ABSTRACT
I hesitate to describe my first visit to this country as an example of "education abroad." In the early months of 1951, I was a student at the University of Hamburg, and had just begun my doctoral dissertation when the opportunity was offered to me to travel as a mess steward on a German cargo vessel from Antwerp to New York, on to Cuba, and back to Bremerhaven. We carried scrap iron to New York. In the rough seas of the North Atlantic, our 4,500 ton ship seemed as if it had itself been found on a scrap heap to form a part of the infant post-war German merchant navy. Then, there were my books, suspicious books at the times for example, my dissertation on Karl Marx, and this was the McCarthy period. However, nobody suspected anything at Bethlehem Steel's pier in Hoboken. New York was, at the time, a slow port, without cranes; the mess steward had a week to himself. After the first evening, which I spent with my fellow sailors in Yorkville, in places called Mozart Hall or Rheingold Bar, I ventured further afield. I went to Columbia University, where the officer responsible for foreign students, a woman who was training to be a teacher, took me and three others in a ramshackle car to her hometown in upstate New York. She stopped at the petrol station, and the owner invited one of us to his home; she stopped at the general store, and off went another one of us. I spent two memorable days in the home of a local craftsman. He took me to church, where I was greeted as a friend from far away, never mind my not being a member. He took me to neighbors who asked many questions and listened intently to what I had to tell.
