I then applied for admission to the Committee on the History of Culture program. At the end of the spring semester of 1944, I needed only two courses to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. The University allowed me to take these two courses during the summer at the University of Chicago, where I also planned to begin my graduate studies. Instead of the normal four years required for the bachelor’s degree, I had taken only two. This had become possible because I had been allowed to take more than the usual five or six courses a semester.
In early June 1944, I left Richmond to begin “graduate” studies in Chicago. I wanted to study comparative linguistics to prepare for my plan to construct an artificial world language. This was to be more logically constructed than Esperanto and therefore easier to learn. I came to Chicago with a great deal of confidence and self-assurance, which did not last. At seventeen, I was in some ways far ahead of my peers, but on the other hand very immature and terribly naive…
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Zwei Seiten der Geschichte. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002, p. 80 (translation)
In spite of many a disadvantageous experience in the German Department, in time my life in Chicago turned out to be quite pleasant in many respects. During the first year I lived in the International House, where I very soon met students of different backgrounds: German-Jewish emigrants, Latin Americans, American Jews, and American blacks, with whom I became friends. I was poor as a church mouse, but that didn’t bother me. In addition to my scholarship, which paid for my tuition and, at times, my room at International House, I received only a dollar a week from my parents. Soon after my arrival, my roommate and friend Walter Levy, a refugee from Königsberg, got me a job in the Hutchinson Commons dining hall. This was fortunate; because unlike later in New York, I never went hungry that way. The dining hall also catered to students in an Army program who were studying Chinese and Japanese intensively. Among the army students were some German refugees, including Stefan Brecht, the son of Bertolt Brecht, Franz Schurmann and Steven Jaroslowski. Schurmann later became a famous sinologist who played a significant role in academic resistance to the Vietnam War. Jaroslowski, not a Marxist, became a wealthy financier.
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Zwei Seiten der Geschichte. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002, p. 83 (translation)