Interesting Times

An Encounter With the 20th Century 1924-

George Mandler

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415655224
• eBook ISBN: 9781135639679
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Psychology

This book is an autobiographical account of George Mandler--born in 1924--who grew up in a middle class Jewish family in Vienna. It details the fears and attempts to find a safe haven when Austria was invaded and absorbed into Nazi Germany in 1938, followed by Mandler's escape to England and residence in a small boarding school. The threat of the holocaust and reaction to anti-semitism are explored and the author describes the life of an emigre youth group run by a branch of the Austrian communist party. Drafted in 1943, Mandler is trained in military intelligence and ends up as a front line interrogator with the 7th army in Germany. The training and function of military intelligence and the role of German and Austrian refugees in it are described for the first time in detail. Military intelligence and counter-intelligence work in post-war Germany follows, including the evacuation of a scientific establishment before the arrival of the Soviets.

Returning to New York in 1946, Mandler begins his college training at New York University and the University of Basel, Switzerland. This is followed by graduate training in psychology at Yale and a first position at Harvard for seven years. Highlights of the period include a short episode of peripheral involvement in a Soviet spy scandal. After five years at the University of Toronto, Mandler is given the opportunity of a lifetime--to start a department at the prestigious new San Diego branch of the University of California. He describes the process of building a department and a university in the context of the 1960s, as well as academic life and actions during the turbulent 60s and 70s. Mandler's successful career as a writer and researcher in psychology is described in lay language, as is the professional/scientific bifurcation of the field. The final chapter comments on and describes current academic life and problems.

1

Growing Up in Vienna
1924–1938

I was born into a rather tranquil period in central Europe. The great depression was still a few years off, though it received a major impetus in Vienna with the crash of the Creditanstalt bank in 1931, which did not keep me from banking there 60 years later. No wars of great importance were underway and the Great War was nearly six years past when I was born on 11 June 1924 at the Low Sanatorium (a private clinic specializing in minor events like births). My mother, having lost her first child in 1921, had some difficulty becoming pregnant again and her physician prescribed a relaxing excursion with two woman friends to Venice in the summer of 1923. Obviously, it was successful.

GROWING UP

Growing up in Vienna for me meant growing up Jewish well-to-do middle class with all the appurtenances and advantages that involved. I don’t think we deviated much from close to upper-middle-class norms: two children, one live-in maid who took care of cooking and cleaning; during our earlier years, a nanny; and later, a quasi-governess (referred to as Fräulein); summers usually in Italy.

As far as the intellectual atmosphere was concerned, neither in the country nor in the age was university education frequent, and our home was not intellectual in any academic sense, but literate. My mother was a fairly constant reader of contemporary literature, whereas my father delved less frequently into fictions; rather he was very self-educated in current affairs and politics and an avid newspaper reader—a family characteristic it turns out. Books abounded. My mother was usually into the latest belles lettres and Galsworthy was a favorite of the house.

Like most European big-city inhabitants and practically all Viennese, we were apartment dwellers. We lived in the typical large apartments in the rather nondescript middle-class third district (Landstrasse) of Vienna, at first in the Untere Weissgerberstrasse (No. 49) until about 1933 and then in Löwengasse (No. 3). Both apartments were close to the Danube Kanal, facing it in the second, Löwengasse, apartment, and this “river” closeness shaped part of my early years. The Kanal is frequently mistaken for the Danube by tourists because the Kanal, in contrast to the Danube that is off to Vienna’s north side, flows through the middle of Vienna and diverts water and traffic from the main river to the south. There are a number of general traffic and railroad bridges over the Kanal and, in my days, small ferries for additional passenger traffic. My first acquaintance with the “river” was being taken for walks by a nanny or governess; later, it was to play in its shore-side park and to engage in hard fought scooter races up one side, over a bridge, back down the other side, and over another bridge.

I have few memories of my early placid years, though I do remember my favorite “toy”—a rocking horse called Schogo for reasons lost long ago. Later, my friends and I played soccer with tennis balls in the park adjoining the Kanal (one or two to a side—the Doppelspitzer, in which each player was limited to two successive contacts with the ball in play). As I got older, my friends and I would, on weekends, go walking and window gazing in the inner city, dominated by St. Stephens and bounded by the Ringstrasse, the circular road following the path of the former city walls. We did not seem too impressed by the large Victorian government buildings lining that street, the leftovers of old Imperial Vienna and now, in the absence of an empire, devoid of their original function. We frequently stopped off in the Rotenturmstrasse where there was a seller of cones of chestnut puree topped off with whipped cream—what a delicacy! A less praiseworthy activity took place in later years after school in the Josef Gall Gasse, which was just a couple of blocks from the Vienna Prater—the large park on Vienna’s southeast corner. During the late afternoons and early evenings in the summer, the bushes tended to be a place for trysts of lovers and, more often, for prostitutes and their clients. It was great sport for 12—13 year olds to disturb these poor folk.

Sometime during my first 10 years or so, I had the pleasure of being introduced to the firm glories of our live-in maid’s beautiful breasts, which she occasionally allowed me to caress. At another time, our governess had to stop bathing me (as she did my sister) after I complained that she had become too attentive to the cleanliness of my slowly becoming-reactive penis. Sometime later, I started to masturbate and was convinced that my masturbatory activities were revealed by dark rings around my eyes, though I never thought that the activity would drive me mad or otherwise impair me. One time, busily engaged in the bathroom in my manual activities with a copy of Balzac’s Droll Stories at hand, my mother caught me and insisted I hand over the book. Nothing more was said. Another book around the house that was appropriately titillating was a copy of Van De Velde’s Ideal Marriage. At least my masturbatory literature was adequately high toned.

While I am on games and sports, there was regular ice-skating at the Wiener Eislaufverein where we adored one of the Austrian figure skating champions, Felix Kaspar, and supported our teams and skaters against the competing Engelmann skating rink. It was a time of Austrian dominance in men’s figure skating, and the Engelmann skater Karl Schäfer won the world gold medal from 1930 to 1936. Kaspar finally made it just in time—in 1937 and 1938 before Austria disappeared. Women’s skating during those years was of course dominated by the legendary Sonja Henie. In between cheering on our skaters, we pretended to be speed skaters or ice hockey players. The only other regular sport activity—apart from ubiquitous soccer played wherever and whenever—was at the (Jewish) Hakoah sport club where I went regularly for swimming and diving lessons and exercise. I also have a vague memory of a gymnastics/exercise class sometime before I was 10. Otherwise, in the summer, there was the usual hiking and excursions to the Vienna woods or the Danube (the real one) for picnicking and gambolling in the Wachau and other areas with family or friends—take the streetcar to the end and start walking! Or we would go to the Prater (more a large area of woods and meadows than a park) for coffee and cake in one of its Molkereien (dairy cafes), and, on special occasions, to the Volksprater, the amusement park in the Prater with the Riesenrad, the giant ferris wheel made famous in The Third Man movie. Today, it is full of daring roller coasters and their ilk, but back then, its major attractions were the Grottenbahn, a sometime ghost house but also with large special panoramas; the Hippodrome, a largish arena where I loved going horseback riding, and the miniature real steam railroad, the Liliputbahn. On a recent visit, I was reminded of the Calafati statues, 30-foot wood-carved pseudo-Chinese statues, that, I believe used to adorn large merry-go-rounds. In the winter, in addition to skating, I would in later years go skiing in the Vienna woods with friends.

Surprisingly, the skating rink I used was often transformed into an ash-surface for motorcycle racing in the summer, and even more surprisingly, my father took me to several of those events. His devotion to his son’s interests even went so far as to take me to a couple of soccer games, which didn’t interest him at all. My father was a devotee of circuses, and we went frequently to the Ronacher, a building devoted primarily to such spectacles. I encountered some of the great European clowns of the period there, including Grock. There was even one occasion when the whole inner circle of the circus was filled with water for little ships exhibiting marine derring-do.

When I turned 11, I was allowed to go to skiing camp with my older cousin, Lotte (daughter of my uncle Louis). I will be forever indebted to her for making those trips possible and especially for pulling me out of a snowdrift in which I was sure I was doomed to die during my early skiing days. The camp, in a chalet in Saalbach, was run by the Zerner family, some of whom I met again in the emigré youth groups. They also had a summer camp in Rimini, though I never went there. But their Italian cooking spilled over to the winter activities, and I recall with pleasure the pasta asciutta in Saalbach. My skiing was at best fair to middling, but when my mother took me for a winter holiday in 1937 to Zell-am-See, I was overcome with athletic joy when I came third in the local slalom run.

Summer holidays meant that my sister and I were usually packed off with my mother, though I remember one miserable summer at an orthodox Jewish summer camp. Sometimes we went to the Austrian watering place of Vöslau near Vienna; more often, we went to Laurana—on the Italian Adriatic—now Lovran on the Croatian Adriatic—less fashionable than the neighboring posh Abbazzia (Opatija). There, we often met friends from Vienna and spent much time on the beach. I fell in love in 1937—at 13—with a distant relative, Ruth Rosenzweig, an older woman of 16. At one time, I was able to watch her getting dressed through a hole in our cabana. Another time, she invoked a heavenly togetherness when she asked me to come by her Pension early one morning, to whistle under her window and we would go off swimming before anybody else was up. The disaster that faced me—and that I could not possibly confess—was that I couldn’t whistle. I appeared at the house and devotedly watched her window where she finally appeared. She joined me and I nonchalantly remarked that I was surprised that she hadn’t heard my whistle before.

Going to a foreign country (Italy) was more complicated in those days, requiring passports, visas, and (instead of the yet-to-be-invented credit cards) a letter of credit to one of the local Italian banks. A couple of times, we spent summers with the large contingent of family and friends that surrounded my best friend, Hans Matzka. They regularly went to Aspang, not far from Vienna. The usual crowd consisted of Hans and me and lots of girls—the Szilagyi family and the woman we all adored, Maria Reimer Haala, known as Mimi. She was four years older than us—a serene, helpful, beautiful older goddess. Mimi was a devout Catholic and caused me one of my most acute preadolescent embarrassments. Walking along with Mimi on a hike during our summer vacation, we came across a wayside cross with the statue of Jesus and the usual INRI inscription. Having recently learned a new joke from Catholic school friends, I turned to Mimi and asked whether she knew that INRI meant Ignaz Neugebauer Regenschirmmacher Innsbruck (Ignaz Neugebauer, umbrella maker, Innsbruck). Mimi was quiet—ignored me. It was shortly thereafter that I realized the seriousness of her religious commitment. I learned quickly to be careful about other people’s commitments.

Mimi lived up to her reputation as a superwoman shortly after Hitler’s occupation of Vienna in March 1938. Mimi was a student in the same school Hans and I attended. With the advent of the Nazis¹ and for the few weeks before we were transferred to a “Jewish” school, the few Jews in the school were an avoided and isolated island. Mimi went out of her way to spend school intermissions with us, to be seen talking with us. She maintained her anti-Nazi stand in the context of her strong Catholic faith and eventually became part of the religious establishment. When I saw her again shortly after the war, she had become film reviewer (and censor) for the Vienna diocese, and was concerned about the upcoming Kulturkampf between the church and the socialists. She was still the warm and fine person of years ago.

I sometimes wonder whether all these girl cousins and other “women” around me on holidays and elsewhere created the atmosphere in which I eventually would end up liking women as friends as much as, if not more than, objects of passion. Others would spend their time in gender regulated camps and with male friends from school. Unintended, my surrounds were different and I benefitted from that.

The Jewish middle-class life came equipped with serving girls and nannies and governesses and French and piano lessons. Until my sister was about three, we had a much loved nanny—Schwester Helli (Appenzeller). I remember her as always wearing the “nurse’s” uniform of the Viennese Nanny. She was kind and gentle, and Trude and I loved her much. Eventually, she left and was replaced by a governess who shepherded and taught us, and eventually left my life when she was overcome by my sexual magic. The French lessons were fairly successful but the piano lessons were a disaster. It was just not my cup of tea. The magnificent sum of which is that to this day I can still play Für Elise and nothing else. More lasting is my memory of my piano teacher, the rather pompous, flamboyant wanna-be Herr d’Orange, whose real name was Pomerantz. Describing him to friends once, I was asked how I knew that. I don’t remember, but it is likely that my father—in a style that never tolerated phonies—might well have asked “Herr d’Orange—what was your name originally?” Obscure is the origin of my memory that he went on his way because he made a pass at my mother—or is that just a memory instilled by classic Victorian paintings of piano teachers and their vulnerable students?

Music returned when in 1936–37 a friend (Kurt Eisinger) and I were given season tickets to the Vienna opera. My first opera was, rather unfortunately, Wagner’s Walküre, and we were much put off by Wotan’s monologues. Things picked up after that though and I remember clearly the production of Palestrina (by Hans Pfitzner); one of the choruses still wanders around my mind. Whether because of those opportunities or not, I am still a devoted opera watcher and general music listener, though never a performer. Music is always on in my office, a usual mix of operas, piano music (sonatas, especially Beethoven’s), and symphonic music, plus a reasonable mix of classical jazz.

In the Viennese tradition, I was taken to operettas and operetta-like musicals from about age 10 on, which has established a whistling acquaintance with Lehar, Strauss, Stolz, and others and an unalterable tie to the Viennese Walzer. In addition, frequent exposure to the music-dominated radio made most of the Viennese operetta music, arias, and so on, familiar, as well as much opera and symphonic music. Partly because of the ubiquitous radio and partly because we had regular music lessons in school where these song were taught, I find much of the Lieder repertory familiar and even remember many of the words of Schubert’s Lieder (Forelle, Ständchen, Erlkönig [I also recall large parts of Goethe’s poem], Heidenröslein). I guess it was that kind of background environment that makes a Viennese of one, including an apparent inborn ability to do a formal Walzer. We did have a gramophone that required hand winding and frequent needle changes. I discovered as an adult that—never having taken dancing lessons—I could dance (and dance well) Viennese waltzes. However, the American influence on European tastes was already strong then. The most recent American “hits” quickly became popular. One of the memories of a very painful bee sting and subsequent twisted ankle (that’s the memory!) at age 11 at the Stadion swimming pool was that, just before those momentous events, I was humming and singing “Heaven…” from Irving Berlin’s 1935 musical Top Hat. What I was really singing was a Viennese take-off, Hef’n, I bin im Hef’n …—freely translated “I am down the drain.” And in 1937, I was exposed to talk about the new American “swing” style in music.

There was also theater—mostly classical German, and I remember going to the Burgtheater for the classical plays of Schiller and Grillparzer. My reading matter was mixed and typical of the schoolboys of the day. When younge...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Growing Up in Vienna: 1924–1938
• 2 Ends and Beginnings: 1938–1940
• 3 Emigre Life in New York: 1940–1943
• 4 My War: 1943–1946
• 5 The Veteran: 1946–1949
• 6 Graduate School and Some Unfortunate Stumbles: 1949–1953
• 7 The Trip Through Harvard: 1953–1960
• 8 Toronto—A Not So Foreign Country: 1960–1965
• 9 California Beginnings: 1965–1970
• 10 Settling Down and Retirement: 1970–
• 11 My Psychology—and How I Got There
• 12 Consolidations and Reflections
• Epilogue