9Z
PARTISAN REVIEW
dilemma, hate or forgiveness. "You have many admirers among our read–
ers," he said, raising his wine glass in a toast, as I wOlldered what in the
world I was doing in this place and at the same time was excited.
We went to Hamburg theaters as arranged by
Dip bit.
We were in–
vited to the university by a professor of English whom I had met {<lUr years
before. He asked me to speak to his seminar in American Literature. One
afternoon his assistant called tor us at our hotel, drove us to the university,
and escorted us to the classroom. The bulletin boards along the corridors,
with their announcements of concerts, lectures, meetings, apartments to rent
or share, looked exactly like the bulletin boards at Yale, where I was then
teaching, only with the English garbled.
The students in the seminar spoke English easi ly and kllew a good deal
about American writing, especiall y modern authors. The conversation was
lively, but I chiefly remember some talk afterward. We went {or coHee with
some of the students, and all of us began talking about teachers, there and in
America. A young woman said that one of her professors in another course
always wore a blue tie. One day a classmate of hers said wryly, "Always
the same damned blue tie," without knowing that the professor had over–
heard. Next day the professor came in wearing the same blue tie, called on
the complaining student
to
recite, and while the student was reading at length,
the professor took off his tie, put it in his right-hand pocket, pulled an identical
tie from his left-hand pocket, tied and untied it and put it in his right-hand
pocket, pulled another identical tie from his left-hand pocket, tied and untied it,
and so on. Ten ties, all blue. The story cheered me , in the li ght oflegends
about German professors.
Lubeck is an hour's train ride h"om Hamburg, and we went up there on
a Sunday
to
see the "Buddenbrooks" house of Thomas Mann. A clean Sun–
day sky, with scrubbed Baltic air. Lubeck is close to Denmark, and many of
the houses, among those that survived the war, look Danish. A medieval old–
people's home, the Heiligen-Geist-Hospital, came through the bombings un–
scarred, an ancient and patient place. The great Marienkirche had been hit.
In one corner of the interior were two giant bells that had fallen from their
tower in an air raid. They had been left lying on the stone floor, which had
cracked under them, and that corner of the church was cut offby an iron
railing. A plaque said that the bells had tolled regularly f()r four hundred
years and that they had been left like this as a perpetual reminder of what
war does.
All through Germany there were ruins that had been lett as memorials.
They appalled me , and they angered me when I thought about causes. In a
strange way they also saddened me, as if the ruins were my loss, too.
The "Buddenbrooks" house was still there , the eighteenth-century
