The Blume Administration (1945-1956) The Cunz Administration

This was to change radically when Bernhard Blume became Evans' successor in 1945. Born in Stuttgart in 1901, he had made a name for himself in German literary circles at the age of 24. He owed this name to the remarkable success of his first stage play, Fahrt nach der Südsee, which was to be followed until 1933 by a number of dramas, serious as well as comic. At the same time he worked as a Dramaturg (literary adviser and adaptor) for the State Theatre of Württemberg in Stuttgart. Realizing in 1933 that the victory of the Nazis would force him out of Germany and that he would have to earn his living abroad not by making literature but by interpreting it, Blume acquired his doctor's degree at the Technical University of Stuttgart with a dissertation on Arthur Schnitzler (1936). Even today, 35 years later, this study is among the most valid and sensitive interpretations of the great Austrian author. After his escape from Nazi Germany Blume found a position at Mills College in California, and during his nine years of service there he not only created a German program but reorganized the general curriculum in modern European literature. It was, therefore, a highly versatile and productive man of letters who assumed the chairmanship of the German Department of the Ohio State University in 1945.

Within this short survey it is impossible to give even a sketchy account of the breadth and depth of Blume's contributions to literary criticism. Though its span reaches from Klopstock in the middle of the 18th century to Bert Brecht in the middle of the 20th, Blume's interpretive efforts center mainly on the works of Goethe, Kleist, Rile, and Thomas Mann. In later years has broadened the scope of his endeavors, concentrating not so much on the work of given individual authors, but following through the centuries the variations and developments of certain poetic motifs, e.g. the island, the shipwreck, the water image - and not only as they appear in German literature. It is true, that a number of Blum's fascinating findings were published after he left the Ohio State University in 1956. But some of his finest work was done while he administered our German Department, e.g. his monograph on Thomas Mann und Goethe (1949) and his long essay "Kleist und Goethe" (1946), which is so full of penetrating insights into the relationship of two of the greatest German writers that it was later (1968) included in a German anthology assembling the best samples of Kleist criticism in our century.

Bernhard Blume was not only a first-rate literary critic--in fact, the stylistic perfection of his writing is rare in German scholarship on both sides of the Atlantic. He was not only an inspiring teacher, from the start he also showed a high degree of administrative skill; and administrative skill he definitely needed, especially at the start. There were unavoidable tensions in the department, which for so many years had become used to the very different personality and pace of "Papa Evans." And there were also logistic difficulties with which the new chairman had to cope. With the end of the war and the passing of the G.I. Educational Benefits Bill, a swarm of returning soldiers descended upon the campuses of the American universities, which were ill prepared for such a sudden onslaught. In the first school-year after the war the enrollment in German at the Ohio State University was still manageable: in the four quarters of the year 1945/46 a total of 1703 students were registered in German courses. But in the following year the figure jumped to 3218, which meant that approximately 1000 students had to be taught in German classes during each regular quarter of the year. It was difficult to provide for such an emergency, all the more so since it could be foreseen that in due time, with the graduation of the returning G.I. generation, the figure would recede again. And so it did. In the year 1950/51 the number of students enrolled in German courses fell back to 1427, and it changed but little in the remaining five years of Bernhard Blume's administration.

But for the time being new staff was needed, especially since in the early years of the new administration some of the members who had served for many years under Evans (Gausewitz, Kramer, Nordsieck) left the department. The first Blume appointee was the writer of this historical sketch, Oskar Seidlin, who will, as tact and discretion require, present here but a minimal sketch of his academic career and his activities at the Ohio State University. Still a student without a terminal degree, he left his homeland immediately after Hitler's seizure of power and went to Basel in Switzerland, where he acquired his Ph.D. in 1935. While in Basel he made his living (if living it can be called) by free-lance contributions to Swiss newspapers, the publication of children's books, and a volume of poetry. In 1938 he emigrated to the United States and in the following year began teaching German literature at Smith College in Massachusetts. In 1942 he was inducted into the United States Army, in which he served for almost four years, taking part in the earliest stage of the invasion of Europe, and finally working with the team which revived and reorganized the destroyed German media of communication, i.e. newspapers and radio stations.

Blume met him in the summer of 1946 at the German Summer School of Middlebury College where Seidlin has taught frequently before and since the war. In the fall of the same year he came to the Ohio State University, and at the time of this writing he has now served the institution for 23 years. His main fields of work have been the Classical and Romantic periods, as well as the early 20th century. His scholarly contributions amount to well over 150 reviews and articles, some of which later published as books, the English ones in the volume Essays in German and Comparative Literature (1961, 2nd. Ed. 1966), the German ones in the collection Von Goethe zu Thomas Mann (1963, 2nd. ed. 1969). His most comprehensive critical venture is his book on the great Romantic poet Joseph von Eichendorff (Versuche über Eichendorff, 1965), which has been very favorably received both here and in Europe. A good number of his essays, especially those on Goethe, Eichendorff and Thomas Mann has been incorporated as model pieces in various anthologies of modern literary criticism, published here and in Germany. To the American undergraduate student he is best known as the co-author of a volume in the Barnes & Noble College Outline Series, An Outline History of German Literature (1948, 3rd. Ed. 1966). A good number of these publications were of course written and published, as the dates indicate, under Blume's successor.

With the teams Sperber-Fleischhauer in philology and Blume-Seidlin in literature the demands of the advanced undergraduate and graduate students were well met. Especially the work in the graduate seminars was of a caliber which earned the German Department of the Ohio State University a highly respected reputation in the country. But Blume was equally concerned with the quality of the elementary and intermediate instruction in his department. With the growth of the student population in the fifties and with the increase of graduate students earning their education by serving as teaching assistants, a large number of the beginners' classes had to be turned over to young and inexperienced teachers. In order to insure high standards of instruction, the work of these teaching assistants had to be supervised by some of the experienced personnel who could plan with them the conduct of their classes, give them helpful methodical hints and correct their mistakes. Blume was anxious--and his successor turned out to be even more so--that a systematic training program be instituted, a regular supervision of the young people entrusted with teaching duties. This function was assumed first by Wayne Wonderley, a member of the department from 1947 to 1960, and later by Glenn H. Goodman (in the department since 1947), whose exclusive interest lay in elementary and intermediate teaching, and good elementary and intermediate teaching at that.

Blume met head-on another danger that developed in the fifties and grew to dangerous proportions in the sixties: the emergence of the professor as primadonna (or the primadonna as professor). In many departments and in most American universities there blossomed forth a new breed of the privileged few who considered it beneath their dignity to teach any but the most advanced students, and as few of them as humanly possible. Blume saw to it that this situation, which is undoubtedly one of the sources of the student restiveness in the sixties, did not develop in his department; and in this respect too his successor proved to be just as adamant, if not more so. The chairman himself and the most distinguished members of the department, men who enjoyed world-wide reputations, taught der-die-das like the most inexperienced instructor or teaching assistant, and they did it with the same dedication which they brought to the most advanced graduate seminar. If in the last 15 years the German Department of the Ohio State University has enjoyed the reputation of being one of the most harmonious and homogeneous in the country, this is mainly due to the high morale and to this democratic spirit which the chairmen have instilled in its members.

The course program of the department was by now well established, and very few changes were needed. There was, in addition to the elementary and intermediate instruction, the array of philological courses topped by a survey history of the German language, for which Sperber's compendium, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache (later revised and enlarged by Wolfgang Fleischhauer in 1958) was used as the basic text. There was a sequence of six courses for advanced undergraduates and graduate students that offered in a two year cycle a panoramic view of German literature from the 18th century to the 20th. There was a special course on Faust. Blume introduced a few new courses: an "intensive" course during the summer quarter, in which the student had three German lessons a day and could do the work of three quarters in one term. The most important new offering was a course on German literary masterpieces in translation. With this course Blume hoped to tear down parochial walls and to offer students who knew no German the opportunity to acquire a modest familiarity with the great moments of German literature. When Seidlin taught the course for the first time in 1951, it had an enrollment of 7 students; today it draws 140, and there would be even more if the department did not limit it to this number. As we shall see later, Blume's successor undertook in effect to "double" this course.

There were other services which the department rendered the university at large. One of the most demanding tasks was the administration of the foreign language examination required by the Graduate School of Ph.D. candidates in other disciplines. For many years now this thankless duty has been in the hands of Professor Paul Gottwald, who took his Ph.D. at the Ohio State University in 1955, and whose inexhaustible patience and painstaking meticulousness make him the ideal man for an un ideal job.

To reach interested people outside the confines of the university itself, the German Department began to take part in the offerings of the University Radio Station (WOSU) and later the University Television Station (WOSU-TV), presenting language instruction over the air, and German sketches and dialogues for those listeners who had successfully absolved the initial stages. At first Glenn H. Goodman was responsible for these programs; and in 1958, under Blume's successor, they received the First Prize in the class "Systematic Instruction:Telecourses," awarded by the Institute for Education by Radio-Television. Goodman's place was later taken by Professor Ilsedore Edse, who had earned her Ph.D. at the Ohio State University in 1960, and about whose activities "over the air" we shall report briefly in our next chapter.

Also over WOSU Oskar Seidlin offered a series of lectures on Thomas Mann, Kafka, and Rilke, and in 1949, the Goethe Year, a comprehensive radio course on Germany's greatest poet. Goethe's two-hundredth anniversary in 1949 offered the opportunity for a number of special events. Oskar Seidlin presented Goethe lectures at a great number of colleges and universities; he journeyed as far East as the John Hopkins University, as far West as the University of Washington in Seattle, as far South as the University of the South in Tennessee. On the Columbus campus an impressive celebration was arranged by the German Department, at which the German writer Ernst Wiechert, at that time at the peak of his fame, delivered the main address.

And since we are talking about festive extra-curricular events, we might as well mention the Christmas Parties of the German Club. Students of our department and of others as well gathered to sing--or at least to listen to--German Christmas carols, accompanied by our secretary of many years, Anna Luise Shearer (1950-1964), who handled the accordion almost as skillfully as the typewriter and the other paraphernalia of the departmental office.

Forward to History of Our Department, The Cunz Administration.

Content Owner: Professor Bernd Fischer.