little more sightseeing while they waited. On August 5, when they returned to the consulate they found they still could not go home, and by then the Germans had invaded Belgium; their trip home was further imperiled. The next entry, still August 5, “War-Germany 9

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and England.” How quickly and stunningly the world around them was changing, and how helpless they were. Fritz’s entry for August 6th says he went dancing on the pier again where he met several girls. He listed each of their names suggesting that he would be getting in touch with them—a startling disconnect from what was going on the continent. The next entry is that the Germans are at Liege, the most fortified position in Belgium; however, also on that day he had tennis lessons and went bathing—“beautiful”. Finally back to London where the Swiss Bankferein issued ten pounds per person, and the consulate issued legerdemain cards testifying that Fritz and Hans were Swiss. Though they were permitted only hand luggage, they were going home. Their channel crossing took four hours to Dieppe where they discovered they were being brought home as a military unit. They were packed into railroad cars and headed for Paris. It took nine hours to get there, but once there they ate lunch at the Chatelet, went to the Louvre and saw the Eiffel Tower. On the 12th they headed for the Swiss border by train. The trip to the small town of Emberner outside of Lyon that should have taken no more than three hours, took 20 hours. On the 13th they traveled to Bellegard from where they marched across the Swiss border at Cassirer. Getting home was only the first of many harrowing war experiences in Fritz’s life. He was not put on active duty right away and spent his time reading, cycling, practicing stenography, reading, writing letters, playing the piano, going to the dentist, reading, picking pears and plums and going to the Fair, often with Suzanne. He also went to Zurich to look for living quarters while he would be in school there. He does note at this point that there may be a conflict with his military service. Again one cannot help getting the feeling that the war and the military were quite peripheral to his activities and plans for the future. In Gottlieb’s statement about the war, he says, “The war did not end in a few months, as the whole world believed. . . .” So Fritz was not alone in dismissing the war as a brief interruption of life. In October he prepared to go to Zurich and requested dismissal from the military and for noncommissioned officer school. He was told that dismissal is impossible for the moment and he was promptly put on active duty, starting with a long march, which landed him in sickbay with a bad leg. For the next six months he served in the infantry mainly in the Jura on border patrol. He was constantly in pain because of bad feet and consequent bad legs. He often fell out of a march and had to go to the sick bay where he was sometimes given an excuse from carrying a pack, another time he was given office work, but more than once he was sent away and not even seen. He was constantly in touch with both parents by mail and his father tried to intercede on his behalf to either get a proper medical assessment and some relief from his foot pain or a reassignment. He did get a conference with a doctor who, as Fritz wrote, “is friendly”, and then adds, “possibly at higher

Military Service

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instigation”. Such a sad commentary on the kind of treatment he was getting up to that point. The doctor said he would try to get him a dispensation by way of the chief surgeon, but in the next entry Fritz writes, “The doctor says I am just simulating.” He wrote to his Papa “there is nothing to be done”. He read the Gospel of St. Luke. He was not only in pain most of the time. The daily diary entries are a record of hours of time filled with reading, writing letters and more letters to family and friends, including Suzanne, who responded equally frequently. Mama sent packages with “goodies” and “cookies” and “fruit”, also the laundry, which Fritz was required to pack up and send home regularly. Other recreations included a skit that he was responsible for writing, rehearsing and producing in December. He also made drawings of the landscape from various vantage points while on patrol. He pointed out as he read this entry that this was often done officially as a resource for the army in the battlefield. He often comments on the beauty of the views in the mountains. I was particularly delighted to find the entry, “We saw the French troops way out in Alsace,” because he told us when we were kids about how you could see the French with their ballooning red pants, blue jackets and plumed helmets. These would have been either the famous Zouaves whose pants were truly like pantaloons, or the line infantry whose pants were red but not so ballooning or whose jackets were longer. I was amazed that someone could have experienced something so ancient. Despite his gift for seeing the beautiful he was seriously frustrated by his situation. There are no entries involving recreational interaction with his fellow service men: no card playing, small talk, off-duty drinking and carousing. He did not have companionship and, in fact, may well have been the butt of some derision; he mentions that a battalion major “says I have no energy” suggesting, at least, that there was no sympathy for his painful condition. By the end of the year his feet, legs and knee joints were all very painful. On the last day before he was to go home on furlough for Christmas he recorded that he had served 179 days as a recruit and in occupation of the frontier. He did not get his furlough until New Year’s Day, his birthday—21 years old. He wrote that being in the infantry, and “carrying the private’s heavy equipment” jolted him out of his “bourgeois complacency and out of the career devised by Uncle Fritz.” The military experience certainly stood in stark contrast with the life he had thought he was destined to lead, and confronted him with compelling life experiences that might well have prompted philosophic speculation. There was no doubt that he was to attend the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology to study Mechanical Engineering. Before going to the front he had made his application for admittance and was accepted in July of 1914, but it wasn’t until the summer of 1915 that he was in a position to begin preparing for his upcoming academic program.

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While at home in Bern on furlough, he visited a doctor who diagnosed a “weak ligament” and who said maybe the division commander could help with his military service. One assumes the doctor made some kind of contact on Fritz’s behalf; however after he returned to the front he was still marching. He reports that they were marched round and round four times through the same section of the forest. Apparently, he was no longer the only one complaining; there was a “minor mutiny”, as he calls it, and the mutinous section was sent home on “home arrest”. He recorded that his leg was no good, his knee hurt when he ran down hill, and that he, as well as many others, had to fall out on a march. I keep wondering about the attitude and behavior of the senior officers. It feels to me coarse and unnecessarily bullying given that the Swiss were presumably in a defensive action rather than an aggressive, belligerent one. It has not surprised me, therefore, to learn that the German Swiss were pro Germany in this war, and that there was some collaboration with Germany by some Swiss. On subsequent furloughs doctors diagnosed “fallen arches” and “painful flat feet” but their diagnoses and treatments were ignored at the front. In a brief autobiography Fritz wrote in 1943 he says, “In retrospect the ordeal of military training . . . proves to have been purgatory,” and that, “Private Marti discovered that armies are unlike well-ordered middle class households, and that the Governor of the World bears no resemblance to an enlightened schoolmaster, a conscientious administrator, or an unostentatiously ruling grandmother.” This Hell, or Purgatory, that he found himself in was mercifully to come to an end, but not because anyone heard his cries for help. On the 16th of March 1915, they were sent to Bern for a review by some general. While they were there Fritz took the occasion to write to the Technical School in Zurich. He was in the Military section of the (illegible) for some purpose when he saw a sign—“Automobile Dienst” (Automobile Service). He wandered into this office and said he was interested in the “Auto Service”. He was invited in to an inner office where “. . . the captain, knowing I was a private, said, ‘Have a chair’. It was unheard of for a senior officer to invite a private to have a seat in his presence.” As a result of this serendipitous interview, Fritz was ordered to report for duty on the 8th of April to the Automobile Service. MOTOR CORP His duty upon reassignment was as chauffeur and involved maintenance of a particular car. The men in this service must have been selected for their competence as mechanics, which at this early stage of motorized transport would be those who were educated or at least well enough off for someone in

Military Service

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their family to own a car. Fritz loved the whole company saying they were “kind of a club”, played games and had fun. He was in his element; he found companionship. After he was fully qualified as a driver, ironically, he was assigned to drive the officer in charge of “horse transport” and the veterinarian. The horse was still the main form of transport in 1915 and the vet had to travel to the horses to administer care. Fritz loved to tell the story of the chicken. On one of these horse-care missions he accidently killed a chicken that flew up ahead of him. He stopped, retrieved the chicken and just as the three of them agreed that it would make a good dinner a farmer’s wife came running out of the farm house yelling and gesticulating. They somewhat shamefacedly brought her the dead chicken, and apologized for its demise. Service in the Automobile Corps lasted for Fritz through the war and continued even after he came to the states in 1923. Entries in his Dienstbuche were stamped by the Swiss Consulate in Washington, D.C. In 1917 he was made Korporal, in 1918 he was Lieutenant-Motorwagon, and in 1921 Oberlieutenant. There were no negative incidents and he apparently performed superbly throughout these years. However, there was a tragic event that he never told anyone about—not even Gertrude, his wife, until very late in his life when he shared it with his son, Felix. Sometime in 1917, as officer in charge of a convoy of vehicles, he had orders to reconnoiter with some other convoys. He calculated that he had time to make the designated rendezvous in very good time and could therefore beat everybody else if he expedited his travel plans. It was just dusk when the convoy was set to start out and they would have to light the lamps on each vehicle for the trip. Normally they would have lit them all before starting out, but this would take time Fritz didn’t want to waste. There was another way of getting all the lamps lit that was authorized when a convoy needed to keep moving. The procedure was that someone in the first vehicle would light the lamps of that vehicle, jump off the moving vehicle and catch the following vehicle, climb aboard, light the lamps and then jump off and so on for the full length of the convoy. In order to make good time Fritz elected to use this method and the convoy set out. He admitted to his son, Felix that he selected someone whom he knew to be “timid” to perform that lamp lighting and in fact this young soldier did miss his footing, slid under the wheels of Fritz’s leading vehicle and was badly injured. He was loaded into a vehicle but there was nowhere closer than where they were already headed to take him for medical care. He was dead on arrival at the rendezvous. Fritz was brought before a military “court”, but since the procedure he followed was within regulations, the army exonerated him. A newspaper obituary inserted in the pages of his 1917 diary entitled “Militarungluck am Klausenpass” (Military Misfortune/accident on the Klaussen Pass) says (in German): On Saturday the 29 of September at 5:00 P.M. we traveled from Luzern with four officers and a truck chauffeured by the unfortunate victim,

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Korporal Binschedler. The account goes on to describe that after a long stop the truck with Binschedler driving and one officer pulled ahead of the other vehicles. The truck was seen not to be moving ahead, but then did go forward again and then came to a halt. Those following then heard a scream, rushed forward to investigate and found Binschedler caught between the wall and the truck. All efforts to get him to a medical facility failed and he died. The article names no one but Binschedler, and no mention of lighting lamps. If the article was not doctored in any way we can surmise that Fritz’s decision to send Binschedler off to do the lamps was the cause of the incident and that the first pause in the truck’s progress was when Fritz took over the driving in order to begin the lamp lighting procedure. Though the story corresponds in time and place to what Fritz told Felix, the lamp lighting procedure was not mentioned and Fritz’s name never appeared. Somehow the news released to the press was doctored Though the Army exonerated him, a civil suit was brought by the Binschedler family against Fritz indicating that his role in the whole matter was known and revealed at least to the family. According to Felix’s account, Papa, Mama and Grossli met with the Binschedler family on the steps of the courthouse and negotiated a settlement that kept Fritz’s name out of the news. In divulging this to his son at the end of his life Fritz said, “There is one thing I will have to account to St. Peter for.” This was a tragic consequence of Fritz’s youthful expectation that he should be “the first”, and he carried his guilt to the end of his life. How big was the impact of this misjudgment and its consequences on his life? Can it explain his decision to take up philosophy instead of engineering? It is the kind of purely personal guilt, never acknowledged beyond the most immediate family, never atoned for publicly that would spur self-examination and a search for fundamental moral understanding. However it impacted him, it would appear that at the time his influential family could fix it for him.

Chapter Three

Zurich

If 1913 was a beautiful year, and 1914 was a horrible year, 1915 was a transformative year. He got out of the infantry into the automotive branch of the military, learned mechanical skills, hobnobbed with top ranking military officers and prepared to go back to school. He arranged to take rooms in Zurich and started reading and studying in preparation for his upcoming academic program. He read psychology, aesthetics, logic and some philosophy. His division of the Motor Service, the Sixth Division, had their headquarters in the little town of Chur in southeastern Switzerland, and there he picked up a few pocketbooks of elementary philosophy. He wrote in 1943, “Into a mind fairly well ploughed, the wind of chance blew some seeds of philosophy.” His observation that, “They made me see that philosophical questions need not be left to untutored guesswork,” suggests that his “well ploughed mind” had already engaged in “philosophical guesswork.” Among the books he picked up was a copy of Spinoza’s Ethics that, he wrote, made him see “. . . that there are other theologies than the conciliatory though moralizing theism. . .” he had known. He goes on, “During the winter of 1915–16, Nietzsche finished the job which, sooner or later, had to be done on the Feet of Clay on which, so it appeared, any God had to stand. Better no God!” It is safe to assume that given his omnivorous appetite he did not necessarily deliberately choose the books because they were philosophy but perhaps just because they were there. In any case they spurred him on to take as an elective a course in philosophy with Fritz Medicus.

15

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MEDICUS Fritz began his engineering studies at ETH (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule) in the fall of 1915. Though he was, ostensibly, going to ETH to get a degree in engineering he was more interested in science than in engineering; the “war had upset my bourgeois complacency.” He started out hoping “to discover the inner secrets of nature,” however, “what I got instead was a first rate training in higher mathematics and in the various branches of theoretical physics,” which he never regretted. By 1918 he had passed the examinations for two of the pre-diplomas of Mechanical Engineering, and he also took a course with Fritz Medicus in pursuit of his awakening interest in philosophy. Medicus had come to ETH in 1911 as the Chair of Philosophy from the University of Halle. He was born in 1876 in Stadtlauringen, Bavaria. He studied Theology and Philosophy at the universities of Jena, where he made his doctorate, Kiel, Strassbourg and Halle. He wrote, within the mainstream of German Idealism, works on Kant and Fichte including an eight-volume edition of works by Fichte. It is hard to exaggerate the importance of Medicus in Fritz’s life. He took his first course in philosophy with Medicus in the fall of 1915—his first term at ETH. Many years later in a paper prepared for The International Congress for Philosophy he wrote, A blessed teacher can be of great profit [. . .] by merely presenting problems as, in truth, they are at that time. Such was my privilege in finding Medicus, and to this day I owe thanks to him for having introduced me to the life of philosophy. 1

By the summer of 1918 he had passed the examination for the Pre-Diplomas of Mechanical Engineering, but he had also come to realize that for him, “the study of philosophy could not remain the hobby of an engineer.” In retrospect, he viewed the agonizing, sleepless week following this awareness as a conversion. He did not have the temerity to personally inform his father so at the Easter break he did not go home, and instead gave his brother, Hans, the “unpleasant task” of telling his father of his decision. His father apparently did not fight the move to philosophy, which Fritz has explained as probably due to the fact that the business had been hurt by the war and did not need “academically trained” engineers. (Incidentally, Hans also wanted to leave ETH, however Gottlieb did not approve.) Fritz plunged into his philosophy education in the summer of 1918 as a registered student in the University of Zurich (not ETH). He took every course Medicus taught that Spring—Ethik, Pestolozzi, Philosophische Ubringen—as well as ten other courses with other professors whom he found

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wanting in comparison with Medicus. Ordinarily, he would have sought to study abroad, but because of the “troubled conditions” in the countries surrounding Switzerland, he decided not to follow this custom. Instead he enrolled at the University of Bern for the fall term. He nonetheless returned to Zurich for the summer term of 1919 in order to continue his studies with Medicus. He took Medicus’s courses in Logik, Die Nachtkantische Spekulation, Grundl, Der Geschichte der Pedagogik and Philosophische Ubringen. He was fortunate in finding at the University of Bern Anna Tumarkin, “an extremely thorough follower of Kant.” She was the first woman to graduate, in 1898, from the University of Bern as a professor of philosophy. She was also the University of Bern’s first female honorary (1906) and associate professor (1909). Tumarkin was Europe’s very first female member of a University Senate, and was also authorized to examine Ph.D. and professorship candidates. It was under Tumarkin that Fritz wrote his doctoral dissertation, Der Begriff des Unendlichen bei Kant. It was March 1921 when he passed Zusatprufung in Latien, he was 27 years old, his formal education was over, the war was over and he was ready to begin his life as a professor. He would have been happy to have found a position in Switzerland but the probability of not getting a living wage before some 40 years had passed in a Swiss academic institution went against this option. NOTE 1. Marti, Fritz. “Fritz Medicus (1876–1956)”. The Southern Journal of Philosophy, spring 1970.

Chapter Four

Search for a Job

The circumstances of his life were significantly altered by 1921, not only intellectually and academically, but also economically. The war years had been financially crushing for the Marti business, though Gottlieb had hoped and planned for a significant increase in business. According to some biographical notes written by him in 1927 and collated in 1982 by his nephew, Georg Sibler-Wildberger, from 1915 to 1918 the business did do quite well, but according to Gottfried, “. . . the state taxed away the cream of it.” Had Uncle Fritz been alive and running the business it might have fared better than it did under Gottlieb’s management; however, it was his uncle’s unorthodox management of the business finances that undermined Gottlieb’s stewardship. It had been Uncle Fritz’s policy to take half of the business profits each year and distribute the remaining half to his employees—all of them. With his own profit he speculated in real estate, such as acreage near railroad stations, and the Gurten in Bern. Upon his untimely death in 1902, at only 58, Gottlieb discovered not only did Uncle Fritz have almost no capital of his own in the business, the employees, having invested their bonuses in the business, were now the real owners. Gottlieb himself had no capital to buy them out. Furthermore, though he was Fritz Marti’s sole heir, the local (Zurich) inheritance laws required that the surviving siblings of the deceased must be co-heirs of one fourth of the estate.” This involved Gottlieb’s father, in Argentina, his Uncle Benedicht, in Switzerland and his Aunt Anna Aberegg, also in Switzerland. And, of course, he also had to pay a hefty inheritance tax. The resolution was the formation of a corporation, Fritz Marti A.G., in which Gottlieb held 3/5 of the shares and 2/5 were held by the other shareholders. In fact the investment by Gottlieb and his immediate family did not 19

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amount to 3/5 of the actual capital (Fr. 500,000) in the corporation, so, subsequently he began a process of shrinking the Marti holdings. He sold properties all over Switzerland and invested in a business property in Basel, which he later “exchanged for five residences in Bern.” After the war, when there was a housing shortage in Switzerland he sold the residences which left him with the Gurten property and its hotel. Gottlieb refers to the arrangements he had to make as, “. . . a hail of private and business difficulties. . .” that resulted in such significant distress for him that he had to take a long vacation and a “medical cure”. Sad though this tale is, it is hard to imagine that Uncle Fritz would have succumbed under the challenge. Where Uncle Fritz was expansive and daring, Gottlieb was overwhelmed and as a result, though he still had the business and the Gurten property with its hotel, ultimately the war destroyed the hotel business as well. By 1920 the business was doing poorly, so Gottlieb and his co-directors let themselves be persuaded to let the owner of the German firms that represented them in Germany become a partner. The share capital was raised and the new partner held all of the new shares. This in turn brought the business in Switzerland to the verge of bankruptcy and was only saved by Swiss investors who were issued preferred shares. This was the state of things in 1927 when Gottlieb wrote his biographical notes. He himself had already retired in 1926. In February 1922 he had had to rent the house on Kirchenfeldstrasse and move the family into the Gurten, and then into a smaller house that he owned and finally after selling that house, he and Lina, his wife, moved to a little house in the town of Muri just outside of Bern. Lina, his wife, sold the Muri house in 1947 and went to live with her married daughter until she died in 1952. Fritz did not leave Switzerland until 1923, but, sadly, it is too difficult to read his diaries for the years leading up to his departure. It is fair to suppose that he had to make a living at this point. I assume he lived with the family. Had the family resources stayed abundant he might have stayed around until an academic position came up, but, according to Georg, his nephew, it was always said in the family that there was no appropriate position for him in Switzerland. In a later document Fritz indicates that not until his forties could he have expected to make a living wage in academic teaching in Switzerland. He was active in the military as a technical instructor in the training camps and as a company commander in various services. He would have been financially compensated for this service. In 1921 he advertized tutoring services in math (as he had in Zurich while he was there) and in 1923 he was the manager of the Electric Cable Railroad-Gurten (the cable car that carried passengers up to the Gurten hotel) of which his father was a major shareholder, but there is no indication that he took any remuneration for this service. In fact there is no indication that any of these “jobs” were considered by any-

Search for a Job

21

body as necessary for income. He was looking for an academic position in America. If one could decipher his diaries for the years 1920 to 1922 it might become clear why he chose to come to the states. There is no evidence that he applied to European universities. Rather there is a long list of some of the top institutions in the United States in his 1923 diary: Harvard, Chicago, Columbia, Madison, Cornell, Yale, Michigan and California. Perhaps the best explanation is that being Swiss, he felt if he could not teach in Switzerland, America was the only choice. According to those who know Switzerland it shares many fundamental similarities with the United States. It is a democracy composed of distinct, regional political entities (the cantons), serving a diverse population that includes refugees, governed by a central government working under a constitution. The Swiss themselves are as patriotic, indedependent, and hard working as Americans. So the United States was a good choice, but there is no way of knowing if he based his decision on these factors. Knowing Fritz, I think it is just as likely that he was ready for a romantic adventure, and America was it. In later writings he confessed that his idea was to spend a few years in America and then go to India . . . In the summer of 1923 he met Dr. Walter Rebec, head of the Philosophy Department and Dean of the Graduate School of the University of Oregon. The meeting was on July 17, in the restaurant of the Hotel Central of Zurich. Rebec, who was on leave and travelling in Europe heard from some one at the university that Fritz Marti was interested in their position for a teaching fellowship in the department. Fritz had applied for a position at Oregon because a friend, George Schmidt of a friend, Arnold Kellor, of Hans knew that the chair of the German department was desperately seeking anyone who could teach German; his department had lost all of the German speaking faculty. In spite of this communication confusion Rebec took advantage of the opportunity to interview Fritz. Somewhere Fritz describes the humorous contrast between the rangy, casual older western American and the formally dressed university man, as Fritz described himself, with his high collar and wire-rimmed spectacles coming together in a coffee shop in Zurich. Rebec was pleased with Fritz and said he would like to bring him on, but would have to wait until he got back to Oregon; he would cable him as soon as he knew. Fritz was a guest of Medicus and family in their summer mountain retreat when the cable arrived. He recalled that Frau Medicus came running up the stairs shouting, “Dr. Marti. Wake up. A cable from America, a cable from America.” The cable simply said “Come immediately!”

Chapter Five

Oregon

On the 19th of September 1923 Fritz boarded the Olympia in Southampton for his crossing. On the 25th he sighted the Ambrose Lightship. On the 26th and 27th he made a few stops in New York—The New School, the Institute of International Education, and the offices of the Amalgamated Clothing Worker where he met a Dr. Kallen, a labor leader. He left Grand Central at 12:50 on the 27th on his way to Albany. He is in Chicago by the 28th and on the 29th he visited the Albert and Clark Teacher’s agency and Northwestern University. As we shall see he was never idle in his pursuit of teaching positions His trip west by train took four days, giving him his first awareness of the “vastness of this country.” He arrived in Portland on October 4 and thence to Eugene. He began teaching immediately—Nineteenth Century Philosophy and Formal Logic. The first paper he delivered in this country, “A Tentative Introduction to Aesthetics”, was based on three open lectures he gave in 1924 at the University of Oregon School of Architecture, and again in Portland. This is the beginning of a current in his teaching career; he always introduced Art into his personal course offerings where ever he went. Aesthetics became a cornerstone in his philosophic views, touching on intellectual, spiritual, educational and political beliefs. His approach with his listeners in these three lectures characterizes his teaching method thoughout his career. It is, and always was, in the classic tradition of philosophy, Socratic. In these lectures he tells his listeners what questions they have regarding the subject he has introduced, insinuating that he knows what is in their minds. In this he is very successful; before he makes any instructive statement he has introduced the relevant questions into the minds of his audience and they are convinced that those are in fact the 23

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very questions, curiosities, that they harbor. For example, he helps them realize that in the presence of a work of art “. . . you have had a great festival of your soul which evoked the most splendid feelings, pictures, melodies, thoughts in your mind; you are quite sure at that time your genius was at work; you felt yourself a poet, a composer, a painter, a thinker, the occasion may have been solemn or trifling; a play, a concert, a book, a show, a game, a hike, a dance.” He goes on in this spirit as if he knew each one’s personal aesthetic life history. His lectures were never impersonal. He was passionately committed to guiding the willing to philosophy as he himself had been guided by his beloved teacher, Medicus. With respect to aesthetics and philosophy in these lectures his references and reading recommendations were to Croce and Medicus. He develops our sensitivity to images, ordinary, daily images as events (to use a modern term) in our awareness of and consciousness of both the world about us and of artistic works. He transforms the images into expressions of the things around us as well as of the artists’ renderings. Quoting Croce, “The intuition is the expression” and goes on to say, “This is the fundamental proposition of aesthetics—and hence . . . of philosophy.” We understand by intuition our direct grasp of the work of art as such: the art “has nothing to express outside itself; it is nothing but expression. That is why, when we really see, hear, feel it, when we have the real and true intuition of it, then there is nothing at all outside that intuition; we forget ourselves in the intuition . . . I think in common parlance the direct intuition is when we say, I get it. He then aids us by posing for us the question, what about those expressions which are not pieces of art, our daily images which always refer to something beyond themselves. He answers, “. . . what is in the mind is image, whether rich or poor, clear or hazy, and nothing else. Yet they mean something which is not merely an idea, something real, some thing.” He then argues that to find out what things are is the task of science; to question how we can know them is the task of epistemology or metaphysics. Aesthetics, however, is concerned with the images as such. His discussion of “Art’s Significance in History, i.e. in life”, presages his recurring argument for human spirituality. At first he denies that art teaches anything – it is not a history lesson, . . . ” it does not point at objects or truths beyond the expression. What the artist brings to pass is the living organism of the piece of art.” By way of a discussion of the immortality (eternal artistic greatness) of great art he posits that, “. . . being intuition, expression, the pieces of art can reveal to us immediately the life of their time.” Reminding us of our appreciation of the beauty of ancient Greek art he says, “. . . this beauty was the outgrowth of the terror of life of which the Greeks were well aware, . . . we neatly civilized people forgot that Aphrodite was born from the foam of the roaring sea.” The point is that for us Aphrodite’s birth is only a myth, but for the early Greeks it is a story about the real power of the gods.

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What affects us when we address the beauty of ancient Greek art is the terror of the forces of fate in the hands of the immortal Gods. He easily steps from this analysis of immortal art to the art of our time. “The artist gives us our freedom by giving us the intuition, the self-certain expression of that which was only gloomy torment, vague anxiety in our mind. In the piece of art we hear life, our life, our life being the spiritual life,—not a mere dull elapsing of biological necessities. In as much as life is spirit, art is essential in it . . . ” There is nothing in this early testament that is not found in his lectures and teaching at the end of his life. In retrospect, many of his responses to and analyses of the major ideas and events of the twentieth century are almost forecast by his conviction that, “Without art we cannot live. A nation without its own art is not yet, or no longer a nation.” As if to say, if we live complacently in uneventful times, or we play no role in the events of our time, either as individuals or as nations, we will produce no memorable art; and vice versa, if our times produce no memorable art we have not truly lived in our time. Art is like a measuring instrument by which we know the past and understand our own time. The three lectures given when he was so newly here represent both what he brought with him when he came and what he would try to give during his life in the United States. However, the poise and confidence he brought to his teaching and lecturing were not matched by a comparable ease in his social and professional life. His early interactions with life in America were frequently painful. Up until he took the position in Oregon, he was secure in his place socially; he was an honored student/scholar and a member of a respected family. Furthermore, he had never engaged in the hurly-burly of business or finance; he never participated in the Marti business or even knew what the circumstances of the family fortune were. What money he had was either given by the family, the Army or as fees for tutoring and teaching. Now that he was on his own, he was determined to live independently of his family. His University of Oregon salary was fixed when he was hired, and afforded him only a very modest life style—a rooming-house room, food and drink and travel money. He had never lived lavishly so he was not crushed by his circumstances. In March of 1924, during his second semester at the university, Rebec, his chairman, told him that they would like to keep him at Oregon at a salary of $1800 with the option of earning more by teaching at the university extension in Portland which he immediately accepted and taught in Portland for the summer of 1924. However, according to Fritz’s diary entry on June 30, Rebec told him, after all, he would get only $1200 for the next year. Fritz did not deal with this salary issue until September after he had taught his summer course in Portland and had taken a traveling vacation in August. Since we have only Fritz’s account of the situation one can only speculate about the relevant

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circumstances, but his account suggests a suspicion that he is being duped by the administration. He characterizes Rebec’s explanation as, “. . . makes some excuses for not getting the 1800 promised.” Clearly he had every reason to be very confused and upset by this reversal of fortune, and quite possibly that is how he presented himself to Rebec in discussion (confused), but the entry in the diary is questioning the credibility of Rebec’s explanation of the situation. The Dean, whom Rebec told him to see, apparently informed him that Rebec had pushed for the $1200 when the Dean was going to offer only $1100, the going rate for teaching-fellowships, but he could earn more if he stayed longer and/or procured an offer from another institution. Probably there was some sort of miscommunication between Rebec and the Dean, (particularly since by January 1, 1925 Dyment, the Dean, says he is in favor of getting him a raise to $1800), but Fritz made no diary entries exploring this reversal. What did he think was going on? Was he being taken advantage of? I think he really didn’t know and lacked any insight into his situation. In his own 1928 translation of his diary for the early years in Oregon he commented on many of the entries, but even there he does not reveal any real understanding of this quasi-political situation. He does, however, explore other relevant ongoing matters. For one, he often mentions discussions with Rebec about becoming a naturalized citizen leaving no doubt that there was persistent pressure on him to make a commitment to staying in the States. He didn’t see these probes as relevant to his position in the Philosophy Department or the University. Instead he did much soul searching about whether he could possibly live in the United States and become an American man. His ruminations around this issue were primarily connected to his having fallen in love with an American woman—Kate. Everything that happened in 1924/25 was intricately tied in to his obsession with Kate. He first met her in December 1923. She was a colleague in the Art Department where Fritz made many contributions including an offer to teach a new course, so they had mutual interests, but in Fritz’s diary whatever shared academic interests they had were almost peripheral to how she related to him—what she said to him, how she answered him, how she looked at him or failed to look at him, where she went, how she traveled, who else she talked to, but most of all what she wanted from him. On one level his account is like any other lovelorn story, but two salient life issues are also part of the story: will he remain in the States, and the depth of his discourse on love and commitment. The latter becomes relevant when he later goes into Freudian analysis and reveals much of what impacted his psychosexual development. In the end his relationship with Kate failed to mature but for Fritz it was a profound awakening. He had always had enjoyable social relationships with women, in Switzerland and in his early days in Oregon. But, even in Switzerland, he admits to having strong feelings for a girl who never knew how he

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27

cared for her. He really liked women and engaged them easily all his life. He was not shy or hesitant in making dates, often movie dates, but he had not experienced a truly passionate relationship. Though he felt passionately for her he persisted in expressing his feelings romantically with flowers, chocolates, poems, and little gifts. He knew she wanted something more from him, a sensual, sexual relationship, and he struggled with his own inhibitions but he was unable finally to meet her needs. It is a really heartrending story. His personal and social naivety, exacerbated by his uneven accommodation to American culture, was a persistent struggle. Though he despised the stodginess of Switzerland, he had learned during his young years to adapt to it. In America his natural reticence was constantly challenged. It endeared him to some, but left others cold. Concerning his ambivalence about staying in the States and becoming a naturalized citizen he was terribly conflicted. With Rebec, he was not prepared to make the kind of commitment that inspired confidence. Kate sensed his ambivalence and on more than one occasion told him he had to go home. She had this insight: “You love the country, but you hate the people.” Strong words but not off the mark; numerous diary entries give evidence of his distaste for American attitudes and manners. I think the pressure from Kate and Rebec fueled a stubborn kind of oppositional attitude that did him no good service. The final blow came when he refused to grade Rebec’s students’ papers on the grounds that he was not paid to do this and he disagreed with the paper topics (!). Not only a clear affront to Rebec, but threatened to get him fired. “[Rebec] says that my refusal to read the papers would mean notice of termination of employment at the end of the year, or even immediate dismissal.” Though Rebec’s statement implies the dismissal is conditional, Fritz did not reverse himself. Instead he became very heated, and wrote in his diary, “that means I will no longer be here,” and then sought solace from Kate This ambivalence of his about staying here or going back to Switzerland was probably resolved for the moment when he learned that his father finally had to sell the Gurten. This news propelled him into a final twist in his relationship with Kate. Her father was somehow involved in real estate, so Fritz asked Kate if her father might be interested in purchasing the Gurten property. Apparently he was open to meeting with Fritz, but when he asked Fritz if his father was already bound to anyone else in Switzerland Fritz said no but they would like to get an offer from the US to boost the the offer from the Swiss parties interested. Kate’s father responded that price-boosting was unethical. All of these machinations have the feel of confusion and desperation to salvage a future with Kate. The Gurten news from home not only squelched any lingering hope that Kate could be persuaded to accompany him back to Switzerland, but also that the family fortunes were sufficiently diminished

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that he himself had no prospects there. In the end he had to turn to the business of getting another job. He tells Rebec that he will go east, though privately he notes that, “The visit east is going to be a matter of curiosity only.” Rebec wrote him a “warm recommendation” for a position at Princeton, but he did not get the job. “Go home? Study up the PostKantian Speculation? But it would be unjustifiable as long as the Gurten is not sold. Stay here and try to sell Gurten here? Go home and help Hans with the business?” He is clearly lost and confused.

Chapter Six

Going East

In mid-July of 1925 Fritz placed an ad in some local newspaper as follows: “DRIVING EASTWARD end of July or August? Will you take along a university man?” During the winter of 1924–1925 he had taught an evening class in the University of Oregon’s Extension Center in Portland where he had a young Dutch electrician, Louis Boomsma, as a student. Boomsma had a Model T Ford and was planning to travel east to visit an uncle in South Dakota. Fritz worked out a deal with Boomsma to travel with him thus saving both of them some expense. I think if I could go back in time I would choose to take that trip with my father. It must have captured his curiosity, his aesthetic appetite and his love of freedom. Again, his diary for this period is in German script, so illegible by me, however the 1928 translation supplies some details. As of September 18, he starts to record the names of academic institutions along the way. First is the University of Montana, but they “needed no professor of philosophy there.” Next, the Montana State School of Mines—they had “no money for such luxuries.” He mentions visiting Yellowstone National Park, the Big Horn Mts., and the “long and enchanting prairies.” In Wyoming they visited the Devil’s Tower, then on to the “corn belt” of South Dakota where his travel with Boomsma ended, though not their friendship. From there he traveled by train to the East and stopped in Lacrosse, Wisconsin where a friend of the family, Mary, lived. She had been helpful to both Hans and Fritz when they first arrived in the States, and now helped him explore the prospects for a job there. He then went on to Madison, but the University of Wisconsin also had no jobs. He visited Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, the Armor Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago—no jobs. In Chicago, though, he recalled that a fellow student and old friend in Switzerland had asked him to call on his uncle who 29

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lived in Chicago. He did contact the uncle, who over dinner, gave Fritz his calling card and suggested that he get in touch with a fellow Swiss, Adolph Meyer, “. . . one of the country’s leading psychiatrists and Director of the Phipps Clinic at the Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore.” The Swiss community in America appears to have been an active network then—in Fritz’s case both in Oregon between Hans’ friend, Arnold Keller and George Schmidt, and between the uncle in Chicago and Dr. Meyer in Baltimore. His search for a job continued all along his trip East: Ann Arbor, Western Reserve University, Case School of Technology, University of Pittsburgh, Temple University—no openings. He was scared by now that he would have no job in the fall and changed his inquiry to, “Do you need anybody to teach anything?” As a result he was offered a position as an elementary Latin teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, which he turned down supposing that his knowledge of Latin was not equal to the position! But, once again the Swiss connection kicked in. He decided he needed to get in touch with Professor Meyer at Johns Hopkins Medical School, who, on receiving the calling card from Mr. Muller, the “uncle in Chicago”, invited Fritz to meet with him. As so often happened with Fritz, Meyer extended the meeting with an invitation to have dinner with him at his home. The upshot was that Meyer put Fritz in touch with another Swiss, Hans Froelicher, the professor of German Literature and Art History at Goucher college. The Swiss connection worked and Fritz was hired by Guth, the President of the college whom Fritz quotes as having said, “Today is Wednesday. Next Tuesday the fall semester begins. I cannot hire you today, but if you can be back Saturday morning at nine, I may be able to offer you an instructorship.” Guth was waiting to hear from Valmi Evans of Wales who was to come to the states to teach at Goucher but was having problems getting her visa. Fritz did get the Instructorship, and Valmi came to teach in the department the following year. She and Fritz became close colleagues and remained life long friends. On September 26 he went to Philadelphia where he had been staying with his old school friend, Dolf Meyer (not the Psychiatrist In Baltimore), and shaved off his mustache. GOUCHER It is time to describe Fritz the man, for by now he is a man and looks like the man I knew. He was about 5’10”, fair, sandy colored hair already receding when I first knew him, and in photographs of him in his early days in the States he already has the high forehead of an intellectual. He was, during his active academic years, well groomed—wore his hair respectably short, a tie, vest and jacket with slacks in muted beiges, browns, soft grays, shoes polished, and no jewelry. He wore round, wire-rimmed glasses, always, and if

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he wore a hat it was a beret—all his life. The beret was a distinguishing feature, recognized by all who knew him. His dress was always appropriate for the weather including rubbers for rain and galoshes for snow. Scarves, gloves, ear muffs if necessary, raincoat when needed. He was always lean and fit and in fact despised fat people. Though he had scoliosis, it was imperceptible when he was dressed; he stood erect, and had a healthy gait. He had a comfortable awareness of himself and used his body well. When lecturing or speaking before an audience he was like some musicians—he moved in sync with his thoughts. His hands were always an important part of his communication—some gestures so characteristic as to be unforgettable: such as the index finger of his right hand at the side of his nose which meant, “Maybe yes. Maybe no. Let’s take a look at this.”; the fingers of both hands always at work playing in accompaniment to his discourse; and the simple gesture of extending his arm and quietly pointing to something beautiful that should be attended to. His voice was full and low. His diction was almost theatrically perfect, and his accent was European colored by the English accent he would have learned in studying English in Europe. It was a good voice, and often rhetori-

Figure 6.1. Fritz Marti, c 1926.

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cally punctuated in public speaking. But his most important feature was his eyes. They were riveting. They were grey, neither large nor small, and proportionate to his well-shaped nose, full lips and firmly rounded chin. His eyebrows were always a little bushy only more so when he was older. But it was the eyes that captured you. They were open, focused, actively seeing, alive, inviting and welcoming. When he was pleased and happy you could see it in his eyes, when he was thoughtful they were quiet, when he was angry or frustrated they were defiant, and when he was fascinated or attracted by a woman they were compelling. Though he was not the typical “good looking” man, in his own way he was irresistible. The years between 1925 and 1935 were years of intense personal, social and professional development. Fritz was in his 30s and determined to have a social life. At Goucher, a women’s college, he went to all the dances, dated his students (not a no-no in those days). Though his love for Kate persisted (letters were exchanged) he appears to have accepted the end of the relationship when she headed back west after a trip to New York City. His European manner and his age, no doubt, were attractive to women and he had many women friends, but finally they did not help him to make a successful liaison. Late in 1928 into 1929 he went into Freudian analysis where he examined the dominant role of the powerful women (his mother and grandmother) in his life. He sees his Uncle Fritz as a strong male presence, and says in his notes from his analysis, that he wants a woman like his Uncle Fritz would have had. Ironic since his Uncle Fritz never married. Was this also his image of himself—never to marry? (He never wore a wedding ring.) He does at another point say he had an abhorrence of marriage; presumably a reference to the life of his father who was always working, never home, but constantly providing for his wife, children and mother-in-law. His father seems to have no character other than as seen through the eyes of his mother and grandmother. In fact, his father died on October 12, 1929 and I can find no references to the event, not even entries in later years marking the date of his birth or death. This is particularly significant since he recorded the birth and death of almost everybody he knew. This practice once got him in trouble with one of his girl friends who resented the familiarity implied by his asking for her birth date. Concerning his father, the analyst suggested that, “Fighting theology= 1929 form of fighting father in the corral”. Based on Fritz’s notes, he appears to have had a classic Freudian analysis, though it seems to have lasted less than a year. His own summary of the experience is to understand that emotionally he never got past early childhood; that he needs to look at present behavior in terms of past experience and learn from it; and that he should slow down. This last is probably a reference to his intense pursuit of girls.

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His copying and then commenting on his earlier Oregon diaries must surely have been part of his analytic work. In addition to this personal development, he developed a wide circle of friends and acquaintances. He was at three separate colleges (Goucher, Haverford and Hollins College) between 1925 and 1935 affording him a life with three faculties and three student bodies on three campuses. He took advantage of them all. When asked once his impression of American college students he observed that they had a much freer, relaxed academic experience than he had had as a student in Switzerland, and I cannot escape the impression that through these years, he was able to have that American college experience himself. He was in plays, went to all the dances, went to football and basketball games, attended and spoke at campus clubs. He appears to have had quite a reputation for his dancing. He frequently attended movies, plays, gallery openings, lectures and campus social events. In addition to speaking at campus clubs, he was invited to speak at town gatherings such as the Rotary Club and the County Women’s Club. As a result his circle of acquaintances grew very large. At first his friends were young students or colleagues with whom he went to the movies and partied. Some whose names appear very often as companions at the movies—Mary Lane, Chev (who made films), Sally—got married after a while or graduated and took positions elsewhere, but would stay in touch. Always brings tears to my eyes when I read them. Letters from the female friends are often apologetic as they announce their engagements or weddings. One spoke of awe and respect for all he had taught her. Another was very fond of him, but life must move on. Apparently he had proposed to one. Boomsma and his family are always visiting or he is writing to them. He did develop some long term friends during these early years; Valmai Burdwood-Evans, the instructor in Philosophy at Goucher between 1926–1928, and Gertrude Bussy, Head of the Philosophy Department at Goucher who accepted Fritz into the department when he first applied. His friend, Joe Beaty, who taught at Haverford, was instrumental in getting Fritz a one semester appointment at Haverford where he met Rufus Matthew Jones, the famous Quaker Mystic. Fritz and his fellow Goucher Philosophy Department colleagues often went to the Johns Hopkins Philosophy Seminar. According to Fritz, they felt some obligation to attend because at that time there were only two faculty members, A. O. Lovejoy and George Boas, and just a few graduate students. After Fritz’s semester at Haverford, Boas sent for him and offered him a one year instructorship to cover for Lovejoy who was going on sabbatical leave. This invitation speaks volumes about Fritz’s potential and prospects as a scholar and teacher at this early stage in his career. The Philosophy Department at Hopkins might have been small, but it was and is a major academic institution, situated not in the boondocks, but on the east coast amidst other

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fine institutions, and it is not likely that Boas did not have his pick of suitable candidates for this position. Dr. Bussy informed President Guth of this prestigious invitation, and Guth responded by telling Fritz he wanted to keep him at Goucher and would “. . . promote me as fast as possible and raise my salary from $1500 to $2400.” Though Guth’s offer was never made in writing, Fritz accepted it and turned down the Hopkins offer. As it turned out Guth never raised his salary above $2400 and never promoted him. Of this debacle Fritz says, “It was probably a foolish decision. Even one year at Hopkins would have been a good stepping stone toward the big league.” He goes on to admit that he had been too scared by what happened to him in 1925—no job, no income— and so he opted for the safety and security of his situation at Goucher That safety and security ended in 1931 when due to the depression the enrollment at Goucher plummeted from 1100 students to 600, the college had to dismiss one third of its faculty. Goucher had no capital cushion, but, of course, Hopkins did. Might he have been invited to stay on at Hopkins? In any case, he was one of those dismissed and no one was hiring. Happenstance, instead of the Swiss connection, did, in this case, kick in. Through a series of coincidences some psychology faculty members happened to visit Hollins College on their way north from a Florida holiday and learned that a full time professor of philosophy at Hollins was leaving and that there was an opening. They in turn contacted a friend at Goucher, Jane Goodloe, who also had taught at Hollins, and she sent Fritz for an interview there. Again, Fritz captured the imagination of his interviewer, Estes Cocke, nephew of the president, Miss Matty Cocke. He and Fritz talked all day and in the end Cocke was able to offer him an Associate professorship at only $1600 but with free board and room. Fritz, of course, accepted. At Hollins he was commissioned to start and organize the new Department of Art. He also had the duty of teaching the senior course in education required by the State of Virginia. This explains why, in the summer of 1932 he went up to Columbia University and attended education courses at the Horace Mann College of Education. He was, all through the years from 1925 to 1935 writing, translating and presenting papers. He read papers every year at the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, and the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology. He was also beginning his translations of Schelling; he translated Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism which appears to have been the beginning of his collaboration with James Gutmann at Columbia University. But his professional career really began to take off in the summer of 1935, and we see a much more mature person.

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UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND On July 10th, 1935 he records his first interview at the University of Maryland. This interview was totally the result of “happenstance”. The president of Hollins College, Miss Matty, finally had to resign; she was quite elderly. The consequent administrative upheaval meant that the former Dean, Mary Williams, resigned as dean and therefore had to return to full time teaching. Her field was philosophy and there was no need for two philosophy professors at Hollins—Fritz had to leave at the end of the first semester of his third year there. They took pity on him and let him keep his room and board free for another semester. Apparently he made trips from Hollins College up to Baltimore off and on to visit friends there. On one such trip, he picked up a hitch hiker near Washington D.C. who was a student at the University of Maryland at College Park. According to Fritz’s account, when the student learned that Fritz’s field was philosophy he said, “College Park offers no courses in philosophy; why don’t you come and teach it?” So, Fritz drove the student directly to campus where he procured a catalogue. Goucherites and Hopkins faculty considered the University of Maryland a “cow college”, but it was still depression years and “no philosophy courses” was as good as a vacancy. Fritz wrote to the new president of the university, “Curly” Byrd, and proposed that they should open a Philosophy Department. How American is that?! Like Uncle Fritz, he was clearly better at innovating than fitting in, a trait that sparks many of his life moves. Throughout July and August he met with several people at Maryland, including President Byrd and ultimately he was made Professor and Head of the Department of Philosophy there. Once at the University of Maryland his circle of acquaintances begins to include very significant names. He and Tobias Dantzig became good friends and apparently Fritz attended lectures given by Dantzig over the course of 1935 and 1936. When Dantzig’s book Numbers was accepted for publication he invited friends over to hear a reading of the first chapter, and Fritz was among them. The reader was Elizabeth Lindsay, Vachel Lindsay’s widow. He also met with George Boas socially and the first diary entry of “James Gutmann”, with whom he did a great deal of work, was in February of 1936 when he was in New York. The beginning of his references to ongoing national and international events begins in the winter of 1935–1936: He notes on the 6th of December,1935 that he participated in a discussion, “Spain: The Philosophy of the Hitler Movement”; On the 20th of January 1936, King George V dies; and on December 10, Edward VIII abdicates. During the summer of 1936 he spent three months traveling extensively in Europe France (where he appears to have met Dantzig on the 4th of

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August), Italy, Austria and Switzerland, possibly Germany as well. It is very hard to tell because his diary entries for this trip are, again, in a tiny, cramped, German script, with five or six entries a day on many days. For many reasons it would be intriguing to know what he wrote, because this is a return to Europe and his family and because it is likely this is when he may have photographed the many prewar examples of architecture that he later made into the glass slides he used in his Art history and aesthetics classes. It is also interesting that I did not see any readable entries concerning the family though Cousin Georg remembers his Uncle Fritz visiting, and we know that his mother desperately wanted him to come back to Switzerland. Would he have noted these meetings and discussions in his diary? I actually do not think he would—too personal. During his years at the University of Maryland, he also became a Washingtonian and met my mother, Gertrude Austin.

Chapter Seven

Washington D.C.

My mother, Gertrude Austin, and I moved to Washington D.C. in the fall of 1936. When I was growing up there, Washington was a beautiful city; tree lined avenues, spectacular monuments, beautiful gardens and parks. I can still see the fine town houses occupied by the ambassadors and their entourages. As David Brinkley says in his fascinating book, Washington Goes to War, the only industry in Washington was government. 1 There were all the people who had come to work in the government agencies and bureaus set up by President Roosevelt. And then there were all the secretaries who worked in the government offices. Finally there were all the maids and chauffeurs, and cooks and cleaning people who worked in the homes and offices and hotels in Washington. But there were no factories or factory workers. There were stores, of course, department stores—Woodward and Lothrop’s, Garfinkel’s—grocery stores, drug stores—Peoples—cleaners and garages. But there were no major cultural events or venues as in other eastern cities so people went to New York and Philadelphia to go to museums and concerts and to shop. The older, rich families lived in great mansions on Massachusetts Avenue, a neighborhood still called Kalorama. According to Brinkley, they were called “cave dwellers” because they never came out of their huge, gorgeous homes to participate in activities in Washington. 2 They represented old Washington before Roosevelt and the New Dealers came to town. Their Washington really was a southern town—slow moving, quiet. For example most of the food prepared in restaurants, hotels and homes were deep fat fried, southern style. In the summer months it was hot and humid, and, of course, there was no air conditioning, so those who could afford to left town for those months.

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The hard, physical laborers and all service personnel were black. According to Brinkley one third of the population of Washington in 1937 was black. Some were well-off, middle-class families, but most were laborers up from the south who worked for very low wages and lived in very poor housing. According to Brinkley, the city was totally segregated. 3 I certainly never knew any black children; there were never any in my schools. The only black people I knew were the baby-sitters and maids with whom I spent lots of time. Other blacks I was aware of were porters at the railroad station and the men who collected our garbage. I could never understand a word they said even though I would poke my head out of the window and listen as hard as I could trying to figure out what their language was. There were street vendors, who came through the streets selling fresh fruit, and they were black, but I don’t remember that we bought anything from them. I do remember an organ grinder and his monkey that I would throw paper wrapped dimes to when he played and sang under the window of our apartment when we lived on Swann Street, but I think he was Italian. My mother’s friends and acquaintances were almost all artists and musicians. In 1930 She had been selected from an international pool of applicants to receive a scholarship to study eurythmics with Jaques Dalcroze in Geneva where she stayed for a year. Dalcroze’s intention was to train young musicians so they would spread Eurythmics to other countries. After her year abroad she returned to the Cornish School in Seattle where she had been a student and a piano teacher from a young age and introduced Eurythmics there. In 1936 she was invited by the King-Smith School to teach eurythmics in Washington, D. C. When we first arrived in Washington we shared an apartment with Franc Epping, a sculptor. It was at a party given by Franc on February 25th, 1937 that Fritz met Gertrude. At the celebratory party for the publication of Dantzig’s book, Numbers, he had met and became attracted to Elizabeth Lindsay, Vachel Lindsay’s young widow. He found out that she would be at Franc’s party, so he eagerly accepted her invitation. And so it was that he “met Gertrude Austin”. His diary entries thereafter steadily include appointments with Gertrude. On the 22nd of March 1937 Fritz recorded in his diary that he met Judith—I was one year old—and on June 5, 1937, one hundred days after they met, Fritz and Gertrude were married. GERTRUDE AUSTIN Fritz wrote diaries, Gertrude took pictures. Starting in her school days through the year in Switzerland and the childhood of each of her children, with her cherished Kodak camera she recorded it all. Of course there are stories and anecdotes, remembered differently by each of us kids, and she

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kept written accounts of the development of each child. Besides a few critical documents—birth certificates, marriage certificates,—these pictures are the account of her life. One must speculate in telling her story and others will, no doubt, see the story differently. My goal is to present her as she became a part of Fritz’s life and influenced it. She was born in 1908, in Seattle, Washington, the second daughter of Michael and Nellie Austin. Their first daughter, Betty, died young and they had a third daughter, Alice. At the time of Gertrude’s birth Michael Austin, her father, listed himself as “retired”. He was 52 years old, twenty-four years older than his twenty eight year old wife, Nellie. Legend has it that he was a boarder in Nellie’s mother’s boarding house in Worchester, Massachusetts and was presumably going to marry her mother, Mary Spaulding, but eloped with her daughter instead. His status as retired makes good sense in light of his own life history. His birth certificate, which Gertrude obtained late in her life, says he was born in 1855 in Worcester, Massachusetts, son of James Austin and Bridget, both from Ireland. Notable is the lack of a maiden family name for Bridget. My mother maintained all of her life that he was actually an orphan, brought from Ireland and left with a parish priest and money to pay for his keep. My mother on some occasions suggested that there was a lot of money left with him. Beyond these details not much is known about his youth until he was sixteen years old when, working in an iron foundry, he was blinded in both eyes by an accident at the foundry. What is known of his life immediately following the accident is that he was persuaded that there was an ophthalmologist in Ireland who could restore his sight and so he booked steerage passage to Ireland where he was told there was no hope of restoring his vision. He returned to Worcester and in September of 1877, at the age of 22, he entered The Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, Massachusetts. In 1887 he had a son, Bernard, born in Worcester, Massachusetts whose mother is recorded as Anna (no maiden name given). Bernard’s daughter, Loretta, was in touch with Gertrude in the 1980s, but her letters indicate that she only knew of my birth and nothing else about Gertrude’s family. Michael may have had other liaisons and other children, but the record is elusive. He seems to have supported himself as a traveling salesman. According to Gertrude he traveled coast-to-coast selling Collier’s magazines and cast iron kitchen cooking ranges. As a girl I had a small salesman’s model of the range he sold to play with. He may have sold other things, but not to my knowledge. How he supported his Seattle household is not clear. At first they lived at 300 Denny Way and later in a large house at 5119 Morgan Street with sufficient grounds to raise chickens and supply fuel for a wood stove. As far as I know his wife, Nellie, was not gainfully employed until after his death. It has always been my understanding that they were very poor, but where did

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the money for the upright piano he purchased for his daughters and the house come from? Was there a tuition fee for enrollment at the Cornish School? According to Gertrude her father played the fiddle and performed locally. He was apparently enough of a musician to have taught both Gertrude and her sister, Alice, to play the piano sufficiently well to have turned them both in to accomplished pianists. Gertrude made her debut at the age of three after only six months of her father’s tuition, at the Warren Avenue School. She was called “the west’s musical prodigy” in a newspaper article reporting the event. A year later she played at the Eilers Recital Hall and she was again introduced as making her debut. Interviewed by the newspaper reporters, her father said he would continue to teach her for a year or two and “then give her an opportunity to continue with some of the best teachers.” And that was what happened. She went to the Cornish School of Music in Seattle where she remained as a student/instructor until 1930 when she went to Geneva. She remained in Geneva and traveled in avant-garde, interbellum Europe until 1932 when she returned to Seattle as a faculty member at the Cornish School and established the eurhythmics curriculum there. What a splash she must have made! But in 1935 she did not return for the spring term at the school. She and a colleague, Niles Navarre, left Seattle for Colorado, ostensibly to start a research trip, exploring native dance, which was to take them ultimately to New Zealand. Niles was a dancer who introduced Native American Dance at the Cornish School. That trip did not happen. Instead in August of 1935 they announced their marriage to the surprise of their friends and colleagues in Seattle, and in November Gertrude gave birth to me, Judith Anne. She had taken up residence in Longmont, Colorado and even opened a studio advertising private piano lessons there. She and Niles were not, in fact, married nor was I his child, but he lovingly supported her during this time and willingly gave his name for the marriage announcements and my birth certificate. To all intents and purposes Gertrude became Mrs. Niles Navarre and I was Judith Anne Navarre. In September of 1936 Gertrude was hired by the King-Smith Studio School in Washington, D.C. to start teaching Eurhythmics in October of that year. The school arranged housing for us in an apartment next to the school on New Hampshire Avenue where we lived until after Fritz and Gertrude married. People always said of my mother, she is a very striking looking woman. She was tall for her generation, about 5’7”, lean like a dancer, with rich, red hair that she wore in long curls until she was older. Her face was strongly sculpted with high cheekbones, a strong jaw line and broad forehead softened by sparkling brown eyes and full lips. She was beautiful. She was always conscious of her appearance. She dressed with an acute sense of style fashioned and made by herself and carried herself with grace and dignity. Be-

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cause of her stature she wore clothes well. She was always the center of attention when she entered a room. She had a vibrant and intense personality. She spoke with a strong voice leaving no doubt about the honesty and conviction behind her words. One listened to what she said. She was also warm and had a lively sense of humor. She loved to entertain and shined in the mileu of company. It is not surprising that Fritz fell for her as soon as he met her. GERTRUDE AND FRITZ Gertrude and Fritz together forged a remarkable life. Their impact on those who became close to them was vital and lasting. He with his European charm and powerful intellect, she with her striking beauty and dynamic personality

Figure 1.7. Fritz and Gertrude, Wedding Picture, 1937.

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dazzled those around them. Fritz gained the social confidence he had struggled so long to achieve and Gertrude could bask in the erudition he brought into her life. The security and stability thus achieved emboldened them to realize cherished dreams. Certainly for Fritz his fulfillment as a man was realized in this marriage. He had a beautiful wife, a home, one child already and before long another one on the way. He was living a better life than either his father or his Uncle Fritz had. At first we lived at 1701 Swann Street across New Hampshire Avenue from The Kingsmith Studio where Gertrude taught. Fritz and Gertrude were very active during the fall and winter of 1937/38. Gertrude’s eurythmics offerings were written up in the Post and the Evening Star. She also had some recitals with her friend Marte Poncy that were part of the social news. I don’t remember most of this, but they seem to have entertained people almost every weekend. Fritz entered the names of six or seven individuals or couples on the Saturdays. There were the Froelichers, Burkes, Goodman, Boas, Ponce, King-Smiths, Mrs. Vachel Lindsay (Elizabeth), Ferrells, Dantzig, Hutchins, Gamov, Bolman. Fritz made an important connection to the art world of Washington D.C. when the Washington Star introduced an “Art Appreciation Campaign” in the fall and winter of 1937/38. David Brinkley observed that, “Washington ‘aristocracy’ kept track of one another in the social pages of the Evening Star, the only paper they considered fit to read.” 4 The goal of the campaign was to awaken Washingtonians to the world of art. Printed, color reproductions of “famous paintings” were made available in several venues by the Star in collaboration with the National Committee for Art Appreciation; lectures and classes were sponsored and offered by civic and private organizations, public, private and parochial schools and on the radio. Fritz was one of those who did radio shows as well as lectures for organizations; he was selected to present the program to the Metropolitan Police Boys’ Clubs. His activities were extensively reported in the Evening Star and in each case he was presented as an important local scholar and art historian. The campaign lasted through the New Year, and Fritz was actively engaged in it throughout the whole period. He made a scrapbook of the newspaper clippings and in some cases made notations on them. Though he seems to have liked this attention, he did not pursue this entree into the social world of Washington. Though most of their friends and acquaintances were academics and artists a few of them that I remember were attached to the government, principally, Louis Simon, who was the Supervising Architect of the Treasury Department, and, in fact, was made a member of the American Institute of Architects on June 1 of 1937. He and his wife “Tessie” were surrogate grandparents to me. They called me either “Precious” (a name I learned to say) or “Blessed”. I got used to being addressed with these names and only fleetingly wondered why they called me that. I have since then come to know

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that they were the parents of three beautiful daughters, whose picture was on their dresser where I often saw it. They all three died in a typhoid epidemic. Tessie and Louis gave me their unconditional love for the rest of their lives. Another friend who was involved in government business was Dolf Meyer. He was exactly Fritz’s age and had been a class mate of Fritz’s when they were both at ETH, in Zurich. Dolf lived and worked in the Washington/ Baltimore area until he was hired to work on the Tennessee Valley Authority, a New Deal project, and moved to Tennessee. (Fritz also noted that his salary was $4000) I remember him as a “jolly fellow”, as Fritz would say, who had a very thick Swiss accent. I do not remember most of these times in 1937 because I was only one. I do remember the organ grinder and his monkey, and coming into Tessie and Louis apartment, and going to Dupont Circle, but I really don’t remember the trip we took out west that summer. We went there so Fritz could meet my Nana, Nellie Austin, and my Grandfather, Michael Austin, my Aunt Alice and her husband Gene Erckenbrack. Fritz also met Miss Cornish who was the head of the Cornish School of Music where Gertrude had gone to school and taught piano before she came to Washington, D.C. Fritz looked up and visited people along the way. We got to Washington State by the 13th of August, and on the 17th he seems to have had a meeting with Edwin Guthrie, the psychologist at the University of Washington. He visited Portland and Eugene Oregon. On the way home we visited Longmont, Colorado, where I was born. But there are no details about whom he saw there. We got back to Washington by the 15th of September. Washington D.C. by 1937 had been seriously affected by the depression, the Roosevelt administration and the influx of the New Dealers. Most native Washingtonians did not like the New Dealers who came from all over the country, but many of them were there to stay. Katherine Graham, who had left Washington for college in 1934, was thrilled when she returned in 1939 to find that her “stodgy town” was alive with “energetic, dynamic young people,” 5 but David Brinkley still found in 1937 that “. . . local Washington’s drowsy life went on as drowsily as ever. . .” 6 Fritz, as we have seen, knew and loved art and at one time considered aesthetics the area on which he would concentrate his scholarship. He loved the movies and all seventeen he went to in 1937 were recorded in his diary (as were all the movies he ever saw in his life!). He read novels, went to plays (even acted in some), went to concerts and lectures. He loved social gatherings, except when he didn’t and commented on how boring someone was. He surrounded himself with interesting people, entertained and was entertained often. But above all he was a serious man who had found a calling in philosophy. As of January 1937 he had had three publications in major journals in the United States: the first was in 1930, a review concerning Croce’s aesthetic, the second another review, and the third, published in January 1937 in The

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Review of Religion, “Religion and Natural History” in which he wrestles with the concept of creation. He starts with a citation from Schelling and quickly challenges contemporary theologians on the “. . . deep meaning of the very conception of creation.” 7 Reading this phrase I can hear the seductive appeal of his voice as he intones those words. It is as if he were saying, “Come, I am going to take you into another world.” He himself was never very far from this other world. He had also delivered papers at philosophy conferences, and at the colleges where he taught he offered lectures about art and architecture, religion and theology, Schelling, Hegel and Croce. In the summer of 1938 we went to Europe where Fritz’s family first met Gertrude and me. It was an extensive trip, starting June 10th until September 3rd. Europe in the summer of 1938 was facing an uncertain future. Hitler’s takeover of Austria was not only ongoing but widely reported in the news. By 1938 a large number of the Jewish intelligentsia had already left Austria (as well as non-Jewish academics from Germany and elsewhere in Europe). There is no doubt that Fritz was fully aware of this. The Swiss were firmly opposed to the Nazis, so I imagine Fritz had no fear about going there, but their borders with Austria and Germany made them vulnerable. Two notes written to him from friends in England—Valmai and Ottalie (a friend of my mother’s)—after our visit with them that summer reveal the horror and fear of Europeans at the prospect of war. Fritz must have known that we had to go that summer or it would be too late. I have no memory of the trip but there are pictures of me on the roof of Notre Dame cleaning the ears of a gargoyle, and running in Tante Lisel’s (Fritz’s sister) garden in Datlikon and many of me on the ship on the trip home with Gabrielle, who was to be my nannie for the following year. Gabrielle was Swiss and was coming to the States to “go into service”, but she knew no English. So she lived with us and spoke only French to me all that year when I was three while she learned English. But the memories I am confident of begin after we moved to our house at 11 Hesketh Street in Chevy Chase. NOTES 1. Brinkley, David. Washington Goes to War (New York: Ballantine Books, 1988) 9. 2. Ibid. 8. 3. Ibid. 15. 4. Ibid. 8. 5. Graham, Katherine. Katherine Graham’s Washington (Vintage Books/Random House, 2002). 6. Brinkley. Washington Goes to War. 20. 7. Marti, Fritz, “Religion and Natural History” (The Review of Religion, 1937) 149.

Chapter Eight

Chevy Chase

Chevy Chase is a suburb northwest of Washington D.C. From downtown you go out Connecticut Avenue to Chevy Chase Circle, the final stop for the buses. From there you walk two blocks around the circle to Magnolia Drive, as lovely as it sounds, and shortly thereafter you come to Hesketh Street. Chevy Chase was and still is a desirable neighborhood characterized by substantial homes on broad tree-lined streets. Hesketh Street is typical of the suburb, lined with large, old Tulip Maple trees that canopy its whole broad way including the sidewalks on both sides. The houses are moderately large, architecturally varied, set back behind front lawns with hedges or small, low walls. The whole neighborhood has a spacious, quiet atmosphere. Fritz bought our house in August of 1939. Gertrude was pregnant with Ursula and we needed more space. He looked in several other neighborhoods and consulted with friends, including Dolf, who told him not to buy it. He offered $9,000 for it including all the furniture. However, the owner wanted to keep the furniture and counter-offered $9300 without the furniture (!), which offer Fritz accepted. He withdrew from his inheritance, from his Grossli, SFR 30,000 which in 1939 was more than enough for the house, but there were other, extra expenses now. He had to furnish the house and that included a piano for Gertrude which I remember was an upright, and there was the birth of the new baby expected in November. It was this event, the birth of Ursula Maria Marti, November 11, 1939 that begins my most distinct first memories of our life as a family. The new house afforded us the space we needed. It was a three story, stucco house with a front and back yard, a driveway along one side and a garage. The front entrance led into a large entrance hall with the dining room and kitchen on one side and a living room the depth of the whole house on the other side. The floors were oak, as was all the wood work in the house, 45

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and, of course, the walls were plaster. The kitchen had high, glass-fronted storage cabinets and a walk-in pantry. There was a back, servants’ staircase that went from the second floor to the kitchen. A wide, banister stairway went from the entrance hall to the second floor hall off of which were four large bedrooms, a bathroom, and a stairway to the attic which also had a bathroom. There was a full basement with huge laundry tubs, a coal furnace and a large coal bin that was filled by a chute from outside. I think the laundry was dried in the basement as well. Ursula and I each had one of the bedrooms on the second floor, and Gertrude and Fritz had the attic. We had boarders who used the other two bedrooms on the second floor. I remember only two of them; one was Miss Sell a sweet lady who sent letters and cards after she left, and a painter whose paintings were copied from post cards. Over the years our home in Chevy Chase and our life in it has become idealized in my memory. We led a textbook version of a very ordinary American family life there. Fritz went to work, Gertrude taught piano lessons and went to work, I went to school, babies were born, Nana often visited from the west coast, especially when the babies were born. We celebrated the holidays—Halloween was the wonderful, magical moment it is for all children. There is a photograph of Ursula in her witch’s costume and me in a devil costume that Gertrude made. My birthday was the day after Halloween and there were birthday parties. Christmas was the exciting holiday that it is always thought to be—Santa Claus, Christmas tree, lots of presents. Our Christmas celebrations were a mix of American and Swiss traditions. St. Nicholas visited us and left either nuts and fruit (when we had been good) or coal (if we had been bad). Felix, my brother, actually got coal once! I had a friend, Joanie, with whom I played dress-ups, and once I went with her and her grandmother to their seaside cottage where I got impetigo. There were two brothers who were bullies and I was scared to walk by their house, but most of the kids in the neighborhood were friendly and we rode tricycles and roller skates and scooters and bicycles up and down the street for hours and hours. When I was naughty I got punished. Once I picked all the tulips from the front garden of a neighbor to give to Momie; I was scolded and had to return the tulips and apologize, but when I climbed the next door neighbor’s plum tree and shook down the unripened plums for my friends I was spanked. Because it was Washington D. C. we had a laundress, a cook and nannies. I loved my sister and was jealous of her. She was cute and I wasn’t cute any more, but we had fun together. There is a photograph of both of us in dressups dancing to the music of an organ grinder. I had a sweet tooth that led to pilfering my grandmother’s secret stash of candies and stealing boxes of Jello from the kitchen. I played absorbing, imaginative games with my dolls. We had pets, two dogs for a while, a cat, a turtle. We went to church—at

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Figure 8.1. Judith in outfit designed by Gertrude.

least my mother, and Nana and I did. Fritz did not. I was happy there, but life was not only happy, it was intense. Life with Gertrude and Fritz was not lived casually. There was always something going on, something significant in whatever any of us were doing. Even when Fritz would be sitting quietly and reading, he would be sitting erect, turning each page carefully—as he taught all of us to do—so the pages were not folded or torn in the process. There was a reverence for books. My mother was never idle. She was an excellent seamstress and had a keen sense of style. She made all of her and her children’s clothes, and took tremendous pride in the finished outfits. She herself was statuesque and always looked elegant. At night, after I went to bed was when she practiced so that I went to sleep to the music of Chopin, Schuman, Bach and Mozart. The only interruption in this vital flow of activity was when one of us was sick. In those days, people went to bed when they were sick, and Fritz’s diaries have always recorded everyone’s illnesses from their onset through each day of their duration. Ear aches, tummy aches, smashed fingers, sore throats, head colds,

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the flu and, of course, Gertrude’s migraines. This diligent accounting of episodes of illness reflects both the high level of death rates from ordinary illness in those days and underlines the significance to Fritz of everything that happened in our life. Not only was our life intense, in my memory it was also elegant and glamorous. When Gertrude and Fritz entertained, there was a heightened sense of drama all around the house. The preparations—the guest list, the menu for dinner, the table setting, the seating arrangements, the choice of wines and before and after dinner drinks—created an air of “opening night” excitement. For Fritz, social events had always been noteworthy, and he frequently made lists of the people in attendance even at other people’s social gatherings. Children were not included in these adult gatherings, so my relationship to them was always as an awestruck audience. I was once included in dinner when I was deemed old enough to know how to conduct myself at a dinner party. I remember it vividly on two accounts. Though Gertrude did cook, she was not, at first the good cook that she eventually became, and in those days in Washington D.C. many people had cooks. So dinner party menus were planned by Gertrude, but the cook did the actual preparation and the serving of the meal. This particular dinner party involved eight people, including me, and I recall being captivated by the liveliness of the conversation, but particularly captivated by the fact that people would tell stories that everyone laughed at the end. So far I had done well at the table, serving myself successfully from the dishes circulated by our cook, remembering to put my napkin in my lap, using the appropriate flatware and not spilling or slopping my food or drink, so I was emboldened to think that I too could tell a story that people would laugh at. I began the story like others had, introducing a person and place where the following events would take place, but in my case the whole thing was a complete fabrication. I was gratified by the silent attention I was receiving from everyone, including Gertrude and Fritz, and went on at some length, the story becoming more and more fantastic as I proceeded. I finally became lost in my story and had no idea where it should go so I just decided to end it. There was only silence at my conclusion. Realizing that the guests must not know that it was over, I said, “That’s the end. Now you can laugh,” which, of course, they did. I remember feeling very conceited at my success, and in this conceit I observed more critically the rest of the dinner party. The dessert that my mother had planned was a half of cantaloupe with a scoop of ice-cream in the center cavity. When the cook served the desserts they looked beautiful and delicious, but as each guest started to scoop out their first bite, the cantaloupes promptly slid off the plates onto the table, into people’s laps and onto the floor. Horror and consternation were written on my mother’s face; the cook had taken it upon herself to peal the cantaloupes before serving them! It

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was hopeless. They couldn’t be eaten as they were. I do not remember how this catastrophe was dealt with, but I remember wondering how anyone could have dared to ruin such a spectacularly successful dinner party, my first dinner party. Our life always seemed to be touched with events that were bigger than us. And it wasn’t just that we were living in the Capital during the war years, though that made many of the things that happened to us and around us possible. Gertrude and Fritz were what we would call today highly charismatic. They were sought out by others in innumerable ways. Our maid, Carrie, was not just our maid. Because of Gertrude’s faith, Carrie decided to become baptized into the Catholic Church. Because of Fritz’s intense interest in and knowledge of art, he became a significant voice for fine art in the D.C. community. Because they were both educated in Europe and intimately understood European culture, they made sure to take me to museums, and concerts, and theater, and dance. Made sure I had art classes, music lessons. And even these fairly normal activities blossomed into significant community events. I was featured in a Washington Post series on youth and arts—a long article about me and my painting was prominently posted. Because I sang well and my mother was the music director of my school, The Whitehall Country School, I ended up together with two other youngsters singing for President Roosevelt and actually sat in his lap. We were the children on the March of Dimes stamp that year. Again, there were prominent newspaper accounts of this event. These are not the ordinary moments of a child’s life they were special and they happened the way they did because of the kind of people Gertrude and Fritz were. The most spectacular of these events, in my memory, was when they entertained the Crown Prince and Princess of Norway. Prince Olaf and Princess Martha emigrated with their children to Washington D.C. in 1939. They lived in Bethesda, Maryland and their children attended the Whitehall Country School, which I also attended. The school enrolled students up to eighth grade. My mother developed a music program including eurythmic that was a huge success. She was admired by colleagues and parents alike. As was so often the case with Gertrude and Fritz, her warmth and enthusiasm charmed everyone, royalty as well as ordinary folks, and she took it upon herself to invite the Prince and Princess to a dinner party at our house. I do not know whether I knew their children, but I did know that a Prince and a Princess were coming to dinner. For a seven year old girl this was nothing short of miraculous. I was not included at the dinner table as, it was explained to me, this was what was known as a State Dinner, and only people approved by the government could be included. In fact, we have today Fritz’s exquisitely drafted seating arrangement and the menu. What I was permitted to do was sit at the top of the stairs and listen and watch as people arrived and as they moved from the living room to the dining room.

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The first person to arrive was the cook from my school which was confusing because our cook had already been in the kitchen all day. He did go to the kitchen where he must have been helping out, but later, when guests started arriving there he was at the front door, dressed in his butler clothes. He was very tall and thin and, like our cook, very black. He was very impressive. I don’t remember any of the people who came, and even when I look at the seating plan I do not recognize any of the names (except of course “Mother” my Nana). Our “butler” was posted at the door and as he saw them approaching he would open the door for the guests, take their wraps and escort them into the living room where I could hear Gertrude and Fritz greet them. The men were all dressed in tuxedos and the women in beautiful, long gowns. It was breathtaking. After most of the guests arrived, there was a lull, but I did not abandon my post. Finally the Crown Prince and Princess arrived. Our butler gave them a little bow as they entered his voice low and soft as he took their wraps, and there they were . . . a real prince and princess. They did not dress differently from the others. No crowns or ribbons to distinguish them, but to me they radiated royalty. Immediately following them were two men who I thought, to my horror, were belatedly arriving guests. However, these two were not escorted into the living room after they took off their coats. Rather our butler brought out two straight-backed chairs and positioned them on either side of the entrance, and the men sat down in them. They stayed there all evening long. At the time I had no idea who they were or why they sat there. Clearly, they were security people of some sort. The lively chatter and clinking of glasses coming from the living room into which I could not see, tantalized me. It went on for quite a while, but still I did not budge from my perch. Finally I heard my mother say, “I believe dinner is served,” and the guests moved across the hall into the dining room. Gertrude led the way on the arm of the Crown Prince. She was wearing the dress I had seen her making for days before the party; it had a sleek, black, velvet bodice, and a full, plaid, taffeta skirt that swished excitingly when she walked. I thought she was magnificent. Fritz followed with Crown Princess Martha on his arm. She was beautiful and reported to have been a favorite of Franklin Roosevelt who made her a frequent guest at the White House. The rest of the company followed, ladies escorted by gentlemen. It is the only time in my life that I witnessed this kind of formality and I have always been awed that it happened in our house. I did finally go to bed while the dinner was going on. I could hear, but I could not see, and I finally got sleepy. We rented a cabin at Scientists Cliffs on the Chesapeake Bay every summer where we played on the beach and swam. We must have taken our cook with us, because there is a photograph of her with Felix, Ursula and me walking down the beach. Once we went in the winter while Felix was just a little baby. I think we were going for Christmas. It got very cold while we were there; even the little wavelets around the posts that held up the dock

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were frozen solid. The cabin was cold too—it probably was not insulated. In the morning when we got up we found little ice crystals on the pillow near Felix’ tiny nose. That was it. We packed up and went home. The fact that there was a war going on during these years when we lived in Chevy Chase was responsible for some of the very interesting things that happened in our life. Not only were we graced by the royal émigrés, but several artists and intellectuals emigrating from Germany and Austria also frequented our home. Among the first of these was Leo Steppat and his wife. On May 16, 1940 Fritz notes, “Steppat brings plaster head”. This plaster head was a bust of Gertrude. It has been recast several times so that all the children now have one. What I know about it is that it was a gift from Leo Steppat to our family in gratitude for taking him and his wife in as displaced persons when they arrived in the U.S. Leo was born in Vienna in 1910 where he studied at the University of Fine Arts. I remember being told, or overhearing, that he and his wife had succeeded in getting out of Austria to a port in Italy where they were fortunate enough to have gotten on a ship sailing for the States. I don’t know exactly when that was, but on June 10th, just after he brought the plaster head, Italy entered the war. Leo also did pastel portraits of Ursula and me. The bust and the portraits have stood the test of time. They are superb. In 1947 he went onto the faculty of American University in Washington, and I am sure Fritz would have been instrumental in this since he was friends with Hutchins of the art faculty there. He taught at several other colleges and universities and ended up at the University of Wisconsin in 1955 where he remained until he retired. He died in 1965, only 55 years old, but I do not know the cause. The University created a chair in his name which continues to be filled up to the present. I remember Werner Vordtriede better than Leo Steppat. Though I remember him as being an older, grown up man—he was only just 24 years old. He was tall and stood very erect. He had dark hair and I think blue eyes set under dark eyebrows. His face was gently angular and his expression was usually serious. Like Fritz, he always dressed in a suit, but sometimes he didn’t have a tie. Also I remember once when he slept on our couch in the living room that he had on tall boots but no socks. Fritz notes on September 15, 1940, “Vordtriede arrives”. Before his arrival, Fritz had received two post cards from him posted from Zurich, one on the 3rd of September and the next on the 5th. The first one addressed Fritz as Herr Professor, thanked him for his prompt reply by telegram, and sent greetings from Medicus. The second said he had forgotten to mention that he had finally gotten his visa and that he was waiting to meet with his sister one more time and hopefully she would have a good trip. Finally he says, “Die Zeit ist aus den flugen” (Time is running out). I see this young, German man, fleeing Europe, seeing his sister for maybe the last time (was she traveling

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from Germany?), and I am deeply frightened for him. Though, of course, I know he does arrive in the U. S. at my home. Werner Vordtriede refused to get his Arbitur certification upon completion of high school in Freiburg, Germany in 1933 because he would have had to give the Hitler greeting at the celebration. He immediately fled to Switzerland where he studied German and English literature, and came to the U.S. in 1938. Fritz’s first reference to Werner is on January 7th, 1939 and during the spring of ‘39 he came frequently to the house. Clearly he had returned to Switzerland again. Perhaps he had to go back to get his visa renewed, since he mentions this in his card to Fritz. He knew Medicus, obviously, and possibly Medicus was responsible for getting him in touch with Fritz. He continued his education here at Princeton University from which he got his Doctorate. Like any American college student he came and went from our house frequently over the years. But he was not an American and prided himself on being German. He loved his homeland, but without Hitler. In 1947 he became a professor of German at the University of Wisconsin, where Leo Steppat went in 1955. Is this a coincidence? I imagine not. In 1961 he went back to Germany, to Munich, where he taught comparative literature. He is well regarded as a translator of Yeats, and he wrote a book, Das Verlassene Haus: Tagebuch aus dem Amerikanishen Exil 1938-1947. He died in 1980, just 65 years old. Actually, Fritz had been involved in helping émigrés for quite a while. In 1935 he was significantly involved in helping Richard Kroner, a philosopher at Kiel who was renowned for his famous history of German philosophy, Von Kant zu Hegel. He lost his position in 1933 because he was of Jewish descent even though he had converted to Christianity as a youth. He did not lose his salary because he had served in the First World War. Medicus had been involved in editing some of Kroner’s books and was helpful to him between 1934–1938. Kroner had given a lecture in Bern in 1933 which Fritz had heard. He arranged, through Medicus, for Kroner to apply for a position for a Hegel scholar at the University of North Carolina. He also translated Kroner’s paper, “Philosophy of Life and Philosophy of History” and got it on the APA Program for the annual meeting in Baltimore. However, Kroner did not stay here long; he did not speak English well enough and knew nothing of American thought. So he returned to Berlin where he stayed until 1938 when he could no longer stay—the Jewish persecution was increasingly threatening—and escaped with the help of a former, English student. Correspondence between Fritz and Medicus at that time concerning Kroner’s prospects in the States was depressing. Fritz tells Medicus that the opportunities in the U.S. for scholars trained in Germany or Switzerland were no longer plentiful. Kroner did eventually get to Union Theological Seminary with the help of Paul Tillich who had been a colleague of his in Germany. However, in the end he spent his last years in a clinic in Switzer-

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land. There were others who came here and could not adapt to life in America. Fritz saved an article from a newspaper dated October 25, l932 that reports that a Dr. Huber, from Winterthur, who was an associate professor at Johns Hopkins Medical School had committed suicide. Colleagues gave as the only possible motive that, “. . . he never seemed able to adapt himself to this country.” In light of these depressing accounts of other scholars and professors from Germany and Switzerland, Fritz’s deliberate and successful adoption of the United States as his home is impressive. By the time Kroner made his trip here, Fritz was an American citizen in fact and in spirit. The most remarkable of the émigré stories concerns Fritz Kraemer. His name appears over and over again in Fritz’s 1942 diary. The entries are an odd mix. One entry says “disc. w/Kraemer: women’s education”. Several days later, “Kraemer helps with porch screens”. Then, “Kraemer helps me w/ 6’ of driveway”. Later, “Disc. w/Kraemer on vision and reason.” These entries start on April 24, and on June 2, “Kraemer to train”. The only other entry for Kraemer is on November 15, “Kraemer back; rooms at Duttons”. After that there are no more entries and no more references to Kraemer until an article from the Washington Post, Sunday, March 2, 1972, filed by Fritz under “Kraemer”. The article is entitled, “The Iron Mentor” subtitled, “Why Henry Kissinger needs Dr. Fritz Kraemer.” The article was written by, Nick Thimmesch of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate. After checking several critical dates and places I was able to establish that this was the same Fritz Kraemer referred to in Fritz’s diary. The article is a long, comprehensive account of Kraemer’s life to the present, 1972, when he is celebrating his 65th birthday. Kraemer was an extraordinary man and lived an extraordinary life. Though his story is not my story the fact that he was among “our émigrés” makes it worth a sketch here. In 1933, when Hitler ascended to power, Kraemer left Germany. He was 25 years old. He was born in Frankfurt, raised principally by his mother and fashioned himself a Prussian of the old guard. Peter Drucker, in his fascinating description of Kraemer during his youth, describes his idiosyncratic dress which included a monocle and attributes it to Kraemer’s early abhorrence of the weak, Weimar dominated, post W.W.I Germany. He could not abide Hitler, apparently describing him as a “Bohemian Barbarian.” He had completed his law school education by the time he left, and with his Doctor of Law degree emigrated to Rome where he took his doctorate in political science. He was for a while employed at the Comparative International Law Institute at the League of Nations. His personal story, including a wife and son, is nothing short of traumatic, and results in his emigration to the United States. He was unable, upon arrival in New York, to find work. He finally responded to an advertisement for farm work in New Hampshire where he

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went to work as a potato picker in summer and a wood cutter in winter. According to the Washington Post article, a local farmer recognized his erudition and sent Kraemer to the Library of Congress to do some research for him. Kraemer loved Washington and the library, and took a job there for $50 a month. He also found a job as a proctor in a dormitory at American University. One must assume that both his attachment to a university and his impecunious situation combined brought him together with Fritz. He must have needed the least expensive room and board to sustain himself on his meager income. This probably led him to find a room, such as the ones we rented out, to live in. He did, after all, when he came back on November 15 “room at the Dutton’s” (neighbors of ours in Chevy Chase). Furthermore, why would he have been helping Fritz with heavy chores if he were not living at the house? Kraemer’s life after these early years took him into the army, eventually as an intelligence officer where he befriended Henry Kissinger and, according to the accounts I have read, molded him and mentored him right up to the time of the Washington Post article of 1972. In 1947 he took a job with the National Resources Board which in 1969 became the National Security Council. He was, over all his years in Washington, very influential at the pentagon where he held the post of Plans Officer for the Chief of Staff, US Army. In retrospect it amazes me to think that such a person lived, and worked and communed with Fritz in our home. There were dramatic changes in life for Fritz after our move to Chevy Chase. He was the head of a household that included not only the responsibility for a house and grounds but also a new daughter. Gertrude did not drive, though she learned later under Fritz’s tutelage, so he did all of the marketing and other shopping, took everyone to the doctor when necessary and managed all the finances which included the rents paid by our boarders. Of course, he remained actively engaged at the university and attended meetings of the Workers Education Conference at American University, the Study Club at the University of Maryland, a discussion group where he frequently made presentations, the American Association of University Professors, The American Philosophical Association, and The Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology, to name some of them. But the entries in his diaries starting in 1940 through 1942 are increasingly about house and garden, home and children. The number of projects he started and persistently worked on began to exceed most other entries. He still went to movies, museums and concerts frequently, and, of course, he and Gertrude entertained often, but never before was he so engaged in building things. Of course, he never had had some place of his own to do these things, but the obvious delight he took in these construction projects is significant. He made a corner cabinet for Gertrude.

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The project took months to finish, but along the way he described exactly what he did each time he worked. He built a dictionary stand, he built a rocker for Ursula, he made a cabinet for me, he made a “dog café” and a turtle fence, he built shelves here and there in the house, he and Gertrude together took up the linoleum in the kitchen and replaced it with new linoleum. He worked in the yard planting and watering the lawn (every year), building a new driveway, looking for shrubs and plants in some woods (I remember going to the woods too, but not where they were), building a fence in the back of the house. He turned our back yard into a playground with a climbing rope hung from a branch of one of our large trees (I remember the day I got to the top), a sand box, a really long sliding board, a balance beam and a swing. I particularly remember the swing which he put up in the doorway to the garage. He constructed the swing himself with thick, strong cord and a wooden seat he cut and sanded until it was very comfortable. When it was finished, he wanted to demonstrate how I might use it in other ways than just swinging. He grasped a rope in each hand and executed a complete turn over except for the fact that he didn’t really complete it. He was still wearing his work gloves and when he was at the top of the turnover, head down, feet up, his hands slid down the ropes and he landed on his head. It was really awful, but it was also very funny, because he leapt up and holding his head with his hands he started whooping and whooping and dancing around inside the garage. I was completely paralyzed by my fear that he was badly hurt and my urge to laugh at his performance. I can’t remember if he had to see a doctor or go to the hospital, but whenever he joked about the Bernese having hard heads I remembered the incident of the swing. And, of course, he put the screens in in the spring and raked and burned the leaves and put up the storm windows in the fall. What is significant about all this is not that he did these things, but that he recorded them so diligently in his diaries. Even when he was having major problems in his professional life, he was still absorbed in these projects. In fact, in 1942 when he had consuming conflicts at the university that were recorded in his diary on 14 days out of the whole year, his projects involved 32 entries many of which concerned a complete rebuilding of the side porch of the house. This was accomplished in August when there was presumably nothing going on at the university, but it is very hot in Washington in August; he had to have found this project very satisfying on the level of a true hobby. He could not have afforded to have someone else do the work, nor could he afford to buy the things he made for us. On the other hand we could have done without them. The fact that he could do these things and liked doing them became an integral part of his life, and, I think, illustrates his abiding confidence in his own competence.

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After we entered the war, Fritz added to his activities preparations for becoming an Air Raid Warden. He took First Aid courses once a week, and then he took a “bomb course” and a “gas course” in which, I assume, he learned what to do in case of a bomb attack or a poison gas attack. He spent all of his young manhood preparing for the First World War, and now his middle years preparing for the second. During blackouts when there were air raid warnings he went on patrol, and he attended the Chevy Chase Citizens meetings regularly. My mother made thick, black curtains to cover the windows during air raids. I remember these things but I didn’t really understand what they were about. I remember the sticker with a big, red A on the windshield of the car—gas rationing—and Fritz has several diary entries about with whom he drove to the university in 1942. On August first, 1942, my brother, Michael Felix, was born. INVITATION TO CHICAGO Fritz’s diary for 1943 has never been found, making an account of the important events of that year only partially documented. In 1943 President Robert Maynard Hutchins of the University of Chicago invited Fritz to come to Chicago for one year as a Visiting Professor. Fritz had not applied for a position at Chicago, though he was thinking of moving as his letter to Rebec on January 5th of 1943 indicates; he tells Rebec he would love to come back to the west coast and, further, that he and Gertrude were talking about the possibility of going to Alaska! The invitation came serendipitously as the consequence of a casual acquaintance with the book editor of the Washington Post, Lally. He says, “I liked to stop in for a chat at his small office crammed with piles of books.” After one such visit in early spring of 1943, Lally asked him if he would like to review a small book on higher education by John Maynard Hutchins. Fritz already knew of Hutchins’ innovative ideas on education and he gladly accepted the assignment. The whole story of his review, its publication and how Papi came to send it to Hutchins after it came out was one of his favorite autobiographical anecdotes. Hutchins responded to Fritz and invited him up to Chicago so they could meet. Once again, Fritz charmed his host and was offered the position in Hutchins’ famous program that recruited high school students two years before graduation to come to a university program in natural and social sciences and in humanities. Though this interview occurred in late September, and Fritz would have to start immediately, he accepted the offer without hesitation. Though we do not have the day to day account the diary would provide, there is no doubt that he would have been in touch with Gertrude about this decision, and it is also clear from their mutual desire to seek a position elsewhere that she would have agreed. What is more

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interesting is what he would have had to go through to be relieved of his responsibilities at Maryland so late in the academic year. The following excerpt from his little essay on “How I got all my jobs” gives us his view of what happened: Back at College Park I asked Byrd for a leave of absence. He saw readily that I could not afford to turn down the honorable invitation which also reflected well on Byrd’s own still growing University. He told me simply to cancel the philosophy courses at Maryland for the year. Up to this point in his academic career Fritz, though hot tempered and impulsive, had managed to balance his personal achievements as a philosopher with his livelihood. Until his appointment to the chairmanship at Maryland he often said he would teach anything anywhere. Admittedly this is the view of a youngish, unattached man in a new world. But, as we will see, when he was told to stop teaching his philosophy classes in order to teach physics full time he point blank refuses to do this, preferring to overwork rather than give up the philosophy courses. This was a bold, confrontational move in defense of philosophy both for himself and for the department. One would have expected that given the opportunity to go to Chicago he would accept, but he would have fought for the hiring of a replacement for himself at Maryland while he was gone. It was, after all, his department. We don’t know for sure that he did not try to get the replacement, but he went anyway apparently without worrying about what would happen to his position at Maryland after the leave of absence. This signifies the beginning of a completely new modus vivendi; he has become a risk-taker pinning his aspirations on idealistic if not romantic possibilities. Chicago was his chance to get into the “big league”, and who can blame him for making the leap; certainly not Gertrude. But, as we shall see, he failed to take into account what he knew about how President Byrd and the University of Maryland regarded the importance of philosophy in their curriculum. UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND: OVERVIEW In order to appreciate Fritz’s situation at the University of Maryland we should look at the situation at the university over the period of his employment there. According to George Callcote in his A History of the University of Maryland, at the time that Fritz was hired, 1935, the university was at a significant stage of development. President Byrd had just been promoted to succeed his boss, President Raymond A. Pearson. Pearson’s presidency was troubled and had been for a number of years. He was found wanting by both faculty and students. The trouble started with the issue of state funding when a move was made to amalgamate the several professional schools and the Agricultural College into a state funded university. On April 1, 1924 the state

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senate upheld the merger and the increased funding that accompanied it. 1 Over the next few years the college flourished, sometimes for improved academic resources and then sometimes for new buildings. The latter outcome resulted in the campaign to oust Pearson in the academic year 1934–35 and on June 28, 1935 the Regents appointed Harry Clifton Byrd, acting president. 2 Because of this history, Byrd was determined to rebuild a respectable academic institution. Among other things, he hired Fritz to create a philosophy department. When he first met with Byrd, Fritz described him as “. . . Maryland’s most successful football coach, then athletic director, and eventually Vice President.” He also said of him that “Curly” was always interested in innovation and in that light “thought well” of Fritz’s proposal to introduce philosophy into the curriculum. What Fritz had walked into was Byrd’s dynamic determination to rescue the University from the Pearson debacle. Byrd was remarkably successful in finding money. He attracted donors, pursued and got New Deal money, and competed with others for grants and state funds. His story like his personality is big, but he also had a reputation for attention to details. With regard to Fritz and Philosophy he worked conscientiously on the development of the Division of Arts and Sciences. He appointed Fritz full professor and head of department with a starting salary of $2100. Fritz moved into 110 Calvert Avenue, College Park, Maryland, and he had an office and all the duties and responsibilities of a department head as his diaries report. He had many meetings with Byrd and Dean Taliaferro concerning courses, office space, library expenditures, an assistant, “desiderata” for the Department of Philosophy, and, of course salary. Most of what was said at these meetings and what Fritz thought about them was written in German. The names and numbers often are the only legible bits, but based on the overall chronology of events the negotiations with Byrd and Taliaferro were at least not rancorous and must have often been productive. Over the years Fritz succeeded in introducing new courses including, of course, an art course and a pro-seminar, and eventually a major in philosophy. After a while He and Taliaferro even developed a nonprofessional, social relationship. Two new administrators’ names appear in Fritz’s diary starting in 1938— Broughton, Taliferro’s successor as head of Arts and Sciences, and Gilbert. On April 8 Fritz writes, “Gilbert offers Asst. $2400!” He is clearly outraged in this comment. Was the “Assistant” an Assistant Professor? Is the offer the same or more than Fritz was making? What department was hiring the assistant? It was/would be fruitless to pursue these questions; the notion of salary scale at the University of Maryland never existed. Salaries fluctuated wildly depending on the president of the school and on the economy surrounding it. Callcott found that during Byrd’s presidency “While some full professors received $3,100 annually, others received as much as $7000.” 3 The adminis-

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tration was free to offer whatever it took to attract the best faculty they could. And they did. Though this is outrageous in a state institution today, it had been worse before. In 1912 a full professor’s maximum salary was $1800, yet in the 1920’s, according to Callcott, during Wood’s presidency, faculty salaries went from $162,000 to $322,000. There was no answer to these, Fritz’s, questions. Given the record it is not surprising that wild discrepancies existed across the faculty spectrum, and the diary entry shows that Fritz was alert and sensitive to salary levels in the faculty. On October 24 he writes, “Broughton” (salary?); on November 9 he enters “dinner Broughton”; and on December 8, “see Broughton”. He is now newly married and has an adopted child to support. He needs more money—a salary increase, whether to be offered by Broughton or requested of Broughton. 1939 brought the purchase of the house in Chevy Chase (for which he had to take money from his inheritance) and Ursula’s birth, but there are no diary entries suggesting he asked for or was given a raise in salary. Throughout 1940 there are again no clear references to salary, but there is one note of frustration on November 15th: “Broughton hasn’t yet read my proposals.” By early 1941 Fritz’s frustration with his situation is escalating. On February 17, he has another meeting with Byrd about which he says, “Byrd: can say nothing on Salary; or help; leave Schelling manuscript. (Fritz had been impatient that Byrd had not yet read his Schelling paper); “Broughton noncommittal on help.” The help referred to here must have been either some secretarial help or some student aid help. On February 21st he writes, “Broughton: no $3600”. It feels to him as though Byrd has backed away from his support and that Broughton has been instrumental in this shift. The next series of events confirms this erosion in confidence and in support. On March 6th Fritz writes, “Broughton: don’t teach next week.” This was Broughton’s remarkable response to Fritz’s plea for help. Fritz notes that he does teach his Art class and his Plato class, but otherwise he does not teach. He writes, “Gather together the bulk of Croce material” for the whole of that week. The fact that he no longer could count on his good relationship with Byrd was made crystal clear on April 4th when he writes, “Byrd: must go through Broughton.” By the 28th of May, Fritz shows his disappointment by referring to Byrd for the first time by his absurd nickname “Curlie”. He says, “’Curlie’ says he still wants to look at Schelling.” Adding insult to injury, when Fritz sees Byrd on July 7th he is told he will get a “token raise”, and when he sees Broughton on October 20th he learns that his raise is $120. He immediately writes a letter to “Curlie” in which he declines the raise. He is now outraged by the treatment he is getting and makes observations like: “Broughton amiable!” and “Byrd: ‘Well, how is old man Marti?’!” The humiliation must have been profound. Throughout 1942 there are no more diary entries about salary, nonetheless, money had to have been a problem. Felix was born in August and in December

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when Gertrude went back to King-Smith Studio they told her they had no money. According to a letter Fritz sent to Rebec, his old chairman in Oregon, he was making $2600, and Momie was teaching, presumably at Whitehall Country School, as well as giving piano lessons. One has the sense that there was no money to be made. We were at war, and by late April of 1942 Roosevelt had sent Congress his recommendations for wage and price controls. At the University of Maryland they went to a three term plus summer term schedule. Fritz had always taught summer school, but now there was a push to educate young men quickly to be officers in the army. According to Fritz, “When we were actually at war, Byrd was quick in bringing to the campus the first eight hundred men for the Army’s Special Training Course in the principles of geography and physics.” In order to staff these courses Byrd had to look into the background of faculty members to find those qualified to teach them. Fritz was approached and told that, “… by Byrd’s orders I was to cancel all courses in philosophy and give all my time to physics, as my patriotic duty.” As we saw earlier, Fritz’s response was that he would do no such thing, but he would teach all his philosophy courses and take on, without pay, two sections of thirty men in physics. Apparently this was acceptable, but the arrangement led to more trouble. “Our beloved professor of physics, Eichlin . . .” had died of cancer and had been replaced by a high school teacher “. . . who was stupid and ignorant.” According to Fritz this high school teacher wrote a ridiculous exam for the course and Fritz refused to grade any of the blue books. It was in response to this rebellion, that Gertrude told him he had better start looking for another job. From Fritz’s point of view the dwindling interest in philosophy (and therefore in him) was fueling his resentment of the university administration. Fritz’s nature was to address confrontation with impassioned letters, no compromises and a withdrawal to the study. In 1942 this had the salutary outcome that he spent much of the year working on his Presidential Address, “Religion, Philosophy, and The College”, for the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology (SSPP), and began his translation of Medicus’ Menschlichkeit. UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO Fritz’s year at the University of Chicago was marvelous for him. He left Washington before the rest of the family and returned over the Thanksgiving break. I don’t remember that period of time at all, but I do remember riding with Papi from Chevy Chase to Chicago by car. I remember feeling very much at a loss making this trip. Momie and Ursula and Felix came separately, probably by train. We moved into an apartment on Dorchester street which was one half of the top floor of a three story apartment building. The

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apartment itself was floor-through with, I think, two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen/dining room, and a back porch looking out over a back yard and alley area. My impression was, “How ugly!” There were other children in the building and across the landing from us was a dancer—a tap dancer. I remember hearing her radio or record player playing the click, click, click of tap dancers and wondering what in the world the sounds were. She was really very nice and invited me in once or twice for cookies. I think she was the reason I took tap dancing classes with the local Girl Scouts troop that I joined as a Brownie while we were there. The most alarming thing that I experienced in Chicago was the big public school I had to attend. The building was about three blocks from our apartment and I walked to school. It was a huge, square, dirty-yellow building with a macadam playground surrounding it and a very high, chain-link fence around that. The class-rooms were huge and there were rows and rows of children in my third grade class. I had to write with an ink pen (I didn’t know how) and I had to write in script (I did not know how to do that either). Also I could not spell correctly. So all in all I was miserable in school. Fritz, on the other had a very productive year. There were no more projects to distract him. He met regularly with a group that was discussing graduate education, he attended lectures, one of which was given by McKeon, and he met with Hutchins once a month. It is not hard to understand how exhilarating it must have been to him to have been involved in the planning for Hutchins’ progressive programs for the university. His dedication to college teaching is best expressed in his Presidential Address at the 1942 SSPP meetings. For him the university was as sacred as the church. He gave a series of “University College Public Lectures” under the title “German Philosophy and German Politics”. The Nazi regime in Germany and the war in Europe was surely the occasion for this series of lectures. It was important to raise American awareness of the profoundly important German philosophic tradition of the 18th century. I do not have a figure for the attendance, but the series was delivered at the Art Institute of Chicago and was open to the public at $1.50 + $.30 tax for the whole series. Although the lectures were long (an average of 40 pages), he did deliver all of them; there must have been an audience. The series: “Kant: Practical Reason and Perpetual Peace”, “Fichte: Education, Economic Autocracy, and Theocracy”, “Hegel: Sovereignty, Morality, and History”, “Schelling: Life Determined by What is Eternal”, and “Nietzche: The ‘Good European’ vs. State Idolatry”, was recorded and transcripts exist for all of them. Of them all the lecture on Schelling is part of his lifelong work on Schelling. In that lecture he said, “Before I came upon Schelling, I rejected all theologies because they seem to offer nothing but a stranglehold upon man’s freedom.” It would have been in Medicus’ course, “Die Nachtkantische Spekulation” (Post-Kantian Speculation) in 1919 where he must first have

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seriously encountered Schelling. In 1930 he translated Shelling’s, “Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism” which he took to Arthur O. Lovejoy at Johns Hopkins University who read it and encouraged him in the endeavor thus launching English language translations of Schelling. James Gutmann at Columbia University used Fritz’s translation of the “Letters” in his lectures at Columbia and he and Fritz formed a collaboration on Gutmann’s own translation of Schelling’s Of Human Freedom which was published at Gutmann’s own expense in 1936. The copies of Fritz’s notes on Gutmann’s translation indicate hours of exacting editorial work for which he apparently would take no credit, but his contribution is acknowledged by Gutmann. In 1931 he presented a paper, “Schelling, 1795”, at a meeting of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology (SSPP). In 1934 he translated portions of “Lectures on the Method of University Study” and that same year he delivered “Some Remarks on Schelling’s Philosophy of Religion” at the American Philosophical Association (APA) of Religion which was published in Review of Religion in 1937. In 1938 he delivered a paper entitled “Schelling’s Absolute” at the SSPP meeting of that year. So, by 1944 he had a substantial track record in Schelling scholarship, but, as he said in his 1944 Chicago lecture, his translations had still not found a publisher. (Note that Gutmann published his translation with personal funds). Though this was a year of scholarly productivity, family life with Gertrude and his children as well as his Swiss family also went on. On March 6th he received a “cable from Hans about Basel.” There is no reference to Basel in his diaries before this, so I assume this was his first knowledge of anything having to do with Basel. On March 14th he received a “new cable from Hans asking to send Philosophy of Education.” In the margin he also has written “write papers on Ed. for Basel,” and further along in the margin he writes “prepare philosophy of Ed. etc.,” and on the 21st the entry is “send papers to Bruffen.” Incidentally, on April 24th he writes “censor wants explanation of cable,” and this is the last reference in his diary to Hans’ cable or to the Philosophy of Education. In his own autobioraphical material I can find no discussion of this series of events. But later in a July 8th letter to Rebec he explains that there was an empty chair of philosophy and pedigogy at Basel. What did Basel want with Fritz’s’s philosophy of education? It is still very mysterious “. . . My guess is that a reorganization is in the making, of the training of Gymnasium and secondary school teachers, and that the Basel Government wants a man with foreign experience.” What I imagine was happening was that there was pressure from home for him to come back to Switzerland and that Hans was put up to pursuing any such possibility. So, whatever Basel wanted in the way of philosophy of education, Hans was sent to find out. Fritz did send the material, but nothing seems to have come of it. Fritz, at that moment, was making his mark in the “big leagues” (Chicago) and was not interested in returning to Switzerland. I

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believe that, no matter what the future held, he made the right decision at that time. However in July of that year, in that same letter to Rebec he says of the move to Basel: Gertrude and I would gladly go. Not on account of any ardent desire to be out of this country . . . But because the call to Basel would mean finally that my services would be wanted rather than barely tolerated. This heartbreaking sentiment perfectly expresses the distance between his pre-Chicago and post-Chicago outlook. In April of 1944 Gertrude’s book, Teach Your Child Music, was accepted by Shimer Publishing Company; she had to wait until after war shortages to get it in press. Ursula and Felix and I all got chicken pox and Gertrude started a garden in the pathetic back yard of our building—another project. She persuaded all the kids in the building to come out and clean up the trash, then she divided the yard into six lots, one for each apartment, and Fritz notes “start gardening” which must mean he was coralled into digging along with all the kids. The garden was a huge success, though we left Chicago well before harvest time. Of course, before we left Chicago we went to all the museums—the Field Museum and the Aquarium, the Science Museum, the Art Institute—saw movies—Sonia Henie for me—and Fritz again began enquiring about possible openings in Chicago. Hutchins’ only suggestion was to see if the University of Chicago had fellowships available. I wonder why Hutchins did not find a place for him in the College. On our way back home we travelled to La Crosse Wisconsin where Momie and I went to the “Bluffs” (?) and later Fritz went to the SSPP meetings where he saw Dolf. On June 27th we left Chicago for Chevy Chase. I had many spells of homesickness while we were in Chicago and was ecstatic when we started back. It took us three days to make the trip with stops, one at a park on Lake Michigan where we went swimming—the trip was fun, but coming home was not the happy moment I had anticipated. Fritz’s diary entry for June 30th says, “get to Chevy Chase; Youngs, talk to Doyle; 10:30 Boyce.” I do not remember anyone named Doyle nor have I found this name earlier in the diaries (though it may have been in the 1943 diary), but I do remember the Youngs. Once when I was “lost”, according to Fritz, I was found two blocks away from our house sitting with my feet in a little fish pond in someone’s back yard. I do remember that moment. The fish pond was in the back yard of Admiral Brent Young and his wife Pat. We became friends with the Youngs and Fritz and Gertrude corresponded with them for many years thereafter. They even sent me to the Youngs once when I was older to visit, and they took me to President Truman’s inaugural parade where I sat up in one of the reviewing stands reserved for senior military personnel. I do remember that very clearly—it was my first experience of patriotic fervor.

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What follows in Fritz’s diary is: July 1st “9:00 Bethesda Court House; day at Whitehall; move to Bakers!” July 5th “move to M M Snows 4621 Morgan”, July 13th “to Baltimore; back; Rockville Court House”, and then nothing until August 31st. The only thing I actually remember about this time was that I was staying with some neighbors by myself while the others in the family were staying at some other peoples’ houses. Subsequently I learned that when we went to Chicago, we rented our house to a naval officer who was not prepared to move out by the date of our return, June 30, and had communicated to Fritz that he could not move before July 1st, and he was not out when we returned. I think Doyle may be the name of the officer since we called him from the Young’s house. I know that Fritz was outraged that the United States Department of the Navy could sequester its men in our house and he seemed not to be able to do anything about it. Note that he made two court house visits, no doubt about our homeless situation. This was 1944, and the housing situation in Washington during this war time was hopeless. According to Brinkley, “The population of the metropolitan area had mushroomed from 621,000 in 1930 to well over a million by the end of 1941.” 4 Roosevelt had built hideous “tempos” everywhere to house all the new agencies, and the people who came to man the agencies had to scramble and compete with one another to get hotel rooms to live in. In response to this shortage of space . . . what the armed services wanted, they took.” The Navy was the worst: … the Navy was Franklin Roosevelt’s favorite military service, a fact it never forgot.” 5 So, I think Fritz was told that our house was needed for the war effort. I have never been able to find any documents relating to the buying of the house, the renting of the rooms in the house or the ultimate renting of the house. I suspect that Admiral Brent Young may have been instrumental in helping Fritz rent to a naval officer, but there is no evidence of this. My memory of this time is a blank. Fritz and Gertrude sold the Hesketh Street house. Fritz asked for another year’s leave of absence and used the money from the house as salary for that year. One wonders why they did not keep the house and use the rent for expenses. Some documents make it appear that they intended all along to sell the house before they even returned from Chicago. Both Fritz and Gertrude in subsequent years claim that they had every intention of giving up their life in D.C. for a simpler life, and no doubt this thought preceded the move. It is also possible that the outrage of not having access to his own house was a “last straw” and sparked the latent wish to get out of their D.C. life. Gertrude wrote later, in telling about the move “. . . we discovered [while in Chicago] we did not miss the parties and crowds of friends.” And of Fritz she later wrote: [He said,] at our ages [49 and 35], with three children we can’t just destroy all the bridges.

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There were multiple forces at work including Fritz’s commitment to teaching. Gertrude spoke of his sense of desperation when he would say, “There is so much to be said and there are so many people who need it and want it.” Almost as if he were a doctor saving lives. This, at least is what she heard. His goal for himself was “. . . to bring into printable form the Chicago Art Institute lectures on German Philosophy and Politics. . . also. . . retouch and partly rewrite my Philosophy for Teachers. . . And then I want to meditate and write down some things I believe I see in the philosophy of religion,” which no doubt led to his, “Faith versus Belief.” I never again lived in the house on Hesketh Street. On the 31st of August 1944 we moved to a small farm in Brinklow, Maryland. The wrenching events of 1942 through 1944 could be viewed, cynically, as par for the course in an academic career. And if an academic career had been Fritz’s raison d’etre he might have responded and acted more shrewdly, but in light of his presidential address, read in April, 1942 at the 37th annual meeting of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology, a career was not what worried him. The title of the address is, “Religion, Philosophy and The College”. In it Fritz says forthrightly what he was about in the academy. He had already by this time made clear his sense of personal responsibility for translating and transmitting the works of Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schelling and others. His translation of Schelling’s “Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism” was part of the collaboration between himself and James Gutmann in 1935. What more he wanted was recognition that “the college” was uniquely responsible for nurturing and developing the quest of the young for meaning in their lives. He already in his own youth found in philosophy, in “the university”, in his teacher, Medicus, what to pursue in his own quest for meaning. In his case the path seems to have appeared quite fortuitously, but not without some pain. Because he lived and read and studied in a post-Kantian philosophic world the issues around god and religion always inform the arguments. His writing often appeared, therefore, in journals of religion here in the states, but his message reached well beyond institutional religion. In fact the opening of the paper makes clear his commitment to the separation of church and state. He goes so far as to condemn the practice of having a clergyman open an academic event with a benediction. In disengaging the church and the academy he not only proposes to give the academician authority in the academy, but imposes on the academy the responsibilities and duties of the church. This might seem sly, but it is not underhanded. He calls into play the entire corpus of the history of philosophy to support this notion. It is not so much that he needs the entire corpus to make the point; rather he argues that the young need to work with the corpus in their quest for meaning. A profoundly important argument in this paper is the role of myth. He argues that myth is the foundation of all religion and that each epoch has its

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own great myth. He observes that “our” great myth is Christianity. It is both a complex and a persuasive argument. First he rallies a chorus of proponents of the significance of myth (Schelling, Vico, Croce, Medicus), and then demonstrates that everyone lives in their own time and cannot escape living the myth of their time. He argues that the symbols of the great myths lose their potency over time if they are not renewed by spiritual growth of the keepers of the myth. When the sacred symbols lose their power to give spiritual support, the young can find no meaning of life in them. This meaning of life is what Fritz found in philosophy and what he proposes as the purpose of the college. In addition to charging the college with the responsibility for guiding the young in their search for meaning, he is responding to the “God is dead” arguments of the prevailing empiricist thinkers with his explanation of ‘myth’. Essentially he argues that we can exercise the freedom of our “intellectual conscience” in scientific research unencumbered by “. . . the guardianship of prescientific mythological conceptions. . .” This high-wire act is his way of drawing attention to the possibility of empirical research and discovery marching in tandem with the speculative pursuit of, as he and Schelling would say, unconditional understanding and discovery. Recognizing the actuality of myth in our self-knowledge is the non-dogmatic path to self-realization and meaning in our lives, and philosophy is the guiding tutor in this work. This is what philosophy was about for Fritz; the college, or university was where it could happen; and the university has a responsibility not shared by the church to keep the pursuit of truth, beauty, and justice ongoing. That he is dissatisfied with the status of either religion or philosophy at his own institution is plain in the all-but-closing remarks: What our students want is not a charted course, but charts of the deeps, and a practical knowledge of how to steer by them. No mere revivalism can furnish such orientation. And if pusillanimous academic administrators schedule modicums of mild revivals they demonstrate that they do not know what our students need.

NOTES 1. Callcott, George H. A History of the University of Maryland (Maryland Historical Society, Garmond/Pridemark Press, 1965) 285. 2. Ibid. 323. 3. Ibid. 334. 4. Brinkley, Washington Goes to War, 105. 5. Ibid. 117.

Chapter Nine

Brinklow

My first memory of Brinklow was of a sad little, white clapboard house with a small front porch at the end of a dirt driveway. It stood on a slight rise surrounded by scruffy untended fields. There were a couple of out buildings and down a fairly steep slope was a large red barn that looked deserted. It was. Near the barn was a magnificent weeping willow—sure to be a future playground. A sweet smelling old apple orchard was separated from the house lot by a wooden fence that was no longer keeping invaders out. The trees were wonderful in their craggy old age, clearly still dropping ripe fruit. One could only keep an open mind about this whole scene. I certainly did, not daring to acknowledge too closely my impression. I was not happy that we were not going to live in our old house anymore. I was 9, and I had a school, a neighborhood and a close friend, Joanie, and I had been happy there. This is not only my story—many youngsters have lived this tale, but it needs to be part of this memoir about my father because it cannot help but color my account. Events and people seem much less vivid at this stage of the story than at earlier and later times. On our way out to the house we passed through the village of Brinklow, one of many unincorporated communities in Montgomery County, Maryland. It consisted of a very small, unpretentious grocery store cum post office. I don’t remember any other buildings. This crossroads was to be our local connection to the larger world. Sandy Springs, a larger, nearby community was where the school and the hospital were. Montgomery County is now one of the richest counties in America. Just north of Washington DC, it is considered part of the Baltimore/Washington metropolitan areas, making access to these cities convenient. Today the real estate in the county is extremely valuable, well beyond a professor’s means, but in 1944–1945 there was no sign of this wealth. In the 60s I went back to 67

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the area and did see the little house, still standing as I remembered it, but by then it appeared uninhabited again. I doubt that it is still there. There is no indication in Fritz’s diaries concerning the acreage that came with the house, but he was not buying it, just renting, so he did not make his usual record of the details. It was just a little, family farm that was no longer being farmed. The fields by that time of the year, end of August, were overgrown—full of goldenrod and other flowering weeds. There was the smell of the over-ripe apples fallen from the gnarled old apple trees. The farmland was part of the soft, rolling hills that characterize that part of Maryland and Virginia, both gentle and wild—country, not city. The house itself was small enough and well enough organized to be simple to care for. There were three bedrooms and a bath upstairs a large living/dining room, a study/bedroom and an ample kitchen downstairs. Everyone fit and the living/dining room made for good family living. It was too small to accommodate all our furniture, but we had our big oak dining table and the piano. Papi’s books lined the bedroom walls, as usual, but certainly not all of them. Much of our stuff was stored in one of the larger outbuildings. We were comfortable. The basement was more than unfinished in that it had a dirt floor. But it was electrified and we could run our washing machine there. Some things developed in this new living experience that I think of as identifying the kind of family we became. Someone was always reading to someone else. The younger children were always being read to and almost every evening Fritz would read aloud while Gertrude knit the endless sweaters and socks she made for everyone. He also read to her—The Reader’s Digest—while she cut his hair. He really enjoyed the humorous humaninterest anecdotes featured in the little magazine. I read volumes already by then; the Simons brought a bag of books for me every time they came. Gertrude ensured that there would be music, though she did not play regularly as she used to. She purchased a number of LPs including musicals I memorized—Kiss Me Kate, South Pacific, Carousel—and she cooked everything we ate so she spent a lot of time in the kitchen. True to his personal commitment to spending his leave writing, on September 11th, only eleven days after the move, Fritz recorded, “began writing—2pp Philosophy of Religion; Read Tillich’s discussion.” The next day, September 12th, “2pp Medicus.” However diary entries for the rest of September and beginning of October were less about reading and writing. They covered: repairing the south porch, seven days of rain, hanging two and a half weeks of laundry in the barn, visits from the Simons and the Kingsmiths, my first day of school (when I missed the bus), tarpapering the porch roof, getting my appendix out, tarpapering the pump house, picking the last apples, making a saw horse and finally, “finish Vincent Sheehan’s, A Day of Battle.” The repairs to the house were part of the deal he had worked out with Kahn,

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the owner of the place, for an affordable rent. As in Chevy Chase he took one opportunity after the other to build something, make something, refinish something. He loved these projects and his cabinetry pieces were apparently faultless and very attractive. So he must have felt very secure in his understanding of the hammer and nail though he frequently “banged his thumb,” as he would say. Gertrude was five months pregnant when we moved so more things fell on Fritz’s shoulders. Also, though Gertrude had learned to drive, she was still a timid driver so Fritz did most of the shopping and ferrying. Early in November Gertrude felt that the baby was coming early. A first trip to the hospital did not include a birth but Gertrude was back in the hospital a few days later and gave birth to twins early on the morning of November 7th. It was stunning. In the middle of the night on November 7 Papi was at the side of my bed, waking me up, saying, “There are twins!” It is a blur, but I know he said, “Twins, twins . . .” He was so excited. The babies Verena Regula and Moira Magdelena were born at seven weeks gestation. Gertrude remained in the hospital for 15 days with them— they were so very small and needed constant care. On the 22nd they came home. Everyone was recruited to take care of them. One, Vreneli, was in more critical shape because of serious digestive problems and Gertrude never left her side. A Father Thorning was called to the house on December 6th to baptize her. For a while these new babies were what was happening in their life. For three weeks there were no diary entries at all. Nana came on the 26th. How we all fit into the house I can’t remember. Fritz still had repairs to make before winter came—“put in storm sashes,” “Louis Simon came out to help with the north windows.” I thought we were living Laura Ingles Wilder’s life. It had been too late in the season to plant a garden when we got to Brinklow, but Fritz bought a goat, Mutch, and laying chickens. The animals came with their own set of special needs; Mutch, a doe, sported beautiful long horns and she used them to assert herself. The horns were dangerous and had to be trimmed back which happened just after Gertrude came home with the twins. There was no place to house the chickens so Fritz remodeled the unused doghouse for their home. Though we had a washing machine, the clothes, including cloth diapers for two babies had to be hung out doors to dry—summer and winter. When the weather was bad, which it was on December 11, Fritz hung them in the barn. He still had to finish the east wall and south entrance of the shed. On the 12th he made a sled for the children and on the 26th he and Gertrude had colds. There were very few entries about writing over this period, but he did write “Faith versus Belief”, his Presidential Address read at the June 15th 1945 session of the Southern Society of Religion. He wrote, “Abutments and

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Piers for Bridges of Cultural Understanding” for the Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion at Columbia University, August 1945, and he wrote, “Philosophical Obligations of the Psychology of Religion” for the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology in 1946. And there was ongoing work on Medicus’ Mesnchlicheit. “Faith Versus Belief”, published in The Journal of Religion, January 1946 is a theological examination, as the title says, of the difference and the relation between faith and belief. The arguments, again, are couched in theological terms and for the theological layman they are often hard to grasp. But one can easily see that the distinction he argues for rests on the recognition of the separate grounds of the conditional and the unconditional. He will pursue this line, found in Kant and Schelling, throughout the corpus of his philosophic writing and teaching. “Abutments and Piers for Bridges of Cultural Understanding” was his contribution at the Sixth Meeting of the Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion in the Democratic Way of Life at Columbia University in 1945. The theme of the conference was “Approaches to Group Understanding”. Fritz used the metaphor of bridge building to illustrate his discussion of building understanding between cultures. He developed the notion that to adequately build a bridge between cultures one has to secure piers that will support the bridge. He worked with the idea that cultures are grounded in their own myths and that the founding myth of each culture is the supporting pier. He introduces here the thesis that religiosity is a kindred core in all cultures even when beliefs are irreconcilably different. The cultures he selects for discussion are Russian Communism and Islam. The gravamen of the argument lies in his distinction between religiosity and religion. “There are no cultural bridges in religion—what establishes the connection is religiosity.” It was wartime while we were in Brinklow. D-Day, after all, was June 6, 1944, just as we returned to Washington. Fritz was the only one who read the newspaper and he would read out things he wanted Gertrude to hear, but he, we, seldom heard from Switzerland during the war. There would always be a Christmas package that was exciting to receive with a long letter about and for the family from Fritz’s mother (our Grossli) and Swiss chocolates. There was no such thing as Swiss chocolates in America. The delicate, shiny, crinkly tin foil it came wrapped in was mesmerizing. Papi treated it like pure silver and was the one who distributed the chocolate over many weeks. Gertrude did listen to the radio sometimes; I remember her sobbing at the news of President Roosevelt’s death in April. We ended up living in Brinklow until August of 1946. By then we had three goats; our first, Mutch, had had twins, Brunsli and Schnely and we were milking Mutch. That is Momie was milking Mutch, until she broke her

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foot. Papi should have had to milk her then, but he had badly cracked fingers in winter, so instead he carried Momie on his back down the basement stairs to the milking stall so she could milk. We kids were greatly entertained by this daily show. Papi did learn to milk, as did I, later when there were more goats. We had a producing vegetable garden. Momie canned fruits and vegetables. We made jam and jelly. How well I remember batting off yellow jackets as we pulled grapes off their stems in preparation for grape jelly, purple juice running down our arms to our elbows. We had our own eggs and chickens. We were lucky in that since many foods were rationed then. We cooked Spam some times, and because of the babies Momie got extra bananas and maybe sugar too. We also had fresh homemade bread every day. None of us really knew how to be, to live in the country but we tested the possibilities little bit by little bit. We kids started by making up games, imagining all sorts of expeditions. After a storm brought down a large branch of the weeping willow, Fritz trimmed it and stabilized it so we could use it to create and perform high balance circus acts. Eventually we went beyond the house lot and discovered the little stream at the base of the hill. I am sure Gertrude and Fritz accompanied us on these excursions—sometimes—but I have the distinct impression that we were often off on our own. A scary event happened when we went off to the stream after a heavy rainfall and found it not only flooded but with a steady current down the middle that was not usually there. I still think I almost lost Felix to the current, but maybe it was only a bad dream. We learned a lot. Gertrude was an accomplished seamstress and had for years designed and made her own clothes. She made all my clothes and Ursula’s clothes. As time went on she made everyone’s clothes. But during our stay in Brinklow she taught me how to sew little gifts and make skirts. I learned to cook everything we ate and how to butcher and dress a chicken. These were the years when I learned that being a “big girl” was the highest praise. I was of course the big girl. I was nine when the twins were born and Ursula was four years younger. I was, therefore often the extra pair of hands that were needed to help with the babies. I did lots of feeding, diaper-changing, clothes washing and drying and just plain babysitting. I was made to feel like a very important part of the household. I did not have lots of friends and activities of my own pulling me away from the family life, because soon after our move to Brinklow Gertrude and Fritz decided I would be better educated at home. It is true that I was easily distracted in school—something of a show off. In fact there is a letter addressed to someone at the new, consolidated country school where I was slated to attend the fourth grade in which Fritz describes me as a bit flighty. He says some other worshipful things about me, but I

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have always subscribed to the “flighty” descriptor. I don’t think they threw me out of the school (I don’t think they were allowed to) but I was brought home for my schooling. It is clear in retrospect that my parents, particularly Fritz, were not really prepared to guide me through any public school system. It wasn’t so much that they disagreed with the systems, the protocols, and the curricula, as it was that they saw these as irrelevant. They never did, nor would they expect me to conform to superfluous requirements or expectations. Note Fritz’s own insubordinate reactions to expectations he thought insupportable. In my case it wasn’t I who had to conform; I was meant to be uniquely me and strong enough to maintain my difference. Case in point, on my first day of school I was to go to the end of our driveway and wait for the school bus to pick me up. I had taken a school bus to school before so that presented no problem, but I didn’t have an appropriate fall jacket to wear. Not to worry, Gertrude brought out a wonderful Scotch tartan military cape she had acquired in her European travels. It was a deep blue, heavy wool, with a large bold plaid collar around the neck. It flared sufficiently to wear over my arms but it also had plaid decorated slits on the side where one could put out one’s arms. She thought it was striking and it fit. This was what I wore on my first day in this school; the first time I would meet my new classmates. Momie’s last words as I scuffed down the driveway were, “It doesn’t hurt to be different.” This was, after all, part of the plan. How we were educated was at least as important as how we lived. Were I writing my own biography I would write that these were very important years in my life, but because it is a memoir of my father I can say these were very important years in his communication with me. Important because of what he was able to teach me, his child, his daughter. He was perhaps not unlike other fathers in that he was always showing us how to do things, sharing his vast knowledge with all of us through stories, art, solving structural problems as he mended and built things. What mattered most to me was he never treated me childishly. I always knew he believed I could understand what he was teaching, showing, saying. And if I didn’t understand I could say so and he would never belittle my query. Not understanding was usually the beginning of a discussion full of Socratic questions and always leading to a discovery of what I did understand. Not everyone can do that, and I guess not every kid willingly plays along, but I count myself blessed by this father. In spite of the distractions and demands, Fritz did carry on his professional life throughout his leave. He wrote and delivered papers at professional meetings. He frequently travelled to New York and Baltimore as well as D.C., where he recorded having lunches and meetings with people whose names I don’t recognize, and he gave talks at various community organizations like the YMCA.

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After living on the little Brinklow farm for a couple of years, it was plain to Gertrude and Fritz that they wanted to continue living in the country. Fritz began visiting country places within Montgomery County and in northern Virginia. The search speeded up when he was asked by Kahn, the owner of the Brinklow place, to leave by May 1st of that year, 1946. Fritz was able to get the eviction date moved to August 1st; Gertrude was again pregnant with a delivery due date of early June which was no doubt relevant in getting the deferment. Fritz had, of course, also been looking for employment since he had resigned from the University of Maryland in October of 1945, and early in May the new president of Marietta College, Marietta, Ohio contacted Fritz to persuade him to come out as Chairman of the philosophy department. William Allison Shimer had just come to Marietta himself in 1945. Fritz had met him earlier when Shimer was teaching philosophy at Bucknell. His primary task was to accommodate the steep rise in admissions occasioned by the war veterans. The college population had risen from 227 students to 559 in one year. The college had had no philosophy department; philosophy was taught in the religion department. Shimer explained that he wanted to rebuild Marietta around philosophy as a core curriculum, a plan Fritz had long hoped to see realized at some college or university. It was the perfect appointment; he could form the department he wanted, he would be paid at their top full-professor salary, $3150, and had “life time tenure”. The possibility of finding a farm location for the family was excellent. Marietta is located on the Ohio River at the confluence of the Muskingum River in the southeast corner of Ohio. The town dates back to the end of the revolutionary war when veterans of the Union Army were paid warrants for land in the Northwest Territory instead of cash. It is a wonderful story of westward movement in early American history. The town is charming as is the Marietta College campus. Anywhere within 10 miles of the city’s outskirts farmland could easily be found. In fact, on June 3rd after he had submitted his grades for courses he was teaching at the YMCA and at the University of Baltimore, Fritz went back out to Ohio to find his farm. But, before he made the trip out he had to make one of the most decisive choices of his life. Ironically, no sooner had he accepted the position at Marietta than he received a notification that he had been designated by Medicus, his beloved teacher, to be his replacement for the Chair of Philosophy at ETH. Fritz, in a letter to Rebec, confessed that it had always been his hope that he would go back to his homeland to bring what he had learned here about teaching philosophy. Medicus did not contact Fritz about his selection until he, Medicus, knew for certain that Fritz would be the first choice of the faculty, and then did not

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cable him to let him know he was first, writing a letter to him instead that arrived after the trip to Marietta. According to Fritz, “A two-word cable: ‘First Place”—would have kept me from going to Marietta for the interview.” Had he still been single he might well have chosen to go back, but Gertrude, his whole family, weighed against it. Of course his mother, Lina yearned for him to return, but Gertrude did not want to live in Switzerland nor did she want to raise her children there. Fritz voiced issues of better nutrition and greater opportunity for the children in the states than in post war Europe, but in truth he could never have gone against Gertrude’s wishes in this. His decision was for the family, for the children. So, he picked his farm, twenty miles outside of Marietta in the township of Lower Salem. Gertrude (nine months pregnant) took a train out on June 6th to see and sign for the farm, returned to Brinklow on the 7th and the baby, Rebecca Nell, was born on the 9th. Gertrude really had this down pat by this time.

Chapter Ten

Ohio

Getting to Ohio is a story better told by Gertrude (see Appendix). The caravan consisted of three vehicles, our old Nash sedan and a truck with our animals driven by two local young men, and a large moving van with our furniture and Fritz’s library. It was August 1st, the Swiss national holiday and Felix’s birthday. There were by then six children between the ages of ten years and two months, Nellie Austin, Gertrude’s mother, Gertrude and Fritz made up the rest of the travellers, nine in all. We travelled west by way of route 50 (no interstates yet) through the Cumberland Gap, through West Virginia, across the Ohio River at Marietta, which we did not see because it was dark, and out to Lower Salem where we took route 145 to Gould’s Run Road, crossed the East Fork of Duck Creek over the wood-planked bridge from which, looking up to our right, we could see Berglihof. Little mountain manor, Berglihof, Fritz named his farm, and so it was together with its barns, granary, coops and sheds perched atop its own particular rise like hill-towns in Tuscany. After he had found it he came home and drew a beautiful plan for us showing how the drive circled the hill up to the top and ended midway between the house and its out-buildings all neatly positioned on his map. We knew this was to be our new home in Marietta, Ohio where “Papi” was going to teach at the College. He was happy and excited and loved his Berglihof, so we were happy too. The van with our furniture did not arrive on that day so we had only the stool Fritz had fastened onto the top of the car at the last minute, legs sticking up like a crown on the car, to serve as a table for the birthday cake we had not been able to open and eat on the road because of constant thunderstorms from Maryland to Ohio. We celebrated in the barren kitchen with only a hand pump at the sink. There were two candles on the cake. 75

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Even in the failing light of that day the house was welcoming. It was a bigger, better house than the one we had left in Brinklow. The rooms were large, with plenty of windows. Downstairs was a large kitchen from which one entered a dining room with a nice bay window and plenty of space for the grand, oak, dining-room table that came from our house in Chevy Chase. From there, through a framed entry we came to the living room where a large, mantled fireplace was situated in one corner. A smaller room, bedroom, opened into the living room, and another doorway led from the living room into a hallway off of which was the master bedroom on the right, the front door straight ahead and a broad, banistered stairway on the left. At the head of the stairs was a spacious landing, a hallway that led to three bedrooms and at the end a small room from which the attic stairs rose to the finished attic. It was a good house, well built, well cared for, oak wood finishing and floors, real plastered walls and ceilings, resting over a large, dry basement. Next morning we explored the outdoors. We could see Duck Creek flowing steadily through the fields and pastures of the valley. From the crest of the hill we could look down and see the bit of Gould’s Run Road as it lead to the bridge and the bridge itself. At the near end of the bridge were all the mailboxes for the family farms back in the hollows left and right on our side of the creek. We were close enough to the bridge that we could hear the rumble of vehicles as they crossed and see the little red flag of our mailbox standing up if the mail had been dropped there. The house was white clapboard, with a gabled roof and looked like many of the Folk Victorian houses in that region, particularly in Marietta. The style came directly west from New England, the birthplace of General Rufus Putnam who was one of the Revolutionary war generals who founded the town of Marietta. So, as farmhouses went, it was a cut above the average. It had been there long enough to have large shade and fruit trees in the fenced in yard. Within the enclosure was a washhouse, mimicking the style of the big house, where washtubs of water could be heated by gas for laundering. The water could be drawn either from the large hand pump, also in the yard, or from the cistern that gathered water from the roof of the house. There was no running water in the house or the washhouse until August 10th. I remember the peculiar experience of getting all our water, including water for washing dishes, from a little hand pump at the kitchen sink during those first few days. Running parallel to the driveway was the vegetable garden that we entered through a gate from the yard. There was a little garden shed just at the corner of the garden by the gate. Also within the yard enclosure was the outhouse. Until we installed the running water, there had been no bathrooms or toilets. The silent vacancy of the buildings at the other end of the hillcrest was less inviting. There was no grain in the granary, no chickens in the chicken

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coop, no horses in the horse barn, no hay and no animals in the big barn. These were just looming open spaces. It was hard to imagine what it would take to fill them up. Each building was properly shut up with doors that latched and squeaked when opened. Inside they were clean, the barn even smelled good, but there was so much space. The hay loft in the big, white barn was so large one couldn’t imagine so much hay filling it up, and the downstairs had pens with latched gates and a long corridor with a feed trough on one side and a long gutter down the middle. It was for cows, my father explained. Would we be having cows, we asked. As we passed beyond this compound of farm buildings the land sloped down from the crest into a shallow depression before again rising gently up toward the higher range of hills beyond. This was pastureland. It too seemed vast. There was a rough wagon track that followed the contours of the land and rose steeply up the sharper incline to the pastures at the top of the tall hills. It would be months before we explored all that acreage beyond. For the moment the smaller comforts of home preoccupied us; who would get what room, where would we put the piano, how would we fit all my father’s library into the downstairs rooms. Then there were bigger issues such as how we would heat the house, where we were going to school, Ursula and I. As we worked out these problems we functioned as a close family unit. Schooling was a big issue. For the year before we moved to Ohio, they had kept me home for my schooling—fifth grade. I still remember being isolated to do my studies in my parents’ bedroom where my twin sisters, preemies, were also tucked away in their laundry-basket bassinette head to toe, toe to head so they would keep each other warm. They were so tiny and fragile I spent much of my time hovering over them to make sure they were still breathing. The rest of the time I spent on long pages of arithmetic, writing letters and essays to be corrected for spelling and grammar, drawing maps, learning my French vocabulary, and any other home-work type exercises. Much of the rest of my education surrounded reading history and plays with my father, speaking French with my mother as I learned to bake and cook with her in the kitchen. I was also given ample space and time to draw and paint, sew up aprons and potholders, knit and can foods. This course of study set the agenda for the kind of education Gertrude and Fritz envisioned for all their children. Achieving this in Maryland appears to have been easier than it was in Ohio. At first Ursula and I attended the local, consolidated school in Lower Salem, the village that was our postal address. Though it was less than ten minutes away, the school bus we caught at the end of our driveway took an hour, traveling up and down the local back roads picking up children, to get to school. The schoolhouse, brick with a bell tower, had three classrooms, each divided into two classes: first and second, third and fourth, fifth and six.

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I was in the sixth-grade room; Ursula was in the second-grade room. Each room had a very large potbellied coal-burning stove in the middle that emitted too much heat in the middle of the room and not enough in the corners. There was also a wooden paddle conspicuously displayed right next to the blackboard in my classroom. There were no subjects taught I hadn’t already mastered except Ohio history. Recess consisted of getting outside for a bit and getting to go to the girls or boys out-house. And at the end of the day, there was that bus-ride home, shorter because we were among the first to be dropped off. This setup was a far cry from what our parents envisioned for our education, but they were stymied by the regulations for home schooling in Ohio which it took them almost the whole first school year to satisfy. Meanwhile, in January of 1947 they moved me to a Catholic school in Marietta, which was no less terrifying than the public school in Lower Salem, but academically superior. I can’t remember what they did for poor Ursula. By the time summer vacation began in that year we were beginning to function as the self-sufficient community we were meant to be. Our yearly celebration of Christmas is a good indicator of who we were as a family. We were always following two traditions simultaneously and melding them into a powerful family celebration. Over the course of the winter and spring gas heaters were installed in the house, one heater in each bedroom, some new goats were added to our small herd, and in the early spring our goats gave birth to several kids, some of whom died, though it is not clear why. Two of our older goats were butchered and their meat went to a community freezer locker in Marietta to be stored. We were by then drinking only goat’s milk and often eating goat meat. Our hens were in the chicken coop and we were gathering eggs. In April, a scene I will never forget. My mother and father were turning over the soil in the quarter acre garden plot. They had a hand tiller with two long handles attached to a smallish plow share that one could use in a small garden plot, but because of the size of the garden and the fact that it had not been plowed during the prior season, it was almost impossible to push the plow through the weedy turf that had developed. So, my father pulled the plow, while my mother directed the blade down into the soil. The plow was not rigged for pulling so my father devised a kind of rope harness attached to the plow with a broad, padded band that he fitted over his forehead and in that manner pulled the tiller as my mother pushed. The image still distresses me. There were some misfortunes that winter. Not only did we suffer the loss of several newborn kids, but my grandmother who had accompanied us on our move to help care for the still very young twins and our newest baby sister, died on January 8th of 1947. It was our first death of a close family

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member. She was buried in a Catholic cemetery high on a hill in Fulda with beautiful views, selected by my father for its aesthetic virtue. In March my mother was x-rayed and spots were discovered on her lungs. The diagnosis, as I recall, was tuberculosis and the treatment was bed rest. She lived on for many years so I suspect the diagnosis. One amusing, but potentially devastating incident happened in November. My father was on the way in to town with the twins to deliver some goat’s milk, but as he made the turn at the barn he remembered something he had to do in the barn, stopped the car, dashed in and returned to find the car was gone. It had rolled, not down the driveway, but off to the side and down the hill into a flat below. When he came in to announce this catastrophe he was grinning from ear to ear. Not only had nothing happened to the twins or the car, but the bottle of milk he had sitting on the front seat hadn’t even tipped over. He was thrilled at his good fortune while the rest of us gaped in horror at the probable dire consequences of the accident. But, of course, he had experienced a similar mishap once before and was relieved that this time there was no damage. It is hard to tell what Fritz and Gertrude had in mind when they bought 135 acres of farm. Fritz had taken money out of his remaining inheritance to pay for it, and given the good deal he had at the college he certainly thought of permanence when they made the move, but such a large farm was more than they needed to raise a few goats and chickens and their six children. It was a beautiful place surrounded by wonderful views and high hills, almost Swiss countryside, which could have been a deciding factor. It was what unfolded at the beginning of the 1947 school year that determined Berglihof’s destiny. Fritz had succeeded in getting permission from the state to educate his children at home on the condition that the “home” was a “school” and all it took to be a school was one student who was not of the family. So they set about finding that one other child whose name I believe was Nicky. (Note: each pregnancy after Felix was born included the wish that there would be a brother for him, so the first student selected was to be a boy.) With that one other student we became a school, The Marti Farm Home School and what grew out of this initial step was just that. Had Fritz not been teaching full time at the college the farm-home-school enterprise would never have matured as it did. The combination of Gertrude’s management of the school and the home and Fritz’s management of the farm combined with his student following created a remarkable experiment in living.

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BERGLIHOF From the start Berglihof was an academically serious school. Our experience with the schools Ursula and I attended during the 1946/1947 school-year fell far short of Fritz and Gertrude’s expectations, but they had not been in a position to remedy that, and with the addition of four more children they could not have afforded to pay private school tuition. Ideally, Fritz wanted the education he so happily experienced as a child in Switzerland, and in Switzerland he could still have found it. But on a farm in Ohio factors other than the quality of academics played a role. The experience of living in a natural environment and being self-sufficient were also powerful drives in their vision of education. Engaging, observing and working in the natural environment was not, as it has been for other educational experiments of this sort, considered an alternative curriculum. They believed a truly educated individual had to be educated in two worlds. The school motto was Orare/ Arare; one not only would develop intellectual understanding, but one would physically work the land. No one who was part of the family or who would eventually become part of the Berglihof community did not work. There was no job, or care, or concern of farm life that we did not do. The daily, weekly, yearly lists of chores were endless. At first it was just the family, including Nana, but the size of the property and some of the major agricultural work that had to be done became part of the ongoing responsibilities and required the help of people of experience. According to Fritz, “Our school’s curriculum was patterned after that of a Swiss gymnasium or College. Switzerland strictly requires a reading and speaking knowledge of three or four languages, mathematics to calculus, four years of world history, and a thorough grounding in physics, chemistry and biology.” Fritz himself acknowledged that they did not succeed fully nonetheless that was the curriculum. They had to fulfill the Ohio Department of Education’s required subjects for each grade level and I do not remember what the actual day by day, week by week schedule of classes were, but I do remember studying subjects that were not part of the state curriculum: piano practice every day, drawing at every grade level all year long, oral German, written and oral French, Latin, geography and map-making accompanying whatever history was being read, some craft work regularly–leather tooling, wood carving, linoleum block printing, sewing, embroidery, and so on. I remember especially creating a mural on the wall of the upstairs landing, transferring my painted image accurately enlarged to fit on the wall—so much to learn in one project. Gertrude was the main teacher at first. Fritz was at the college every day, coming home to instruct me in German and Latin. Gertrude was doing all the cooking, Fritz doing all the shopping. There were three babies and a toddler

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to feed and bathe and watch over. We had, of course, begun preparing for all this in Brinklow, but everything began to expand. In the fall of 1946 Fritz had already bought two new goats, one a buck. Looking ahead he contacted the Federal Soil Conservation Agency inquiring about the free services the agency offered to improve one’s land. He built a pigsty. We had a corn husking bee—where the corn came from and who was there I don’t remember, but I do remember how lacerated my hands were after handling ear after ear of corn. We did have a small cornfield and no doubt a local farmer had planted it for himself, but we got some corn out of it. A large alfalfa field spread out in the valley just across the Gould’s Run stream at the foot of our hill. Someone had harvested the hay in the summer, but we would be responsible for haying next summer. It was clear we would need help. And then in January Nana died. Remarkably people from all over the valley, people we had never even seen, came to give us a hand. How did they even know of her death? It was the telephone. Our phone system was a party line and it was everyone’s business to listen in to find out what was going on. Each party had a ring sequence that could be heard by everyone else. The phones were the primitive ones with a crank on the side that you turned by hand for the party you wanted; ours was two short rings. That was how everyone knew who had had a death in the family. Fritz and Gertrude sometimes felt compelled to speak only French when talking to one another on the phone, but later they learned that about half the farmers on our line were from Alsace-Lorraine and understood French quite well. Over the course of 1947 Fritz and Gertrude hired more and more help. They had to. After Nana’s death they hired a young woman from the congregation at the church to help with the babies, but though she was lovely with the children she could not take on all the housekeeping. Fortunately before too long they found Ruth Puls. She really was a perfect match for their needs. She must have been about 40, previously married, with two young daughters she had to raise. I do not know her whole story, but it is really irrelevant since she found her new life at Berglihof perfectly suited to her needs and her personality. She was a strong woman spiritually and physically. She had been a laboratory technician and was a painter. She fit well into our family almost as a big sister to me. Actually she was a good companion to Gertrude who now had few women acquaintances. She managed the house intelligently to everyone’s satisfaction, and she taught hands-on science courses and arts-and-crafts classes. Fritz bought more goats and eight kids were born the spring of 1947 necessitating his constructing a third milking-stand. He needed a foreman type of farm hand and began advertising for one. Meanwhile, he hired a local man, Oskar, a gentle, steady worker to spread manure, plant potatoes, and

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mend some fences. He got someone to cut the hay and the barn began to fill up. The barn itself became the focus of the most unusual project they ever undertook. When traveling on main roads in Ohio, and elsewhere in the rural Midwest at that time, the roadsides were dotted with colorful advertisements for chewing tobacco painted on the sides of barns. There were also Burma Shave road signs, but the tobacco ads were so big you could see them for miles. One could see our big, white barn for at least a mile before getting to our road making it ideal for advertising. And so Fritz and Gertrude decided to do just that. They engaged their old friend Franc Epping to create the image and on May 5th Fritz invited Art Department students and others to come out and paint the side of the barn. One of Fritz’s students, Arthur Sanders wrote, “The College Art Department found ladders and sketched an outline. Dr. Marti bought paint and brushes, and gave notice that food and beer would be furnished to painters and guests.” It was nothing short of fabulous; a huge painting of the fabled St Michael slaying the dragon occupied the whole, sixty foot, visible side of the barn. It

Figure 10.1. Barn painting of St. George and the Dragon.

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became a landmark, at least for our visitors of whom there began to be quite a few. Fritz had already begun to invite his students out to the farm for a student dinner in the fall, but this event attracted others as well. Arthur wrote, “ . . . we found that Dr. and Mrs. Marti were serious, brilliant, dedicated teachers with years of world wide experience, and we learned that we would always be welcome in their huge book-lined study.” And come they did. The fact that they came to help paint a barn was the key to what made the ensuing liaison between farm and college work. They came to work. Like everyone at the farm they knew they were expected to participate in whatever projects were a-foot. We kids loved having these college students visiting and they doted on us. Arthur wrote about who this particular generation of students was: “Many formerly innocent men and women had recently experienced the dark side of military life and the wounding and killing of friends and enemies. College was presenting the world to us in these glorious days before television, and we wondered if and how we fit in. None of us realized it at the time, but Dr. & Mrs. Marti, the children, and the farm, were a special kind of mentor.” Arthur eventually came to work at Berglihof full time. He took responsibility for Fritz’s correspondence, for advertising and promoting the school, for keeping the books, doing the taxes and fixing everything electrical. Fritz had never had someone so dedicated to help him with his hateful “paper work”. Gertrude was no better than Fritz at handling complicated insurance, contract, legal, tax, or other such documents, and he became apoplectic when confronted with “gibberish” and “unintelligible directions”. Arthur was not only dedicated to “Dr. Marti”; he became wholly committed to the idea of Berglihof. He was adept at the electronics of the time, particularly audio equipment. He had a wire recorder, the only one I ever saw, which he used to record Gertrude’s account of our trip to Ohio in her story “House on a Hill”. He was cherished by everyone in the family. Ann Pappenheimer, another one of Fritz’s students, used the artwork of the school children in fabric designs, her field of study. Though she did succeed in making samples and showing them to fabric houses, the project did not take off. However, she and Arthur married and Arthur continued to consult with Fritz and Gertrude for years after he and Ann no longer lived with us. As things grew Fritz still needed someone to run the farm. His advertisements led to a string of hired hands, only one of which truly suited us. All but one was a single man, the youngest a boy from the hillbilly country of West Virginia whom Papi and I went to pick up at his home, an experience indeliblised in my memory. We had adequate directions, I recall Papi or I reading

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them as we travelled deep into mountainous backwoods in West Virginia. I can no longer recall what town or village we were near since the home we finally came to was simply up a high bank off the dirt road we came in on. It was a stark, unpainted, one-story ranch style building with a full-length, covered porch on which several adults and children sat observing us as we pulled up and stopped. No one said anything. A young man in overalls, holding a small bag stood up and came forward. Papi asked if he was ____ (a name I can’t remember). He nodded or said, “Yup”, clambered down the embankment, said goodbye to no one, and climbed in the back seat. He did work for us for a while. Another prize was a 70 year-old man who was looking for a woman to help him on his 50-acre place in the south. He thought I would do and actually proposed to me. That was a scary moment. Harry Mills, our best hand, was with us for a long time. Harry supervised much of the farm work: haying, planting, feeding all the animals, caring for sick animals and helping to manage our horses. We had all learned how to ride horses and care for them and this became Ursula’s passion and responsibility. Harry was an excellent horseman; he bought and sold them, saw to breeding them, purchased a team of workhorses to help with fieldwork and hauling in the hay. Though he was part of the adult community he was not there all the time. He, as well as many other young men, went to work for silo-building companies, if they could, because the pay was very good. But if he wanted to go out to one of the local dances he would borrow our car and sometimes take me along with him and his date. By the beginning of 1948 there were four boarding students besides Ursula and me. There were four adults, Ruth Puls, Arthur Sanders, Gertrude and Fritz. And there were five little ones under the age of five. Fritz enlarged the capacity of the house by enclosing the landing at the top of the stairs into another bedroom. It is still unclear to me where everyone slept. We ran short of water in the summer, so a water pipe was laid down in a ditch in the driveway from the large cistern at the barn to the house cistern. School still happened in the house, and our beloved old dining room table had to be enlarged with new leaves fashioned in oak to match the original surface. Fritz built a pass-through window between the kitchen and dining room to expedite mealtime service and clean up. We had butchered our first goat and stored the meat in the local community freezer. Over the course of the winter of 1948 Fritz built laying nests in the chicken coop so we would have plenty of eggs. He also built pig-feeding troughs in anticipation of getting pigs. He was inspired by the first hog butchering he had attended (about which later). In the spring lots more kids were born enlarging our herd and of course our milk and meat supply. Dave Adams, another Marietta College student came to stay. I do remember his war story. He had been some sort of “ranger” in Korea and had been deeply

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affected by his experiences there. I think he just felt safe with us because he did not get involved with the Berglihof agenda beyond digging ditches and planting over a thousand evergreens on the steep slope above the big pasture behind the barn. I happily helped him because I had a crush on him. Fritz bought a Gravely tractor so he and Gertrude did not again have to plow the garden “by hand”. And in August we bought two riding horses, Chico and Danny. Berglihof had become bigger than just our family. It was our family though, no one else’s in the same sense that a medieval manor or court was of the family that presided over it. It was not a commune where everyone had equal say over what happened, nor was it like a religious enclave governed by an ecclesiastic code. Fritz and Gertrude were Momie and Papi to everyone who was there. We kids were growing up. By the summer of 1948 I was twelve, Ursula was eight, Felix was six, the twins four and Rebecca three. At twelve I was on the verge of being a teenager and distracted by my own emerging maturity, a condition exacerbated by my isolation from other kids my own age. I was stuck in a world between my younger siblings and the wonderful adults in our home but individual access to my parents was limited. I remember that sometimes in order to have a private conversation with my mother I would have to catch the poor woman on the toilet with the bathroom door closed. So I sort of made it up as I went along. Ursula and I had experience of a world beyond the family, I much more than Ursula, but Felix and the babies never lived in a smaller family. How in the long run each of us understood our family life in the context of Berglihof was different. Because I was significantly older than the others I could stay up later and participate in “grown-up conversation” in the evenings. Frequently this was when Gertrude did a lot of her sewing and mending. (I have to believe it was a creative outlet for her; there was so much of it.) That is when on one evening when Fritz was out I sat with her, sewing on the whirring sewing machine, and learned that Fritz was not my biological father. This was so confusing to me that I cannot reconstruct how it affected my understanding of my relationship with him, my brother and my sisters. It was like a life altering storm in my head. The only sense in which it belongs in this story is as it reflects on Fritz. In hindsight I think it did not in any way change his relationship to me. After all, it wasn’t news to him that he was my adoptive father. The most positive outcome was that I chose to think of myself as especially chosen by him. But confusion is the right term for how I felt. The fact that I do not recall Fritz as ever having any discussion with me about this issue is a good indicator of his Swissness. This was a significant personal event for me and should have been an occasion when he, as father, as adult, might seek to make some emotional gesture. He did not. I am sure

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Figure 10.2. United States Marti Family: from left to right, back row, Judith, Fritz, Gertrude, front row, Michael Felix, Moira, Rebecca, Vreneli, Ursula. c 1948.

that he funneled his concerns through Gertrude rather than have to engage in any emotional expression towards me. Not for lack of feeling, but for lack of confidence in his ability to express his emotions. We did not talk about this subject until after I married. He was my father, I was his daughter and there was nothing to talk about. There is no doubt that Fritz was fully committed and very proud of what he and Gertrude were doing at Berglihof. From the start Fritz wrote up a letter at Christmas time, like others do, in which he would report on what everyone in the immediate family had accomplished over the past year. There would sometimes be a mention of others at the school, but when I now read them I have a sense of how many people in their former life would want to know what was up with the family. Just as St Michael and the Dragon boldly stated, “Here we are”, so the yearly Christmas letter was an unflagging statement about who we were. The news about Berglihof spread locally, often by Arthur’s dissemination. Reporters would come out and photograph us with the goats and later in classrooms. Arthur took on the Berglihof “brand” as a career while he was there. He started a flier comparable to the Christmas letter called the “Berglihof Harvest” with a wider distribution, he wrote articles about us for various community publications and he created brochures, one about the school and others to promote Fritz as a lecturer. He was also responsible for getting Gertrude to start writing about our move and what we were up to.

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Fritz was anxious to develop a lecture circuit. His conviction that what he had to say was important never flagged. He invited prominent people who gave talks in Marietta out to the farm hoping to learn from them how to initiate such a tour. I remember with great disdain two roly-poly characters that presented as a bad advertisement of life-on-the-road. However he also had Aleksandr Kerensky, who had been head of the Russian provisional government, out on the occasion of his speaking tour in the United States. I‘m not sure if Fritz wasn’t the one to invite him to speak at the college. He and Kerensky sat and spoke for a long time out in the yard. I hold the image to this day. But what made Fritz a magnetic teacher would not work for a one-night stand. What he had to say, what he wanted to give was not available in a sound bite. What made him a great teacher was his subservience to the ideas and his willingness to lead a student to them. The ideas were not his alone, they were always there, he would say, and it was his task, our duty, to seek them. A short outline of his position on ideas appears in, “The purpose of getting introduced to philosophy”, a stray, closely typed, one page document I found among his papers. Human life rests on facts of nature and on facts of social tradition, but it develops only by ideas. Our occidental society has come to be what it is owing chiefly to two sets of ideas, those about nature, and those about freedom. Historically speaking, we owe most of our ideas about nature to the Greeks. And our ideas about freedom derive more or less directly from Hellenism, Judaism, and Christianity. Popularly speaking those two sets of ideas constitute the realm of science and, roughly, religion.

The paper goes on to propose that philosophy is the discipline that directs our questions about ideas to possible answers. A perfect course description but hardly a proposal for a speaking tour. He did speak frequently at the Unitarian church in Marietta, and at the American Association of University Women in Zanesville, Ohio, the Ohio College Association, the Ohio Valley Philosophy of Education Society, and the Marietta Seminar for Religious Thought, to name only a few engagements. The topics were sometimes educational ranging from “what is philosophy” to “math curricula” indicating that people and groups wanted to hear from the head of the school. Sometimes he incorporated “the cold war” or some other current national or international concern. He did address topics concerning theology and philosophy. The thank-you notes from the sponsors of these groups are uniformly laudatory and I think he was pleased to be approached by them. He felt needed. He and Gertrude were also active in the local, Duck Creek community they lived in. There had, of course, already been the neighbor’s response to the death of Nellie Austin, so in a sense we had been accepted into the

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community. On one occasion when there was a death, Gertrude asked how she might help and someone brought over a basket of dry clothes to be ironed. I was a little apprehensive at the thought of Momie doing ironing for someone else, and in fact she did ask us all if it might be the custom here to iron the two terrycloth bath towels included in the ironing basket. Gertrude, along with the children attended the local Catholic Church and before long took over the choir there, which involved frequent choir practice. I necessarily became part of the choir since there weren’t many adequate voices. (She was, of course, introducing the great church music of Europe that the local choir members were unfamiliar with.) Early in our affiliation with the church I underwent a powerful renunciation of my Catholicism. I did not want to go to church any more. My complaints were the same as those of any rational person; I didn’t believe the Catholic story anymore. Fritz and Gertrude brought home a priest with whom I might talk, but they saw that was not what was called for. Instead I was permitted to stay home from church but I would spend the time reading and discussing with Fritz the great church fathers, especially Augustine. I was his first convert. It would take a lot to maintain a large farm, right in the middle of all the other farms without being involved in the year round network of seasonal demands. The major activities on these farms was breeding and feeding. There were cows, and pigs, and horses that still did much of the labor of plowing, planting and harvesting. The cows were a major source of income providing as they did milk and meat. Farmers bred their animals with those who had bulls and stallions. Pigs were an important source of both income and family food. The crops were hay and corn, used to feed the animals in winter and some other grains that needed to be threshed. Chickens were the domains of women who kept the earnings from eggs. When we first arrived there were no sheep or goats in the valley. Much of the work on each farm was more than any one farmer, even with his sons, if he had them, could do alone. In the spring tilling the soil for planting could be done without extra help, and planting could be done by one as well. There were of course the constant demands of fence repairing, animal water and feed sites to maintain, roads and machinery to repair, but the crucial moments surrounded birthing, harvesting, butchering, and preserving. These events involved extremely hard work on the part of neighbor helping neighbor both in the spring and well into the fall. If one were lucky with the weather one could bring in three cuttings of hay and depending on the size of the hay field each cutting could involve as many as three, huge hay wagons each pulled by a team of horses. No one had more than one team so a big haying when the weather was right could involve one or more other neighbors with their teams to help. This went on all summer. Generally speaking birthing happened in the spring—for goats always in the spring. Every birth of every calf, kid, piglet, colt carried the potential for

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crisis. Most births were normal and easy for the mother, but when there was trouble, not only might one lose the baby but also the mother—an expensive risk. Neighbors often became involved before a vet was called. One of the more stunning moments of my “farm life” was when I was helping Gertrude with a kid that was coming out backward. It was deep into a very black night, in the barn, no one but we two when Gertrude announced “I have to go in there”. She rolled up her sleeves, greased her hands and arms and reached into the birth canal and drew out the baby goat. It was certainly a first for me, but actually an oft-repeated procedure there in the countryside. This experience had to be what Fritz called the “open book of nature” when describing education at the Marti Home School. Corn had to be cut, stalks gathered and bound in the field before being harvested, husked and stored in the granary, and so on for other crops like potatoes, but the biggest events were the butcherings. These were almost always hog butcherings but sometimes calves were butchered at home as well. Each person’s butchering involved up to four full-grown pigs. Everyone helped everyone else and a schedule was worked out so all the butcherings could be achieved in a couple of weeks in October. These were occasions involving sometimes more than six grown men, some youngsters and as many women from dawn to late afternoon. It was exciting. The hogs were shot before everything else happened but if you came early you could hear high-pitched squealing. Huge, black cauldrons hanging or sitting above large fires steamed in the frosty air. Long, strong lengths of wood were fixed at the ends to notches in upright posts creating a rack from which the carcasses were hung before being gutted. The whole butchering included processing of every part of the animal from collecting the blood to stuffing the sausages. It did take all day and every available hand. Gertrude over the course of several butcherings became a gut woman—one of the women who could clean the very delicate intestines used for sausage without breaking through the tissue. Though butchering did not engage Fritz at the hands-on level, he always went to them and arranged for butchering our own pigs. He made close friends with one of the nearby farmers, Harry Ullman. Harry helped Fritz out with many of his projects. He became attached to Fritz’s European roots. Harry was one of four brothers in the valley who had originally come from Alsace-Lorraine after WWI. I do not know many details about his story, but he talked and told stories in French to Fritz. They became drinking buddies over Fritz’s homemade apple cider. It was remarkable how long they could sit together and talk. Harry, a dirt farmer who could not have had much education and Fritz, a professor of extraordinary erudition; immigrants sharing the experience of the “old country”. Harry was rough, raw and often off color in his remarks and in his company Fritz expressed a happy camaraderie that was full of loud, almost backslapping gestures. They were friends.

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Fritz’s demeanor was changed by the life on the farm. He now wore bib overalls when working outside. He liked warm, plaid, woolen work shirts in winter, but went topless in the warm weather and one could see that he remained perfectly fit. He became more and more casual in his university clothes adopting the academic uniform—sport jacket and wool trousers in winter, and short sleeved, tieless shirts with light trousers in summer. He still always wore his beret for his hat. The tempo at Berglihof became steady. Fritz, together with Gertrude, of course, did a good job of managing the farm. There were always ups and downs, most of which he had never faced before, but they almost took care of themselves because they were problems that belonged to the farm, to Berglihof itself. Every year the creek would flood and we would not be able to leave. These floods were usually related to the major flooding of the Ohio and Muskingum in Marietta where students always got drafted to help the downtown businesses secure their ground floor shops with sand bags. In 1948 we were hit by a blizzard, but big snows were not strangers to Fritz. He organized an expedition, including me and him, to climb our way through drifts and up steep, snow filled gullies to the barn in the uppermost pasture where three horses were stranded. It was an adventure. The most serious crisis though, was the decimation of our goatherd. The herd had grown to sixty goats, all producing milk, kids to sell, meat to eat and sell, and even goat hides that we learned to cure. Quite suddenly adult goats became diarrheic and often did not recover and died. We had to send specimens (which included the whole head of a goat) to the state agricultural laboratory to get a diagnosis. They had all been infected by a “sheep fluke”. Normally found in sheep it was lethal. Apparently, no one could remember when sheep had been raised on our place. The fluke resided in the pasture soil until on a cyclical timetable they were rejuvenated in sufficient abundance to cause the sickness. Goats were liable to be infected by the sheep fluke as well. This could have been catastrophic, so the decision was to switch to cows, Brown Swiss Cows. The farm survived, some money in Switzerland bought the cows, but it was not the same. It was a nightmarish experience as one went from one isolation pen to the next to watch sick and emaciated goats drink a bit of water and eventually expire in the fouled beds of straw. I never got over it. I can’t remember ever milking a cow. One summer drought conditions dried up the vegetable garden. I don’t think we ever watered the garden, depending on rainfall for watering. We were always aware of the scarcity of water even when it was plentiful. Having to make up for garden produce involved buying more than usual from the grocery store. Usually we bought, sugar, flour, tea, coffee, yeast, salt, pepper, laundry soap, fish, cooking fat and oil, and citrus fruits. Fritz would supplement with things like raisins, chocolate, or fruit juice, when

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they were on sale. All our vegetables came from the garden and were preserved for the winter. We managed to preserve all sorts of food: cracklings, hominy and hominy grits, sauerkraut, eggs, goat cheese, even goat milk cream, cottage cheese, jams and jellies from harvested blackberries, apple sauce, canned peaches, canned pears even some canned meat. It seemed that once Gertrude began preserving food her imagination took hold and she couldn’t be stopped. Some problems involved the children. Everybody had accidents; I fell down the stairs and dislocated my shoulder, Ursula seems to have avoided physical accidents, Felix had a bb ricochet back and almost enter his eye, one of the twins got her head trapped in the drawer of a falling chest of drawers, but nobody had the accidents Rebecca had—all too gruesome to describe. It was her petiteness—things happened that couldn’t happen to a larger person. For example, she ran to the end of the barn, stopped herself by braking with her hands on the big barn door just enough to swing the bottom of the door out a little, just enough for Rebecca to slip through and drop 20’ to the ground below. She survived with no acute injuries. Rebecca’s small stature became an issue when she was not growing enough and she had to be tested and examined often, and treated with growth hormone eventually. She was (is) also very hard of hearing. Concerns on this level were not any more or less than happen in all families and were seen to exactly as in other families. For instance, none of the attempts to fix Felix up with male companionship at the school succeeded because he was (is) unusually gifted. So for better or worse he was not getting enough opportunities to interact with a larger community. This, of course was true for all of us, and Fritz and Gertrude responded by devising substitute opportunities for social development. It was not a problem for the school since the small, integrated living-learning-working structure was what the school was all about. It was only a problem for us Marti children since we did not leave for vacations or summer breaks with our parents in their bigger world. For Felix they placed him in a Boy Scouts troop in Marietta, for me they sent me to Dennison College for a summer theater program, others went up to Canada for a summer with a French Canadian family. They clearly saw the need and responded to it creatively. It is so clear that this burgeoning adventure was for the children, and that it had to go on to the last school year for the youngest child. And it did go on. By the fall of 1950 school was conducted on the top floor of the granary. I never attended classes there, still being, at fifteen the only student my age. In fact the winter of 50-51 was my last year in the school. In the fall of 1950 I met Stefan, my husband, at one of Fritz’s student outings at the farm. That was the beginning of leaving home and Berglihof for me. My ideas about what I was going to do with my life had included staying on and running the school eventually, a truly fantastic thought but I

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knew so little about the world beyond that I could generate only fantasies about where I would go or what I would be. Stefan (Bernie, his given name) was from New York and represented the very pinnacle of a world I had once known and missed. My thoughts and plans began to coalesce around the possibility that I might end up in New York, that it was time to leave the farm. I was the first graduate of Berglihof and thus the first test of the educational theory behind the experiment. Not a good test since I was a unique example of the students, nonetheless a product of the school. The most plausible thing to say was that I was, and remain, solidly comfortable with my intellectual ability; I trust my own thinking. I was not at all well-adjusted to the social world of my age cohorts. I went for my freshman year to Marietta College where I was already known by faculty and some upper classmen, but I did not fit in. I hung out with those upperclassmen who were the liberal lefties on campus and who afforded me all kinds of unearned respect. I was allowed to take courses I was not ready for, and all but failed them. College was not for me just then and I left for Stefan and New York before the spring term was over. This leaving really separated me from the family and Fritz for a long time, though Stefan and I did spend one summer there teaching summer school before we enrolled together at Ohio State University in September 1954. I am sure that Fritz had misgivings about my marrying a Jew, however I did not hear them then since neither Stefan nor I were asking anyone’s permission to marry and, in fact, married in New York before going to Berglihof to celebrate with my family since they could not afford to all come to New York for the ceremony. The year 1952 when I went to college was the year Fritz was dismissed. He taught through until June of 1953 and that was when I went off to New York. According to a letter Fritz wrote to Professor Haynor, chairman of the APA Committee on Information Service, his dismissal was ostensibly because his per student income to the college did not warrant maintaining the Department of Philosophy, thereby side stepping the “life-long-tenure” he thought he had with his appointment in 1946. According to this letter, Fritz was one of several faculty members who had supported President Schimer when Schimer was dismissed in 1947 for divorcing his wife of 26 years and marrying the Dean of Women. Fritz, as well as others, believed his dismissal went back to his support of Schimer. All of Schimer’s other appointees had been dismissed by the time Fritz was dismissed. His letter was meant to warn the Committee on Services about how Marietta had treated him. He had informed many others including the AAUP, but apparently at the time there was no recourse.

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He claimed to be happy to have been relieved of college duties freeing him to devote himself to the school. By the date of the Haynor letter, May 1960, the school was no longer Berglihof but the Marti School, Dayton Ohio. This is the end of the memoir, but not of the life. Gertrude and Fritz schooled all their children through high school and then pursued extensive individual projects until the end of their lives. They remained close to their children, their children’s spouses and their grandchildren. For years and years, we all converged on them at Christmas time. The family celebration had been a momentous event in our lives as children. Gertrude, the devout Catholic, always went to midnight mass and many followed her there. She shed great joy on all of us as she celebrated, and Fritz relived his European traditions with readings from the Bible and real candles on the Christmas tree on Christmas Eve. Coordinating the two traditions resulted in a strict schedule of events that became almost sacred observances by themselves. They had done an incredible job creating a devoted community out of their family. And all my memories after leaving home are now of family gatherings and interactions and less about Fritz Marti. In my own career as a psychologist, what he taught me was at the core of my work, and he did read and comment on my publications, but he usually did not share my views.

Chapter Eleven

Fritz Marti American

From 1953 to 1956 Fritz devoted his energy to the school and Berglihof. He and Gertrude moved the family to Dayton Ohio in 1956 where the School reopened under the name Marti School. Gertrude was the Director in charge of administering the school while Fritz played a major role in curriculum development and teaching high school level courses. Though the school was successful, Fritz became dissatisfied with the students. He identified the problem as the “laziness of the students”. He was in his late 60s/early 70s and I am sure he was tired of having to work so hard to educate young students. He later admitted that he had never been very good at teaching students who did not already want to learn. In 1961 he took a visiting professorship for the Fall Semester at Antioch College, and from 1963 to 1965 he was hired as a visiting professor at Hiram College near Cleveland, Ohio. Gertrude joined him there when she stopped teaching at The Marti School because the board appointed a new headmaster. (Eventually Gertrude and Fritz were reimbursed for the transfer of ownership of the school to the board.) Gertrude made her MA in French Literature at Case Western Reserve while they were living near Cleveland. Meanwhile, Stefan and I had moved to Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. In that setting Stefan was able to help Fritz gain a position as Lecturer in Humanities at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. Gertrude and Fritz moved to Collinsville, just east of East St Louis. Both Fritz and Gertrude lived very full lives during their time at SIU. Gertrude taught French and French Literature there and began her pursuit of a PhD at Washington University. Fritz taught a course as a visitor at Washington University as well as his courses at SIU. In these university settings 95

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his devotion to teaching was re-inspired to the remarkable extent that he taught one of his SIU courses from his hospital bed. He suffered an injury that required hospital bed-rest such that normally the university would have had to cancel his class. Instead Fritz organized a crew of technicians to transmit by telephone his lectures to the classroom where his son, Felix, conducted classes so the students’ questions from there could be heard by Fritz in “real time”. Imagine what he would have done with today’s electronic systems! His years at SIU saw the culmination of his academic career, but before going on with this theme, something needs to be said about Papi, the father of his family. Throughout the 1960s his children were leaving home, going to college, marrying, taking on new careers and having children. Six children create an enormous amount of life activity, not to speak of reams of paper correspondence. The family remained close. For the children the family was the world of their youth. Both Gertrude and Fritz were completely committed to the welfare of all their children. Given their limited means at all times, their ability to help each one of us when we needed it is remarkable. The flow of correspondence is filled with the details of life: money for tuition, library fines, transportation, postage stamps; care packages including a three-way transfer of one item of clothing, buttons found for a sweater someone was knitting, a pattern for a favorite skirt; news about one another, everyone’s travel plans at the holidays, pregnancies and births, school progress, and on, and on. And the letters were brimming over with affection, humor, gentle admonitions, and the wish that they could still have their children around them. It is important to note that this testament of a family, recorded in documents, spread now across six families, would not be possible in this electronic age. This must be true for many families, and it is a real loss to future chroniclers of the present period. Southern Illinois University made Fritz emeritus in 1973, so, with Gertrude still teaching, he was finally able to spend full time on his own work. While at SIU he published: the article “On the possibility of a form for all philosophy”, an early writing of Schelling; On Being Human, his translation of Medicus’s Menschlicheit; and his own Religion and Philosophy and his Religion, Reason and Man. Gertrude retired in 1976 and they moved to South Bend Indiana where their daughter Moira had a position in the Art Department at Notre Dame University. There he continued publishing; 1980 his translation of Shelling’s The Unconditional in Human Knowledge; in 1981 Fritz’s Unpopular Truths; and in 1982, Medicus’s Lectures on Logic. These are his major publications. For the most part they represent his lifelong study, translation and dissemination of the works of Schelling. He was active on the Notre Dame campus where he presented the paper, “Theological Epistemology in Augustine, Kant and Schelling”, later published in The

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Modern Schoolman, 1977. He also presented his paper, “Schelling: Theologian for the Coming Century”, later published in The New Scholasticism. When Fritz turned 90 in 1984 his whole family was able to attend the birthday celebration. Gertrude was already ill and was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She had a yearlong remission some of which she spent travelling to Virginia to visit Rebecca, to St Barts and Martha’s Vineyard to be with Stefan and me and with Ursula and her husband, Frank Ferro. When she died in 1985, Fritz moved in with Moira and her husband, Charles Geoffrion and then moved with them to Tucson, Arizona where Moira took the position of Chairman of the Art Department of University of Arizona. He stayed busy until almost the very end of his life. His ultimate contribution to the Schelling works is his translation of Schelling’s The Method of University Studies. This work, as yet unpublished, was begun in the 1960’s and exists as typescripts held by the Oregon State University Library Archives among the Fritz Marti Papers, as is the “Schelling Index” on which he continued working throughout his years in South Bend and Tucson. A most intriguing work of Fritz’s last years is his “Schelling: Theologian for the coming century”. I sense that he had achieved the ultimate point in his Shelling scholarship with this publication. He read the paper at a colloquium in 1984 at the University of Notre Dame where he terminated the presentation as follows: While we are always unconditionally challenged by the ideas of justice, goodness, truth and beauty, the challenge is not a natural, objective trait of man. Mythologically it comes upon us by Grace, and we are truly alive only by the Grace of God. As soon as the individual realizes this, then only can it recognize the abyss between itself and God.

Appendix Gertrude’s Story: “House on a Hill”

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Bibliography

SOURCES Fritz Marti Papers: Special Collections and Archives, Oregon State University. Personal letters, papers, notes, photographs, other documents and diaries.

REFERENCES Brinkley, David, Washington Goes to War, Ballantine Books, 1988. Callcott, George H., A History of The University of Maryland, Maryland Historical Society, Garamond/Pridemark Press, 1965. Cole, Jonathan R, The Great American University, Public Affairs/Perseus Books, 2009. Graham, Katherine, Katherine Graham’s Washington, Vintage Books/Random House, 2002. Marti, Fritz, Religion, Reason and Man, St Louis: Warren Green, 1974. ———, Religion and Philosophy, Maryland: University Press of America, 1979. ———, Unpopular Truths, Maryland: University Press of America, 1981. Medicus, Fritz, On Being Human, Fritz Marti translator, New York: Unger, 1973. ———, Lectures on Logic, Fritz Marti Translator, Maryland: University Press of America, 1982. Schelling, Frederich W.J., The Unconditional in Human Knowledge, Fritz Marti Translator, NewYork: Bucknell University Press, 1980.

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