Two new professors, Liepe and Schulz, were appointed as members of my dissertation committee, and Gamer was a member ex officio. Since I had had hardly any contact with the department for some time, and the two people were new, I was actually quite optimistic—mistakenly, as it turned out. Bergstraesser adopted the attitude of his colleagues toward me, and the two new people did likewise. Once I had a conversation with Bergstraesser in the office of Mrs. Schmitt, the secretary of the department. I had just answered his question about Krauss attitude toward the Communist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg. Suddenly he became furious; I had never seen this man, who seemed so civilized, behave in this way. He reproached me for being “nothing but red”. He wanted to throw his briefcase at me, but only hit the window. The next day he apologized to Mrs Schmitt and told her that such attacks of his were caused by a war injury. She told me this fifteen years later.
From then on I only had few opportunities to speak to Bergstraesser, especially once I had moved to Akron, Ohio where Georg and I were teaching at the University after we married in December, 1948. At one point, Bergstraesser promised to return several chapters to me within a week, and when I finally called him I was told by a tenant that the Bergstraesser family had gone to Germany and would be there for several months.
Soon after his return I considered the dissertation completed. Gamer decided that each of the professors on my dissertation committee should in turn suggest changes and then pass it on to the next member of the committee. The process took a long time, as none of them was in a hurry. I received the most nonsensical suggestions that made the dissertation neither better nor worse. When it finally was accepted, Georg advised me to make photocopies of the twenty-one pages of suggestions, because he thought the professors would later claim that they had neither demanded changes nor approved the dis sertation. I did not think that they would go so far, but made the copies anyway. Exactly what Georg had predicted happened, and from that time on, I saved every scrap of paper that seemed relevant. When I brought the typed thesis to Bergstraesser—almost five hundred pages in length, he did not look at it but only said, “Cut by one third.”
By the time I had done the cutting, we were living in Little Rock and expecting our first child. The defense was set for the afternoon of October 4, 1951, and I went to Chicago on the first. Early in the morning of October 4, I went into labor and had to go to Chicago Lying-in Hospital. The examination was canceled and our first son Jeremy was born shortly after 6:00 p.m.
From the hospital I called Gamer and told her that the head of the clinic approved of my taking the examination after the ten days’ compulsory stay after childbirth. She decided, however, that I could only take it six months later, since in my case it would not be the usual defense of a thesis, but a thorough examination of the literary history, culture, and politics in Germany and Austria in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
I then wrote a long letter to Dean Wick of the Graduate School and enclosed all relevant documentation pertaining to the dissertation, including copies of the criticisms and suggestions which, the committee insisted, they had not made. The dean promised not only to send an observer to the examination, but also to be present himself. Apart from the icy glances of my professors, the examination was uneventful. When all the others had left, Gamer said to me: “You know that you only passed by the skin of your teeth” and “Now you have a child; why do you want a Ph.D.?”
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Two Lives in Uncertain Times, New York: Berghahn Books, 2006, p. 47f