Memory and History: Recollections of a Historian of Nazism, 1967–1982

This second volume of memoirs picks up where my first volume, Out of Hitler's Shadow: Childhood and Youth in Germany and the United States, 1935-1967, left off, namely with my return to the United States with my wife Steffi and my daughter Trina from five years of expatriation in Germany in the "drop-out" years of the 1960s. I taught high school English and social studies in northeastern Vermont from 1967 to 1969, followed by a Ford Foundation Leadership Development Fellowship in 1970, and the resumption of my graduate education at the Universities of Vermont and Massachusetts, Amherst, where I earned a PhD in modern European history in 1974, a full eighteen years after my BA at Harvard in 1956. It was not a good time to enter the academic job market, as indeed I had been duly forewarned by my instructors as early as 1970. Several chapters in this book deal with the trials and tribulations of job-hunting in the unfavorable academic employment market of the 1970s. I was very fortunate to have landed a tenure-track position at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington, in 1978. Although I faced unexpected opposition from some members of my department, my application for tenure was eventually approved in 1982. I taught in the history department at Gonzaga until my retirement in 2004. The present volume covers the years from 1967 to 1982. If I live long enough and retain my mental faculties, a third and final volume will follow.