Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Peter Ehrlich

2018; Boston University; Volume: 26; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/arn.2018.0033

2327-6436

Fred Licht,

Historical Medical Research and Treatments

Peter Ehrlich FRED LICHT When they fled from Germany, the Ehrlichs took nothing with them except a cheerfully whimsical crayon drawing by Paul Klee signed “Für Peter und Hilde. Erfinder der Freundschaft” (For Peter and Hilde. Inventors of friendship ). Whenever a guest discovered the drawing on their living room wall, where it was hung among a welter of Hilde’s untidy aquarelles, Professor Ehrlich and his wife would glance at each other as if they had been caught in a shameful act. “We smuggled it out,” they confessed as if accused by an Inquisitor. “We weren’t supposed to take anything of value, but we just couldn’t leave it behind. Paul would have been terribly disappointed.” Even though Peter could fill you in on every detail of Cardinal Mazarin’s diplomacy or Soderini’s political attitudes, the Ehrlichs had never paid the slightest attention to contemporary politics. It took them a long time before they realized that they could no longer live in Germany. From all I heard Peter or Hilde say about their decision to leave Germany , it had very little to do with their being Jewish. They wore their Judaism lightly. Though they would sooner have died than deny their origins, it was not because of pride in their belonging to the Chosen, it was not because they were particularly proud of their heritage, but because it would have offended their thoroughly Prussian sense of decorum and their just as thoroughly cosmopolitan intelligence to hide behind a subterfuge. Their removal to America was not so much dictated by fear as by the growing impossibility to talk to people about the arion 26.2 fall 2018 things that made life such an immensely great and lovely gift. They could not live in a nation that tolerated the burning of books and caused their beloved friends to move to distant lands. Paul Klee was gone and so were all the other Bauhaus friends who had come to their house as one might come to a hospitable public institution, a library, say, or a place reserved for discussion, for music, for work but also for gaiety. By the time they finally took in what was happening and realized that the storm would not quickly exhaust itself, it was far too late for them to transfer even a fraction of their fortune or, for that matter, so much as their domestic belongings. Perhaps they could have managed to hide a bit of jewelry or a little more cash. But that was not their way because they had never been able to understand that there might be laws that one need not respect. Only for the sake of Paul Klee were they willing to compromise their convictions. They were Lilliputian in size, fragile of aspect, looking as ancient and yet as ageless as fledgling birds. They always wore impeccably brushed clothes, quaint of cut and made of excellent cloth. You encountered them on their daily strolls through our tidy Ivy League campus or in the book shops where they always browsed at the “Bargain” table, eagerly pointing out passages to one another in books they had found but could not afford to buy. Through the intervention of highly placed friends, our university had granted them a tiny apartment and a wretched monthly pittance. The same highly placed friends, having salved their conscience, forgot about Peter and Hilde and never tried to persuade the university authorities to have Peter teach a course. Their little stipend was doled out to them every month and it occurred to nobody that the inflation of the war and post-war years had reduced the stipend’s purchasing value to practically nothing. In retrospect one wonders why he was never asked to teach. Could it have been because he might have shown up the highly placed friends as being far less erudite, far less knowledgeable, far less deeply involved in art and in the history of art than they 142 PETER EHRLICH were? No matter. The highly placed friends (many of whom had been brought over from Germany with great fanfare), having helped to provide a roof over Peter and Hilde’s heads, turned their attention to...