Read the Review. On June 27, , we crossed the Rhine Bridge from Strasbourg to Kehl, and I was subjected to the most disconcerting anti-Semitic display I had endured since I left Germany twenty-two years earlier.
After a delightful few weeks touring in France, my wife, Ruth, and I were on our way to Berlin. Touring through France had been an unmitigated delight. We moved westward at a stately pace through the chateau country all the way to Angers, with its magnificent tapestries, eating and drinking our way across the region.
Then we turned south to take in cities like Bordeaux, getting slightly drunk at a degustation at Chateau d'Yquem on the sweet local dessert wine, sleeping in double beds guarded by crucifixes overhead. In contrast, our prospects for a German stay seemed far from inviting. The Free University, its very name a calculated provocation to its East Berlin ancestor, was an institution born or, rather, assembled faculty by faculty, department by department, not long after the war.
From on, academics from the old University of Berlin began to set up new headquarters in idyllic Dahlem. The old university was renamed Humboldt University by East Germany's Stalinist masters to exploit the great prestige enjoyed by Wilhelm von Humboldt, the humanist who more than anyone had been responsible for the founding of the university in and who, no doubt, would have been among the first to be arrested in the communist regime.
Dahlem, a district of broad avenues and once magnificent villas, had been spared the worst of Allied bombings, but like all of Berlin it showed the blemishes left by the war. Its avenues were still largely intact, but the villas had been turned into discreet boarding houses and small hotels. This had been a Berlin out of my family's reach, but its famous Grunewald, a sizable, carefully cultivated forest, was familiar to me: as a boy, I had ridden my bicycle in its designated paths.
