In winter of 1941-1942, I applied for scholarships for graduate school. Of the two I was offered, I decided to accept the one from the University of Chicago. Chicago interested me as a city with a large Czech population. Besides, as the University of Chicago had been founded as a Baptist institution, my friends at McMaster were convinced that I would be in good hands.
I was not. Chicago was a nightmare from beginning to end, from 1943 until 1952. But first, in May 1942, I went to Ottawa to work in the postal censorship where I read the letters of German prisoners of war and their friends and relatives. We especially had to watch out for complaints about conditions in the camps, about information that might be of interest to the enemy, and about the morale of the German population. My co-workers were new Canadian B.As, Canadians of German background, Polish émigrés, and English women who had come from England with some experience in that kind of work. Thinking back now, I mainly remember funny passages in the letters. I enjoyed the work, and with monthly pay checks of $114, I felt rich. During the seven months in Ottawa, I saved enough money to live on during the subsequent nine months in Chicago.
Unlike Canadians, I had to wait for a long time for a U.S. student visa, but early in January 1943 I went to Chicago. Before I was allowed to register I had to have a medical examination, during which a tumor was discovered on my palate. The doctors decided to operate immediately, and while still under local anaesthesia I wrote to my parents, who were totally beside themselves with worry. Back in my room, I began to feel a terrible pain, which lasted for almost a week. With a compress on my cheek and almost unable to speak, I attended my lectures at the university. Nobody was interested in my condition, not even the fellow student who lived in the same building. Because of the war, the department of Germanic Languages and Literatures had only few students, all of whom had come at the beginning of the fall quarter and therefore knew each other. (Instead of semesters the university had four quarters annually of three months each.)
I had come from McMaster University believing that one should always be friendly and helpful, but in the German department at Chicago this assumption turned out to be mistaken. One of my first courses there was Middle High German, and I found it very interesting that the Egerländer dialect which I had known from childhood retained many remnants of Middle High German that had disappeared in High German. I hence proclaimed in the graduate students’ common room that I would be glad to help my classmates with the work for that course. As I found out later, my offer was held against me as an example of my conceit.
Miss Gamer, the head of the department, was hostile toward me from the start. Mr. Jolies, whose fields were the German classical period and the history of German literary criticism, was not much better. In all of his courses, he drew a chart on the blackboard, tracing the history of literature, philosophy, and art to a common denominator, the pair of opposites systole and diastole. Because this framework did not impress me sufficiently, he was insulted and declared that I was above all Czech and Jewish—whether at all human was not clear. Mr. von Gronicka, with whom I studied the German novella, praised my work and even told me later, that he did not enjoy teaching the course when he taught it again after I had taken it. But he also came to understand which way the wind was blowing: When I asked him for a letter of recommendation for my file with the Dean, he said that he did not remember me well enough even to fill out a form. In the meantime I had babysat his children several times. After such an evening he asked me what had happened to his mother’s silver cigarette case. He told me that it had disappeared and that apart from me nobody had been in the apartment.
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Two Lives in Uncertain Times, New York: Berghahn Books, 2006, p. 44f