ABSTRACT
O n the way to study mathematics in Göttingen, I spent six weeks in Berlin, in a program at the Humboldt Universität in Berlin designed to acculturate new students from abroad. I
attended classes at the university building on Unter den Linden, stayed with a German family, had lunch in cafes and tried generally to learn more about the country. I was already aware of pessimistic books such as the Untergang des Abendlandes by Oswald Spengler, and I found out about current politics from a long pamphlet presenting the 27 political parties of Germany-the number 27 did shock me. But the most decisive cultural influence was the German poet Bertold Brecht. I saw his play Die drei Groschen Oper and was at once deeply impressed by the level of disillusion, as in the verse which described a passing parade of people, “Denn die einen sind im Dunkeln und die andern sind im Licht und man siehet die im Lichte,die im Dunkeln sieht man nicht.”1 This awareness of suffering and total loss of illusions was new to me. I heard tales of the horrors of the German inflation; I contemplated the complex political situation of all those parties with little understanding. It was wholly unlike the two-party system of the United States. In Chicago I had searched in vain for communists but here in Berlin I could find them in plain sight although I did not anticipate in 1931 what would later develop beyond street battles between communists and Nazi thugs. (The Horst Wessel song has a verse “Comrades who were shot by the Red Front or the reaction, march now in spirit in our ranks.”)
Once settled in Göttingen, I did learn more of student life; in particular I learned about the “color fraternities.” The color fraternities (farbentragende) had a strong nationalistic bent and believed in the importance of personal honor, in a way that seemed almost comical, and certainly was very elitist. They trained their members in dueling with broadswords. Dueling was officially illegal, but the results (in bandaged faces) were evident each Sunday morning. German professors, most prominently in fields of law and medicine (but rarely of mathematics), who sported dueling scars were much admired by many German ladies. I once even came close to fighting in a duel myself. In the winter of 1933, as I was walking to my room, I came across two kids playing with snowballs; I joined in. Presently one of the kids fired a snowball at a passing student (one with fraternity colors). The snowball did not hit, but the student stormed back, enraged, to beat up the kid. Acting American, I intervened. The student then turned on me, as one perhaps worthy of his attention. He said, “Are you a student?” I answered, “Yes.” He thereupon asked for my card (it was common to carry cards, similar to business cards). I fumbled in my pockets, only to declare that I did not have a card with me, although I did have such a card in my room. The student then announced emphatically, “We do not concern ourselves with such people,” and turned on his heel. In this way I seemed to have lost my honor (in the German sense). But I did avoid a duel, in which my lack of practice with the broadsword would have been very troublesome. The student was true to his pronouncement; whenever he and I passed each other in Lotze Street-and that happened quite regularly-he held his eyes up in the air. Later I discovered that the famous mathematician George Polya was once banished from Göttingen for declining a challenge to a duel.
