Schriften der Universitätsbibliothek Freiburg im Breisgau

11

Herausgegeben von Bärbel Schubel

2 Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar Felix Grayeff

Migrant Scholar

An Autobiography

Second edition

Edited by Eleonore Engelhardt and Albert Raffelt

Freiburg : Universitätsbibliothek, 2003

4 Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar

Printed edition: © Marianne Grayeff, London, 1986 © Universitätsbibliothek Freiburg i. Br., 1986 ISSN 0179-8383 Electronic edition: URL: http://www.freidok.uni-freiburg.de/volltexte/1037/ © Universitätsbibliothek Freiburg i. Br., 2003 Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar 5

CONTENTS

1. Early Education: Home and School (1906-1924) 7 2. The First World War and Its Consequences in a General Sense and for Ourselves (1914-1924) 18 3. Undergraduate Years (1924-1930) 21 4. Search for Work During the Great Depression (1930-1932) 29 5. The End of the Weimar Republic, Nazism and Emigration (1933-1937) 34 6. A Year in Australia (1938) 38 7. Lecturing in New Zealand (1939-1952) 41 8. Change of Outlook (Intellectual Development) 45 Prima Philosophia 52 Epilogue (1953 seqq.) 53 * Appendix: The Meaning of the Geisteswissenschaften 57

* Afterword to the printed edition – Nachwort zur Buchausgabe 1986 65 Afterword to the electronic edition – Zur digitalen Ausgabe 2003 66 Bibliography Felix Grayeff – Bibliographie der Arbeiten von Felix Grayeff 67

ILLUSTRATIONS

Felix Grayeff 2 Manuscript 24 6 Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar 7

Chapter 1

EARLY EDUCATION: HOME AND SCHOOL

Königsberg, the capital of East Prussia, was a thriving city when I was born there in 1906. It was famous throughout Germany for its castle in which the first King of Prussia, Friedrich I, had been crowned, and after him Wilhelm I, who was to become the first Emperor of re-united Germany. It was equally famous as the birthplace of Immanuel Kant, who had spent his entire life in Königsberg and written his three great Critiques there. Moreover, its University, founded in the earlier part of the sixteenth century, was well-known and in particular its Medical Faculty was considered to be outstanding. Generally, Königsberg enjoyed high cultural standards and an intense intellectual life. It had its own orchestra, and celebrated conductors as well as soloists regularly came to the city where they played to large, enthusiastic audiences. Königsberg could also boast of three theatres, of which the oldest, the municipal theatre, was principally though not exclusively Königsberg’s Opera House. Of the two other theatres one, recently founded and called the ‘New Playhouse’ was meant to introduce the Königsberg public to the modern authors of the day – Ibsen and Gerhart Hauptmann, Wedekind, Shaw and others. The third of these theatres was devoted to operetta. Königsberg also had three daily papers, one of which was long established and had already been published in the time of Kant, who read it regularly, the Hartungsche Zeitung, known throughout Germany for its liberal views as well as for its excellent comment on all cultural aspects of German life. Who could possibly have foreseen in those days that only forty years later the entire population of Königsberg would be expelled and the very name Königsberg extinguished, to be replaced by a Soviet name, Kaliningrad. Around 1900, however, Königsberg flourished, commercially and financially, because of its proximity to Russia. It was in the port of Königsberg that each year the corn newly harvested in Russia and bought from its Russian producers, the great landowners, arrived, and in turn was sold to all parts of Germany and indeed Europe. Silos had been erected along the banks of the river Pregel, Königsberg’s waterway, and an impressive Corn Exchange built in the middle of the city proper served the essential purposes of handling, that is, purchasing and selling the Russian corn. The total population of Königsberg numbered 200.000 to 250.000 and its Jewish community approximately 3.000. Of these, not a few were first or second generation immigrants, mainly from Lithuania and the Ukraine. On the other hand, some of the Jewish families of Königsberg had roots going back several centuries. My maternal grandfather, who had migrated to Königsberg with his family around 1875 was a cornbroker at the Corn Exchange; my father who had come to Königsberg with his parents as a teenager was an importer and seller of corn. He met my mother, then a girl of thirteen, at my grandfather’s, with whom he had close business contacts; he was my mother’s senior by ten years. I have been told that he fell in love with her almost at first sight, and after a courtship lasting eleven years, he and my mother were married in Königsberg on January 10th, 1906. 8 Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar

My grandparents were observant Jews as was my father, but my mother, who was born in Königsberg, was less religiously inclined. She did not like to be bound by old customs and rites and thought of herself as German – ‘a German citizen of the Jewish faith’. I believe that neither my grandparents nor my mother thought much of Zionism – although a large photograph of Herzl hung in my grandparents’ drawing room –; the former because they were orthodox to the extent of waiting for the Messiah to lead all Jews back to Jerusalem; my mother, for the reason already mentioned. About my father’s attitude I know nothing because he died too early to tell me of his views. I was the elder of my parents’ two children. My sister was born three years and three months after me. She was called Ellen Cassia. Her first name was my mother’s choice; I believe it was Ellen Terry my mother had in mind. Cassia was derived from the name of my paternal grandmother who had died shortly before my sister was born. My sister has always meant a great deal to me and I will have occasion to speak of her in later parts of this book. One of my earliest recollections is of the Kaiser’s state entry into Königsberg in 1910, when I was four. As it happened, the imperial procession passed through the street where we lived, in a second storey flat, not far from the city’s main railway station. On the great day every one of our windows looking out on this street was packed with our relatives and friends, who had come to see the Kaiser. I, of course, being the son of the family, was given a place right by the window. I still vividly remember the imperial cavalcade, with hussars, ulans, cuirassiers and dragoons as outriders, followed by important personages on horseback and in coaches. Then came the imperial coach drawn by eight white horses. I remember the thunderous cheers as the Kaiser, riding in his state coach with the Empress by his side, was passing. He was followed by more members of his suite again in coaches and on horseback and finally by further detachments of cavalry. Incidentally, it was during this visit to Königsberg that Wilhelm made one of his very silly speeches. An election during the summer had gone against him and soon afterwards, the harvest in Silesia turned out to be poor. Wilhelm solemnly proclaimed in Königsberg on this occasion that the poor harvest was God’s punishment for voting against him. – Two things were explained to me. First, that in contrast to the Russian Tsar, who could not move freely amongst his own subjects because of his constant fear of assassination, the Kaiser was so popular and beloved by his people that not even any special police supervision was needed when he rode in public amidst large crowds; and secondly, that the Kaiser was the only gentleman in Germany who sat on the right of his lady, the Empress, whereas in the case of everybody else it was the lady who sat or walked on the right. Well, I was so impressed and stirred up that for days or weeks afterwards my favourite game was ‘Kaiser’s entry’ – for which I created a whole cavalcade in my nursery, with chairs for coaches, tables for horses, men on horseback, cavalry, outriders and so on. Presumably, I myself was the Kaiser, riding in my rocking chair. Incidentally, the word ‘Kaiser’ in those days was used much in the same sense as the prefix ‘super’ is to-day. The best lollies were known as Kaiser-lollies and my mother called me her ‘Kaiser-pet’. My second recollection is a sad one, of my father, fatally ill with cancer of the throat, sitting in his dressing gown in my nursery on my fifth birthday, and watching me play with a train-set he had given me. I somehow felt his deep distress. He knew that death was coming to him, inexorably. Nine days later he died in Wiesbaden where he and my Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar 9 mother stopped on their way to Italy, a journey which the doctors had prescribed for him. He was only forty-one. I was five. Of course, I did not grasp then what his loss must mean to me, but when I grew a little older and began to understand, my father, who had generally been held in high regard, (he had made a great success of his business and been wealthy, almost rich) became, as it were, a legend to me. I often thought of him, and I hoped or dreamt that he might come back. In a sense, I believe that nothing in my life ever quite made up for the loss of my father when I was five. So we had become a one-parent-family. My mother, then thirty-one-years old, was competent in every sense, except as regards matters of business, for which she had neither inclination nor had ever been trained. She was the gentlest mother one could think of. She spoiled me and my sister and for this reason was often criticised by relatives and friends. She was well-off: my father’s business was kept going (till the outbreak of the war in 1914); it was directed by two relatives, an uncle of mine on my mother’s side and a distant cousin on my father’s. Besides she had, or rather we children had, some capital left to us by my father, of which my mother enjoyed the fructus usus, i.e. the interest. After my father’s death she decided to move from our city flat to buy a house (called Villa in German) in a fashionable new suburb with many parks and tree- lined streets (Die Hufen, Amalienau) and there we spent our childhood, from 1911 (the year of my father’s death) till 1922, when the notorious German inflation of the twenties was rising to its climax. We children enjoyed the garden, which was of medium size, partly in front and partly at the back of the house. It contained many flowering shrubs and trees, rose and carnation beds and a tiny vegetable plot. My mother made her house a centre of social life, with leading theatre personalities as its stars. Leopold Jessner, his successor Rosenhayn were her guests as well as actors, actresses, journalists, writers (Ludwig Marcuse was one of them), apart from my mother’s close women friends. My mother’s influence on me was great: she introduced me to Schiller early and took me to a performance of ‘Wilhelm Tell’, my first theatre experience (apart from Christmas pantomimes) when I was nine. On the other hand, since my mother went out a great deal and sometimes travelled, we were often left to be cared for by nannies. Most of them were alright but some (or all?) were sometimes inclined to take the easy way out, especially as regards our food; they gave us what we wanted, and not what was good for us. I remember, however, a special case. When I was eleven and we no longer had a regular nanny, my mother went on a short Whitsun holiday with a former schoolfriend of hers, Frau O.; Frau O.’s daughter, a girl of sixteen, was to stay with us, but it was not quite clear whether merely as a playmate or a playmate-nanny. In any case, she felt responsible for my sister and myself, and one evening at bedtime when I refused to go to bed and it became later and later, there was a struggle, and since she was five years my senior and a strong girl at that she soon got the better of me; and then, as I remained obstinate and she wanted me to lie down for the night at last, she decided to punish me. Curiously enough, I did not like her less for that but rather better, and for years to come, just as our mothers remained close friends, so did we, playing draughts, Chinese chequers or card games with each other. And later when we were a little older, we would read plays or have light-hearted chats together, about mutual friends or the theatre and its actors and actresses. At six I was sent to school and unlike many other boys spent my entire school years at one school, from Nona to Oberprima; from Preparatory School to the Upper Sixth, 10 Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar from my sixth to my eighteenth year. The school I was sent to was called the Königliche Hufengymnasium. Of the various grammar schools it was the nearest to us. Its name was derived from the new suburb Die Hufen where we lived (I don’t know the origin of that name). My school was different from the majority of the Gymnasia in that the syllabus was drawn up according to the so-called Frankfurter Programm, which meant that French was given the place of Latin as the first foreign language. At twelve (Untertertia, lower third) Latin was intensively taught (ten hours per week) and in the lower second (Untersekunda) Greek was taught ten hours per week. There was a choice at this stage: boys could elect to join the natural science division and concentrate on Physics, Mathematics and Chemistry instead of joining the Classics division to learn Greek. For me, this Frankfurter Programm worked successfully enough. I read (and still read) French reasonably well, finding this language familiar, and yet learned Latin and Greek to the same standard as those who started in the old tradition with Latin, i.e. went through the whole school, lower and upper, with the two classical languages prominent throughout, but never learned much French. Moreover, from the upper fifth, Obersekunda, at the age of fifteen, we were taught English in two lessons per week which however were not sufficient for us to make much progress. The Direktor, Headmaster, Brettschneider by name, was a successful administrator of the school. His own subject was History. He had written textbooks which were prescribed for the boys of his and several other schools. His political views were liberal and on account of this he never received the coveted title of Geheimrat. He was very kind to me. My mother knew him well and occasionally met him in the homes of mutual friends. My chief gain from my time at school, I might say, (apart from the many stimuli I received through the teachers of history, German poetry etc.) was my appreciation of precision in scholarly work, acribia, Akribie. This came to me through my Latin lessons, first in the lower third under Dr. Peschties (still alive in 1975, eighty five years old), later under Professor Seliger, and it was he to whom I really owe Akribie. He instilled in me what later, when I was a teacher of languages myself, I used to call the ‘horror of mistakes’. He seemed to collapse or faint before our very eyes whenever a pupil made such an error as joining a masculine adjective to a feminine noun or a singular predicate to a plural subject. Still, we were not plagued with perpetual examinations nor the constant fear of them. Of course, we had to take minor tests during each term but at the end of the year we were judged on the whole year’s performance. There was only one examination for us, at the very end of our school career, the university entrance examination (Abiturium), and even that examination was almost a formality because if a student had done well throughout his years at school but handed in poor examination papers on this occasion, he was normally allowed to pass on the basis of his former satisfactory record. Prussian education was well-considered, well-organised and succesful. I know that the word ‘Prussian’ is now almost a term of condemnation, equating Prussia with militarism, aggressiveness etc. But there was another side to Prussia: from 1810 at least, although anticipated under Friedrich II in the eighteenth century, Prussia was culturally pre-eminent within Germany beside Weimar and this is especially true of Berlin. From the second romantic period, Berlin was the acknowledged centre of literature, the theatre, music (as at an earlier time Vienna had been), and also for nearly all branches Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar 11 of study – historical, literary etc. Only for philosophy Heidelberg and later Marburg and Freiburg were superior to Berlin and in mathematics Göttingen. Indeed, for a short period, from the 1880’s to the late 1920’s Berlin could have almost been called the cultural capital of the world. Even the cinema had its first world centre there. So much in the defence of the other side of Prussia. But returning to my schooling: retrospectively I realise that it had its weak points too: e.g. we were never encouraged to visit the Königsberg Museum, where inter alia manuscripts by Kant were kept, or the old university where Kant had taught or to see the Napoleonic battlefields of Preussisch-Eylau and Friedland, so near to the city. We knew the exact dates of those battles, and the battle lines were chalked on the blackboard for us by our teacher but we were never taken to the actual sites. Any such excursions, if organised or even encouraged by the School, were regarded as most unwelcome interruptions of the formal lessons, which were considered almost as the only essential part of education. And so, I never saw any of those memorable sights or unique exhibits – a fact which I now deeply deplore. And, of course, we were also ‘indoctrinated’, especially during the years of the war. We were told of an essential difference, that between civilisation, a characteristic of Germany’s enemies, and especially France and Britain, and German Kultur. Civilisation, we were told, consisted in technical achievement, the flippancy of bons mots, brilliant apercus, superficiality, lack of moral fibre and above all lack of reverence (Ehrfurcht), owed to that which was truly great. Kultur on the other hand was German. Its main features were the re-experiencing of all that was deepest in feeling and thought. Knowledge of as many as possible of the manifestations of the Spirit (Verwirklichungen des Geistes) throughout history, reverence rendered to everything that was worth revering – in art, poetry, music and all other fields of culture. Kant was said to be the greatest philosopher, Goethe – perhaps after Shakespeare – the greatest poet of all time; and Faust was stated by some professors to be ‘the greatest work of the greatest poet of the greatest nation’. The German language, admitted to be inferior in sound to Italian and French, was yet considered to be the most expressive, most flexible and potentially richest of all spoken languages, second only to ancient Greek. Kant’s kategorischer Imperativ together with his emphasis on duty were the guiding lights of our moral education. Always to speak the truth whatever the consequences might be, was one of the principal virtues instilled in us. ‘Laß nie die Lüge deinen Mund entweihen’ (‘Let never a lie desecrate your lips’) – this is a line we had to learn by heart. And so, we were outspoken and sometimes blunt and rude. ‘Im Deutschen lügt man, wenn man höflich ist’ (Goethe, Faust II). In sharp contrast to our moral education, the teaching of history was clearly based on Macchiavellism. Bismarck was great, and so was Friedrich II of Prussia because they so successfully outmanoeuvred their opponent, Germany’s enemies, by cunning. The gulf between what was thought good in governments on the one side (not only German, because Richelieu, the elder Pitt and other foreign statesmen were also admired for their shrewdness and their unrestrained use of the means of power), and private behaviour on the other was immense. ‘Knowledge’ was based on a sort of encyclopaedic study of all details ‘relevant’ to a subject. More importantly, this completeness was wrongly equated with Sachlichkeit, impartiality, and the fallacy contained in this equation was never obvious either to my teachers at school or to myself for a long, long time – indeed not until I lived in New 12 Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar

Zealand. The crimes committed by the European nations against African and other colonial races during the nineteenth century were never revealed to us. We were not told of the ruthless way with which the Red Indians of America, the Bushmen of Africa, the Aborigines of Australia had been exterminated; we only heard of the glories of European domination, and especially German. We were all ‘patriots’, and that meant the Kaiser’s devotees. In our family the most ardent patriot was one of my mother’s brothers, my uncle David. I remember that a year or two before war broke out he asked me – a boy of six or seven – would I, if the Kaiser was threatened and I was near him, place myself in front of the Kaiser to save him? I do not know what I replied, probably that I would, because I felt that this was the answer he wanted to hear, but my mother who was present loudly deplored both her brother’s question and my reply. Still, my uncle went on to declare enthusiastically that he would not hesitate for a moment to save the Kaiser by sacrificing his own life. In 1915 this uncle of mine – the same who acted as a joint director of our business after my father’s death – volunteered for active service on the first day of the war, altough he was then already thirty-five-years old, and was killed in action exactly a year later, on August 1st, 1915. When the First World War broke out it seemed that there was only one cause for it: patriotism. The Germans believed that their existence was threatened, France feared German domination over herself and all Europe; England and Russia felt threatened by Germany’s military and economic might. But perhaps there were some other reasons causing that war: (1) the fear of revolution which haunted the monarchs of all countries, who wished to divert their subjects’ attention from the domestic suppression imposed on them, especially in Russia; (2) in the opinion of many people the world was over- populated and so, the emperors and kings as they contemplated the possibility of war and the bloodshed to which it would lead expected that most of the war’s victims would be the very people who, being oppressed, were inclined to join those revolutionary movements. But the mercilessness of the monarchs rebounded on their own positions and lives: by unleashing the Great War they brought about the very revolutions which they wanted to prevent and by which they were all swept away. And therefore, the statesmen of the present if they consider involving their countries in war are restrained by their realisation that, whatever else may happen, they themselves would lose their prestige, their posts, and perhaps their lives. In Germany after 1918, the ‘religion’ of patriotism was once again whipped up to an unbelievable degree. One only had to read such almost incredible statements by men like Wilamowitz, R. Eucken, and many others, who said that they would never again be happy in their private lives after Germany had lost the war and its Kaiser, to realise how fervent – or shall we say hysterical? – a creed patriotism was in post-war Germany, especially in comparison with the quite different mood which has prevailed in Germany after the Second World War. The mood engendered and zealously fostered after 1918 led to what it could only lead: the overthrow of democracy in Germany, Hitlerism and the Second World War, which in turn resulted in the destruction of the German Empire so recently founded by Bismarck. Nevertheless, most Germans now, enjoying a prosperity made possible for them by victors far wiser then those of 1914-18, have become reconciled to the great losses of territory they have suffered, and to a divided Germany. Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar 13

My reading was as diversified and oddly contradictory as it could be. On the one hand, I read ‘penny-dreadfuls’ – three different series of them: detective thrillers, Red- Indian tales and stories of a wanton young girl who played innocent, funny tricks on everybody around her. New issues of these short story series appeared once a week and I bought and read them avidly, with my mother approving, or at least not forbidding my doing so – in spite of dire warnings, especially from a schoolmaster friend, who gravely predicted that this kind of reading would spoil me for ever for the enjoyment of great and noble literature. My mother had a strong influence on me, as I have said before. I admired her because she was witty and intelligent and her repartees, if sometimes sarcastic and, in accordance with German habits, occasionally even offensive, were greatly appreciated by her friends. She was much interested in literature and the theatre, and she introduced me to German classical poetry and its writers – Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, Heine and others. I have remained an admirer of these poets and playwrights till today, including Schiller, however critical I might now be of Schiller’s occasionally melodramatic scenes, indeed, almost up to the present, my German style has been modelled on Schiller’s, especially in his ‘messengers’ reports’, e.g. in the Jungfrau von Orleans (on Joan’s first appearance on the battlefield) or in Wilhelm Tell (on the Emperor Albert’s assassination). But it was Shakespeare who fascinated me more than any other writer. I read his plays again and again in Schlegel-Tieck’s German translation and especially the tragedies and histories. As for Goethe, of course, I read his works and loved them – Werther, the early and the Divan poems and parts of Faust, but, fortunately, I never tried to model my style on Goethe’s, except his lyrics, or to emulate Werther or Faust, whereas unfortunately, for years or even decades to come I attempted to write plays like Schiller’s or Shakespeare’s spending quite disproportionate periods of my time on those attempts, which never led anywhere or bore fruit in the accepted sense of the word. As a boy of twelve, I wrote a five act tragedy in blank verse with ancient Egypt at its background. This play was based on a popular book by P. O. Höcker, Der Wüstenprinz and earned me much praise. It was typed with my mother’s approval and read by her friends and other adults who even predicted a great future for me as a playwright. Unfortunately, the praise I received led me in a wrong direction. It gave me an exaggerated belief in my talent as a playwright, which proved a quite serious psychological handicap for me, preventing me from devoting myself to more useful studies and causing me quite serious depressions more than once, at times when the plays I had finished were not appreciated or, worse still, when I felt that I was unable to write or finish a play as I had planned. While 1 wholeheartedly admired classical plays I could not, however hard I tried, bring myself fully to appreciate contemporary or modern plays, e.g. Ibsen or G. Hauptmann. Still less did I respond to the expressionists, E. Toller, Barlach and others. Again and again I tried to like them but never succeeded. Incidentally, – as I may add at this point – two or three of the great publishing firms used to produce ‘best-sellers’ of gigantic numerical proportions, each year, always in autumn and always in time for Christmas. I remember in particular an anthology of expressionist poetry Menschheitsdämmerung. At some other time, the great best-seller was Thomas Mann’s Zauberberg, then the Forsyte Saga [by John Galsworthy] in a German translation. Stefan George’s poems too, which appeared in unusually designed slim volumes with 14 Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar even the spelling of his verse made to look different from normal spelling, was a best seller. The all time bestseller was Remarque’s Im Westen nichts Neues. Each time such a ‘best-seller’ appeared everybody, including my mother,bought a copy for ourselves and several more to give away as presents. As far as I know this publishing technique of artificially (and succesfully!) creating best-best-sellers is still being practised in Germany. Der geschenkte Gaul [by Hildegard Knef] sold a million copies or so, and so did Pasternak’s Dr. Schiwago before it, and then Solzhenizin’s stories, for which their author like Pasternak received the Nobel prize, after it. Referring, however, to the twenties or pre-second-world-war years and my own reading: while I did not enjoy the expressionists, I avidly read the ‘classical’ great novels, famous then and now: Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which I have never ceased to love. Dostoyevski’s, Stendhal’s, Thackeray’s, Thomas Mann’s works and those of others. Either influenced by Goethe’s poems to Friederike and Lilli, or by Heine’s, or may be by natural inclination, I again and again believed myself to be ‘in love’, from the age of fourteen or even twelve, and each time this happened, I wrote short ‘lyrical’ poems dedicating them to the objects of my admiration. One or two of those little childhood poems were quite touching. So my ‘loves’ meant something to me, and the thought of one in particular remained with me for a long time. Its object was a girl of seventeen (I was fourteen at that time) who had been sent by her parents from a small provincial town to Königsberg there to attend the only, or the best, existing grammar school for girls. She lived in our street and her name was Käthe Fischer. I remember her because she was the first girl with whom I had ‘serious’ conversations. I do not remember what about – life in general? poetry and literature? relation to friends? our urge to rise to high principles in our lives or work? I cannot say, although I still possess a diary which I started on the day when, to my distress, our short-lived friendship came to an end, through my fault, I am sure, either by my obstinacy in demanding that she should be friend with me alone and no one else, or by my reproaching her again with preferring ‘shallow pleasure’ to ‘true friendship’. The second girl with whom I had serious discussions was Hannah Arendt who later became a celebrated political philosopher in the United States. She was born in 1906 like myself and grew up in Königsberg. Our two mothers, both widows at the time, were acquaintances without being friends and so I knew Hannah first as a little girl of seven or eight, playing ‘hops’ before eight o’clock in the morning in front of the as yet unopened gates of her school, which I had to pass every day on the way to my school. Then I met her again as the friend of Käthe Fischer and at the age of fifteen (I believe) we somehow met and decided to go for walks with each other and on one occasion visited the theatre together. Wedekind’s Erdgeist (Lulu) was the play performed. That period of our friendship lasted for a few weeks or perhaps months, then ended – temporarily – by mutual agreement. I failed to ring her after a little quarrel, whereupon she wrote me a letter, which the postman gave me and I read on my way to school. For a long time I kept this letter but in the end lost it on my wanderings, and I still regret that it is lost. It was an extraordinary letter for a girl of fourteen or fifteen. She told me in it that ‘I was indolent in spirit in the Nietzschean sense of the phrase’ (‘Träge im Geiste’; I believe she meant, that I did not accept the equality of men and women). Then something else came, presumably connected with some aspect or other of our quarrel, Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar 15 and she finished off her letter by saying that, at any rate, she could not be friends with a person who had not read Nietzsche. In fact, I had not then read Nietzsche but soon after I had received her letter, I did read a large number of Nietzsche’s works and was duly impressed by Nietzsche’s powerful style and stern, uncompromising teaching. Even at that time Hannah was generally considered a most extraordinary girl, outstandingly gifted intellectually, although this did not always show at school or school examinations (at which I managed to excel). I will return to the subject of our friendship which, though sometimes with long intervals, as we later lived in different continents, has persisted till her death in 1975. Wasting time is the privilege of the young. I wasted mine not only by writing poetry and plays but also by inventing a language of my own. I can trace back its origin to a childhood experience. I had two girl cousins, born and educated in Moscow and roughly my age, who with their mother visited us in Königsberg every other summer and talked to each other in Russian, a language which, to my chagrin, I could not understand. So I invented a language that they would not understand. My language consisted of soft slavonic sounds; its grammar was French and its idiom German. As time went on it became quite a full language which I developed or cultivated to no particular purpose, spending much time on it (e.g. translating Mark Antony’s speech into it). And then, having invented a language, I went on to invent a country where that language was spoken, and since I had called the language ‘Gutollian’, the country’s name was ‘Gutollia’. I visualised its capital city and other larger towns, the countries surrounding it and above all, its history – which of course was modelled on European history and was full of great conquering heroes, battles won or lost, kings and emperors and revolutions. Geographically, ‘Gutollia’ was a central power – within ‘my world’, so I could dream, as a boy, of hundreds of express trains travelling in every direction from, or to, the main station of its capital. There were rivers, lakes and mountains in ‘my world’, but no oceans – a proof for the land-bound perspective of a German educated boy in those days. Further to my reading while I was at school: Naturally I possessed editions of Shakespeare in German, of Voss’ Odyssey; and apart from reading the plays and the cantos I also read and often re-read the introductions supplied by the editors – which were philological, historical and critical. When we started reading the Odyssey in Greek in the lower sixth and the teacher, to introduce us to the task ahead, gave us a brief survey of what Homeric scholarship had established, he was surprised to find that I knew much of what he meant to acquaint us with. He therefore asked me how I had come to know about Homeric scholarship and of course I told him which sources I had used. I also read the introductions in my Shakespeare edition, e.g. to such plays as Henry VIII or Timon of Athens. These had made me aware of an important problem: which parts in classical text should be regarded as genuine and which as spurious? And I tried to discover criteria of the genuineness or otherwise of a text and soon, with a boy’s sureness of his own judgement, I considered myself able to say: this speech is genuinely Shakespearean, but that dialogue is far too flabby or flat or turgid to come from him. That is to say, my criterion was aesthetic: I believed that I could decide between ‘spurious’ and ‘genuine’ on the basis of poetical worth. And so, on the whole, my years at school passed peacefully enough. 16 Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar

Still, there was at least one episode which seemed to interrupt the easy progress of my life at school. A year or two after the German revolution of 1918, which had brought about the abdication of the Kaiser and the establishment of a German Republic, a youth movement sprang up aiming at pupils’ participation in the running of their schools. It happened that at that time I was elected ‘spokesman’ for my form by my classmates and in this capacity I attended a pupils’ assembly. On that occasion it was I who made the most violently revolutionary speech of all. I do not remember what I said but probably demanded that the headmaster and his staff should never make any important decision affecting the school without prior consultation with the pupils’ assembly and subsequently its full agreement, or something to that effect ( I was fourteen at the time). But I had gone too far: my ‘speech’ was considered ‘beyond the joke’, and I was summoned to see the headmaster who told me, more in astonishment than in anger, that he had expected something better from me. Obviously he thought that as I had always been well treated by the school authorities I would always be on their side. But the truth was – and is – that, although I have at no time known the urge to be outside the establishment, fighting or ignoring it, I have never felt quite comfortable within it either. Soon, however, that ‘pupils’ participation movement’ which had grown out of the spirit of the 1918 revolution faded and fell into oblivion, and with it my involvement in it and the ‘speech’ I had made and, as a result, my remaining years at school were again quite untroubled and as pleasant as my earlier years had been. Very near the end of my schoolboy days, during the Christmas vacation preceeding our final school examination – the one qualifying those who passed it to enrol as University students –, three classmates of mine and myself decided to have a special party at our home on an evening, or a night, when my mother was to be out (I assume by arrangement with myself), and it was to be a drinking party. Presumably the four of us wanted to have a foretaste of the freedom which we hoped we should enjoy after leaving school. So we bought one half bottle of brandy and two half bottles of liqueur, and on the evening of our party we had some snacks first and then started opening bottles. But, to my surprise, two members of our little party of four announced that they would not drink and, in consequence of their unexpected decision, it was left to myself and one other of my guests to drink all, and in fact, the two of us together by ourselves managed to empty the three half-bottles. The result was that my drinking companion and I were stone drunk and indeed, as we were told afterwards by our two sober friends, were first staggering, then tumbling and finally rolling on the floor from one room to the next and back again. Still, the experience and the embarrassment which followed it were worth passing through: although they did not by any means make a teetotaller of me I have never again been drunk in all my life. I passed my school leaving, i.e. University entrance examination (Abiturium) in March 1924. As it was one of the principles of Prussian education, to weed out the weak as they moved upwards through the school, and not to allow anyone to enter the sixth form unless the school was fairly sure that he would pass the finals, the failure rate was always very low indeed. We were fourteen in the Upper Sixth (Oberprima), and only one of us failed at this stage (but passed six months later). The examination consisted of a written and an oral part and those who had handed in examination papers of a sufficiently high standard were granted exemption from the orals. This was regarded as Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar 17 an honour, and of the thirteen of our group who passed that year ten, including myself, were allowed the privilege of ‘exemption’. 18 Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar

Chapter 2

THE FIRST WORLD WAR AND ITS CONSEQUENCES IN A GENERAL SENSE AND FOR OURSELVES

When war broke out in 1914 we were on holiday in Cranz, a Baltic seaside resort. I was eight at that time, and still have a very vivid memory of the weeks of tension preceding August 1st: would there be war? Could war be avoided? War came and for a long time I blamed myself for it because during the last week of July, I had repeatedly prayed: ‘Dear God, make war break out, so I have a chance of, seeing what war is like.’ We, like so many others, hung out the national flag each time a victory was announced; on my gramophone I played the record of ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’ at all these occasions. In the early days of the war when we celebrated the victories in Belgium and France the Russians advanced towards Königsberg. As a result, many left the city for safer places, including ourselves, after my mother had said a tearful good-bye to her parents who refused to move. We went to Berlin starting our journey on August 26th or 27th. But as it turned out we need not have gone because half-way, in Konitz I believe, we were told of Hindenburg’s victory at Tannenberg which removed all danger from Kbnigsberg. Still, we went on to Berlin – the journey took thirty three hours – and spent five or six weeks there. Then we returned to find our home in perfect order. Soon afterwards we were obliged to accommodate seven soldiers (Zwangseinquartierung) who behaved very well and played with us children. Six of them were ordered to move on after some weeks or perhaps months, but one of them stayed for two years or so. More incisively, than for most people, the war had a strong and adverse effect on my mother’s financial position. My father’s business, which had been directed by two relatives till war broke out, collapsed on August 1st because it was based on trade with Russia. Still, for a few years my mother could live on her reserves plus her income from the trust fund set up after my father’s death. But then, inflation set in, and by the time inflation had reached its climax, or even before, all her money and ours was gone. My mother who had been spoiled as a young girl and rich as a married woman and even as a widow, became poor. This reflected on me in a twofold way. She confided her worries to me at an early stage, which upset me because I could do nothing to help. And then I, too, had had a spoiled childhood and now, as an adolescent saw myself deprived not only of pocket-money but of new smart suits and so on. Naturally this contrast between wealth and need had a serious effect on me. It changed my mood or even my character. It made me seem easily depressed although I believe that I am quite cheerful by nature. On the other hand, on the positive side, my early years, when I was brought up in better than average conditions, have given me a life-long basis of self-confidence especially in meeting people of all ranks. War, of course, brought great hardship to the entire population – shortages of food, fuel, etc. Much has been told about this aspect of the 1914-1918 war and I will not go into detail – eating the horrible kind of bread we ate, with no butter, or hardly any, to spread on it. There was hardly ever meat on the table, the jam was of a kind that gave Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar 19 one heartburn. Clothes were of substitute material. We had wooden-soled sandals for shoes etc. It was at that time of the war, in the summer of 1917, when we were on a holiday in Zoppot, a Baltic seaside resort near Danzig, that I contracted polio – then so rare and unknown that the resort doctor (Badearzt), was unable to diagnose it. Nor was I kept in complete isolation. It is true, my sister and other children were kept away from me but adults visited me frequently and, at any rate, no one caught the disease. I believe I hovered between life and death for a few days, but then recovered with my left arm paralysed, till to-day. Everything was done to help and cure me after our speedy return to Königsberg – massage, electric treatment, hot-air-baths, orthopaedic gymnastics and in fact, the condition of my left arm improved and for many years, from then onwards (I was eleven and a half) till approaching my fiftieth year, my arm’s weakness did not bother me much and was hardly noticed by anyone except the keenest observers, e.g. passport officers who had to fill in the column ‘Special Marks’. Then, however, after my fiftieth birthday the old infirmity has become more and more of a real disability and disadvantage. The end of the war in November 1918 was also the time of the birth of the Weimar Republic. It was a most unfortunate moment for the Republic to come into existence, as we now all know. The double event of Germany’s defeat and the end of the Kaiser’s rule split the German nation. There were those who were too deeply upset by the outcome of the war to come to terms with the new Republic. On the other hand, there were the Social Democrats and many of the Liberals who rejoiced at the disappearance of the monarchy and the feudalism connected with it and were inclined to believe that the military defeat was not too high a price to be paid for the social progress achieved, and since the Jewish community in Germany had all its remaining disabilities removed, most of the German Jews belonged to the second group, though by no means all. Many of us (among them one of my uncles and a first cousin of mine) had given their lives for Germany and all those who had fought felt that they were the equals of their comrades. The Kaiser’s one and only Jewish friend, Ballin, the President of the Hapag Shipping Company, committed suicide after the Kaiser’s abdication, as he felt he could not live in the new Germany – as did some generals of the Kaiser’s army and other patriots. Still, the Republic was a reality, and both as Germans and as Liberals we, i.e. our family and friends, hoped that it would be a success. However, personally, as mentioned, we were far worse off than in the Kaiser’s days. With every turn of the inflationary spiral we became poorer. My mother started selling her Persian carpets, her jewellery, my father’s gold watch etc., to buy food, and in the end – at the most ill chosen moment as it turned out – sold our house for a sum which fast became valueless. As mentioned before, Germany was split into two camps: right-wing and left-wing. By 1919 it became apparent that the right-wing parties were making anti-semitism one of the main issues of their anti-Weimar campaign. One saw anti-semitic stickers, large and small, on nearly every board or hoarding. East Prussia was particularly right-wing. To my surprise, and at first quite inexplicably to me, schoolmates with whom I had been friends, and who had come to see us in our home and whom we had visited, shunned and cut us almost from one day to the next. Later I realised, or was put wise on it by a politically informed friend, that it had become the principle and policy of all right-wing nationalists to cut every connection with any Jewish person, young or old. One or two of my mother’s friends, but not all of them, acted in this way. On the contrary, during 20 Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar that pre-Nazi period as I may call it my mother’s closest Christian friends and some of mine, were undeterred by this right-wing atmosphere and remained our friends. Still, that evil propaganda, and the offensive behaviour of so many, had a profound effect on me, as on many other young persons of my faith. They and myself began to wonder whether Germany was really our country, our fatherland, and Zionism began to attract us. In a sense, German nationalism was reflected in our turning towards Zionism. German outcries against the Versailles treaty were echoed by our outcries against the persecution of Jews, and the demand for a Jewish homeland. The assassination of Rathenau coming soon after the assassinations of Eissler, Haase and Erzberger, reinforced our conviction that we did not ‘belong’ to the country where we lived. Inflation reached its height during my last year at school. However, by the time of my finals the German currency (Mark) had been stabilised and a small proportion of the money which had been left to me by my father, and had been invested as a mortgage on a city house since his death, was restored to us, in accordance with a restitution law then passed by the German Reichstag. This enabled my mother to send me to university and I chose Freiburg, where I travelled with a schoolfriend of mine in April 1924, for my first term (Semester). Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar 21

Chapter 3

UNDERGRADUATE YEARS

From school to university – I found the difference immense. At school my time table had been fixed. I was compelled to attend all the lessons and do my homework. At university I was free; I was able to choose which lectures I wished to attend or miss, just as it pleased me. I started as a student of medicine but soon realised that I was not suited for the medical profession and instead, decided to attend Husserl’s lectures on Ethics and a seminar on Descartes’ Meditationes held by one of Husserl’s assistant lecturers, Dr. Becker. It is not easy to describe what it was like to be an undergraduate in Freiburg or Heidelberg, in the 1920’s, a decade now so nostalgically remembered as a period of great intellectual intensity, alertness and inspiration. It was certainly exciting to be a student at that time. One felt that something important was going on, something one was affected by and tried to capture. All of us at the universities seemed to be engaged in a common enterprise which was to seek knowledge, and advance to ever deeper insights of nature and the ‘living spirit’. Professors and students – there seemed to be no essential difference between them, only a difference of degree. The professors knew a little more than the students, so they could advance from a point the students had not yet reached, or carry out research from a broader basis than their juniors, but both they and the students had the same aim: new discoveries, new insights. And accordingly, students were continually encouraged by their professors not to be satisfied with what was handed out to them but to search for something as yet unknown, and so, to be creative. The very essence of the universities’ teaching principle seemed to be, to raise students to a level on which they could do without a teacher for the rest of their lives, while continuing to do what they had done during their undergraduate years, namely, try to discover something new, i.e. be always involved in the search for truth. The Geisteswissenschaften seemed to rank higher than the natural sciences. Those devoted to them seemed destined to penetrate more deeply into the secrets of the mind and spirit, and thereby nature, than the scientists. Ultimately, the insights they could gain were of a philosophical character but it was considered of equally great importance that such insights could also be obtained in the various specialized fields, in linguistic, historical or literary studies. And hence, what one may call ‘the cult of genius’ was quite a prominent feature of university studies then – whether poetical, artistic or philosophical –, Plato, Aristotle, Homer, Sophocles, Pheidas, Praxiteles. The underlying assumption for this ‘cult’ was, that the greatest of philosophers, poets etc. had had a deeper understanding of truth than others whether in their own or in our time, and that by entering into their thought and spirit a kindred mind might discover some profound truth which, without studying the great masters, he could never have found. Many of the celebrated professors of that time wrote books on Aristotle, Plato, Kant, not only to explain the texts they had chosen but to express their own philosophy by interpreting one of the great of the past. Very aptly, 22 Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar therefore, the Pindaric line γένοι᾿ οἷος ἐσσὶ µαϑών (‘become what you are through learning’) was seen as the motto of what the universities tried to achieve. And as the values of the spirit counted most and so much was genuine the majority of us were inclined to take things at their face value, e.g. were convinced that the most honoured professors were the most inspired, that the Nobel prize was awarded to those most deserving, that the Prussian Academy of the Sciences was an assembly of the greatest academic minds, and in politics, that Ramsay Macdonald, as the first Labour Prime Minister of Britain, was a great man etc. On the other hand, and as a result of the predominance of learning and research, the administrative side of university activities was neglected, and perhaps even despised – in contrast to what is in evidence at most of the universities now. It is fitting in this context to mention an inaugural address at Berlin University which I attended. It was delivered by the then celebrated Latin scholar Professor Norden and of which I remember one particular passage: ‘Beware of mediocrity’ he said, whereby he meant – as the tone of his voice made clear enough: A grave danger is threatening the present high standard of the German Universities, it comes from the people who hate those capable of doing outstanding work. Those words spoken by Norden, or what he meant by them, have proved prophetic, not only for German universities but those of the world. For now, towards the end of the twentieth century, the universities have relapsed into the status and position they occupied in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and indeed up to the eighteenth century, epochs during which Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz declined to be university teachers and Hume was refused a university post; while any work of extraordinary perspective was done outside the universities. And it is to this status that, with a few notable exceptions, the universities of to-day seem to have reverted – a status of great political importance combined with intellectual near-irrelevance. The time when the universities were different, i. e. in the forefront of all cultural achievements, was rather short: it extended from Humboldt (1810) to Hitler (1933). During these one hundred and twenty three years most of those who had something to say were attached to one of the universities, where they were expected to lecture on their own, original views. Kant, who was a professor in the eighteenth century, was never in a position to teach his own philosophy to his students but had to expound to them the then current Leibniz-Wolff philosophy which, by his own works, the three great Critiques, he attempted at and succeeded in refuting and supplanting. In my third semester (Summer 1925) I decided to make Greek and Latin Classics my principal subjects. From then on I read a great many Greek tragedies and comedies, Greek lyrical poetry, Thucidides, Plato and so on and also the great Latin authors; and in due course, I was admitted to the Senior Seminar. There we read Greek and Latin texts and wrote short theses on one or other philological question arising from a text, and these theses were then discussed by all students present, with the professor acting as the chairman. It was as members of the Senior Seminar that we were told to make it our task to delve beneath the surface of the texts for the purpose of discovering either the circumstances in which an author had written his work or his motive in writing it; the general influences that had worked on him, the literary models he had followed etc. This kind of penetration into a text was, in those days, called Interpretation. Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar 23

To me, the spirit of this approach to a passage or book was greatly stimulating, and I like to record that I ‘caught the spark’, i.e. learned how to apply Interpretation to a text, from Richard Harder. In the twenties it was customary for students to attend lectures not merely at one but several universities, and I took full advantage of this opportunity. My semesters were spent at Freiburg im Breisgau, Wien, Berlin, Heidelberg and between at home at Königsberg University. In this way I managed to attend lectures and seminars under professors Wilamowitz, von Arnim, Jaeger, Maas, Schadewaldt, Husserl, Jaspers and Heidegger, to name only my most important teachers. Of my semesters I remember those spent at Heidelberg and Freiburg with particular pleasure. All I have said before about the excitement of being a university student in the nineteen twenties applied to Heidelberg with special intensity. ‘Freiburg’, they said, ‘has its fine air, but Heidelberg its atmosphere’. There, apart from the specialized courses, evening lectures were offered to students of all Faculties, all of them stimulating and some inspiring: lectures by Gundolf on Shakespeare as the supreme creative genius of all time; by Jaspers on Existentialism, and Alfred Weber (Max Weber’s brother) on Sociology. The latter two of these subjects were new or almost new in those days. After such lectures small groups of students would gather to go to a nearby café there to discuss the lecture with all its implications till late at night, that is as long as the café proprietor would let them by keeping his café open. In Königsberg, early during my students’ years, I had renewed my friendship with Hannah Arendt, which had begun when we were both about fifteen years old and was at that time interrupted by a little quarrel. But from 1925 on we spent many hours together, mainly at her mother’s home, reading Greek verse and prose together (her major subject was philosophy and her minor Greek and Latin Classics), or discussing problems of scholarship, philosophy and politics. We both were in Heidelberg in the Summer of 1926, travelling there on the same train, and during the term attended many lectures together and after them often went for walks on Heidelberg’s celebrated Philosophenweg. After one of those evening lectures I mentioned earlier we stayed up an entire night to discuss that evening’s lecture in all its aspects; partly walking but mainly sitting down on one of the marble seats in the Castle gardens, however cold and hard they were; till dawn came, when we went to a near-by café to have breakfast together. Hannah was, of course, a pupil of Jaspers with whom she remained in the closest possible connection, however far apart they lived, till the time of his death. I have mentioned two or three of my fancies but there is one more, which has been of no little importance to me from my seventeenth year, and, however extraordinary it may appear, throughout my life since then. Having always been greatly interested both in history and current affairs I decided, when I was seventeen, to copy political reality by imagining myself to be a little republic or kingdom (Cp. Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act II, Brutus’ colloquy) and, as I learned later, Plato in his Politeia). This fancy, or game, has been quite serious for me in that it nearly always helped me solve my problems and above all, make decisions. For in my imagination I gave the conflicting tendencies or aspirations within myself a ‘local habitation and a name’, as it were. I visualised or imagined a ‘parliament’ debating within me, with two or three parties, of which each was reflecting one or the other of my tendencies, or rather aspects of my character. I shall make this clearer by saying that I believed myself to be half introvert and half extrovert; half choleric and half sanguine; partly wishing to have 24 Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar 25 worldly success and partly caring for nothing but my own progress as a scholar and writer. And so, I imagined that such tendencies or aspirations within me were each represented by a party within my ‘parliament’ and, depending on which of these various tendencies I felt to be prevalent at a given time, I imagined the party reflecting that tendency to be the ‘government’. And, going still further in my imaginary constructions, I invented characters, or names, for the leaders of the different parties; and the chief of whichever party was ‘in power’ I imagined to be the ‘Head of Government’. And therefore it became necessary (and this was really the point) that each time my mood changed, a new government should take over; and to make it possible for such changes truly to reflect my own changing attitudes during a few years or even decades, I equated a ‘year’ in my imaginary politics with a calendar month and so could have ‘new’ governments take over sometimes after a calendar year or a few calendar months, or only a few weeks, just as it appeared right each time. This ‘game’ (which in a sense I still ‘play’) has always been more than a game to me: I felt that I was indeed governing myself, and that my decisions, ‘announced’ as it were (though only to myself) by my ‘government in parliament’ were clear-cut, firm and, above all, my own. And indeed, I even had a kind of Monroe Doctrine of my own, which referred to what I regarded as my creative work, and the meaning of which was, that I must always be my own master in deciding which work I should undertake and which not. Retrospectively, I can say that in fact I have always quite firmly adhered to my Monroe Doctrine , e.g. by refusing offers from publishers who wished to commission me to write a book for them or articles which, I felt, were of no value or interest to me. But, of course, my Monroe Doctrine did not apply to the duties I had to perform as part of a post to which I was appointed. When a few years after my Heidelberg semester I once again arrived in Freiburg in the summer of 1930, I found that Husserl had retired and the professor who had taken his place, Martin Heidegger, was providing the main fascination for almost the entire student population. Everybody knew of him or talked about him. He had published his Sein und Zeit a few years previously and by 1930 was generally regarded as the most oustanding of all living German philosophers. He lectured on four days each week, from 5.15 to 6 p.m. and each time to a capacity audience in the Auditorium Maximum. Many of those present were his students, followers and sincerest admirers, but many others came because he was so famous, and it was done to sit at his feet even if they did not understand any of the doctrines he expounded, and indeed, it was extremely difficult to follow him. To watch the young people waiting in front of his lecture room shortly before the lecture was due to begin was like watching a crowd of admirers waiting for their favourite pop-star to arrive. Whether or not Heidegger tried to prevent such excesses of adulation I do not know; they continued throughout the semester. As it happened, he had declined a call to the professorship of Berlin that summer and, as a demonstration of their gratitude for his decision to stay, the Freiburg students organized a torch light procession for the night after his decision had become known. The procession was to assemble in the centre of the city and from there to move to his private house on a nearby hill. When I became aware of the impending event I followed the other students but without bearing a torch. After his admirers had reached the house and formed a semicircle around it, Heidegger appeared on a small balcony and from 26 Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar there addressed the students. ‘Live your lives from the centre and out of the depth of your existence’, he exhorted them (‘Lebt aus der Mitte and Tiefe des Daseins’). Not infrequently, Heidegger allowed students to visit him privately, and those asking, and invited, to see him were always deeply impressed. I only happened to meet one fellow student who had visited Heidegger in his home and told me that in the course of her interview with him she had frankly talked to him about her cares, philosophical and of other kinds. ‘And how did he respond?’, I asked. ‘He said no word’, she replied, ‘but merely looked out of the window lost in thought for quite a long time. – ‘It was wonderful’, she added. Of course, I was puzzled and would have liked to know what it was that had made her feel so relieved and happy in the course of this interview. Perhaps – I thought – she had felt that Heidegger had listened attentively and with great sympathy to what she had disclosed to him about herself – almost like a father confessor – and that this was all she had hoped and wished for. I was a Classics undergraduate from 1925 to 1930. This was not regarded as an excessively long time of study in those days, although the minimum prescribed for any kind of course was four years. Of course, financially my time as a student was not without its problems. During the first two or three years, my mother was able to provide me with a small allowance (RM 150 per month), but then, as her own situation grew more and more difficult I successfully applied for a grant, or scholarship, and on the strength of it was able to continue and complete my studies. This grant, exactly like the allowance I had received previously, amounted to RM 150 per month; and as before I often supplemented my basic income by private tutoring, with which I had started as a sixth former and continued during my undergraduate years and beyond. When the time had come for me to start on my Doctor thesis I returned to my home town Königsberg. Just about that time, in 1928, a new and very young professor had been appointed to the chair of Greek at Königsberg, Wolfgang Schadewaldt, then 28 years old (only by six years my senior). He was one of Werner Jaeger’s pupils, and when he came to Königsberg he was, I believe, the youngest professor of Classics in Germany. I was immediately attracted and charmed by him, and this all the more because his main interest, like mine, was the study of Greek poetry. After attending his lectures and his seminars, I soon asked him if he would agree to my writing a Doctor thesis under him. He told me that he would, provided I chose my own subject instead of waiting for him to put me ‘on the track’, as it were. Soon afterwards I told him that, having read much of Homer and of the works of other Greek poets I should like to investigate and make the subject of my thesis ‘The symbolic and ritual actions of Greek mythical figures as described in the Homeric Epics and Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica (Untersuchung über die Bedeutung der Gebärden in der griechischen Epik. 1934). To this he agreed, and I started work on my thesis. I was the first of many to write a Doctor thesis under W. Schadewaldt, who, during his outstanding career, was, in turn, professor of Classics at the Universities of Freiburg, Leipzig, Berlin (where he was the successor of Jaeger) and finally, Tübingen. I am glad to think that all throughout his moves I have been able to keep in touch with him (with the exception of the war years), till the time of his death in 1974. After the Second World War he twice invited me to come and deliver guest lectures at Tübingen University and after the second of these lectures (which was on Aristotle) he arranged for me to be appointed Visiting Professor in 1965/66. Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar 27

It was, in fact, his first move from Königsberg to Freiburg which made it possible, or indeed necessary for me to complete my studies where I had started them, in Freiburg. For while I was in the midst of writing my thesis I heard the news – and at first it was alarming news to me – that my professor had received, and accepted, a call to Freiburg. Of course, I rushed at once to see him, and to my great relief he told me that he would be glad to have me in Freiburg with him and be my examiner there. My orals were fixed for July 1930, at the end of the semester and during it I enjoyed many walks and conversations with Schadewaldt and occasionally was invited to his home to have lunch with him and his wife. My three subjects for my oral examination were Greek, Latin and Ancient History, and I still vividly remember the charming informality with which Schadewaldt conducted my Greek orals. Having passed my Doctor examination with honours, I naturally began to look round for employment and an income. Obviously, I would have wished for nothing so much as an academic career on however low a level I should have to start it. After my examination Schadewaldt had suggested to me that I should stay on in Freiburg till the middle of August (1930), so he could speak to me when the rush of the term would be over. His suggestion might have been a good augury; nevertheless when I went to see him it was with forebodings rather than with hope. For it was during that summer of 1930 that the Nazi movement began to gain real strength and indeed spread alarmingly. The majority of students, gravely affected by the economic depression, both with regard to their situation then and their prospects for the future, were inclined to join the Nazi movement and party. Some of them were actively recruiting uncommitted students for the movement. I myself happened to overhear, in a park, a conversation between an already converted Nazi student and another whom he tried to convert – successfully, no doubt. And there were other, ill-mannered, students who made offensive remarks about their Jewish fellow-students in a voice loud enough to be heard by those they wanted to hurt. In this atmosphere I was naturally apprehensive when I went to see Schadewaldt in his home, to ask him if he would help me make a start on a University career. I felt and foresaw that his answer would be no, and it was. I remember several of the reasons he gave; that he was only a junior professor and he would have gladly supported me if he were a senior Faculty member; that he had to advise me against even attempting an academic career, because of my unfortunate financial situation. He could not see, he said, how I could survive the long, long years of lecturing as an assistant without an assured state salary, a Privatdozent; to which remark he added in rather bad taste that if I married a rich girl he would consider my application in a different light. He volunteered another reason for putting me off, namely that my special interest and his were too much alike (Greek poetry) for the two of us to make a good team, but he certainly never said that I was unsuitable for a university post. At some stage or other during this conversation he told me that while he personally would not mind having a Jewish assistant lecturer, many of his fellow-professors would find such an arrangement unacceptable. Leaving aside this last-mentioned argument, I must have felt that a dozen or so bad reasons for rejecting me did not amount to a valid ground but rather to an excuse; and after listening to this kind of talk for an hour or even two I at last suffered one of those sudden outbursts of temper which I used to regret soon after they had occured, and some of which had a quite serious, adverse effect on my life and career (this one did not, as there was nothing to lose). I said, no doubt in a raised voice which made it worse: ‘Even if you offered me a lectureship on a silver platter I would not 28 Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar accept it from you’. This was the end of our serious interview although of course there were tea and a friendly chat afterwards. However, he had not merely asked me to visit him do discuss things with me. He had a scheme of his own for me in mind, which he explained to me when I had calmed down. It consisted in advising me to return to Königsberg and take another University examination there (my Staatsexamen), the one that would enable me to become a government employee or civil servant (an advice which twenty six years afterwards has proved very sound and valuable), while he would arrange for my scholarship to be renewed for another year to enable me to take that examination. What could I do but accept? And however disappointed I was, because his ‘scheme’ meant that he did not want me to be a university lecturer but a school teacher, I thanked him for making it possible for me to enjoy the benefit of my scholarship for one more year. Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar 29

Chapter 4

SEARCH FOR WORK DURING THE GREAT DEPRESSION

I was unfortunate in passing my Doctor’s examination, and soon afterwards my State Examination, at the time of the great depression. As I came home to Königsberg from Freiburg at the end of August 1930 I found my mother in great financial difficulties. She was then married for the second time, and her second husband, an engineer, had lost a position he had held for many years, with the Julius Berger GmbH, one of the great German construction firms and at that time under contract to deepen and enlarge the Königsberg harbour. I moved into my mother’s and her husband’s flat, after I had returned from Freiburg, and was enabled by my scholarship to help them to make ends meet. While staying at home I read to prepare myself for my next examination. However, in January 1931 I was offered a temporary teaching post – my first teaching post – at one of the Königsberg grammar schools, the Friedrichskollegium. This was, I believe, the oldest of Königsberg’s High Schools. Kant had been a pupil there but, strangely enough, although the fact was often referred to there was no plaque on the gate or over the entry door to commemorate the school’s most illustrious student. I enjoyed teaching Homer and Plato, Cicero and Horace to Sixth Formers, and although I was subjected to the usual little tricks and pranks which no novice teacher can escape, I was not quite unpopular with my pupils after all (I believe). I used to teach them sitting on a vacant pupil’s desk facing the class instead of on the raised platform with it’s high chair, and they seemed to like my relaxed, informal way of teaching. For at the end of the term they came to me with a photo of myself taken, naughtily enough during a lesson as I was sitting in that position, and offered it to me with good wishes. But whereas I was pleased to think that my pupils liked my informal manner I did not realise that my colleagues felt quite differently about it. If I had just made light of myself they might not have minded, what they did mind was that I seemed to make light of my official position as a member of the staff. Tacitus’ Agricola says that he was nulla extra officium persona, i.e. behaved informally except when carrying out the functions of his office. Unfortunately for me and my entire teaching career, whether at universities or schools, I was informal, or the very opposite to officious and pompous, even in officio, and in this way I unwittingly annoyed or even offended my colleagues who felt I made light not merely of my own authority but of theirs too, i.e. of authority in general. When my teaching appointment came to an end in April 1931, with the return to duty of the master from whom I had taken over temporarily because of his illness, the world- wide economic depression was deepening almost daily, with it the Nazi menace was growing fast. There were two good reasons for me to hand in my papers for my State Examination as soon as I felt ready to do so, and in July 1931 1 passed this, my second University Examination with first class honours. Paul Maas was my examiner in Greek, H. Fuchs in Latin, H. Rothfels in History and A. Goedeckemeyer in Philosophy. P. Maas, as the chairman of the examining committee, congratulated me on my performance; and A. Goedeckemeyer told me to my surprise that he thought I had a 30 Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar

‘philosophical mind’ and asked if I would like to study for a supplementary degree in philosophy by taking a special course under him, to broaden my knowledge of the history of philosophy and deepen my understanding of philosophical problems. Delighted though I was by his compliment I replied that I did not yet feel ready or ripe enough for philosophy but certainly would gladly follow up his suggestion when I had reached a more mature stage. Unfortunately, I indeed had to think of problems of quite a different kind after passing my second, or ‘State’, examination. Whereas it was the normal sequel for those passing it, to be posted to a grammar school as ‘student teacher’ (Studienreferendar), there to obtain their full qualifications after two ‘practical’ years, at the very time of my completing my studies a decree was issued by the Prussian Ministry of Education (a) barring all newly and fully qualified teachers from any government employment for an indefinite period; and (b), while allowing teacher training to go on, discontinuing all financial aid to trainee teachers, which in the form of a small grant, the government had provided till then during the period of teacher training. Even in those days of stern decrees this was regarded as exceptionally harsh and indeed brutal. It certainly hit me hard enough. My scholarship had come to an end, and yet I was to have no state aid as a student teacher and, to make things even worse, private tutoring, too, on which I had always been able to rely, became fiercely competitive after the dismissal – for that is what it amounted to – of so many recently qualified teachers. This first blow was soon followed by another: my mother’s home in Königsberg broke up, because her second husband, who had been made redundant in Königsberg, was sent by his former employers to a small place in Schlesien (Silesia) on a temporary assignment and my mother followed him there. Soon afterwards, however, when that assignment came to an end, he moved with my mother to Berlin where they took a small furnished flat. After my mother had left Königsberg and her former place had passed into other people’s hands I took a small furnished room near the flat of my uncle (my mother’s youngest brother) who invited me to have my every day main midday meal in his home. Both my uncle and my aunt were very kind to me and I remember them with affection and pity. They perished in Poland where they were deported in 1943. While I remained in Königsberg I naturally tried all I could to escape from my desperate economic situation. I first went to see the Chief Education Officer (Oberschulrat) of East Prussia, asking him if, on the ground of my very strained circumstances, and also on the ground of my two first-class-honours degrees, he could possibly help me receive a government grant, however small, to enable me to go on with my teacher training. He refused. I then went to see Professor Paul Maas who so recently had been my examiner to ask him if he could find me some kind of post at the university. He did give me some library work to do for the Classics Department of the University but it was unpaid; and when I approached him about the possibility of my starting on an academic career, his reaction was as unsympathetic as W. Schadewaldt’s had been. The reason he gave me was, that I was too one-sidedly interested in Greek poetry, and that that interest alone formed too narrow a basis on which to build a University career. It must however be mentioned in this connection that Paul Maas was a Christian of Jewish parentage and hence had to be particularly cautious and circumspect in all his actions in those days of the ever-growing Nazi menace. Besides, there was something Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar 31 else to explain his refusal to support me. The son of that Chief Officer of Education (H<...> by name and a member of the Social Democratic party), whom I had approached in vain, was at that very time applying for the position of a junior lecturer in Classics at Königsberg, and of course he was appointed; although I privately pointed out to Professor Maas that, whereas I was born in Königsberg, H. (whom of course I knew) was a Berliner, and also, that he had only gained one second class degree whereas I had obtained two, and both first class. Both H. senior and Paul Maas were dismissed from their posts after the Nazi take- over, but H. junior, I understand, rose to be Rector, i.e. Vicechancellor, of Berlin University under the present Communist East German regime. I do not know what happened to H. senior, but I did meet Paul Maas again in England more than once. He went to Oxford in 1936 or 1937 there to continue his research into classical texts. He published many short articles, mainly in the Classical Quarterly or Classical Review. Most of his contributions were concerned with text emendations, at which he excelled. Even now I can hardly think of that period of my life without a shudder. I went to a bureau newly set up to advise unemployed graduates and help them find work. A kindly young lady asked me with what results I had passed my examinations and after I had answered her question she told me that by directing me to a re-training centre she would make matters even worse for me. And I met with the same kind of response again and again that year and in the following year; people to whom I applied for some kind of work, however simple and plain, said to me: We cannot ask you, a man with your qualifications, to do such subordinate work for us (as cataloguing photographs on one occasion). I have suffered mental depressions several times in my life: early in my younger years e.g. when at one stage I suddenly realized that I was unable to write plays, which at that time was my dearest wish and ambition; in later years (which I have not related yet) e.g. during my first year in Europe after leaving New Zealand and at other times; but my depression in the year to which I am referring now was by far the worst. I would wake up at dawn with almost a shock of despair; spent the morning reading Greek tragedies (to no purpose, I felt) e.g. Euripides’ The Trojan Women, the most tragic of all tragedies; and to read it made me even sadder than I already was. One evening I actually intended to make an end of it all. I walked to the bank of the river Pregel, resolved to drown myself. Extraordinarily enough the experience proved to be a healthy one. As I stood by the river preparing myself to carry out my intention, weighed down by my unhappiness, it gradually became quite clear to me that I would not give in to the despair of a moment and in that moment’s despair do something irreversible. In fact, I almost physically felt some outside force far superior in strength to myself was drawing me away from the river, and never again in my life have I reached the point of even contemplating suicide. At last a chance of my leaving Königsberg was offered by a distant cousin of mine, on my father’s side, the same who had taken over as one of the two directors of our business after my father’s death and then lived in Danzig. He sent me RM 80.00, a sum large enough in those days to buy me a railway ticket to Berlin, where my mother, her second husband and my sister were then living, with some money left over to help me over the first few weeks in Berlin. (The ticket was RM 20 in those days.) Accordingly, I left early in July 1932, seen off at Königsberg railway station by my aunt and cousin and met at Charlottenburg station, Berlin, by my mother and sister. I moved into my 32 Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar mother’s and her husband’s small furnished flat for the time being; my sister, who was employed as a book shop assistant at the time, had her own furnished room, which she shared with a girl friend. My first move in Berlin was to see the Education Authorities there and request that I be posted to a grammar school for training. In due course I was advised by them that I had been assigned to the Victoria Gymnasium in Potsdam (called after Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter, the mother of Kaiser Wilhelm), and that my duties there were to commence in October 1932. In the meantime I looked for pupils for private tuition and if I remember rightly found one or two. Potsdam, the town to which I had been posted, was within convenient distance from Charlottenburg where we lived. The station for the Potsdam trains was quite near our furnished flat and the journey from Charlottenburg to Potsdam took only half an hour. From Potsdam railway station, however, I had to walk about a mile and a half, to reach the school, where lessons started at 8 o’clock. I made the journey each weekday and after lessons had ended, at least for me, I took the same route home; I usually arrived back in Charlottenburg about 2 pm. We were seven student teachers, all but one from Berlin, posted to the Potsdam Gymnasium that year, and after we had all duly sworn our oaths of allegiance to the Prussian State, our training began. It mainly consisted in our watching senior masters giving their lessons and then occasionally giving lessons ourselves watched by one or several of the senior teachers. After each of such ‘test lessons’ we were told what we had done well and what we should do better next time. I certainly enjoyed this training period in Potsdam and profited a great deal by it. I have forgotten the name of my senior master – or supervisor – but I certainly remember that he was both competent and kindly. I enjoyed working under him and as I did so my depression began to wear off and I regained my former self-confidence. Besides, there was something special or even exciting about this school, at least for me as a lover of history: a considerable proportion of the pupils were the sons of the oldest and most aristocratic Prussian families. There were von Bismarcks, von Caprivis, von Moltkes, von Schlieffens, von Kleists and so on studying at the school, and even three Hohenzollern princes, grandsons of the Kaiser, were pupils there. I taught at that school from October 1932 to the end of March 1933, i.e. for approximately six months. However, the last two months of that period stood under the shadow of the advent of Nazi government. Nevertheless, a friendly spirit continued to prevail in the masters’ common room throughout my time there. We, that is, the entire staff, senior masters and trainees, remained on frank and friendly terms with one another, in spite of what had happened outside. The headmaster, too, who of course was ultimately responsible for our training and had shown an earnest interest in our progress continued friendly and sympathetic to all his student teachers including myself. Most of the members of the staff were Conservatives, there were a few Liberals, too, but only three or four were members of the Nazi party. Some of the veteran masters were quite outspoken: they decried the Nazi party as vulgar and unacceptable. Retrospectively, I find it quite surprising to contemplate how much freedom of speech was still allowed in the early days. There was another Jewish student teacher in our group, a Dr. Brann, and I remember vividly that on the morning after the Reichstag fire we – he standing near a window and Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar 33

I by the door – shouted to each other across the crowded common Room: ‘Of course, the Nazis fired the Reichstag, there can be no doubt about it, can there?’ Still, soon afterwards the Hitler government put the first phase of its antisemitic campaign into operation. April 1st was designed to mark the opening of that phase by a publicly conducted boycott of Jewish-owned shops, factories and so on. During the week preceding that date, Dr. Brann and myself were told that our training could not continue. It happened in the following manner: We were still travelling to Potsdam every morning, but shortly before that April 1st we both received telephone calls from the headmaster requesting us not to come to the school anymore. Since no official decree about the dismissal of people on racial grounds had as yet been published I was utterly shocked. ‘But, Sir, why do you tell me to stay away from the school?’ I said over the telephone, ‘and if my training cannot continue, at least allow me to come and say goodbye to you, to my own senior master and the rest of the staff’. ‘No, no’, he replied, ‘I understand and sympathize with your wish but you must not come to the school any more’. And he continued: ‘I have just received a telephone call which makes it imperative for me to tell you firmly to stay away from the school from now on’. He did not tell me from whom the call had come, although I asked him to tell me; with hindsight, however, I feel sure that it had come from the Stormtroopers’ Command, threatening to kill any Jewish teacher who was found teaching at that aristocratic school; or alternatively, from someone who knew of the Stormtroopers’ intention and wanted to save Dr. Brann and myself from the fate that was obiously intended for us. In any case, this was the end of my official career in Germany, as a State employed teacher. The official dismissal notice on ‘racial grounds’ came later by mail, after I had been made to complete a form, on which I was instructed to state, and did state, that I was Jewish by parentage on both sides, and by religion. I believe that I tore up that dismissal notice but kept my membership card of the Prussian Civil Service Association and have preserved it till to-day. 34 Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar

Chapter 5

THE END OF THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC, NAZISM AND EMIGRATION

The advent of the Hitler regime brought to an end a period of German history which, though politically undistinguished, was remarkable for its cultural creativeness in almost every field of the arts and sciences. In the latter category, Einstein, Planck and others produced outstanding work. As to the arts, poetry (Rilke), the novel (Thomas Mann), the theatre (Reinhardt and Jessner), music (the great conductors and virtuosi) and of particular interest to me, the Geisteswissenschaften flourished (Jaeger; Husserl; Heidegger) as hardly ever before. On the other hand – as cannot easily be denied – the Weimar Republic was weak economically and politically, and throughout the fourteen years of its existence it seemed to lack direction and leadership; and as a result that period of German history is held in scant regard in Germany even today. Whereas there are many obvious domestic reasons for the downfall of the Republic, of which notorious inflation and the great depression were the most important, there were also reasons of foreign policy, and these have not yet been fully understood. Whether forced on the Republic or deliberately chosen, German foreign policy in the Weimar period was in effect a continuation of the Kaiser’s handling of foreign affairs, namely a policy of (not so) splendid isolation, i.e. of using one power block (the West) against another (the East), while threatening each with an alliance with its rival though never entering into any firm commitment with either side. In 1914 this policy had led to a coalition of France, Britain and Russia against Germany, and in the period 1918-1933, though in different circumstances, it led to a similar state of affairs, but of course in a new guise and manner. The West, and especially Britain, were implacably opposed to Bolshevik Russia,as is well known, but Germany, with its still very considerable potential, was apparently wavering between the East and the West. Even while still under the Kaiser she had concluded a separate peace treaty with Lenin’s Russia in 1918. And when in 1920 the Russians were on the point of conquering Warsaw, many people in East Prussia were hopefully waiting for a great Russian victory, to be followed by a German alliance with Russia against France, as had been the case in Napoleon’s time (1813-1815). The memory of the years of that War of Liberation was still vividly in people’s minds. What if Germany and Russia combined and directed their united forces against the West, to re-conquer the territory lost through the Treaty of Versailles and in particular the province, now Polish but once German, called the ‘Polish Corridor’, which separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany? In those days, I did not understand the fear caused in London and Paris by the Treaty of Rapallo, concluded in April 1922, but I believe that I do now. That treaty brought the danger of a Russian- German alliance close to reality and for that reason, and a weighty enough reason it was, spelled the end of the Weimar Republic; not because it actually was a treaty of alliance (if it had been things might have taken a different course) but because it forever remained a vague prospect of such an alliance. And hence, the weakness of the German Republic constituted a grave menace both to England and France on one side and to Russia on the other. If Germany were swayed by her left-wing parties to turn to the Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar 35

East, a formidable power would threaten the West; if she turned West a most dangerous coalition of the Western nations, including Germany, would confront the Soviet Union. As a result, both East and West were profoundly interested in seeing a strong regime established in Germany instead of the weak and unstable Weimar government; and for that reason the Soviets instructed the German Communists to work with the Fascists for the overthrow of the Weimar Republic, while the Fascists (as has become evident since then) received encouragement from some Western institutions or even governments. The Soviet statesmen foresaw what some of the Western statesmen did not (although Churchill did), that a Fascist Germany would turn not only against Russia but also against Britain and France, and as their anticipation proved correct they succeded in fighting the Second World War as allies of the West, exactly as in the 1914-1917/18 War, instead of having to face a grand Western coalition, consisting of Britain, France and Germany. I believe it was Napoleon who said that what fate was in ancient Greek mythology that political power is in our time. The events of January 30th and April 1st, 1933, set in train the most profound changes in my own life as in the lives of all those who were placed in the same class as myself by the German Fascist Government. Having lost my position in the government service I once again looked around for private pupils and – as I will soon explain – was moderately successful in that. Also about that time we moved into a rented three-room converted flat, furnishing it with a few remnants of our former Königsberg home, near the Kurfürstendamm. By ‘we’ I now mean my mother, my sister and myself; for my mother’s second husband had deserted her towards the end of 1932 as an early convert to Nazism although he had been a member of the Social Democratic Party all throughout his adult life. My sister, who had lost her job as a bookshop assistant, was looking for a job, and she found some work to do for a real estate agent, and I started teaching a small group of students who needed Latin in order to take their examinations in history, literature and so on. I particularly remember a girl undergraduate who did not then start lessons with me but continued them with me. She was a Protestant but one of her parents was Jewish and I shall never forget her bewilderment and utter distress on that April 1st, when – as she put it – the earth seemd to burst open beneath her feet and she felt that there was no place left for her anywhere. Like all other ‘non-Aryans’, she was to be excluded from all further university studies (though for six months or so after the Nazi take-over Jewish and half-Jewish students were still allowed to take government examinations). She had spent her childhood and youth in Christian, now called ‘Aryan’ circles and had never thought of herself as different from other Germans. I then felt that for me and people like myself the new situation was easier to bear: at least we knew where we belonged. While we were trying to make ends meet one of my old friends helped us financially, by regularly sending us RM 50,- per month for more than two years, Konrad J., with whom I had been friends from the time when we met as seven years olds in an infant class of the Hufengymnasium, and with whom I had spent my first semester in Freiburg. I did repay the money to him ten years or so after the end of the Second World War but I remain grateful to him because his help in those days was vital, and we have maintained our life-long friendship till to-day. Even under the Kaiser, Synagogue schools had existed in Germany, and in 1933, when Jewish pupils were expelled from government schools not only did these denominational schools greatly expand but a large number of new private schools were 36 Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar successively founded. I went to see the headmaster of one of the old-established – co- educational – schools, soon after I had ceased going to Potsdam, early in May 1933 and was accepted on a dual basis: I was partly to be a student teacher and partly to be paid for the lessons I gave. However, as the school was only an intermediate one, there was neither Latin nor Greek to teach, and I had to give lessons in German grammar and spelling, history and elementary French. At the end of the summer term the headmaster told another young teacher who had joined the school by then and myself that he had received several more applications from half-trained young men and women who said that they would like to join the staff of the school. What was our view in this matter? Did we think that he should accept the new applicants? I do not remember what my colleague said but I replied that in my opinion he should admit to the staff as many young teachers as possible, considering both their plight and the certainty that the number of the pupils at the school would increase all the time. In response to what I had said the headmaster admitted ten more student teachers to his staff. They came in October that year, 1933. One of my new colleagues was Marianne Zander, the daughter of a highly regarded physician, now my dear wife. Apart from teaching, I spent my time in continuing my linguistic and historical studies, now with a strong leaning towards subjects of Jewish interest. I read not only the biblical texts but also Bible commentaries; Josephus and Philo, and of modern works both Graetz’s and Dubnov’s Histories. Nor did I merely spend the time reading; I wrote articles for periodicals, usually on some aspects of Hellenistic history. I further published a blank verse translation of what has remained of the work of the Alexandrinian playwright Ezekielos, namely a fragment of his tragedy Moses. After that I composed a new translation of the First Book of the Maccabees for the then flourishing Schocken publishing firm. Our main thoughts, however, from the very beginning of the Nazi period, turned towards emigration. We were convinced that there was no future for us in Germany although no one among us foresaw how brutal the end would be. However, emigration did not simply depend on a decision to be made by one self, it was quite a difficult thing to carry through. To enter a foreign country one needed an Entry Permit, and the granting of such a Permit was usually made conditional on an undertaking by a resident of that country, to guarantee the new immigrant’s livelihood. We, like many others, had relations abroad, some in America on both our parents’ side and others in Australia on our father’s side. We wrote to all of them and received replies but years passed before any decisive step was taken. And while we were thus waiting, sometimes expectantly and at other times almost abandoning hope, our mother fell ill in 1935 and, after a brief period of ostensible recovery, died in the autumn of 1936. I have often referred to what she had meant to me. I deeply mourned her, and so did my sister who had nursed her lovingly and indefatigably during her illness. My sister and I grew very close to each other, as we were left alone in the flat which we had rented for our mother and ourselves, and we have remained very close ever since. At the same time, our mother’s death removed the last tie binding us to Germany – how could we have contemplated leaving her on her own and to herself in her illness and misery? While simultaneously, on the other side of the ocean, our Australian relations bestirred themselves, and early in spring 1937 the coveted Permit, the document giving my sister the right to settle in Australia, arrived. She at once handed in her resignation – she was then employed as a real estate agent’s clerk – and began to make her preparations for her migration to Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar 37

Australia, with whatever help she was able to obtain from me, our uncle in Königsberg and the Jewish Welfare Organisations. I saw her off at Berlin station from where she set out on her journey to Sydney, Australia. She left cheerfully, forward looking and full of hope and fortunately her hopes have been fulfilled. I believe her to be quite a remarkable person in her own way. It was she who had kept up our spirits during the many years of that unhappy period. She had some little sayings of her own, e.g. ‘Difficulties are just a challenge’ or, ‘If we can survive this winter we will survive everything’ and so on. And those little sayings were not merely phrases or words but expressions of her courage and resolve. She really seemed to me indomitable. Before she left for Australia she promised to do all she could to obtain a Permit to enter Australia for me, too, and she faithfully kept her promise. 38 Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar

Chapter 6

A YEAR IN AUSTRALIA

By the time I landed in Australia (in March 1938) my sister, who had arrived there eight months previous, was already working as a shop assistant in one of the large city stores; and she was living in her own rented flat near Bondi beach. It was a three-room flat which she had taken so that I could share it with her once I had come. We were as close to each other as in Berlin. She was a great comfort to me and I believe that she too was glad to have me with her. And yet, no one who has never emigrated from his own country to a new land can understand the bewilderment, the profound psychological impact (though perhaps transient) and the unhappiness of an experience of this kind. Added to a deep feeling of strangeness were anxiety, embarrassment and humiliation. Even nostalgia! It is true, the country I had left had turned viciously hostile but I had had work and friends there. My own language was spoken and understood and not only that: my ways of thinking, sense of humour, attitudes were those of the rest of the people. Where was I now? All I saw and experienced seemed unrelated to what I felt. Soulless golden sunny days were following one upon the other; and all I could do was, meet those who had gone there like myself or else, meet the people from whom I could learn the language of the land and try to converse with them – although they never seemed to comprehend what I felt and what was all the time preying on my mind. The one year I spent in Australia, 1938, was the worst for German Jewry, leading up to 1943 when the planned and prepared massacre of six million Jews was carried out: I will say nothing further about this never exceeded satanic crime. And so in 1938 each of us ‘New Australians’ or immigrants tried to save as many as possible of those who wrote to us pathetic letters imploring, beseeching, us to help them escape. Many of those from whom we received letters were in concentration or torture camps where they were told that they would only be freed if they obtained permission to go to some country, any country, but not otherwise. Yet it was becoming more difficult for us from day to day to persuade the governments even of friendly countries to allow those unfortunates to settle within their borders. I tried to obtain a Permit for my cousin Heinz Feltenstein and his young wife, as I had promised I would when I said farewell to my uncle and aunt in Königsberg shortly before my emigration from Germany. I had grown up with my cousin and he was a dear friend to me. But the Jewish Welfare Committee, to which I turned first for support, refused to help, since, as they stated, my cousin had wealthy relatives in Australia. These were my relations on my father’s side, and they, too, declined to support my cousin on the grounds that he was not their relation, but mine on my mother’s side. Having thus been refused help from two sides I asked a Sydney University lecturer in Classics with whom I had become acquainted to sign the necessary guarantee papers for my cousin, which he kindly did. Armed with those papers I went to Canberra, the Australian Federal Capital, to see the immigration officer there (as my sister had done for me a year earlier). I shall never forget my experience in the ante-room, while I was Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar 39 waiting to be called into the room of the officer in charge. Every few minutes or so, I saw a porter come in carrying sacks of cablegrams from those outlawed in Germany, begging to be allowed to enter Australia. I watched all those cablegrams being dumped into huge wicker baskets never to be looked at by anyone, I felt sure. When at last I was called into the immigration officer’s room and told him about my request he did promise that, in due course, Entry Permit would be granted to my cousin – as in fact it was; only it was too late: by the time it was issued the German army had entered Prague where my cousin had taken refuge, and from that day no person of German nationality was allowed to leave Czechoslovakia. In 1943 my cousin and his wife perished. All we were told about it was contained in a Red-Cross message, which reached us in 1946. It advised us that Heinz Feltenstein and his wife had been forced to board train No. ... bound for Poland, and that nothing further had been heard of them since. Of course, all throughout these months I was looking for a job, a teaching post. But I had arrived in Australia in the middle of the school and university session and while I was waiting for the new session to start I began to gather private pupils most of whom required coaching in German. By October that year when I left Sydney the number of those I tutored was thirteen. At the same time I was continually improving my English. I read as many books as I could find, often with the help of a dictionary; and since I believed (and believe) that one cannot learn a language unless one reads the poetry written in that language, and so, apart from reading Macaulay, Dickens and Thackeray, I read Milton, Shelley, Wordsworth and Keats, Marlowe and, above all, Shakespeare. Of modern authors I read Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Somerset Maugham and Noel Coward. Later, during the Second World War, I read the memoirs of Churchill, Earl Grey, Lloyd George, Lord Haldane and others. In the course of my continuing effort to find a proper teaching post I went to see the Registrar of the University of Sydney. He advised me to try and see a very young professor of Greek who had just arrived from England. His name was Enoch Powell. I did knock at his door and was received by him and when he heard that I had been a student of Paul Maas, whom he knew very well, he treated me kindly. However, to anticipate the result for me of my meeting Enoch Powell, he did nothing for me, although he received a letter recommending me to him from Paul Maas and although it was Maas to whom Powell at least partly owed his own appointment. Enoch Powell and I met and talked three or four times while I was in Sydney, mainly about current events. Retrospectively it seems quite clear to me that he was an admirer of Hitler. When I said to him that I thought that if the British Government were to take a strong stand Hitler would surely retreat, and in due course this would mean the end of the Nazi regime, Powell replied: ‘Stop that man? Never! Nothing will deflect him from his resolve. He will go forward and never be made to change his decision and resolve’ – or words to that effect. It was obvious to everyone that Powell had a very high opinion of himself. He described the year when he (and someone else, I do not know who) graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, as the annus mirabilis of Cambridge. Later, when he had given up Classics after the war to become a politician he lent some of his library to a former Cambridge friend of his, then Professor of Classics in New Zealand telling him that he could keep and use the books, ‘until the second baron needs them’. So much about Enoch Powell as I knew him in Sydney where he had been appointed Professor of Greek at the age of twenty three or twenty four, and according to what I later heard about him in New Zealand. 40 Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar

As for myself – as I have mentioned before – Powell was unable to help; and so, while tutoring in Sydney, I sent out letters of application to schools and universities all over Australasia (that is Australia and New Zealand), asking if any of them would offer me a teaching post. I sent off seventy four letters; seventy two were in vain but at last, in August that year (1938), I received the first of two favourable replies, and in September the second. The first came from St. Peter’s College, Adelaide, a highly reputed public school in South Australia; it offered me a temporary post as a teacher of German for one term, from September to Christmas 1938. The other answer reached me while I was in Adelaide; it came from the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. This letter, too, offered me a temporary post, namely as a lecturer in German language and literature during the academic session of 1939. I need hardly say how happy I was first to accept the Adelaide post and a little later the New Zealand lectureship. I was well received by my colleagues at St. Peter’s College, Adelaide, and enjoyed teaching there, but, as throughout my teaching career, I was more successful with my senior than my junior pupils, the boys of ten or twelve. The Rev. Pentreath was the headmaster then and I had several conversations with him. He, like many others, half- jokingly (I assume) asked me why ‘I had not popped off Hitler’. I went to great lengths to explain why none of us German Jews had ever tried to do such a thing. I said inter alia that it would have endangered the entire Jewish community in Germany if such an attempt were made whether successful or otherwise; or that those of our community who were able to use a gun or a revolver, that is ex-servicemen, secretly admired Hitler for making Germany strong once more, whereas the liberals among us were altogether untrained in the use of weapons and would never carry off a thing like this. But none of these explanations seemed to be convincing. Perhaps they thought that we should have preferred death to roaming the world in the vain search for a true new home. Perhaps they considered us as cowards – as we probably were when retrospectively we compare ourselves to the Warsaw ghetto fighters. I left Australia for New Zealand in February 1939. My sister was at the quayside to say good-bye to me; and this time it was good-bye indeed, at least in the sense that we never again lived in the same city or even country. But, fortunately, we have always remained in close touch till to-day, and we have often visited each other, in Australia, New Zealand and above all in England. She has been happy in Australia, where she did find a home. She married a fellow-immigrant and shortly after the war, in 1946 or 1947, she founded her own importing firm, which she has successfully managed ever since, for more than thirty years. Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar 41

Chapter 7

LECTURING IN NEW ZEALAND

The thirteen and a half years I spent in New Zealand constitute a very important period in my life, both in a personal and an intellectual sense. As to the first, I was married in New Zealand and my two children were born there, my daughter on the last day but one of the year 1943 and my son in March 1947. About the significance of my New Zealand years for my intellectual development, i.e. change of philosophical views, I shall have to say a good deal soon; suffice it at present for me to say that as I sailed to New Zealand to take up a university lectureship I was determined to make the fullest possible use of the opportunity thereby opened to me, to resume my reading and my studying so as to be able to engage in scholarly research once again. I arrived in New Zealand in time for the beginning of the academic session of 1939 and was met at the Dunedin railway station by Dr. G. E. Thompson, Professor of Modern Languages, whose assistant lecturer I was going to be. He took me to his home where I met his wife, and then to the small furnished flat which he had arranged for me to rent. I preserve an affectionate memory both of Dr. Thompson and his wife. I could not have wished for a kindlier and more understanding head of department than he proved to be. A born New Zealander, half English, half Irish by descent, he had studied, then lectured at Dunedin University and finally been appointed professor there. So he had known the University, its students, staff and Council for forty years or more (he was 61 at the time I met him) and he always gave me his advice, sometimes when I asked for it and sometimes of his own accord. He not only explained to me how the departments of the university were organized and how they were run but also which of the professors of the university were particularly important so I might try to humour them as best I could. His own subject was French language and literature and hence, as far as the teaching and lecturing in German was concerned, he allowed me to conduct my classes in the manner which seemed best to me. When I came to Dunedin the German branch of Dr. Thompson’s department consisted of a one year course only; he encouraged me to build up the German division till it had developed into a full four year course, leading to an M.A. honours degree. By the time I had left, the German sub-department had become a full department of its own, as was proved by the fact that the teacher appointed to succeed me received the title ‘Professor of German’, with the Professor of French as his equal; while the department of Modern Languages as I had known it has ceased to exist. I understand that the two departments are now cared for by quite a considerable number of lecturers under the two professors, but while I was there I was almost solely responsible for the entire teaching and examining. I lectured on German literature from Gottsched to G. Hauptmann and Thomas Mann, held seminars on prescribed books, such as plays by Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Hebbel etc. or stories by Fouqué and Chamisso; I taught Middle High German and read Hartmann von Aue and Walther von der Vogelweide with advanced, and taught grammar to first year students. In addition I used to introduce 42 Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar scientists to elementary German, so they could read scientific papers on their own subjects in the German language. Initially, I had been appointed on a temporary basis only, to do the work of Professor Thompson’s senior assistant, a lady who was then on sabbatical leave, but at the end of the session of 1939 I was appointed permanent lecturer in German alongside her, i.e. appointed till retirement age, on a motion put to the University Council by Professor Thompson, who was good enough to tell me that ‘I was too good a person to lose’. Unfortunately, I had the benefit of working under him for five years only. He died in 1944, and soon after his death I sensed a changed atmosphere around me. In the end, I felt that I had to leave my university post in New Zealand and return to the old world with my family and settle there. As I started lecturing in Dunedin I was struck by the great difference of attitude on the part of the students when I compared their quietness with the excitement of my Heidelberg and Freiburg fellow-undergraduates as we listened to Husserl, Heidegger or to Wilamowitz and Jaeger in Berlin. Here my students dutifully came along for their lectures. They worked industriously. But they never forgot that an examination had to be passed by them at the close of the year and it was to this end that they strained their strength and gave of their best. They learned their grammar and handed in their proses, they read and translated into English works by Klopstock, Goethe, Schiller and other German writers but they always gave the impression – and this was also the view generally held by the professors and lecturers – that if they did not have to face examinations they would make little or no effort to progress with their studies. As a result, they never seemed to be able to reach beyond a clearly defined level of learning. I did not know then, and I still do not know, what it was that held them back because, as far as their natural gifts and intelligence were concerned, they were in every way the equals of their European colleagues, that is, the students I had met in Freiburg and Heidelberg. Of course, the best of the New Zealand students were usually sent to Oxford or Cambridge for post-graduate courses but how they fared there I do not know. Among the staff I had many friends whom I saw frequently both within the university, i.e. in the staff room, or in their homes. Some of them were New Zealanders by birth, others Australians, but I almost believe, that half of them or more were Welshmen, Scots and Englishmen or women. Since the province of Otago, of which Dunedin is the capital city, was originally colonized by Scots, the influence of the Scottish people and their kirk was the strongest. I had friends among all the sections of the community and university staff but, as is only natural, I also had adversaries. Of the latter, some were opposed to my appointment on principle, and there were others whom – as they put it – I ‘antagonised’. To me the most stimulating of my colleagues by far was the Professor of English, Herbert Ramsay, a Scotsman by birth, who had studied Classics at St. Andrews University under Burnet and Lindsay, and philosophy under Bosanquet, and had gone first to Australia and then to New Zealand on doctor’s orders. For he had contracted tuberculosis in his youth, and after a stay in Davos, Switzerland, was advised by the medical authorities in Scotland to spend the rest of his life in a hotter climate than that of his own country. It was good advice: he never suffered a relapse in Australasia and lived for many years beyond retirement age. I arrived in Dunedin not long after he had lost his wife and, left to himself (all his children had grown up and most of them were married), had found consolation in Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar 43 spending his time in the most minute study of Shakespeare whom he admired more than words can express. To this study he devoted all his energy, scholarly acumen and very fine literary understanding. So when in our first conversation he discovered that I, too, was a passionate admirer of Shakespeare and knew many of Shakespeare’s plays in quite some detail (though at that time still rather in German translations than in English), and even had my own theory about their relative dates of origin, he invited me to his large house and garden – sadly neglected at the time because he lived there,and looked after it, all on his own; and for many years after our first meeting, in fact during my entire New Zealand stay, I spent almost every Saturday afternoon with him there, mainly discussing Shakespeare. Sometimes he would explain to me the deeper significance of a play as he saw it, sometimes the precise meaning of some passage or other which he was re-interpreting, and not infrequently he would acquaint me with a textual emendation of his own to ask my opinion about it. Above all, however, he investigated the manner in which Shakespeare had used and transformed those earlier plays which constituted the basis of his own work. In particular – I remember – he believed that a scene written by Thomas Kyd was the model for the second ghost scene in Hamlet, Act III – the ghost in a nightgown: he thought that the ‘homely touch’ was characteristic of Kyd. He also told me that he had found evidence of Kyd’s influence on Macbeth. Ramsay wrote down his findings and views, and as far as I know, his papers and notes are in the hands of his son, Dr. Frank Ramsay, a physician practising in the North Island of New Zealand, but they have not been published. I believe, however, that they deserve to be known, at least in a condensed version, and I hope that the University of New Zealand will one day realise its responsibility for H. Ramsay’s work on Shakespeare and arrange for its publication. Occasionally Professor Ramsay and myself were joined for our Shakespearean discussions by Gregor Cameron, then the university’s senior lecturer in English. His contributions to our conversations were of great value, and I have remained in touch with him for many years after H. Ramsay’s, death, mainly by correspondence. Stimulated by Ramsay’s research Cameron too has been investigating the models or sources of the Shakespearean plays, but in contrast to Ramsay, who was principally interested in the tragedies and histories, perhaps also the sonnets, Cameron has chiefly given his attention to the Shakespearean comedies. He seems to have come to the conclusion that the Elizabethan playwright Robert Wilson was the author of plays on which Shakespeare drew heavily for several of his comedies. There were several other colleagues of mine on the staff with whom I frequently had animated conversations: the professor of philosophy, J. N. Findlay, a South African by birth, and well known for the books he has written; the professor of economics, Souter, a New Zealander, with wide interests not least in philosophical problems, which he approached according to the Hegelian tradition in which he had been brought up; the professor of education, Lawson, an Australian by birth, with a Master’s degree in Classics; the professor of Surgery, Renfrew White, who loved German literature and set German poems to music, and others. Karl Wolfskehl, once a member of the Stefan George circle, had recently arrived in New Zealand from Italy. He had made his home in Auckland but in 1940 he visited Dunedin where he had friends – immigrants like himself – and I was introduced to him. He was nearly blind by then and as I took him from his hotel to his friends or to a park where he wished to rest, we had many conversations about S. George, F. Gundolf and 44 Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar above all about the principal characteristics distinguishing English poetry from German. To my sursprise, he admired Swinburne and indeed, when I took him to meet Professor Ramsay, it was Swinburne Wolfskehl and Ramsay almost exclusively discussed, admitting their great liking of Swinburne’s work to each other without, however, by any means overestimating Swinburne’s rank as a poet. But it was not only in a scholarly and (as I will soon explain) philosophical sense that I received valuable stimuli in New Zealand. I also experienced what I might almost call a political awakening, which has had a considerable influence on my views and attitudes ever since. While in Europe I had been used to taking the information given out by the press or the media ‘at its face value’ and especially so ‘official news’, i.e. news coming from a government source, even if it came from a Fascist government, and certainly when it emanated from a British, French or United States source. In New Zealand, first to my amazement and scorn, then wonderment and finally increasing assent, people were sceptical about all they heard, to the point of believing almost nothing of what they were told. When war broke out in 1939 – and of course, nothing much seemed to happen between October that year and April 1940 – they regarded it all as merely a story or stunt invented by journalists to boost the sale of their papers – so at least they told me. The reports about the Nazi regime’s concentration camps and their horrors were described by them as just so many instances of ‘atrocity propaganda’. Of course, there was an anti-British element in all this, still, one particular incident, which occurred early in the war, seems to me worth recalling. On September 15th, 1940, it was announced that one hundred and fifty German planes had been shot down for the loss of 15 or 20 British planes. I believed the announcement and was promptly derided by a young New Zealander. ‘How can this be true?’ she asked. ‘This is blatant, impudent propaganda’. I did not accept her view and continued to believe the official account. However, after the war, Churchill himself revealed that the figures had been distorted for the sake of maintaining morale, and that in fact, the German and the British losses on that day had been almost equal. Still, the air battle of September 15th was a British victory, and indeed a decisive one. In 1940 I might still have been inclined to disregard the New Zealanders’ sceptical way of looking at the press, or the media, but gradually I have adopted their attitude, and become as sceptical as they are or even cynical. Indeed, I consider my wary way of looking at any kind of official news, which I then adopted, as one of the permanent advantages I have derived from living in New Zealand; and frankly, I now sometimes wonder which nations are more easily misled, more gullible – the sophisticated peoples of Central Europe and parts of the United States, or the African Bushmen and the Red Indians of old. Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar 45

Chapter 8

CHANGE OF OUTLOOK (INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT)

My own generation of migrants from Germany stands midway between two generations: those who, firmly rooted in German ways of thinking and already well established in Germany both as regards their reputation and their official positions, could find no other purpose to pursue than spread what they considered to be the great message of German culture in Britain, France, the United States or wherever they had drifted, among the uninitiated, the half-educated; the very young who left Germany before they completed their education and who grew up like any other British, French or American youngsters, depending on where their parents had taken them. But there existed an in-between generation, the least numerous of the three, to which I, at the age of roughly thirty in 1936, belonged; and who, though fully trained and educated in the German ways of thinking, yet, arrived in English speaking countries, young and impressionable enough to study, and profitably so, English views on philosophical problems which were essentially new to them; and which, as they gradually discovered, were not only different from those they had been brought up with but, as seen against their own traditional outlook, extremely stimulating. My first reaction on making this discovery was, to prepare myself for explaining to the Germans though not necessarily by going back to Germany but rather through books what they could learn from English philosophy, of which they seemed to know little and think less. However, until I was ready to undertake what I was then planning to do I realised that I had to learn a great deal myself. The first result of my studies was that I began to look critically at what I had been taught in German schools and universities. I remembered that, even while in Germany and still an undergraduate, I had felt instinctively, though I had never quite understood why, let alone been able to formulate my views, that Wissenschaft, and in particular the Geisteswissenschaften, were in danger of growing stale. Speaking mainly of classical scholarship (which does of course occupy a central position within the whole of the Geisteswissenschaften) I felt (1) that the cult of genius, whether it referred to Sophocles or Plato, was leading to an almost semi-religious mysticism and really meant an attempt at projecting man into the divine; (2) that the then current fashion of conductiong research into ‘form’ – the form of a Pindaric ode, even Plato’s Apologia Socratis; and in theology into liturgical formulae and rites, as though form or structure rather than any other aspect of a work contained its spirit, was unsound; and that (3), in almost paradoxical contrast to the avowed principle of steady progress through continuing research, an authoritarian insistence on the truth, not merely correctness, of the main results hitherto achieved by research, was leading to an academic dogmatism, which posed a grave danger to free and unprejudiced research. There were doctrines which had to be accepted, e.g. the genuineness of Plato’s Seventh Epistle which Wilamowitz had decreed was to be treated as no longer subject to debate, and consequently there were questions that must not be asked. On the other hand, there seemed to exist a canon – almost a ‘dictionary’, as it were – of problems which adepts were not only permitted but encouraged to discuss and 46 Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar re-discuss, and in these instances any successive, any reasoned argument whether in favour or against a solution, say the genuineness or otherwise of certain plays under the name of Euripides, or of parts of Timon of Athens, or the infectious or non-infectious character of a desease, was regarded as a contribution to knowledge. Viewed from another, the methodical, angle, I felt able to conclude that, while those devoted to Wissenschaft proclaimed that progress through free and unfettered research was their single aim (though they were strictly keeping to certain well-defined lanes of research), they never doubted that their method of research (in the arts and to some extent in the sciences, too) was the only possible way by which to achieve results; and consequently that the results obtained by that method, were true, i.e. true in the phenomenal, Kantian, sense of truth (and no other truth mattered). The method of Wissenschaft, though it was never explicitly stated, may be described as consisting of the following three steps: (1) a rational approach by observation to a particular, in the light of all other particulars known to the researcher and regarded by him as relevant to the particular under examination; (2) a survey of possible inferences from previous knowledge regarding the nature of the particular under investigation; (3) after a careful weighing-up of the merits or demerits of such inferences, a ‘judgment’ on the nature of that particular which by convention was to be accepted as a new particle of knowledge. I might have remained firmly attached to Wissenschaft and the method connected with it if I had not been forced out of Germany in the 1930’s. But since I migrated to an English-speaking country, New Zealand, my views were slowly and gradually transformed, partly through my listening to explanations given to me by some of my colleagues at Dunedin University and in particular, two young lecturers (whose names, I regret to say, I no longer remember). As a result of my conversations with these two young philosophers I began to become familiar with an intellectual climate essentially different from that prevailing in Germany. What seemed to impress me first was their utter rejection of all ‘mystical’ ways of thinking, including those leading to the adoration of genius; their realism, and also freedom of thinking, as they refused to be bound by any ostensibly unassailable conclusions by whatever method they were arrived at. And, of course, I was told about Wittgenstein’s greatly admired philosophy, which at that time was disseminated throughout the English speaking world, or at any rate the principal British dominions, through copies of lecture notes taken by Wittgenstein’s own students, in Cambridge. These notes were zealously guarded by the few who were allowed to take them overseas, e.g. to New Zealand, and lent out for short periods to the most sympathetic of philosophers only. When I first heard about Wittgenstein from one of those young philosophers who had seen the notes, what I was told was roughly on the following lines: Wittgenstein was making it clear that ‘metaphysical’ doctrines were errors due to metaphorical speech, i.e. metaphors taken literally, naively, and thus seriously confusing thought. And beyond this: according to Wittgenstein, the entire history of philosophy, including the Kantian philosophy (the undisputed guiding light of my undergraduate days, and still highly admired by me) consisted of little more than word-mongering instigated by metaphors which were taken to mean what, so picturesquely and poetically, they appeared to imply. And hence, that all philosophical problems were specious and could quite simply be resolved by the removal of that web of (metaphorical) verbiage which had formed around them; and once this was done, it would become clear that ‘metaphysical’ problems were no problems at all in any sense. Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar 47

Although I instinctively resisted such extreme and, as I felt, anti-philosophical views, by no means did I remain indifferent to them; and whereas I was convinced, in spite of all I heard, that one could not philosophise by making words one’s starting point I formed the view that one should start with ‘ideas’, and indeed the barest ideas, to which words, not propositions or doctrines and theories, or world views and elaborate philosophical edifices, correspond. Still, I believed that one gain of my German university studies was worth preserving, namely, the manner in which I had been taught to approach texts, called in the 1920’s Interpretation; which consisted in attempts to uncover what lies beneath a text, e.g. the customs, habits and beliefs of an age, or a person, as implicitly contained, say in Cicero’s speeches or Vergil’s poetry. Whereas in the nineteenth century the emphasis of research by Interpretation had been on customs, or events, in the 1920’s its aim had shifted to the making explicit of beliefs and, generally, the spirit of an age, or man. An outstanding fruit of this new way of approaching texts was Jaeger’s book on Aristotle’s philosophical development, published in 1923. In this well-known and indeed celebrated work, Jaeger attempts, as far as it seemed possible to him, to recapture Aristotle’s unfathomable vision of truth as reflected in the successive phases of Aristotle’s gradually maturing thought, namely from Platonic idealism to peripatetic realism; and it was in this way that, according to Jaeger, Aristotle achieved the first ever synthesis of idealism and empiricism. This was indeed scholarship at its best, but it was (naturally) directed at a historical philosopher, and history is a record of ever-changing views. Yet, I had begun to doubt the value of historical research (1) because – I thought – it weakened philosophy itself by making the contemplation of the history of philosophy take the place of philosophising; (2) it ignored, or denied, the possibility that there might be permanent truths. I remembered too, that even while still in Germany, I had felt that it was one of Wissenschaft’s great contradictions that, on the one hand, it postulated the certainty of its (most recent) results and, on the other, taught that the phenomenal world, being in a continous flux, was a world of ever-changing objects, ideas, views etc. My misgivings or doubts about the significance of purely historical research were reinforced by my English-trained friends, and partly under their influence I conceived the idea of attempting to subject Wissenschaft itself to Interpretation. As I began to reflect on the foundations of Wissenschaft I first of all felt that Wissenschaft itself had almost created a taboo against any querying of its basic essentials: its method – we were led to believe – was the only scientific one, and only what resulted from it constituted knowledge. I went on to consider certain other aspects: while Wissenschaft maintained that all customs, habits and ideas were subject to changing historical circumstances, how could Wissenschaft itself possibly be free from the influence of its own contemporary world? Nor was it by any means. On the contrary, every fashion in art, literature, philosophy found a ready reflection in Wissenschaft. When symbolism became the dernier cri in literature and art, the study of symbols and forms became fashionable in Wissenschaft too. And of course, though hardly worth mentioning, partisanship, nationalism, religious adherences etc. all found their way into Wissenschaft, in spite of the fact that all the time Wissenschaft emphatically claimed to be wholly impartial, sachlich. And by thus claiming its own impartiality Wissenschaft did in fact introduce another taboo, namely on all suggestions that there was any purpose involved in whatever research was undertaken, or results obtained; and hence, whoever spoke of purpose was, as it were, ‘excommunicated’, i.e. 48 Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar considered to have ceased to be a follower of Wissenschaft. Next Wissenschaft claimed that its method was purely ‘inductive’, or rather solely based on observation and inference. But surely that claim could not be maintained. Although it is true that Wissenschaft (rightly) rejects generalisations, and especially, all attempts to discover ‘necessary’ laws dominating all historical changes and events, Wissenschaft was deceiving itself in assuming that its work purely consisted in studies of the particular in the light of particulars. In fact, those seemingly pure inductions were always guided by some over-all conceptions, such as the Hegelian notion of dialectical progress, or the scientific doctrine of all (natural and historical) changes constituting uninterrupted chains of causes and effects. In short, their observations with inferences had a complement, namely, certain guiding ideas from which they deduced, at least partly, the results of what they claimed was pure ‘induction’, and this other side of scholarly and also scientific research not only remained unstated but was intended to remain so, in other words, was not meant to be exposed. I am not sure that I then had as clear a view of the unstated foundations of Wissenschaft as I have now, but what I did feel strongly even at the time was, that to accept Wissenschaft with its main dual claim that its method of investigation was the only right one and its results, called ‘knowledge’, identifiable with ‘truth’, albeit in the phenomenal sense of the word, was naive and had become stale, and that a more penetrating examination of Wissenschaft, its methods and results was required; that such an examination would involve philosophical reflections; and that, if a conflict between philosophy and Wissenschaft should arise, philosophy would have to lead the way and Wissenschaft would have to follow. Since, however, as already mentioned, I did not quite see the failings of Wissenschaft so clearly then as I believe I do now, I first had to develop my own method before I could scrutinise the views, or assumptions, underlying Wissenschaft. To this end I decided that I must attempt to re-adapt the method of Interpretation, which I had learned at the German universities, in such a way that it did no longer solely apply to objects, circumstances or thoughts which change (i.e. to the varying manifestations of the Spirit) but, as my English-trained friends would have preferred, to what could be considered as permanent truths, of which the most obvious appeared to be the logical truths. And yet, as my friends explained to me, even the logical truths were conditioned scil. by the grammar of the Greek language and hence, conditioned historically, which meant that even the very forms of logic had to be subjected to Interpretation. But how could that be done? And what could one expect to find if it were done? These were two important questions, and the clear answer to the first was that, at least initially, little could be achieved by an investigation of the logical forms in the abstract – the concept, the judgement, the conclusion; the figures of the syllogism etc. Rather an attempt had to be made to examine not so much the logical forms by themselves but their validity for thought as it unfolds, by studying the work of a philosopher who may have used the logical forms, though not for reasoning out his argument but merely for expressing it. This appears difficult, yet it is not so by any means. Even the ancient Greek philosophers, or at any rate some of them, realised that the logical forms were suited to state, with clarity and precision, insights already achieved but not to obtain new knowledge through their use. But if the logical forms are neither independent (scil. of Greek grammar) nor the steps by which a philosopher’s (creative) thought actually progresses, will it be possible to discover the stages by which thought does in fact move foreward? Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar 49

And by stating this query I have come to the second question which I had asked myself, as mentioned above: What could I expect to find if I examined what lay beneath the logical forms? Clearly, the answer was that I might discover the forms by which methodical thought in its developing phases unfolds. Let me start from a certainty which everyone can experience in himself, namely, that one cannot put a thought on paper or even formulate it in one’s own mind, as one ‘hits’ upon it, but has to clarify that thought and spell it out to oneself, as it were, before one can formulate it and finally put down on paper. Therefore, I reasoned, if I attempted by Interpretation to uncover what lies beneath a philosopher’s formulated expressions I might find his thought in its prior-to-expression mode or phase; and that if a philosopher’s thought in its prior-to-expression mode could be shown to be bound to rules or norms these rules or norms would be more basic and elementary at least to him than the rules of logic or any other circumscribed method of thought. I further reasoned: Logic had been devised as a system of forms after centuries of intense dialectical thinking,for the purpose of defining and listing all possible modes of thought, yet it had become obvious, at least since the Renaissance, that the forms of logic were not those in which modern philosophers are used to express their views and may even have been inadequate as expressions of that Greek thinking which preceded their evolution first in some of Plato’s late dialogues and finally in the Aristotelian Organon. The natural conclusion from this realization seemed to be that once again, attempts should be made to discover what forms, or methodical approaches, if any, were inherent in the thinking of modern philosophers, scholars and scientists, or even any educated person. And such forms, if they were found in many or maybe all philosophers’ reflections, would be (a) universal and (b) more elementary than the rules of logic or any other established method of thinking. Anticipating my main results – although as I shall presently explain I could obtain them only by minutely studying Kant’s thought as laid down in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft – I found (1) that thought, or thinking, must always begin with, or be based on, an immediate intuition or impression of a particular, either an object in nature or a taste, or a singular pain, or courage in watching or visualizing an act of courage1; moreover, that such intuition, or immediate grasping, need not be, and seldom can be, of a simple, single, monistic object but is usually of a complex one, e.g. a rose with its stem, thorns, leaves, blooms, or a bed of roses, all intuited, albeit vaguely by one act of perception. (2) I further concluded that such immediate ideas, or impressions, can be related to one another, i.e. can be viewed together and seen as affecting each other, but cannot be fused. And (3) that all coherence of thought consists in the positioning of one immediate idea in such a way that all other immediate ideas regarded as relevant in a particular field of study are placed in relation to that idea and that one only; whereby that idea becomes the central idea of a system within which all other ideas are both affected and affecting not only the central idea but each other. By developing these rules of prior-to-

1 How can anyone maintain that words precede impressions? There are unique tastes, sounds, aspects of fortitude or courage, for which it is impossible to find (or even coin?) words, however distinct and unmistakable the impression itself might be. Of course, as soon as one starts talking about a subject, the implicit or explicit content of the words one uses affects the meaning of what one wishes to convey, even to oneself and certainly to others. That it might be possible to minimize the confusion thereby created, though not completely avoid it, I have tried to prove elsewhere (See F. GRAYEFF: Versuch über das Denken. Hamburg : Meiner, 1966; p. 128). 50 Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar expression thought or, as I later called them, the rules of Synnoëtics, I believed that I had restored freedom to thought and in particular liberated research from the tyranny, i.e. claim of Wissenschaft, alone to be able to provide truth or knowledge. For since the choice both of the ‘relevant’ ideas, and especially of the idea to be placed in the central position is free, the plurality of possible views is naturally explained; and although, of course, that very choice cannot be regarded as fully independent of contemporary tendencies or historical traditions, it was certainly no longer bound to that absolute, historical, ‘necessity’ which Wissenschaft, either deluding itself or deliberately misleading others, so vigorously and uncompromisingly proclaimed as its unshakable basis. And in this way I thought that the leading role of philosophy over Wissenschaft had been restored. As I have mentioned before, I developed these rules while attempting to explain the intricacies of the argument of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, which, in spite of then prevailing views, I presumed to be unitary and fully consistent. I will be allowed here to quote the original Foreword to my book on Kant: ‘This book has two purposes: its first intention is to present an account of Kant’s theoretical philosophy as a logically consistent whole. The second intention is to develop a method of interpretation which contains within it the laws of system-building thought, thereby revealing these laws as the very principles of logical unity in general’ (Kant’s Theoretical Philosophy, Manchester : Manchester University Press, 1970, p. XI). Later I explained those elementary rules of thinking, which I believed I had discovered (and which I then called the rules of Interpretational Logic and subsequently Synnoëtics), in my Essay on Thinking, first published in a German version by Felix Meiner in Hamburg 1966 (Versuch über das Denken); in an article entitled Wahrheit und Methode. Bemerkungen zum „Versuch über das Denken“ in the Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 28. 1974, p. 278-285; in the Third Section of my book on Descartes, and finally in the present chapter of this book. Moreover, and before my system of the rules of thought was fully elaborated, I tried to explain what I had in mind as best as I could, in a talk which I was invited to give at Dunedin University, in 1944 (See Appendix), where a small group of professors and lecturers had founded a Discussion Society for the purpose of exchanging views on different subjects; the aim being to give some insight into progress in the natural sciences to Arts scholars and, vice versa, acquaint the scientists with some of the questions which exercised the minds of the Arts experts. After I had developed my set of norms I felt the need to introduce the notion of purpose, as a complement to my reflections which up to that point might have appeared to be of a purely methodical nature. Of course, ‘purpose’ was a concept alien to, or even sternly repudiated by Wissenschaft, and explicitly excluded by it as a possible ingredient of research, because research was held to be objective, or purely sachlich. However, it was permissable to speak of telos, a term which seemed to have either an irrational or ontological or religious meaning and was considered to be altogether different from purpose in a practical or pragmatic sense. Still, I had read some of William James’ treatises on Pragmatism (Peirce I read later), and encouraged by the American philosopher’s so plausibly stated views I felt encouraged and justified in using Purpose to complete my system of rules. For the problem which I considered I had to solve was how to prevent my rules from being applied arbitrarily or indeed irresponsibly. In methodical terms, my problem was the following: since the choice of the central and of the dependent, relevant, ideas Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar 51 within a synnoëtic system is free, what is it that does, or should, guide the choice? Clearly, the choice could not be restricted; it had to be free; but being free – I thought – it also had to be deliberate and unconcealed, and hence – since I had not developed my own conception of truth in those days (But see my article on Wahrheit und Methode) – I felt that I had to round off my system of methodical rules by making truthfulness rather than truth its complement. In other words, I concluded that for the proper application of my methodical rules a clear statement about the purpose of any particular synnoëtic system, whether it referred to the exploration of nature or history, or to philosophy itself – Ethics, Aesthetics etc. – was an essential requirement, and that without it the risk of self-delusion and, worse still, deception could never be removed. What I had in mind was either, as far as possible, to exclude any tendentious use of a system or, if e.g. in Ethics or Historiography, such use of a system was in fact intended, say, in the interest of a government or society, that it should be unambiguously stated that the system had a clearly defined aim and what that aim was. When I had reached these various conclusions I felt that I had not only freed myself from the tradition, or the conventions, of Wissenschaft but I also believed that I was on the way to making a contribution towards a solution of the still unsolved main underlying problem of Geisteswissenschaften, namely, how to harmonize the conception of a perpetually changing phenomenal world with that of permanent Being. I also realised that I was moving away from Linguistic Philosophy, which in those years (1941-1951) was steadily growing in strength, because Wittgenstein’s philosophy was then maturing; while at the same time its adepts were able to entrench themselves in the British universities and were even reaching beyond the boundaries of their own country, looking towards Europe and the United States. And so, I could not expect that my voice would be heard, first, because I was far away in New Zealand, and secondly, because I was officially not known as a philosopher but a classicist. 52 Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar

PRIMA PHILOSOPHIA

Since the two terms metaphysics and ontology now sound outmoded or even empty of meaning – the first, metaphysics, to English and continental philosophers alike, the second, ontology, to English rather than continental thinkers – the most appropriate name to designate what at an earlier time the terms referred to were coined to signify, namely, the purest and most elementary employment to which thought can be put, is prima philosophia, πρῶτη ϕιλοσόϕια. First: generally speaking, prima philosophia is concerned with the relation of thought to truth and vice versa. More specifically, it is concerned with the dependence of thought on perception and vice versa; and with the contributions made by thought and perception respectively to the apprehension of truth, or acquisition of knowledge. Secondly: any inquiry into the interdependence of thought and perception, or of the relative contributions made by thought and perception to the acquisition of knowledge, comprises within itself an inquiry into the norms of thinking. Thirdly: since the investigations referred to under one and two must always be based on such (scientific or historical) knowledge as is available at any given time, and in particular knowledge in those fields of study which attract special attention at that time, reflections in the sense of prima philosophia can never be regarded as completed or perfected. On the contrary, it must be understood that they constitute an ever-continuing process; which is tantamount to saying that the need for pure philosophy does, and will always, exist. For it is necessary for the norms of thought to be continually adapted anew to knowledge (whether already obtained or still sought) and vice versa, i.e. for the judgements concerning known things, their properties and changes to be perpetually adjusted to the available rules of thought (whether already defined, or used and waiting to be defined). In other words, the need for an examination, or a re-examination, of the interrelation of thought and truth, exists perpetually, both on account of our ever- changing attempts at approaching truth from differing standpoints, and also because of our ever-varying selection of fields of study to which we decide that special relevance should be ascribed. Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar 53

EPILOGUE

For several years I had considered leaving Dunedin, where, as I have indicated above, my stay became uncomfortable after Professor Thompson’s death; and following a series of happenings, of which I will give no detailed account in this context, I had been looking even more eagerly for an opportunity of leaving Dunedin. So when my Commentary on Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft, though originally written in English, was published in a German version by the Hamburg publishing firm of Felix Meiner in 1951, and after I had received a dozen or more appreciative letters about my book from English and German philosophers and in particular Kant-experts, to whom I had sent complimentary copies, I decided that the time had come for me to make a break and return to the ‘old world’. As I had been employed as a lecturer by Dunedin University for nearly fourteen years, I was entitled to claim a period of sabbatical leave, and on the basis of this claim, which was acknowledged, I was able technically to leave the University of Dunedin as a lecturer on leave of absence, with my salary paid for eight months in advance, but actually it had been formally agreed between the University authorities and myself that I would not return to my post in Dunedin. Accordingly, my wife, my children and myself embarked in Auckland in August 1952, and after a short stay in Australia, where we visited my sister and met her husband, we arrived at Tilbury Docks in October that year. My first eight months or so in Britain and Europe were mainly spent in travelling. While my family stayed behind, in London, and later in Kidlington near Oxford, I first went to see the two best-known British Kant-scholars, Professors H. J. Paton in Bridge- of-Earn in Pertshire and Professor N. Kemp Smith in Edinburgh. Of course, the views of these two experts on Kant’s philosophy, and in particular its unity and consistency, were almost diametrically opposed, and although my view was much nearer to Paton’s than to that of Kemp Smith, both of them gave me a warm and kindly welcome. To my surprise no aspect of their widely known dispute was touched on by either of them in their conversations with me. They were both already living in retirement at that time; still, Paton gave me a letter of introduction to one of his Oxford pupils, W. H. Walsh, then fellow of Merton College and now professor of philosophy in Edinburgh. A year or two later, Paton published a review of my book – which however, I thought, was quite irreconcilable with what he had said to me privately, and also in a letter he had sent to me while I was still in Dunedin, about his impression of my work on Kant. From Scotland I went to Oxford where I was accorded all the facilities usually enjoyed by a Commonwealth lecturer on leave of absence. I was admitted to the Bodleian, and frequently invited to Senior Common Room lectures and meetings, and not only met Walsh but on account of my book also met Ryle, Austin, Price and other philosophers. Three months after my arrival in Oxford, I left from Harwich for the Continent, in January 1953. My first destination was Hamburg where I met my publisher Felix Meiner, as well as his son Richard with whom I have maintained the friendliest relations ever since. The first German university town which I visited was Münster, where I saw Professor Richard Harder again (the teacher to whom I thought I owed so much), after 54 Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar an interval of more than twenty years. In Cologne I was introduced to Professor Gottfried Martin, the first Editor of the revived Kant-Studien, who invited me to join his Editorial Committee, of which I have remained a member till to-day. I then went to Marburg where I met Professor Ebbinghaus, a Kant-scholar and friend of H. J. Paton’s. From there I travelled to Tübingen, where, on W. Schadewaldt’s invitation, I delivered a guest lecture at the University on Interpretation und Logik (published in the first issue of the new Kant-Studien 45. 1953/54. p. 55-66). I next visited Freiburg, then crossed the border to Switzerland for brief stops in Basel, Bern and Zürich. I was invited to spend an afternoon with Heidegger in Freiburg and an evening with Jaspers in Basel. I now regret that I did not make a detailed record of my conversation with either of these two famous philosophers but as my meeting then made a profound impresson on me I remember much of what was said at the time. Heidegger still lived in Sonnhalde on a hill near Freiburg and, having opened our, conversation by briefly inquiring about my experiences abroad, Heidegger showed a lively interest in all I was able to tell him about Commonwealth and British universities, their administration, courses, standards and so on. He went on to talk about what he regarded as recent trends in philosophy, which he naturally earnestly deplored, the trends towards Symbolic Logic and Positivism. Nevertheless, or maybe because of the development he observed, he seemed particularly anxious for his philosophy to be understood in England rather than in any other country outside his own. Until then, no English translation of his principal work, Sein und Zeit, had appeared. As politely as I could I explained to him that to translate his work was no easy task, because of his very personal use of the German language; and as I saw him smiling at my remark and since I was not sure then what I would do after my return to England, I suggested, but did not promise, that I might try to translate Sein und Zeit into English. He seemed pleased with my tentative offer and promised me his support if I were to attempt the work. However, all I was able to do in the matter was, to see the Chief Editor of Blackwell’s and ask him if he would wish to publish Heidegger’s work in an English version. His reply was an unhesitating and almost enthusiastic yes. Still, I soon realized after my return to England that I had far more pressing problems to attend to, namely, support my family and myself by teaching. Since then Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit has, in fact, been translated for Blackwell’s, by two very competent scholars, J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. In contrast to Heidegger who had withdrawn from university activities at the time I met him, Jaspers, though older than Heidegger (he was seventy in 1953), had recently resumed lecturing after a pause of fourteen years. For as his wife was of Jewish parentage, and he had refused to divorce her when Hitler came to power, he had been dismissed form his professorship in 1933, but had at once been reinstated after the fall of the Hitler regime. Naturally, he was grateful to be able to lecture once again, after spending twelve or fourteen years in isolation; still, he had succeeded – and even this was no small achievement – in protecting his wife to the extent that she was not deported to a concentration camp. When I was led by her into his study on a February evening in 1953, he had come home not long before from lecturing and, though tired, was keenly alert. Maybe he had lectured that evening or afternoon on politics, or the Ethics of politics for throughout our conversation – and to my disappointment – he insisted on talking about current affairs and not about philosophy. I tried to divert his attention to questions connected with Kant, but he was not to be drawn. He continued Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar 55 talking about the events and personalities of the day, and he did so altogether in the style and manner of the Liberals of the Weimar Republic, as though nothing had changed or come to be known since then. And as a result, unfortunately, our meeting was no success; I could forge no link with him. For he was put out or indeed shocked to discover how greatly I had been influenced by my friends in New Zealand, and how sceptically or even cynically I judged the high-sounding speeches and promises made by the then leading statesmen of the Western world. I remember in particular how sharply Professor Jaspers and myself disagreed on the policies and the personality of John F. Dulles, then the United States Secretary of State under President Eisenhower. Whereas Jaspers seemed to regard Dulles’ principles as perfect reflections of true democratic fairness and the Secretary himself as the model of a great high-minded statesman intent on ushering in a new golden era, I was unable to suppress my mistrust of Dulles’ aims and actions since he had been Harry Truman’s envoy to Korea shortly before the outbreak of the Korean war. At the time of my continental journey early in 1953, Germany had not quite recovered from the horrors of the Second World War and the cruel economic hardships that followed it. Still, I believe, that if I had then stayed in Germany and waited a year or two I would have found an opportunity of lecturing at one of the German universities, especially as I enjoyed the support of Professor G. Martin, the president of the Kant-Society. But my family was in England and neither my wife nor I would have wanted to transplant our children, then nine and six, to a country where English was not spoken. Moreover, I had become a British subject in New Zealand and so, for many reasons, when I returned to England after my journeying in February 1953, I returned to stay. The eight months’ leave granted to me by the University of Dunedin and the salary that went with it came to an end in April 1953; and in May 1953 1 started teaching Classics at English public and grammar schools. One of the former was St. Peter’s School in York, which claimed to be the oldest public school in England, founded by Alcuin at the time of Charlemagne; its most notorious pupil had been Guy Fawkes. I was mainly required to teach Greek, Latin and Ancient History to sixth-formers aspiring to places or scholarships at Oxford or Cambridge, and quite a number of my pupils achieved their ends. In the late summer of 1953 we left Kidlington in Oxfordshire for London and there bought the house in which we have lived ever since, during the last twenty four years or more. I have always considered myself fortunate in being able to live in London and I certainly would not wish to live anywhere else. What is it that makes London so attractive, at any rate, to me? Of course, London’s theatres, opera-houses, orchestras are pre-eminent, and its library, now the British Library, formerly the British Museum Library, is the most comprehensive in the world; still, there is something else. Although perfect freedom exists nowhere in the world, there is more freedom in London than in any other city or country I have known – freedom of thought, expression and action (action within the law, if you like to add). You can speak out, or demonstrate, for any cause you wish to champion, whether it is an important, a ridiculous or an indifferent one. No one will prevent you from doing what you like to do or even laugh at you for attempting to do it. And so, slightly varying Dr. Johnson’s famous observation about London and life, one might say: he who is bored with London is bored with himself. 56 Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar

In 1956 it became possible for me to give up school teaching and since then I have devoted my time entirely to studying and writing. Naturally I frequently spent days or an entire week in the Reading Room of the British Museum but mainly I have worked at home. Here I have to thank my wife for always providing me with that atmosphere of seclusion which I need and indeed for never letting her own wishes stand in the way of my work, almost to the point of self-denial. Of the books I wrote some are philosophical, others biographical-historical. I started with a philosophical treatise which I had long wanted and, as it were, promised to write (in the introductory section of my Kant-Commentary), namely a treatise embodying my attempt to re-define the norms of thinking. I wrote this short work in English under the title An Essay in Thinking, in 1957/58, but it was published in a German translation by Felix Meiner in Hamburg in 1966 (Versuch über das Denken). My next two books I wrote in German, both biographical (Heinrich der Achte and Lucien Bonaparte), published by Claassen in Hamburg in 1961 and 1967 respectively; and regrettably, as I now realize, I also wrote my next book, which has not been published, in German – a full length book on the prophet Jeremiah, under the German title Ein Prophet der Revolution. Jeremiah im Licht der Geschichte. In English the title would be: Jeremiah, A Historical Account of the Prophet’s Life. I have devoted more time to this work than to any other of my books, especially as I wrote two versions of it, of which the second is the shorter and, I believe, the better. My story of Jeremiah’s life is strictly based on the available sources, both biblical and archaeological, and contains many re-interpretations of biblical, including prophetic, passages as well as of some of the archaeological material. What emerges from my research is, that Jeremiah was not a prophet of lamentations but a man of fight and action. He was, I believe, a revolutionary, who succeeded in overthrowing the Davidic monarchy but in so doing put something greater in its place: a religion which teaches that all men and women, high and low, are equal before God. My Jeremiah-manuscript, as mentioned, has so far remained unpublished, chiefly – I believe – because it does not receive the approval of the theologians of whatever faith who object to it, not only for reasons of orthodoxy but also because they consider that my study encroaches on their own exclusive domain. After Jeremiah, I started on my next book in German – Aristotle and his School – but on advice received as I was writing it, continued and completed it in English. It appeared in London in 1974, with the first chapter, which I had originally written in German, translated into English, partly by myself. Ever since, that is, after my experience with Aristotle and his School, I have been writing in English, even when I felt that a particular subject or book might attract less attention in England than in Germany – as may well be true in the case of this autobiographical sketch, which I herewith conclude. Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar 57

APPENDIX

THE MEANING OF THE GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN

A Talk Given in the Staff Room of Dunedin University in August 1944

I have to admit that I have found it impossible to translate the word Geistes- wissenschaften into English. To explain the term, I should like to distinguish between the word in its narrower, strictly technical sense, and the term in its wider and general meaning. In its strictly technical sense, the term was coined by the German philosopher Dilthey towards the end of the last century, and it denotes the modern conception of literary scholarship, such a conception as will bring literary or historical scholarship into line with the natural sciences in many important respects. I will explain this in greater detail later on. In its wider sense, however, Geisteswissenschaften means the study of the products of human intelligence. This is a very comprehensive definition, as it would include engineering feats as well as the discoveries of the natural scientists. In a way, these are to be included, but only secondarily. What is primarily meant, is the works of art – sculpture, painting,music, poetry; literature other than poetry, i.e. philosophy,historiography, etc. Of all these aspects, the literary aspect seems to be the most important. However, the definition is still insufficient, while it is left in doubt whether such studies are undertaken as an end in itself, or with a higher object in view. They are not undertaken for their own sake. There is a higher object. This – for the sake of brevity and using the shortest possible symbol – I will call truth, in whatever sense ‘truth’ is understood, and accordingly I define Geisteswissenschaften, in that broader, general sense, as the study of the products of human intelligence, notably works of literature, undertaken for the purpose of discovering truth, or of coming nearer to truth. Now, there are three possible lines of approach to works of literature, which I will call (1) the theological approach, (2) the approach of the rationalistic critic, (3) the approach of the modern scholar, i.e. that of Geisteswissenschaften in the technical sense of the word – the ‘organic approach’. Of course, I am mainly interested in the third type of approach. But it will give additional light and will throw it into relief if, as a preliminary, I devote a few words to the first and second types of approach. First, there is the theological method. It is applied to an ancient text of the highest, of divine wisdom. The interpreter tries to understand as much of it as is possible for him; he exhausts it as far as is humanly possible; and (of course, you will agree) adds something of his own to it. This method may also be applied to great and highly admired authors. It presupposes the existence of books containing inexhaustible wisdom, as it were, abundance of truth, indeed all the truth there is. An explanation of or commentary on such a book may well contain views and interpretations of which the originators of that ancient book possibly never dreamt. Much may be read into a book supposed to contain all the truth. 58 Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar

The second method is that of the rationalist who does not believe in divine inspiration and therefore considers any book whatever as the product of human intelligence, i.e. as bound to contain errors. He reads a book subjecting it to the scrutiny of his own reason. He wants to learn from it without being misled. He tries to discover as many of its errors as is possible for him, in order to replace them by correct judgements. His attitude is that of the disciple who studies to be a master himself, a successor to his own master who strives to be a greater master than his predecessor was, not because he is conceited but because he believes in progress; and he rejoices at the thought that in turn he will be surpassed by his own disciples. This, in a sense, is our natural approach to books. It is a method which was practised on a large scale by the rationalists of the eighteenth century, notably its philosophers and most incisively by Kant who read Plato’s, Leibniz’s and Hume’s works not only to learn from them but also to refute their errors and improve upon them finally, erect the edifice of his own (better) system of the foundations laid by them. The third method of approach, the ‘organic way’ is that of the modern scholar, of Geisteswissenschaften in the technical sense of the word. The modern scholar does not believe that a text, a literary document, can be improved upon. He considers every text as something unique, singular; as something conditioned by a variety of circumstances2, as the inevitable result of a wealth of causes – as something that has grown necessarily, like an organic whole3. The modern scholar who considers the text as something unique is not so much interested in its finite form as in that process of evolution to which it owes its origin and its form. He wants to understand that process, he wants to explore all its phases; he wants to discover all the elements which have combined to make the process possible, and contributed to bringing about the result, – the final text. And ultimately, he tries to unravel that process, trace it backwards, as it were, to its beginnings, penetrate to its germ or to its very heart: and then, if he has succeeded in doing so, he will reconstruct that process, re-build the text. This is the way of the modern scholar – I deliberately avoid the word ‘method’ – it is called Interpretation in the technical sense of the word by the devotees of Geisteswissenschaften. It may be explained as a technique by which it is possible to re- create works of art, to re-think thought, to re-produce thinking experiences. However, this technique or way of approach, is an art rather than a method. The scholar who practises it must be inspired; but I feel sur you will agree that no natural scientist will ever discover anything new unless he is inspired and also that, in a sense, there is an ‘artistic’ element in the use of method even in the natural sciences. Now you may say: but isn’t this an idle pastime? Why should anyone be induced to un-build and re-build literary documents? What is the aim of studies of this kind? My answer consists in saying that such studies do have a purpose, this: to make explicit something that is implicit. Now there is always a great deal of ideas and things implicit in all that we say and read and write. The all-important problem is: which of these many implicit ideas should we choose to make explicit? And on this point the various schools divide.

2 A variety of circumstances: such as personality of the author; social conditions under which he lived etc. 3 No part of which may be removed without fatal injury to the whole. Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar 59

Hegel, of course, in his metaphysical musings, persuaded himself that he had discovered the ‘Universal Spirit’ as implicit in everything that is explicit, i.e. the world of reality in which we live. Hegelianism, however, was eclipsed and in the second half of the last century, superseded by the philosophy of Positivism. An alliance was formed by the positivists and the scholars of the day, and under the influence of Positivism, scholars made it their objective to bring to light and make explicit the factual reality implicit in all texts. Scholars read the books of the past with the object in mind to discover what events – triumphs or calamities – what social conditions or ideas were hidden in a text. And further, as regards the author himself, which circumstances, such as the author’s personality, the ideas and ideals he cherished; his purpose in writing, his experiences and environment, his upbringing; the age in which he lived, the nation to which he belonged, the education that nation and age could provide; and even the whole history of that nation or indeed mankind which combined to shape the cultural standard of his age and nation – all these factors, more or less concealed in his work, were to be laid bare. So, out of an alliance of Positivsm and literary scholarship, Geisteswissenschaften grew. Mommsen, the celebrated historian, wrote three volumes of Roman history in which he narrated Roman history from its beginnings to Caesar’s death. He added another volume to depict the state of affairs in the Roman Empire – devoting to each of the provinces one chapter and giving such a vivid picture of circumstances and life in that time that a reader may feel he is reading a report from one who had himself travelled all through the Roman Empire in the age of the Caesars., How did Mommsen do it? He read all the literary documents of the Romans, including inscriptions. Avoiding the too often used word ‘analysis’, I prefer to say that he ‘un-did’ these documents, he ‘un-wrote’ them, as it were, and out of the elements which he discovered he re-wrote, or rather re-built, the world of the Romans, their institutions, their laws, their customs, their great personalities and their average individuals. Something similar was done by Droysen for the era of the Greeks, by Burckhardt for the Renaissance and, on a more limited field, for the history of German Literature by Scherer, for Greek drama by Gilbert Murray and Wilamowitz etc. Generally speaking, these scholars were essentially historians: they tried to explain things and ideas by their history, by their past, i.e. as a necessary result and product of their past history. It was Dilthey who coined the term Geisteswissenschaften meaning the sciences devoted to history – devoted to the Spirit that manifests itself in history, i.e. in ever- changing reality4. Every growth in history – constitutions and nations, laws and customs, works of art, poetry and philosophy corresponds to a growth in nature: every such growth or product of the human mind may be described as a flower or a bird may be described, viz. in its uniqueness; and its genesis can be explored, as a species in nature is explored, viz. through research into its past history. There are no isolated phenomena either in nature or in history. There exists that same chain of causes and effects, that same thoroughgoing interrelationship of all phenomena in history as in nature. Political events influence literature; but equally literary works affect social conditions, they affect national policy and the life of the individual; in turn they are affected by each one of all these innumerable and imponderable factors and elements.

4 History is to Geisteswissenschaften what nature is to the scientist: an infinite field of investigation. 60 Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar

And every growth in history is ‘true’ exactly as is every growth in nature. It is true because it is necessary at the time of its existence. And hence, according to Geisteswissenschaften, there is no absolute truth, i.e. no truth independent of the changes brought about in the course of time. On the contrary, ‘truth’ is seen as relative; zeitgebunden, bound up with its own age, limited as regards its validity to its own epoch5. Nor can there be progress, there is only evolution and change. This conception of the relativity of truth is clearly discernible in another brilliant book of the period: Windelband’s Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Philosophie. I would compare Windelband to a dramatist who each time succeeds in making convincing the speeches delivered in turn by his antagonistic dramatis personae. Similarly Windelband identifies himself with each of the great philosophers he discusses, and as he wanders through the history of philosophy, he becomes in turn a Platonist, an Aristotelian, a Kantian, and so on, successively. Dilthey, however, the profoundest of them all, tried to penetrate deeper. He asked: is there nothing that is permanent in that everlasting change? Is there no better or firmer truth than that of the individual moment? And he replies: The problems confronting man have always been the same. And not only the problems remain, but also basically and typically their solutions. However widely one may search through history, one will discover the same age-old problems, the same two or three types of philosophy offering solutions to these problems. Formulations, expressions, arrangements etc. may differ, but under the varying cloaks and disguises with which history clothes the many facets of human existence there appears and re- appears the same fundamental problem, namely that of the relation of matter and spirit; and accordingly only three types of philosophy are conceivable: materialism, idealism and a mixed materialist-idealist philosophy. Truth may be discovered, forgotten, re- discovered; insights may be lost and regained. Yet at the root of it all there lies something fundamentally human, there lie certain basic human qualities – compounds of feeling, thinking, desiring – which will for ever give rise not only to the same problems but also to the same attempts at solving them. And indeed it may prove easier to discern those basic elements of human existence by investigating humanity in primitive ages than by trying to penetrate beneath the surface of man in our own sophisticated time. This philosophy is, I believe, scepticism, and it may be called ‘historic scepticism’. Its influence has been widespread6. So the chief merit of Geisteswissenschaften does not lie in this philosophy. It rather lies in its research into detail. Minute studies were, and still are, undertaken. The chief problems of literary scholarship – as pseudo-authorship versus genuine authorship; chronology; obscure passages; questions of textual criticism – have been discussed in innumerable treatises, as have been questions of political and social history, the history of art, music etc. This type of scholarship, the early phase of Geisteswissenschaften, had its prime in the last decade of the nineteenth century, and although in many ways, those same methods are still being practised and the same aims pursued to-day, a certain weariness began to make itself felt in the first decade of our own century. ‘The first fine careless rapture’ was lost and ‘cannot be recaptured’ (Browning). Positivism lost some of its

5 What is necessary and inevitable to-day, will no longer be so to-morrow. 6 In a way its influence is paralysing. Who will labour to think, who will elaborate his own thoughts if all he can do is to express some age-old truth in the language of his own epoch? And, as a corollary, if what he says will be dead and useless at the time of the next generation? Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar 61 influence, its alliance with literary scholarship became strained. There was a crisis and out of it grew what may be called the second phase, or School of ‘Geisteswissenschaften’, which flourished in the 1920’s. Those belonging to that second School were no longer primarily interested in inquiring into the facts and realities of history. Nor were they interested in surveying long periods of history, as Mommsen, Scherer, and Windelband had done. They felt that they could neither reach deep nor far enough by that kind of research. They wanted to grasp something better and more valuable than mere facts or factual conditions and circumstances. And hence, they turned to research into the work of individual thinkers, the great philosophers, or the poets or outstanding political figures of history. They wished to concentrate on the message contained in the work of one of the very great individuals of the past. It has been their ambition to understand such a message fully, to penetrate to the very heart and essence of such a message – the very essence of Platonism, Aristotelianism, Kantianism. In short, it has been their ambition to understand the great philosophical systems or the great poets of the past better than they had ever been understood before. But what is meant by the ‘essence’ of Platonism, Kantianism etc.? Before I try to answer this question I have to point out that the concept of evolution played an important part in the thinking of the scholars of the twenties, as had been the case earlier, though in a new way. According to these scholars, a great and original philosopher is a man with an innate vision of truth; and as he matures, his vision of truth matures too: it grows purer and clearer until it reaches its culminating height; and after that it may decline and become dimmer and impure again. All throughout his career the philosopher labours to give expression to his vision of truth. This vision is before his mind while he writes his works. It is an urge within him, a living or driving force compelling him to write his works, thereby giving expression to his vision. Still, he can never express his vision adequately. He never succeds fully. All his works are imperfect. Each of them merely represents a stage in the evolution of his thought. None of his statements is final or perfectly true, not even in relation to his own vision. His statements – often contradictory to one another – usually are, or appear to be, dogmatic and static – yet his vision of truth is dynamic. If we allowed ourselves to be guided by any one of a philosopher’s statements we should learn little from him. For it is not his seemingly dogmatic teaching that matters, it is his vision of truth that concerns us and concerns us deeply. But how can we hope to understand a philosopher’s vision of truth beneath his many statements which are, moreover, of unequal value? How can we hope to discover, to re- experience, to re-visualize a great and creative philosopher’s vision of truth? We can certainly do so by reading his works; still, we must know how to read them. We must read them as books that mark the evolution of his thought; we must read them with the object in mind to separate the accidental from the substantial. But above all we must try to discover the trend of his development, the germ from which his thought grew; and we must do so irrespectively of what the author himself may consider, or emphatically proclaim, to be his most important or decisive principle or idea. We must be prepared to find the essence of Kantianism where Kant himself never believed it to be. And so the most astonishing conclusion at which these scholars arrive is: an interpreter may – or is bound to – understand an author better than that author understood himself. 62 Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar

I will give you two examples of works which I believe are highly representative of the second phase of Geisteswissenschaften. The first is N. Kemp Smith’s Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Kemp Smith discovers four phases in the evolution of Kant’s thought, each reflected in some chapter or certain paragraphs of the Critique and each belonging to a different phase of Kant’s evolution as a philosopher. After studying these four phases Kemp Smith believes that he has discovered the trend of Kant’s development; and on the strength of this belief he decides that the third phase is the maturest and highest, the fourth one of decline, during which Kant became disloyal to his own philosophy; and in direct contradition to Kant himself, Kemp Smith considers Kant’s conclusions during his third phase of developement as containing the true essence of Kant’s teaching and boldly implies, or asserts, that he understands Kant better than Kant understood himself7. My second example is Jaeger’s work on Aristotle. The Metaphysics in its traditional form is, of course, an ill-arranged conglomerate of treatises or lecture records, partly complementary, partly contradictory to one another, and as we read it put together by one or many of Aristotle’s successors some time after the philosopher’s death. As we read the Metaphysics now, it is indeed puzzling, enigmatic. Now, Jaeger applied the principle of evolution to this badly arranged body of writings and after completing his studies believed that he had discovered the trend of Aristotle’s evolution, the driving force – as he calls it – of Aristotle’s thought. ‘Only when we examine what Aristotle suppresses or introduces or, emphasises, as time goes on, only then can we discover the determining forces that worked in Aristotle’s mind towards evolving true Aristotelianism.’ Clearly then Jaeger believes that he understands Aristotle’s philosophy better than Aristotle himself at any given moment in his life, and he sets to work to re-build it, to evolve it from its very heart. It follows that Jaeger conceives of truth as a tendency, an urge, e.g. Aristotle’s urge to adapt certain cosmological, half-mystical notions of Plato’s last years to his own scientific and analytical mode of thinking; or in Aristotle’s urge to rationalize the transcendent; logically to explain the inexplicable. And Jaeger concludes that of Aristotle’s urge to comprehend truth in its fullness the Metaphysics is an expression, an imperfect expression no doubt, yet an expression clear enough to enable a deep-searching scholar to grasp Aristotle’s innermost thoughts, to re-visualize Aristotle’s vision of truth. If we ask, what is the purpose, the main idea underlying this method of Gei- steswissenschaften? the answer is: it is the conviction that the deepest truth accessible to man is that contained in the vision of truth of the great original philosophers of the past, rather than in dogmas, second-hand knowledge, eclecticism etc. Coupled with it, diffidence and mistrust with regard to our own creativeness play a part. Besides, there is a strong subjective element in this type of scholarship. N. Kemp Smith and Jaeger, Simmel and Gundolf etc. all select for Interpretation that author of all authors to whom they feel the greatest personal affinity. They all take as their motto a Pindaric line: γένοι᾿ οἷος ἐσσὶ µαϑών (Develop your true self through learning; or: Come to be who thou art through learning). In other words, these philosopher-scholars developed their own philosophy by interpreting the work of that particular philosopher who, they

7 Of course, Kant himself had made a similar claim about his own understanding of the Platonic philosophy. Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar 63 thought, was most congenial to themselves; that is, their scholarly treatises are in fact philosophical confessions in disguise. Evidently then they attempted to achieve more than gain clarity about a text for themselves and their pupils. Rather, they felt that our own erring and confused time was in need of a philosophical and spiritual foundation, and this they meant to provide by the resuscitation of one of the great philosophical systems of the past. Therefore they ‘purified’ one or the other of those systems and placed it before the minds of the people of our own generation with what they thought was its true meaning clarified, in the hope that the once powerful system would once again prove a living force and a guiding light. I do not know whether scholars of this Second School of Geisteswissenschaften ever felt that they had been successful. And have they? What is our own judgment? Jaeger never surpassed his youthful work on Aristotle. Kemp Smith’s views on Kant have come under stringent criticism. One may well say that a new crisis has developed. But I do not want to close on a note of pessimism. A reversal and return to the more sober ways of the earlier School has taken place. In fact, both these Schools co-exist, and treatises are being written at present which show the characteristics of either School or mixed application of the principles of both. Summing up what has been achieved and what is still left to be done and casting a glance on possible developments in the future, I should like to emphasise the following: whatever the results of research of Geisteswissenschaften may be, Geisteswissenschaft has to its credit one very valuable product, the approach through Interpretation – although I believe that the scholars of the second School have attempted too much; they have, as it were, overstepped the mark. I believe that something new will originate if a new alliance is concluded between philosophy and Geisteswissenschaften. Philosophy itself however has little confidence in itself in our time. It has been shaken by that historicist scepticism which resulted from Geisteswissenschaften. The wounds caused by historicist views can only be healed by a philosophy arising out of it. Philosophy has most frequently been influenced and stimulated by the natural sciences throughout its history. It should for once allow itself to be stimulated and inspired by Geisteswissenschaften. The new alliance should be one of ‘give and take’. A very important task, I believe, can be performed. Interpretation in the hands of the scholars is, as I have said before, in many ways an art rather than a method. This art should be systematized and transformed into a method. Let me draw a comparison with formal Logic. The laws of Logic were formulated by Aristotle, but logical thinking had been practised for many centuries before Aristotle. In a similar way I think the laws of Interpretation should be distilled, or formulated and arranged, now that Interpretation has been practised for a long time. I believe that it will be possible to discover something important through this investigation. In the first place, let us appreciate the fact that the same principles of Interpretation are applicable to all the philosophical systems of the past. Secondly, let us realize what follows from this basic fact, viz. that there must be some common ground not only between the re-thinking scholar and any one of the philosophers of the past but also between those differing philosophers themselves. What is it that is common to them all and hence, not subjected to change or evolution but permanent? This is the question before us and its answer can only come through an investigation of Interpretation. And, 64 Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar if I may use a Kantian formula: we have to carry out this investigation by exploring ‘the conditions of the possibility’ of Interpretation. I will explain the same thought from yet another angle. The scholar, who practises Interpretation, i.e. the re-thinking scholar, claims that he is better able than others to understand what someone else has stated or written down. How can that be? What is this scholar’s secret? Does he possess his own method of defining concepts, a method superior to the traditional and unsatisfactory one of defining by genus and species? Apparently, he does possess a method of his own or at least, his practise presupposes such a method – even though he is not aware of its norms or rules. For otherwise his success would be inexplicable. Therefore, an investigation of the scholar’s method of defining as well as of his method of correlating statements and drawing inferences from statements is called for; for with regard to judgements and inferences he is bound to have his own method too. From such an investigation, I blieve, there is likely to result a greater clarification of thought in general; of thought in its relation to its expression; of what a concept is etc. For the discovery of the implicit laws of re-thinking must have an important bearing on the continuing search for the laws of thinking. And ultimately, such clarification of conceptional thinking must affect all the various branches of learning, both in the Humanities and the Natural Sciences. Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar 65

NACHWORT ZUR BUCHAUSGABE 1986

Im Jahre 1982 erhielt die Universitätsbibliothek Freiburg i. Br. von Frau Marianne Grayeff, London, die nachgelassenen Manuskripte des 1981 verstorbenen Klassischen Philologen, Philosophen und Historikers Felix Grayeff (vgl. Abschnitt E 17-26 in der Bibliographie). Durch Herrn Dr. Yoram K. Jacoby, Jerusalem, kamen 1984 noch zwei Manuskripte (E 27-28) hinzu. Neben vor allem biographisch interessanten Zeugnissen – wie z.B. frühen Gedichten (vgl. E 22,12), Dramen (vgl. E 23 und 28) –, kürzeren Problemskizzen (vgl. in E 21) und Ergänzungen zu Veröffentlichungen (vgl. E 19; 20; auch in 22; 25; 26) enthält der Nachlaß die Übersetzung einer auf deutsch erschienenen Schrift ins Englische (E 19), das vollständige Manuskript eines Buches über den Propheten Jeremia (nebst englischer Teilübersetzung; vgl. E 17 und 18), einen „Tractatus economico-politicus“ (E 24) und die hier vorgelegte Autobiographie „Migrant Scholar – Fahrender Scholast“. Die Beziehungen Grayeffs zur Freiburger Universität gehen aus der Schrift selbst hervor, sind darin im Ganzen aber eher peripher. Die Autobiographie ist vor allem das Dokument eines Lebensweges, der die Brutalität und Irrationalität einer Zeit, einer Gesellschaft und einer politischen Konstellation zu bewältigen hatte, die zu extremen Situationen führten. Die Paradoxien des 20. Jahrhunderts spiegeln sich an vielen Stellen des Textes. Daß ein exilierter jüdischer Gelehrter durch sein Wirken in Neuseeland schließlich die Vorausetzungen zur Errichtung einer Germanistik-Professur schafft, ist ein am Rand liegendes, aber bezeichnendes Beispiel dafür (vgl. S. 40), die Veröffentlichung dieses englischen Textes durch eine deutsche Institution selbst noch ein Ausdruck davon (man vgl. die Bemerkungen Grayeffs im Text über die Entwurfs- bzw. Publikationssprachen seiner Werke S. 52 und 55). Eindrücklich wirkt der Bericht aber vor allem durch seine Klarheit und Res- sentimentlosigkeit bei der Schilderung menschlich schwierigster, ja lebensbedrohlicher Situationen, durch die Vorurteilslosigkeit, in der neue Lebensräume akzeptiert werden, ungeachtet der ebenfalls artikulierten Fremdheit (vgl. S. 37). Daneben wird durch ihn das Bild deutscher Universitäten in den Zwanziger/Dreißiger Jahren in manchen Details koloriert. Die Bearbeitung des Typoskripts (vgl. die Abbildung S. 23) für den Druck hielt sich an enge Grenzen: Ganz offensichtliche Versehen wurden berichtigt (z.B. DM- Währungsangaben in der Weimarer Zeit), deutsche Schreibweisen eingeführt (Königsberg statt Koenigsberg) u.a.m. Zu einer stilistischen Überarbeitung, wie sie der Autor selbst ohne Zweifel vorgenommen hätte, sahen sich die Herausgeber nicht berechtigt. Die Universitätsbibliothek Freiburg dankt Frau Marianne Grayeff für die Pu- blikationserlaubnis dieser Schrift. Der Autor hat diesen Dank in seinem Epilog selbst vorweggenommen (S. 55). 66 Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar

ZUR DIGITALEN AUSGABE 2003

Die neuen technischen Möglichkeiten legten es nahe, die Autobiographie von Felix Grayeff nun auch digital zugänglich zu machen. Die Gründe kann dem Nachwort zur Buchausgabe von 1986 entnehmen: Zur Deutschen Universitätsgeschichte in der Weimarer Zeit, zur Geschichte des Judentums im Dritten Reich und zum dadurch ausgelösten Emigrantenschicksal ist die Schrift nicht nur ein persönliches Zeugnis, sondern auch eine aufschlußreiche zeitgeschichtliche Quelle. Die digitale Edition hält sich nicht an das Layout und damit die Seitenzählung der Buchausgabe. Die sonstigen editorischen Vorgaben entsprechen sich. Die Bibliographie wurde ergänzt. Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar 67

BIBLIOGRAPHIE DER ARBEITEN VON FELIX GRAYEFF

A. DISSERTATION 1. Untersuchungen über die Bedeutung der Gebärden in der griechischen Epik. Inauguraldissertation. Philosophische Fakultät, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg i. Br., 1930. Vorgelegt von Felix GRAJEW. – 55 S. – UB Freiburg: D 801,hu.

B. PHILOSOPHISCHE PUBLIKATIONEN 2. Deutung und Darstellung der theoretischen Philosophie Kants : Ein Kommentar zu den grundlegenden Teilen der Kritik der reinen Vernunft. – Hamburg Meiner, 1951. – XXIII, 225 S. – UB Freiburg: B 3426,g. Unveränderter Nachdruck. – Ebd., 1966. 2. Auflage. Mit einem Sachregister von Eberhard HELLER. Ebd., 1977. – XXIII, 242 S. – UB Freiburg: GE 82/3519. Englische Ausgabe: Kant’s theoretical philosophy : A commentary to the central part of the „Critique of pure reason“ / David WALFORD (Übers.). – Manchester Manchester University Press ; New York : Barnes & Noble, 1970. – XI, 232 S. – UB Freiburg: TM 85/1736. Portugiesische Ausgabe: Exposição e interpretação da filosofia teórica de Kant : U comentário às partes fundamentais da crítica da razão pura. Lisboa : Ediçoes 70, 1987. – 28 S. – (O saber da filosofia ; 19) Ergänzungen: siehe unten E 22, 1-3. 3. Versuch über das Denken. – Hamburg : Meiner, 1966. – 106 S. – UB Freiburg: B 4828,ko. Englische Übersetzung: Siehe unten E 19. 4. Aristotle and his school : An inquiry into the history of the peripatos; with a commentary on Metaphysics Z, H, Λ and Θ. – London : Duckworth, 1974. – 230 S. – UB Freiburg: GE 74/6407. Ergänzungen: siehe unten E 20. 5. Descartes. – London : Goodall, 1977. – 126 S. – GE 78/8083. 6. A short treatise on ethics. – London : Duckworth, 1980. – VI, 89 S. – UB Freiburg: GE 82/2784. 7. Interpretation und Logik. In: Kant-Studien 45 (1954/54), S. 55-66. – UB Freiburg: B 3432,z-45. 8. The relation of transcendental and formal logic. In: Kant-Studien 51 (1959/60), S. 349-352. – Zu H. J. PATON: Formal and transcendental logic. – UB Freiburg: B 3432,z-51. 9. The problem of the genesis of Aristotle’s text. In: Phronesis 1 (1956), S. 105-145. – UB Freiburg: B 108,hm-1 10. Wahrheit und Methode : Bemerkungen zum „Versuch über das Denken“. In: Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 28 (1974), S. 278-285. – UB Freiburg: ZG 1561-28 68 Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar

11. Rezensionen zu a) R. G. COLLINGWOOD: An Autobiography. 1939. In: Gnomon 21 (1969), S. 194- 197. – UB Freiburg: D 97,m-21. b) A. H. CHROUST: Socrates. 1957. In: Gnomon 31 (1959), S. 79-81. – UB Freiburg: D 97,m-31.

C. HISTORISCHE PUBLIKATIONEN 12. Der Freiheitskampf der Makkabäer : Aus dem 1. Makkabäerbuch / übers. v. F. GRAJEW. Berlin : Schocken, 1934 (Jüdische Lesehefte ; 41) – UB FR: KA 86/1314. 13. Heinrich VIII : Das Leben eines Königs – Schicksal eines Reiches. Hamburg Claassen, 1961. – 362 S., 4 Bl. Abb. – UB Freiburg: H 8077,e. Neuauflage, Ebd. 1978. – Vgl. auch E 26. Franz. Ausgabe: Henri VIII : Prince de la renaissance. Paris : Laffont, 1963. Spanische Ausgabe: Enrique VIII. – Madrid : CID, 1967. 14. Lucien Bonaparte : Bruder des Kaisers, Gegner des Kaiserreichs. Mit Auszügen aus den Memoiren des Lucien Bonaparte und anderen zeitgenössischen Dokumenten. – Hamburg : Claassen, 1966. – 229 S. – UB Freiburg: TM 85/1793. Ergänzungen: siehe unten E 25,2,b. 15. Joan of Arc : Legends and truth. – London : Goodall, 1978. – 116 S. – UB Freiburg: TM 85/2221. Vgl. auch E 22,10. Niederländische Ausgabe: Jeanne d’Arc. – Brügge : Tabor, 1982.

D. VERÖFFENTLICHUNG AUS DEM NACHLASS 16. Migrant scholar : An autobiography / Eleonore ENGELHARDT ; Albert RAFFELT (Hrsg.). – Freiburg i. Br. : Universitätsbibliothek, 1986 (Schriften aus der Universitätsbibliothek Freiburg i. Br. ; 11). Manuskript siehe E 21.

E. UNVERÖFFENTLICHTE MANUSKRIPTE Übersicht über die in der Handschriftenabteilung der Universitätsbibliothek be- findlichen nachgelassenen Manuskripte Felix Grayeffs.

17. Ein Prophet der Revolution : Das Leben des Jeremiah im Licht der Geschichte. – 351 S. 18. Englische Auszüge aus 17.: Prophet of revolution : Jeremiah. An historical account of his life. 19. An essay on thinking. – V, 168 S., 5 Bl. – Englische Fassung der Schrift Versuch über das Denken (A 3) mit Änderungen und Ergänzungen. 20. Drei zusätzliche Kapitel zu dem Buch Aristotle and his school (A, 4): The birth of ontology : Comments on Metaphysics B, T, E and K. – 64 S. The relation of Metaphysics Beta to the rest of the Metaphysics. – 15 S. An analysis of the opening chapters of the Metaphysics. – 19 S. 21. Migrant scholar : an autobiography. – (vgl. D 16). 22. Kleinere Artikel 1. Zu den Versuchen, die Kritik der reinen Vernunft zu erklären. – 3 S. Felix Grayeff: Migrant Scholar 69

2. Addendum to Commentary on Kant (dt.). – 5 S., nebst einem Brief an Prof. G. FUNKE (18. 7. 1973). 3. Paragraph on Kant (engl.). – 1 S. 4. Notes on Sophocles’ ‘Antigone’,lin. 310-326. – 4 S. 5. Notes on Sophocles’ ‘Antigone’, lin. 368. – 2 S. 6. Notes on Sophocles’ ‘Antigone’, lin. 781-801. – 3 S. 7. dss., lin. 782. – 2 S. 8. Notes on Sophocles’ ‘Antigone’, lin. 782. – 1 S. 9. Notes on Sophocles’ ‘Aias’, lin. 74-90. – 2 S. 10. Descartes againt the Skeptics / by E. M. CURLEY. 1978. - 15 S. 11. Poems in translation (Sophocles, Hölderlin, Eichendorff, Nietzsche, C. F. Meyer, Hofmannsthal, George, Rilke, Hesse). – 20 S. 12. Auf Michelangelos Adam (1944) und Gedichte von 1919-1929. – 7 S. 13. Horace Odes III 9,9. – 4 S. 23. Zwei Dramen Alcestis returns : A comedy in two acts. – (3), 81 S. Phanes : A play in five scenes. – (1), 111, 67 S. 24. Tractatus economico-politicus. – 211 S. 25. Historische Arbeiten 1. The death of Louis XIV : The struggle for the succession. – paginiert S. 201- 262. 2. The marriages of the Bonapartes. a) Napoleon’s rise to power. – paginiert S. 263-321b. b) The Emperor’s rebel brother : Lucien and the system. – pag. S. 322 – 368 + 3 Bl. 26. Machiavelli und die Folgen (5) : Heinrich VIII. Hessischer Rundfunk, Frankfurt a. M. Sendung am 17. 5. 1981. – 24 S. mit einer handschriftlichen Anmerkung. 27. Ezekielos, ein jüdischer Tragiker in hellenistischer Zeit. – 15 S. 28. Uriel Acostas Widerruf : Tragödie. – (2), 80 S.