Tuesday, April 23, 2024 5:46:38 PM
Yes. Is a shame more of that isn't seen -- The American Universities That Took in Scholars from Nazi Europe
Laurel Leff On Academia's Refugees During World War II
By Laurel Leff
December 12, 2019
Back in Vienna in December 1933, Leonore Brecher wrote to Leslie C. Dunn, a Columbia University zoologist with whom she had worked in a Berlin laboratory six years earlier. Dunn had even invited her in 1930 to spend part of her Yarrow fellowship in his Columbia lab working on pigment production with the possibility of permanent employment there. The 40-year-old Dunn was building Columbia’s zoology department into one of the country’s best. Brecher never made it to the States, however, because of a “very unfriendly” Hamburg consul who had denied her a visitor visa. Brecher apparently had suggested to the consul that she might stay in the United States. Instead, she had headed to Kiel.
But just for a year and a half. When the University of Kiel fired Rudolf Hober and shut the lab in which Brecher was working, she turned to Dunn. “On 1 November I had to leave Kiel and to return to Vienna because I had no more to live,” Brecher wrote, noting that she was staying in a room in Vienna’s Institute for Experimental Biology. Its director, Hans Przibram, allowed her to live there and gave her some administrative work so she would not be completely destitute. “I wish very much to go to the United States and continue there research,” Brecher wrote Dunn, “and I beg you, if possible, to help me to a research place in the United States.”
Across the continent, European scholars took up pens and turned to typewriters to compose pleading letters to dispatch to the States. Concerned American academics realized immediately that they had a special obligation and a unique opportunity to help German scholars by facilitating their hiring at US universities. Hiring efforts took place at three levels: through individual faculty members assisting friends and acquaintances, through disciplines organizing to help colleagues in their respective fields, and through national and international organizations dedicated to helping scholars escape. These three levels often interacted. As happened with Columbia zoologist Dunn, individual faculty members would hear about friends or colleagues who had lost jobs, first at German universities and then at Austrian, Czech, Polish, Italian, Danish, Dutch, Belgian, and French ones. American professors would start writing to other academics to discover whether any university was able to hire the displaced scholar.
The efforts of Arthur Compton, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist at the University of Chicago, were typical....
Continued - https://lithub.com/the-american-universities-that-took-in-scholars-from-nazi-europe/
Thanks. This was interesting to me just to there so far. Haven't read much at all on that side of the coin.
Laurel Leff On Academia's Refugees During World War II
By Laurel Leff
December 12, 2019
Back in Vienna in December 1933, Leonore Brecher wrote to Leslie C. Dunn, a Columbia University zoologist with whom she had worked in a Berlin laboratory six years earlier. Dunn had even invited her in 1930 to spend part of her Yarrow fellowship in his Columbia lab working on pigment production with the possibility of permanent employment there. The 40-year-old Dunn was building Columbia’s zoology department into one of the country’s best. Brecher never made it to the States, however, because of a “very unfriendly” Hamburg consul who had denied her a visitor visa. Brecher apparently had suggested to the consul that she might stay in the United States. Instead, she had headed to Kiel.
But just for a year and a half. When the University of Kiel fired Rudolf Hober and shut the lab in which Brecher was working, she turned to Dunn. “On 1 November I had to leave Kiel and to return to Vienna because I had no more to live,” Brecher wrote, noting that she was staying in a room in Vienna’s Institute for Experimental Biology. Its director, Hans Przibram, allowed her to live there and gave her some administrative work so she would not be completely destitute. “I wish very much to go to the United States and continue there research,” Brecher wrote Dunn, “and I beg you, if possible, to help me to a research place in the United States.”
Across the continent, European scholars took up pens and turned to typewriters to compose pleading letters to dispatch to the States. Concerned American academics realized immediately that they had a special obligation and a unique opportunity to help German scholars by facilitating their hiring at US universities. Hiring efforts took place at three levels: through individual faculty members assisting friends and acquaintances, through disciplines organizing to help colleagues in their respective fields, and through national and international organizations dedicated to helping scholars escape. These three levels often interacted. As happened with Columbia zoologist Dunn, individual faculty members would hear about friends or colleagues who had lost jobs, first at German universities and then at Austrian, Czech, Polish, Italian, Danish, Dutch, Belgian, and French ones. American professors would start writing to other academics to discover whether any university was able to hire the displaced scholar.
The efforts of Arthur Compton, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist at the University of Chicago, were typical....
Continued - https://lithub.com/the-american-universities-that-took-in-scholars-from-nazi-europe/
Thanks. This was interesting to me just to there so far. Haven't read much at all on that side of the coin.
It was Plato who said, “He, O men, is the wisest, who like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing”
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