Another September

Campus life was tranquil that day in September when the Nazis invaded Poland

By Jayne Spencer

Banta

(Editor's note: The following story is taken from the archives of the "IU Newspaper" and was first published Sept. 1, 1989.)

Waves of anger and fear/Circulate over the bright/And darkened lands of the earth,/Obsessing our private lives;--from September 1, 1939, by W.H. Auden

The years leading up to the Nazi invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939--the spark that was to ignite World War II--were tranquil on the Indiana University campus in Bloomington.

The obsessions of war would come sometime in the future, when Hitler's "snail war" became a full-blown blitzkrieg.

In 1938, the Army Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) at IU received a coveted Gold Star award. All "fit" male students were required at that time to participate in military training – "to create respect for authority and habits of punctuality," according to the Arbutus, the IU yearbook. Weekly military reviews were held.

But primarily ROTC "held dances and banquets, chose queens and risked life and limb to guard the Old Oaken Bucket during its short period of exposure to the perils of the Union Lounge," noted the Arbutus.

In 1939, students would gather Tuesday afternoons for informal chats in the office of IU President Herman B Wells, who at the age of 35 had become the youngest president of a state university in the United State a year before.

A young Louis Armstrong brought his swing band to play at the junior prom that year, and the prom queen, chronicled the Arbutus, glided across the Alumni Hall stage in a white canoe to receive her crown of pink rosebuds.

Seemingly unaware of the rumblings in Europe that would affect its generation so deeply, the only mention of Germany by the Arbutus staff of ‘39 is a reference to Kirkwood Hall, a classroom building "which houses everything from Mr. Hitler's language to the University Theater."

"We were all so busy at that time trying to make enough money to live on," said Frank Banta, professor emeritus of Germanic studies, who received an undergraduate degree from the university in the spring before the invasion of Poland. "The Depression was not long over and, really, it didn't cease in America until we began to get ready to fight.

"I was aware of what was going on in Nazi Germany," said Banta, "but I was not well aware.

"I knew indirectly that Jews were being persecuted, but not the extent of it. One of the two or three best teachers I've had in a lifetime was on the Bloomington campus. Her name was Hedwig Leser. She was Jewish, and she was able to bring her niece to this country from Germany.

I can remember going to a dance and I knew there were two German exchange students on campus. I remember seeing one of them dancing with Mrs. Leser, and I wondered what she was feeling, what he was feeling. I don't know if he knew she was Jewish or not. She certainly knew he was a person who could be presumed to be in some favor with the Nazis or they wouldn't have let him come here."

As a German major who also studied French, Italian, Greek and Latin, Banta associated with people who had an international perspective, but he has no memory of talk about the invasion.

"The war started so slowly," Banta said. "I remember in the fall of 1939, when I was a beginning graduate student at the University of Maryland, a student came into my office and said, ‘How would you say snail war in German?'

The Germans had been talking about a ‘blitzkrieg' or lightning war following the invasion, yet nothing was happening. The student was planning to write a satirical piece showing that it wasn't a blitzkrieg at all, but a ‘schnecken' war."

As the inevitability of American involvement increased, Banta remembers thinking, "This time I will go, because none of my ancestors had been in a war."

A fifth-generation Hoosier who was reared on a farm near Franklin, Banta was to serve a five-year period with Army Intelligence and the military government in Germany before completing his doctorate in Switzerland. He returned to America and an academic career, punctuated with trips back to Germany.

"I remember most vividly seeing a performance of The Diary of Anne Frank in Hamburg in 1957 and the absolute silence afterwards. No applause, nothing, just a stunned silence. I was seated by chance next to two elderly Jewish gentlemen, and I remember one of them saying he hadn't been in a German theater for 20 years. It was a very moving performance."

Henry H.H. Remak, also a professor emeritus of Germanic studies, was a German student studying on a graduate fellowship at IU when Poland was invaded.

"My concerns were very personal," Remak said. "I had been very lucky and gotten a full-time job teaching German at the Indianapolis Extension Center, the forerunner of IUPUI. It was a tremendous thing for me. And the job began the first week of September 1939.

"And here is the war breaking out on Sept. 1! So the first thing I remember is getting a frantic phone call from the director of the center and he said, ‘What are we going to do? Who's going to want to study German?'"

American reactions to Germans during the first World War had been particularly negative, Remak said. "It was similar to what happened to Japanese Americans during World War II.

"The study of German plummeted after 1917. It had been taught in the elementary and high schools before the war. But legislatures banned it, college enrollment dropped and German teachers were without jobs," Remak said.

"Fortunately, the anti-German hysteria of the first World War did not materialize in the second," he said.

"My much more profound preoccupation was for members of my family in Germany; we were Jewish. They were treated as pariahs by their fellow citizens and the government,, and then to be caught in a country at war...My immediate family had all gotten out. But my grandmother was there, an uncle, aunt and cousins. Some got out, some didn't."

Because he was studying in the United States on a student visa from Germany, Remak was officially designated an "enemy alien" in 1941, a label that was remedied when he became a U.S. citizen in 1943. He later served abroad with the U.S. Maritime Service.

"I think people forget that isolationism was still very strong, although Roosevelt was clearly on the side of the Allies," Remak said. "I will never forget Roosevelt's speech sometime between 1939 and 1941, when he said, ‘I will not get Americans involved in foreign wars.'

"He was very clever. Pearl Harbor was not a foreign land."

The invasion of Poland caused very little initial change in perspective on the Bloomington campus.

"Herman Wells was very much an internationalist from the beginning," Remak said. "But he had been here such a short time, his efforts were delayed somewhat by the war. The university was still very nice, personable, scholarly – and a very secluded place.

"In 1939, you would never have known there was a war going on. Nothing was happening. There was a change of judgment, in my opinion, in about June 1940. People knew from the newsreels that this was going to be a very different kind of war," Remak said.

Pearl Harbor USS Arizona Memorial

More than 27 months after the invasion of Poland by Nazi troops, the bombing of the U.S. military installation at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, brought Americans full-throttle into World War II. The 60th anniversary of that bombing by Japanese planes is being commemorated today (Dec. 7) with ceremonies around the world.

http://www.pearlharborattacked.com/