The Evans Administration (1911-1945) The Blume Administration

In 1911 the German Department could celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary, and its future seemed promising and well-secured. This was the year when the graduate school of the Ohio State University was organized, and one of the very first graduate students to earn a Ph.D. at the Ohio State University had chosen German literature as a major field, receiving his degree almost 20 years before the first Ph.D. was awarded in French. His name was Maximilian J. Rudwin and his dissertation a treatment and exposition of the devil scenes in the German Religious Drama of the Middle Ages. It was published in 1913 in a highly respected German series of scholarly publications. Equally propitious was the fact that the new chairman of the department was to guide its destinies for almost 35 years and thus assure a stability which the department had lacked so far. It did not detract from its soundness that the department now returned to the more modest name "Department of German," to which it has remained true until the present time.

The man who took over the department in 1911 was Marshall Blakemore Evans. He was born in Boston in 1874, had attended the distinguished Boston Latin School and specialized in Classical languages and literatures at Boston University. After receiving his bachelor's degree in 1896, he went abroad and studied English and German philology at Goettingen and Bonn, counting among his teachers such famous scholars as Heyne, Litzmann, Roethe and Wilmans. He returned to America with his doctor's degree from the University of Bonn, where he had devoted himself to the study of the early German Hamlet translations and stage adaptations. The second field of his scholarly endeavor was German medieval religious drama, especially the Passion Plays. His interest in this literature was to remain strong to the end of his scholarly career, and some of his future students (e.g. Rienhold Nordsieck and Frederic Kramer) were to make notable contributions in the area. After his return from Bonn Evans had accepted a position at the University of Wisconsin, whose German Department was at the time probably the most distinguished in the United States, thanks to the presence of Alexander Hohlfeld. Evans remained at Wisconsin until he assumed the chairmanship of the German Department of the Ohio State University in 1911.

At the beginning of the second decade of our century the position of the German Department of the Ohio State University was more firmly established than that of many another in the United States. In 1914/15 the University had a total enrollment of 4,597 students and of these 2,291, i.e. 50%, were registered in German courses! But the outbreak of the First World War was to inflict a blow from which the department did not recover for many years. The enrollment figures speak a language whose clarity leaves nothing to be desired:

• 1914/15 2291 students
• 1915/16 1583 students
• 1916/17 654 students
• 1917/18 149 students.

As the number of students shrank, so did the number of courses from which the students were able to choose. In 1918 there were only 20 German courses left on the books. A goodly number of offerings, some of them rather recent additions to the program--e.g., a course on the literature of the Empire, a course on 19th century lyrics, two offerings in German folklore--had become war casualties.

Even the fact that at the beginning of the war years the members of the department could point to respectable research activities, did not dampen the anti-German feeling. Among the publications of 1916 were listed: a beginning grammar text by Professor Evans and Assistant Professor Keidel, an article on "Experimental Phonetics as an Aid to the Study of Languages" by Assistant Professor Sara T. Barrows. Translations of Rilke poems and of Max Halbe's play Jugend by the same author, translations of playlets and poems by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and additional articles on pedagogical subjects in the periodical Monatshefte. It is not without irony that the one member of the department who was most active as a writer and litterateur, Ludwig Lewisohn, was to become the blackest of the black German sheep and eventually the center of one of the most notorious causes celebres.

Lewisohn, German-born but educated in the United States, had joined the department in 1911. Although barely 30 years old, he had already made a name for himself as a writer and critic, a frequent contributor to H.L. Mencken's Smart Set, and above all as the authorized American translator of the two most eminent and successful German playwrights of the century, Gerhart Hauptmann and Hermann Sudermann. Yet with the outbreak of the First World War and especially after America's entry into the holocaust, Lewisohn's situation became more and more tenuous. In his later autobiographical account Up Stream (1922) he gave detailed and impressive report of the narrowmindedness and persecution which he had to endure until 1918, at which time he found it advisable to ask for a year's leave of absence prior to his final resignation from his position at the Ohio State University.

The statement in his book on The Spirit of Modern German Literature that "the best living writers were liberals, radicals, cultivators of a Goethean freedom" had sufficed to brand Lewisohn as a pro-German agitator, and his basic pacifism was enough to call down on him the ire of a long list of super-patriots. President William Oxley Thompson tried for a time to protect Lewisohn from the most hysterical nationalistic attacks, but the chauvinistic feeling ran so high that Thompson eventually saw no way of saving him. Only a few characteristic utterances should be recorded here. In a letter the Chairman of the American Defence Society Committee on Americanization addressed to President Thompson the rhetorical question:

Furthermore have you not found that about every idea that occurs in German science has emanated from the brains of other nations, simply written up in a voluminous and elaborate manner and as a rule too cumbersome and clumsy for the quick brains of our American students?

And as if this were not enough, the writer of the letter enclosed a printed pamphlet which declared simply that: "German literature is practically non-existent." It became hard to protect Lewisohn from such prejudices; what made it even harder was his careless and questionable attitude in money matters. In addition to a good portion of ill-will he left behind a host of unpaid debts, the largest of them a $5,000 personal loan from President Thompson.

At the end of the war the staff of the department had shrunk to one professor, four assistant professors and one part-time instructor. What was left of the course offerings was mainly in the nature of elementary and intermediate instruction. At the Ohio State Univesity, German literature was now, indeed, "practically nonexistent!" In former years the bulletin for incoming students had warned that those who planned to take up German as their major subject must not start with the fundamentals of the language as late as their first college year. This warning now disappeared. And well it might, for there was hardly a high school left in which this "barbarian tongue" was still taught.

It took the better part of the third decade of our century to gain again for German even a modest place among the disciplines taught at the Ohio State University. In spite of the efforts of chairman Evans and his colleagues the number of students and of new courses for these students grew but slowly. There were 459 students taking German in 1921, and the number of courses slipped to nine. Of these only two were courses in literature. Five years later the number of students passed the one thousand mark again, yet there were still no more than 14 courses and most of them offered work in composition and pedagogy, although a course on Faust and another on Heine had made their reappearance in the early twenties.

Still, it was this reduced German Department of the Ohio State University that helped to provide the impetus for the development of a new scientific discipline which gained more and more ground in this country and finally became one of the leading and most influential scholarly endeavors of our century. We are talking about the field of modern linguistics with its attempt to make the study of language an exact science, insisting--against the "mentalist" and historical approach of traditional philology--upon purely descriptive exactitude, forming an alliance with mathematics and behaviorist sciences, especially with sociology. It is surely no exaggeration to call Leonard Bloomfield one of the founding fathers and most successful promoters of this new discipline; and it was as a member of the German Department of the Ohio State University from 1921-1926 that Bloomfield developed the basic tenets of this new approach to language. From the Ohio State University Bloomfield issued his "Call for the Organization Meeting," which led to the founding of the Linguistic Society. It was as a member of the German Department of the Ohio State University that he published "A Set of Postulates for the Science of Language," in which he stressed form and meaning, morphemes, sememes and phonemes, constructions and constructional meanings, categories and parts if speech. Simeon Potter in his book Language in the Modern World (1964) calls Bloomfield's manifesto a daring attempt to apply mathematical principles to human speech on the assumption that the postulational method can further the study of language, because it forced us to state explicitly whatever we assume, to define our terms, and to decide what things are interdependent.

It is true that the "bible" of modern linguistics, Bloomfield's magnum opus Language (1933) and his path-breaking studies of the Malayo-Polynesian languages and the speech of the Algonquin Indians were published after he had left the Ohio State University and moved to Yale University. But our department can be considered one of the cradles (if such a metaphor may be permitted) of the new science of linguistics.

Bloomfield was not the only internationally known Sprachwissenschaftler at the Ohio State University during the Evans era. Teaching here at the same time--and actually much longer than Bloomfield, namely from 1917 to 1832--was Hans Kurath. Kurath was born in Austria but acquired his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago with a dissertation on the semantic sources of the emotional expressions in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and the Germanic languages (1921). Although a foreigner, or perhaps rather because he was a foreigner, he was particularly sensitive to the sound and elocution of American speech, and to this interest we owe his book on American Pronunciation (1928) and his monumental work, The Linguistic Atlas of New England. This later study, inspired by the great European linguistic atlases of Germany, was compiled and edited (1939-43) after he had moved from the Ohio State University to Brown University. When he returned to the Middle West, Kurath became one of the founders and shining lights of the famous Linguistic Institute at the University if Michigan.

Of all good things there are three--so the German proverb runs--and in Evans' German Department there was a third great philologist, Hans Sperber, who came to the Ohio State University in 1934 and taught here until his retirement in 1955. Deprived by the Nazis of the academic chair which he had held at the University of Cologne, he was the first in a long series of anti-Hitler refugees who were to enrich the study of Germanic languages and literatures in their new homeland immensely in the years to come. It is in a way ironic that Sperber found a home for his American activities at a university which had counted Leonard Bloomfield among its members. Had Bloomfield still been at the Ohio State University in 1934--he had left eight years earlier--the sparks would have flown, for Sperber was as dedicated a "mentalist" as Bloomfield was an anti-mentalist. In one of his earliest books, Über den Affekt als Ursache der Sprachveraenderung (1914) Sperber had stated his basic contention that change of meaning is not caused by the conceptual content of the word but by its emotional tone. In numerous studies, some of which have now become classic, he demonstrated the interdependence of linguistic history and cultural history. Nowhere is the relationship shown more brilliantly than in his investigations into the influence if the religious experience of the Pietist sects upon the language of the 18th century (1930). It was this concern which also led him, shortly after he took up his work at the Ohio Sate University, to the massive study of American Political Terms (1962). Here he traced the birth of political slogans and their impact upon the mentality of contemporaries as well as future generations.

Sperber's truly humanistic concern with language has inspired the writings of his disciple Wolfgang Fleischhauer, who had followed his teacher from Cologne to the Ohio State University in 1936, and who is fortunately still with us. In penetrating studies Fleischhauer demonstrated the living history of certain words (e.g., "innig" and "Zusammenhang") and has shown how semantic changes have taken place under the impact of intellectual movements and emotional attitudes. In recent years he has also devoted himself to dialectology. Encouraged by the interest of Dieter Cunz, our later chairman, in immigration history, he investigated the dialect spoken in some small Ohio towns by a population whose forefathers had come to Auglaize County from the German province of Westphalia more than a hundred years ago.

With the influx of refugees from 1934 on, the German Department of the Ohio State University, as did German departments throughout the country, became more cosmopolitan than it had been before. In addition during Evan's chairmanship another "alien" element was absorbed. In 1943 Russian was introduced at the Ohio State University, and for administrative reasons the new discipline was placed under the tutelage of the German Department, which now became the "Department of German and Russian." But not only for administrative reasons. In the person of Peter Epp, born in Russia of German parentage and a member of the German Department since 1934, it had the man who was capable of teaching the new subject to the students of the Ohio State University. During the long years of his illness and after his death, his wife, Justina Epp, was the Russian department at the Ohio State University. This until 1962, when under the chairmanship of Leon I. Twarog, the Department of Slavic Languages became an independent unit. Considering Mrs. Epp's devotion to her students and the endless hours she spent with each of them outside of the classroom, it is no exaggeration to state that she was, indeed, a whole department all by herself.

The awakening of interest in Russian was, of course, the fruit of the Second World War. For the German Department the war years were again a trying period. Not that the hysteria which had destroyed the study of German in the First World War revived. But between 1941 and 1945 the young men of our nation carried guns instead of books and spent their days in foxholes instead of the study carrols of the library. As the general enrollment receded during the war years--it had already suffered a decade earlier under the impact of the Great Depression--so did the registration in the German courses; and in fact, German was harder hit than many another discipline. Since 1933, and the advent of the Nazis in Germany, all things German, including the language and literature, had become causa non-grata in the United States. A half dozen years before the outbreak of hostilities in Europe the German Department had already lost a good number of students. In 1937/38, for example, when the student population amounted to 17,411, the German Department showed a total enrollment of only 1761 students in all four quarters of the academic year. But a year earlier with a considerably smaller total student population (15,019) 1920 students had still taken German. Now the department could weather the storm of the war years only by the introduction of the Army Specialized Training Program, through which a small group of selected soldiers received intensive instruction in all aspects of German civilization.

It was at this juncture and under such circumstances that Professor M. Blakemore Evans reached the status of an emeritus. And if we try to evaluate the almost 35 years of his service, we have above all to point to the fact that with such men as Bloomfield, Kurath and Sperber the German Department of the Ohio State University was a stronghold of linguistics (or philology, if one prefers the somewhat more traditional and more comprehensive designation.) In the field of literature the picture was not equally bright. Evans' own contribution to literary scholarship was--at least quantitatively--quite modest. If his name was nonetheless familiar to his colleagues in America's German departments, this was mainly due to his textbook editions and to the grammar for elementary instruction which he had written in cooperation with Robert O. Roeseler, a member of the department from 1925 to 1934, and which was widely used in colleges and universities all over the country. Ernst Feise, who in later years was to become one of the best known German literary scholars and after 1931 the director of the famous German Summer School of Middlebury College, was connected with the German Department of the Ohio State University for only three years (1924-1927). From here he moved to the John Hopkins University. To be sure, another literary scholar, August C. Mahr, stayed for a quarter of a century. After his studies in Germany (Heidelberg) and some teaching experience at Yale and Stanford he joined the faculty of the Ohio State University in 1931 and remained a member of the German Department until his retirement in 1956. But none of his noteworthy scholarly writings were in the field of German literature proper. In his books he was concerned with the Origin of the Greek Tragic Form (1938) and the Cyprus Passion Cycle (1947); and in later years he devoted his attention to the history and language of the Tuscarawas Ohio Indians. He rendered valuable service to the Ohio Archaeological and Historical Society in its project to restore the first Ohio "towns" of Schoenbrunn and Gnadenhuetten. Such thoroughly German names indicate clearly that it had been a German missionary, David Zeisberger, who had founded these permanent settlements for the nomadic Indians in the seventies of the 18th century. Mahr translated from the German and annotated Zeisberger's diaries, one of the most interesting records of the life and conversion of the Indians. (Unfortunately, this invaluable document, covering the many years Zeisberger lived and worked with the Indians, is still unpublished). Mahr also contributed to our understanding of place names of the Delaware and Algonquin Indians and their designations of the flora and fauna along the Tuscarawas River. But all this had very little to do with German literature. It was competently taught by such men as Walter Gausewitz (1928-1947), Reinhold Nordsieck (1931-1950), and Frederic Kramer (1933-1947); but during these years the critical evaluation of German literature received little creative enrichment from the staff of the German Department of the Ohio State University.

Forward to History of Our Department, The Blume Administration.

Content Owner: Professor Bernd Fischer.