In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (6 page)

A
rriving in the United States was like starting life anew. Although I lacked both the prescience and the language to say “Free at last,” I felt it then and have felt it ever since. Gerald Holton, a historian of science at Harvard University, has pointed out that for many Viennese émigrés of my generation, the solid education we obtained in Vienna, combined with the sense of liberation we experienced on arriving in America, released boundless energy and inspired us to think in new ways. That certainly proved true for me. One of the many gifts I was to receive in this country was a superb liberal arts education in three highly distinctive institutions: the Yeshivah of Flatbush, Erasmus Hall High School, and Harvard College.

My brother and I moved in with my mother’s parents, Hersch and Dora Zimels, who had arrived in Brooklyn in February 1939, two months ahead of us. I spoke no English and felt I had to fit in. I therefore dropped the last letter from my name, Erich, and assumed the current spelling. Ludwig underwent an even more dramatic metamorphosis, to Lewis. My Aunt Paula and Uncle Berman, who had lived in Brooklyn since coming to the United States in the 1920s, enrolled me in a public elementary school, P.S. 217, located in the Flatbush section not far from where we lived. I attended that school for only twelve weeks, but by the time I left for the summer break, I spoke English well enough to make myself understood. That summer I reread Erich Kästner’s
Emil and the Detectives
, one of my childhood favorites, this time in English, an accomplishment that gave me a sense of pride.

I was not very comfortable at P.S. 217. Although many Jewish children attended the school, I was not aware of it. On the contrary, because so many students were blond and blue-eyed, I was convinced they were non-Jews and I was afraid they would in the long term be hostile toward me. I was therefore receptive to the urgings of my grandfather that I attend a Hebrew parochial school. My grandfather was a religious and very scholarly man, although somewhat unworldly. My brother has said that our grandfather was the only man he knew who could speak seven languages but could not make himself understood in any of them. My grandfather and I liked each other a great deal, and he readily convinced me that he could tutor me in Hebrew during the summer so that I might be eligible for a scholarship at the Yeshivah of Flatbush in the autumn. This well-known Hebrew day school offered secular classes in English and religious studies in Hebrew, both on a highly demanding level.

Thanks to my grandfather’s tutelage, I entered the yeshivah in the fall of 1939. By the time I graduated in 1944, I spoke Hebrew almost as well as English. I had read in Hebrew the five books of Moses, the books of Kings, the Prophets, and some of the Talmud. It gave me both pleasure and pride to learn later that Baruch S. Blumberg, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1976, had also benefited from the extraordinary educational experience provided by the Yeshivah of Flatbush.

MY PARENTS LEFT VIENNA IN LATE AUGUST
1939.
BEFORE THEY
left, my father was arrested for a second time and taken to the Vienna Soccer Stadium, where he was interrogated and intimidated by the brown-shirted troops of the Sturm Abteilung, the SA. The fact that he had obtained a visa for the United States and was about to depart led to his release and probably saved his life.

When my parents arrived in New York, my father, who spoke not a word of English, found a job in a toothbrush factory. While the toothbrush had been the emblem of his humiliation in Vienna, in New York it started him on the path to a better life. Even though he was not fond of the work, he threw himself into it with his usual energy and was soon reprimanded by the union steward for producing too many toothbrushes too quickly and thus making the other workers appear slow. My father was undeterred. He loved America. Like many other immigrants, he often referred to it as the
goldene Medina
, the land of gold that promised Jews safety and democracy. In Vienna he had read the novels of Karl May, which mythologized the conquest of the American West and the bravery of American Indians, and my father was in his own way possessed of the frontier spirit.

In time, my parents saved enough money to rent and outfit a modest clothing store. My father and mother worked together and sold simple women’s dresses and aprons, as well as men’s shirts, ties, underwear, and pajamas. We rented the apartment above the store at 411 Church Avenue in Brooklyn. My parents earned enough not only to support us, but after a while to buy the building in which the store and apartment were located. In addition, they were able to help send me to college and medical school.

My parents were so preoccupied with the store—the key to financial stability for them and their children—that they did not share in the cultural life of New York, which Lewis and I were beginning to enjoy. Despite their constant labors, however, they were always optimistic and supportive of us, and they never tried to dictate decisions about our work or play. My father was an obsessively honest person who felt compelled to pay immediately the bills for the merchandise he received from his suppliers, and he often counted the change he gave his customers one more time. He expected Lewis and me to behave similarly with regard to financial matters. But other than a general expectation of reasonable and correct behavior, I never felt any pressure from him to follow one academic track or another. In turn, I never thought him in a position to advise me on those issues, given his limited social and educational experiences. For advice, I typically turned to my mother or, more often, to my brother, my teachers, and most frequently, my friends.

My father worked in his store until the week before he died, at seventy-nine, in 1977. Soon thereafter, my mother sold both the store and the building in which it was located and moved into a more comfortable and somewhat more elegant apartment around the corner, on Ocean Parkway. She died in 1991 at the age of ninety-four.

WHEN I GRADUATED FROM THE YESHIVAH OF FLATBUSH IN
1944, there was no affiliated high school, as there is today, so I went to Erasmus Hall High School, a local public school that was very strong academically. There, I became interested in history, in writing, and in girls. I worked on the school newspaper,
The Dutchman
, and became sports editor. I also played soccer and was one of the captains of the track team (figure 3–1). My co-captain, Ronald Berman, one of my closest friends in high school, was an extraordinary runner who went on to win the half-mile race in the city championship; I placed fifth. Ron later became a Shakespearean scholar and professor of English literature at the University of California, San Diego. He served as the first head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, in the Nixon administration.

At the urging of my history teacher, John Campagna, a Harvard alumnus, I applied to Harvard College. When I first discussed applying to Harvard with my parents, my father (who, like me, was not familiar with the distinctions among various American universities) discouraged me because of the cost of submitting another college application. I had already applied for admission to Brooklyn College, an excellent school that my brother had attended. Upon hearing of my father’s concerns, Mr. Campagna volunteered to cover from his own pocket the fifteen dollars required for my application. I was one of two students (Ron Berman was the other) in our class of about 1,150 to be admitted to Harvard, both of us with scholarships. After receiving the scholarships, Ron and I appreciated the true meaning of Harvard’s alma mater, “Fair Harvard.” Fair Harvard, indeed!

3–1
The winning team at the Pennsylvania Relays, 1948. The Pennsylvania Relays is an annual national event for high school and college track athletes. We won one of the one-mile events for high schools. (Courtesy of Ron Berman.)

Even though I was thrilled by my good fortune and immensely grateful to Mr. Campagna, I was apprehensive about leaving Erasmus Hall, convinced that I would never again feel the sheer joy of social acceptance and academic and athletic achievement that I had experienced there. At the yeshivah, I had been a scholarship student. At Erasmus, I was a scholar-athlete. The difference, for me, was enormous. It was at Erasmus that I first sensed myself emerging from the shadow of my brother, a shadow that I had found so imposing while in school in Vienna. For the first time, I had interests of my own.

At Harvard, I majored in modern European history and literature. This was a selective major that required its students to commit to writing an honors thesis in their senior year. Those accepted had the opportunity, unique to this major, of having tutorials from the beginning of their sophomore year onward, first in small groups and then individually. My honors thesis was on the attitude toward National Socialism of three German writers: Carl Zuckmayer, Hans Carossa, and Ernst Jünger. Each writer represented a different position along a spectrum of intellectual responses. Zuckmayer, a courageous liberal and lifelong critic of National Socialism, left Germany early and went first to Austria and then to the United States. Carossa, a physician-poet, took a neutral position and remained physically in Germany, although his spirit, he claimed, escaped elsewhere. Jünger, a dashing German military officer in the First World War, extolled the spiritual virtues of war and of the warrior and was an intellectual precursor of the Nazis.

I came to the depressing conclusion that many German artists and intellectuals—including such apparently fine minds as Jünger, the great philosopher Martin Heidegger, and the conductor Herbert von Karajan—had succumbed all too eagerly to the nationalistic fervor and racist propaganda of National Socialism. Subsequent historical studies by Fritz Stern and others have found that Hitler did not have widespread popular support in his first year in office. Had intellectuals mobilized effectively and been able to bring along segments of the general population, Hitler’s aspirations for complete control of the government might well have been prevented, or at least severely curtailed.

I began working on my honors thesis during my junior year, at a time when I was thinking of doing graduate work in European intellectual history. However, toward the end of my junior year I met and fell in love with Anna Kris, a student at Radcliffe College who had also emigrated from Vienna. At the time, I was taking two superb seminars with Karl Vietor, one on Goethe, the great German poet, the other on modern German literature. Vietor was one of the most inspired German scholars in the United States as well as an insightful and charismatic teacher, and he encouraged me to continue in German history and literature. He had written two books on Goethe—one on the young man, the other on the mature poet—and a groundbreaking study of Georg Büchner, a relatively unknown dramatist whom Vietor helped rediscover. In Büchner’s brief life, he pioneered realist and expressionist writing in his unfinished play
Woyzeck
, the first drama to portray a relatively inarticulate common person in heroic dimensions. Published as a fragment after Büchner’s death from typhoid fever in 1837 (at the age of twenty-four),
Woyzeck
was later converted into an opera (
Wozzeck
) and set to music by Alban Berg.

Anna took great pleasure in my knowledge of German literature, and in the early days of our friendship we would spend evenings together reading German poetry: Novalis, Rilke, and Stefan George. I was planning to take two further seminars with Vietor in my senior year. But suddenly, at the end of my junior year, he died of cancer. Vietor’s death was a personal loss; it also created a large void in the curriculum I had planned. A few months before Vietor’s death I had met Anna’s parents, Ernst and Marianne Kris, both prominent psychoanalysts from Freud’s circle. The Krises fired my interest in psychoanalysis and changed my ideas about what I might want to do with my now open schedule.

IT IS DIFFICULT TO CAPTURE TODAY THE FASCINATION THAT
psychoanalysis held for young people in the 1950s. Psychoanalysis had developed a theory of mind that gave me my first appreciation of the complexity of human behavior and of the motivations that underlie it. In Vietor’s course on contemporary German literature, I had read Freud’s
Psychopathology of Everyday Life
, as well as works of three other writers concerned with the inner workings of the human mind—Arthur Schnitzler, Franz Kafka, and Thomas Mann. Even by these daunting literary standards Freud’s prose was a joy to read. His German—for which he had received the Goethe Prize in 1930—was simple, beautifully clear, humorous, and unendingly self-referential. The book opened a new world.

The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
contains a series of anecdotes that have entered our culture to such an extent that today they could serve as the script for a Woody Allen movie or a stand-up comic routine. Freud recounts the most ordinary, apparently insignificant events—slips of the tongue, unaccountable accidents, misplacements of objects, misspellings, failures to remember—and uses them to show that the human mind is governed by a precise set of rules, most of which are unconscious. These oversights seem on the surface to be routine errors, little accidents that happen to everyone; they certainly had happened to me. But what Freud made me see was that none of these slips is accidental. Each has a coherent and meaningful relationship to the rest of one’s psychic life. I found it particularly amazing that Freud could have written all this without ever having met my Aunt Minna!