Education: Exile Employed

Last week a spectacled German bachelor, visiting England on a passport bearing the name “Ian Anderson,” received word that he had been appointed a professor at Harvard University. “Ian Anderson,” whose friends know him as Germany’s onetime (1930-32) Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, was as glad as any exiled German scholar to get work.

Harvard’s Professor-designate Brüning today bears a few traces of the days when, from his offices in Radziwill Palace, he governed all Germany. A Catholic who entered the Reichstag as a Centrist Deputy some years after the Republic was set up, Dr. Bruning accepted the Chancellorship in 1930 from old Paul von Hindenburg to stave off and compromise with what the President then regarded as the Nazi Menace. In his two stormy years of office, Chancellor Bruning invoked Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, unwittingly showed Adolf Hitler how to govern Germany without the Reichstag by personal decree. Today many a German believes that if the “Second Bismarck” had not wearily yielded his office to Franz von Papen, Hitler could not have seized power without civil war.

Like everything else in the life of Ian Anderson-Brüning since he left Germany in 1935, last week’s appointment went unnoticed by the German press. Exile Brüning, who is critical of present-day Germany but not bitter, resembles Exile Napoleon Bonaparte only in that he is currently writing his memoirs. At Harvard, where he delivered a series of Godkin lectures on Germany last year, Herr Brüning will next term be a full-fledged faculty member. As such he will give a course on international economic policies, tutor a few advanced students, draw a full professor’s pay ($8,000 to $12,000) presumably for life. Harvardmen thought he might be the first notable acquisition for the $2,000,000 Littauer School of Public Administration which President James Bryant Conant hopes to launch next year.