2. This seems to have been the last group deportation. On February 10, 1943, fifty-three persons were sent to Theresienstadt. They had been forced to continue

assemble in the former Rosenthal Clinic, which by then was called an old-age home. Afterwards persons from so-called mixed marriages were individually arrested under various pretexts and deported. Almost all perished. See Erckhardt Franz and Heinrich Pingel-Rollmann, "Hakenkreuz und Judenstern," in Juden also Darmstädter Bürger, ed. E. Franz (Darmstadt: Roether, 1984), pp. 185f. [BACK]

3. In the summer of 1942, when the Nazi fortunes seemed to stand highest, a group of gold pheasants, as uniformed Nazi leaders were popularly called, inspected us and explained that the Führer had decided to turn us into military peasants ( Wehrbauern ) along the Urals so that we could defend Western civilization against the Asiatic hordes. Expecting the right answer, one functionary went down the line asking each of us for what we would volunteer. None of my peers, who were only two or three years away from finishing their eight-year schooling and beginning their apprenticeship, budged. They all insisted that they would become metal workers, mechanics, electricians, and so forth. I knew that I would spend many more years in school. I wanted to become an opera stage designer--I had rebuilt many stage designs I had seen in the theater--but I was more cowardly than my peers. So I answered that I did not know. After being harangued for being "dirty pigs," we were given two hours of penalty drill until our clothes were covered with dirt and soaked and we looked like the animals we were alleged to be. [BACK]

4. Late in 1943 the Nazis decided to evacuate my school from Darmstadt and move us deep into Czechoslovakia, into the forests of the Beskids. The evacuation plan made us suspect that they were concerned less about nighttime attacks and direct hits on school buildings during the daytime than about isolating our school from our families and exposing us to more indoctrination. This threat led to the only semiorganized resistance during the war--families trying to protect their own. Although teachers warned my father that he was risking arrest, he called the Nazis' bluff by proving that contrary to their assertions the school could be moved to a nearby small town and the pupils boarded in private homes in the surrounding villages. His many connections from the pre-Nazi period with the rural hinterland served him well. After unsuccessfully sending youth leaders to our school and after an unprecedented parents' meeting with the highest Nazi official in town, the authorities yielded. This victory over the Nazis, whose curious legalism my father manipulated time and again, probably saved our school from being captured by the Russian army. [BACK]

5. See "A Quiet Trip All Round: Darmstadt," chap. 13 in Max Hastings, Bomber Command (New York: Dial Press, 1979), pp. 303-26; "A Detailed Study of the Effects of Area Bombing on Darmstadt, Germany," The United States Strategic Bombing Survey 37 (January 1947); Klaus Schmidt, Die Brandnacht (Darmstadt: Reba, 1964); David J. Irving, Und Deutschlands Städte starben nicht (Zurich: Schweizer Druck- und Verlaghaus, 1964), pp. 266-78. [BACK]

6. To this day I am studying the pros and cons of what many military experts still believe to have been an unimaginative and overly cautious strategy. See Russel F. Weighley, Eisenhower's Lieutenants: The Campaign of France and Germany, 1944-1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981). break [BACK]

7. On the enormous reconstruction problems of Darmstadt, see the August 1946 report by an American journalist, "Ein Amerikaner in Darmstadt," Heute 3 (1945): 36-43. ( Heute, modelled after Life, was the first magazine in the American occupation zone; it was published by the Information Control Division of the United States Army.) I described a night walk through the ruins of Darmstadt in an unpublished composition dated November 13, 1946, "After Sundown: A Walk Through the City." [BACK]

8. The first German author to make a powerful impression on me was Heinrich Heine, for whom I had apparently been too young during the war. My father had kept his works in a closed bookcase, which he had made to order during the Nazi regime to hide his library from curious eyes. As early as 1946 (or 1947) I heard the first of the formerly outlawed modern music when the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music were organized to train musicians and composers; the courses soon became an international institution, for decades attracting many American musicians. The first abstract paintings I beheld were done by an American officer and shown in a half-ruined building. In 1947 I saw my first large art exhibition: riches from the Berlin Kaiser Friedrich Museum, which the American army had recovered from Thuringian salt mines and taken along with it after abandoning the area to Soviet control. The first American novel I read, still in translation, was Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, which the Nazis had banned after 1933 (together with the works of Dos Passos and Upton Sinclair). It was printed on newsprint and looked like a newspaper. My first American movie was Thirty Seconds over Tokyo . In one sitting I devoured my first American play: my father brought home overnight a typewritten translated script of Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, which was being rehearsed for the reopening of the theater in Darmstadt. [BACK]

9. Together with my father's Greek and Latin dictionaries, these history books were the only volumes of our family library that survived the war since I had taken them into the countryside. I still consult the dictionaries and find the textbooks remarkably balanced. See Friedreich Neubauer and Ferdinand Rösiger, Lehrbuch der Geschichte für die höheren Lehranstalten in Südwestdeutschland, vols. 4 and 5 (Halle: Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses, 1908). [BACK]

10. In 1981, when we met for our thirtieth anniversary, the school opened its files. Ours were the only records saved because we were considered the most promising and successful group of the postwar period, together with the class just below us, to which my future Weber coeditor Claus Wittich belonged. It must have had to do with being at just the right impressionable age to draw maximum benefit from a bad war experience and the difficult postwar years, which nonetheless provided a liberating contrast. Eight of us ended up as professors, in archaeology, architecture, Catholic theology, electrical engineering, German literature, law, Romance literature, and sociology. The others are today corporate executives, judges, other high-ranking civil servants, journalists, physicians, engineers, and classics teachers. One became a Catholic priest--after the theologian our other convert in class--and one a member of Helmut Schmidt's federal cabinet in the 1970s. My closest friend, the one poet among us, dropped out. When the school files were opened for us, we discovered the predictions our teachers had made, including their evaluation of our "character," a category continue

later dropped in the course of the "democratization" that undermined our school in the 1960s. By and large our teachers had been accurate. [BACK]

11. Out of a mountain of disparate materials and reports Friedrich Pollock finally pulled together the study under the title Gruppenexperiment (Frankfurt: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1955). [BACK]

12. See the autobiographical statement "Wie ich zur Soziologie kam und wo ich bin: Ein Gespräch mit Kurt H. Wolff, aufgezeichnet von Nico Stehr," in Soziologie in Deutschland und Österreich, 1918-1945 , ed. M. Rainer Lepsius (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1981), pp. 324-46. [BACK]

13. Shortly after my arrival in the United States I wrote in a research paper (still in German): "For young people like me the American turnabout in 1950 to rearm Germany was a bitter disappointment. The United States seemed to abandon the moral foundation on which it had fought the war and which had given it the moral justification for reconstructing Germany. My newly developed realism is not cynicism but has helped me to see matters in a less unrealistic, 'idealist' light" (my translation). [BACK]

14. See Richard Christie and Marie Jahoda, Studies in the Scope and Method of "The Authoritarian Personality" (New York: Free Press, 1954); it includes the well-known methodological demolition by Herbert Hyman and Paul Sheatsley, and Edward Shils's vigorous political critique. [BACK]

15. Guenther Roth, The Social Democrats in Imperial Germany: A Study in Working-Class Isolation and National Integration (Totowa, N.J.: Bedminster Press, 1963; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1979), p. 325. Bendix agreed with Paul Lazarsfeld on the desirability of autobiographical statements for both author and profession. If the old German custom of appending a brief biography to the dissertation could be expanded to include some information about formative experiences and major changes of outlook, the cumulative evidence might be of service to sociologists of knowledge. Authors too might benefit from facing the question of the consistency and continuity of their own lives and work. [BACK]

16. See Reinhard Bendix, Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait (New York: Doubleday, 1960; reprint, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977); Guenther Roth and Reinhard Bendix, "Max Weber's Einfluss auf die amerikanische Soziologie, Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie 11 (1959): 38-53. [BACK]

17. To be sure, I had learned enough from saturation bombing to understand that dropping more tonnage on the Vietnamese countryside than was delivered during all of World War II made no sense. I had also grown wary of American moralism, but I still did not dispute the right of the United States to try to stop communist expansion in the world--I had not only been liberated from Nazism but also saved from Soviet domination. break [BACK]