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Memory and History

Recollections of a Historian of Nazism, 1967-1982By Roderick Stackelberg

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2011 Roderick Stackelberg
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4620-6442-7

Contents

Preface...................................................vii1 The Irasburg Affair, 1967-1968..........................12 Back to Graduate School, 1969-1970......................283 Burlington, Vermont, 1970-1971..........................544 Amherst, Massachusetts, 1972-1974.......................835 San Diego, 1974-1976....................................1006 Eugene, Oregon, 1976-1977...............................1167 Vermillion, South Dakota, 1977-1978.....................1358 At Home in Spokane? 1978-1980...........................1439 The Struggle for Tenure, 1981-1982......................158Epilogue..................................................173

Chapter One

The Irasburg Affair, 1967-1968

Steffi, the baby Trina, and I docked in New York on July 1st, 1967, almost exactly 21 years after my first arrival in New York as an eleven-year old after the war. Another new beginning for me, now aged 32 with a German wife, a one-year-old daughter, and badly frayed literary ambitions. At times it seemed to me I was repeating as farce what Mama had experienced as tragedy! Unconsciously I had heeded Pete Seeger's call, "The time for exiles is over." I got a far warmer dockside reception from my family than I expected – or probably deserved. Mama met us at the boat as promised, as did Olaf and Tempy, who was now working for a brokerage firm on Wall Street. Olaf drove us to Vermont in his VW bus, stopping for the night in Middletown, Connecticut, where he was teaching in the summer session at Wesleyan University. Driving by a power plant near Hartford, I could not help but think of similar installations that were—perhaps at that very moment—the targets of American bombs in Vietnam. The war hung like an invisible shroud over everything I saw, giving all the familiar scenes a peculiar unreality, as if normalcy were merely being faked.

And yet the summer of 1967 lingers in my memory as the most idyllic summer of my life. Mama's ramshackle, hand-built hut had few comforts (one of them being a toilet that could be flushed with a pail of water), but it was cozy and snug. Situated on 150 acres of rolling farmland, surrounded by forested hills, and with no other human habitation within our range of vision (Connie's farm, where Mama now resided, was just beyond the horizon), Mama's place perfectly embodied Vermont's lush green beauty and stark natural solitude. Sunrise in Albany, Vermont in July 1967 was as close to Paradise—or at least its earthly representation—as I have come in my life. We had great luck with the weather: July and August were clear, sunny, and warm. The landscape and the climate formed the perfect backdrop for the honeymoon we never had. In San Francisco they were celebrating the "summer of love." Steffi and I had our own summer of love in rural Vermont.

We also had more than our share of good luck in finding a three-story, four-bedroom farmhouse on the common in the center of the neighboring village of Irasburg for sale for only $6,000. Having squirreled away 6,000 DM in our savings account in Berlin, just enough to convert into a 25 percent $1,500 down payment, we could actually afford to buy.

Remarkably, the house came fully furnished as well. Its owner, Annie Mae Fisher, in her early 80s and immobilized by arthritis, lived in an adult-care home in the nearby village of Barton. With no living heirs, she had turned over responsibility for the upkeep and eventual sale of the property to Homer Sheltra, who had run the Irasburg general store for decades, but had recently undergone a laryngectomy for cancer and was anxious to leave for his new home in Connecticut as soon as possible. His health failing, he did not want to go through the trouble of organizing an estate sale. We were the beneficiaries of his impatience. We also benefitted from the prevailing disdain for "old junk." Natives of this isolated corner of Vermont were just beginning to understand the potential value of antiques.

We paid a visit to Annie Mae Fisher in Barton, determined as we were to maintain the home in the spirit of her family's long tradition in Irasburg. The house was built in 1881 with Victorian dimensions (though without most of the frills of that architectural style) after the original house on that site had burned down. Her father had lived in Irasburg since returning from the Civil War in 1865, in which he had been severely wounded. Besides the farm he ran a livery stable as well. Annie was completely under his spell.

"I had the most wonderful father there ever was."

She told us about a man she had met in an ice cream parlor at York Beach in Maine, where she had worked summers as a young woman. When he wrote her and asked if he might visit her in Irasburg, her mother did not give her permission. Her father said, "Well, Nannie, you've got to ask yourself whether you want to marry him." Annie said, he hadn't asked her, but she wrote him and told him not to come. Twenty years later she read in the Boston Post that he had become Boston police chief and was happily married with two children. She rushed home and showed her father the clipping. "See what I might have been?"— "Well, Annie, I hope I didn't keep you from getting a husband." But Annie told him she had no regrets. She had preferred to make her father a good home. "They say opportunity comes only once in a lifetime. I think our lives are predestined, don't you? It's all governed by fate."

The barn had collapsed some years ago under the weight of a Vermont winter snowfall, but the house was structurally sound. It needed only cosmetic work, most of which we were able to do ourselves. After weeks of painting, laying tile, repairing, and cleaning, we finally moved in just before the beginning of the school year in September. Heat was the major problem we had to confront that first year. The wood-burning furnace in the cellar was beyond repair. We were forced to rely on a centrally located pot-bellied stove and a wood-burning kitchen range. It was not until the following year that we could afford to install an oil-burning central heating system (which since has been replaced by another wood-burning furnace). We got some indication of what we could expect from a Vermont winter when returning from a day trip to Expo 67 in Montreal at the beginning of October we found that the temperature had already dipped well below freezing at dusk. Our babysitter, Paulette Beaudry, had been forced to take refuge with Trina in her own heated home across the common.

Teaching high school in northern Vermont required some adjustment on my part. Although the dairy-farming economy was in severe decline in Orleans County, much of the local farming population still regarded secondary schooling as unwelcome competition for the time and services of the young people whose labor was needed on the farms. Having had little experience with reluctant students, I had to adjust to the unanticipated reality that many of my students simply regarded school as a waste of time. I thought I could use the techniques I learned in the army to enforce discipline, but soon realized my mistake. Military-style threats and commands just provoked laughter and scorn. I had no trouble controlling my own classes, where I knew that the secret of success was to keep students busy. Most...