Lumpen-Caesar

But for the lucky chance that University Hall had had enough of me, I might have still been a Harvard undergraduate in the spring of 1932. Instead, that ominous spring saw me a student at the University of Greifswald in Pomerania. To the Harvard dean who suggested I was more fitted for the path of life insurance than the groove of academe, I have been grateful ever since. Because of him my education was formed, not by taking sixteen courses of academic bric-à-brac, but by living through a society in disintegration and seeing a government fall.

Greifswald was a small Baltic seaport that could have served as background for the minor nostalgic stories of Theodor Storm. Overarched by chestnut trees, dominated by the brick gothic St. Nikolai Church with its baroque tower, its market place unchanged in four hundred years—that was the town.

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Francis Russell

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But for the lucky chance that University Hall had had enough of me, I might have still been a Harvard undergraduate in the spring of 1932. Instead, that ominous spring saw me a student at the University of Greifswald in Pomerania. To the Harvard dean who suggested I was more fitted for the path of life insurance than the groove of academe, I have been grateful ever since. Because of him my education was formed, not by taking sixteen courses of academic bric-à-brac, but by living through a society in disintegration and seeing a government fall.

Greifswald was a small Baltic seaport that could have served as background for the minor nostalgic stories of Theodor Storm. Overarched by chestnut trees, dominated by the brick gothic St. Nikolai Church with its baroque tower, its market place unchanged in four hundred years—that was the town.