Horizon

Changing Sides

The book that triggered my latest chresthomathy spree was An Introduction to Scientific German, by Otto Koischwitz. He does a wonderful job of introducing vocabulary and grammatical constructions slowly, in a manner that allows the reader to learn from context and deduction. I was so impressed that I ordered his Bilderlesebuch (1933), which arrived today. It's designed for the beginner, and Sara picked it up and managed to work her way through two pages without any background in German at all.

I've been flipping through it in the last few minutes, and was surprised by the emphasis Koischwitz places on minorities within Germany. The sixth page of instruction describes Plattdeutsch (Low German) favorably, mentioning the well-known author Fritz Reuter. He gives an almost apologetic, utilitarian explanation of why he's covering Schuldeutsch instead of Plattdeutch, after the only comparison between that dialect and English that I've ever seen in an introductory text. Four pages later, we're introduced to the Wends, a Slavic-speaking minority within Germany who have lived there (and in Lee County, Texas) longer than the Germans themselves.

The emphasis on this sort of diversity is an interesting thing to find in an German author in 1933. I initially assumed that with his residence in the United States and the name Koischwitz — which I assumed to be Yiddish — he was writing in reaction to events in his homeland. Is Koischwitz some sort of proto-multiculturalist? Perhaps he's a crypto-anti-Fascist, who's using his books for American students as a medium for an alternate vision of Germany?

Well, maybe. But according to Elizabeth McLeod on the Old Time Radio mailing list, his sympathies shifted at the end of the decade:

Mister O. K. was Dr. Max Otto Koischwitz, a native German who moved to the US in the early 1920s to pursue his career as a professor of drama and literature. He taught at Hunter College for over a decade -- and at first took a decidedly anti-Nazi view of developments in his native country. But as the 1930s proceeded, Koischwitz's politics shifted -- and even though he took US citizenship in 1938, by 1939, he was openly supporting Hitler and peppering his classroom lectures with anti-Semitic harangues. Hunter put him on a "leave of absence" in the fall of 1939, and he immediately made plans to move to Germany, resigning his position at Hunter in January 1940. By the spring of that year, Koischwitz had landed at the RRG, and was broadcasting propaganda talks to the US as Mister O. K. and also as "Doctor Anders." During his career in Berlin, Koischwitz began an affair with another American, a woman by the name of Mildred Gillars -- who he took under his wing and promoted as a broadcaster, even though she was strongly disliked by superiors in the Propaganda Ministry. Koischwitz broadcast almost for the entire war -- dying of tuberculosis in a Berlin hospital in August 1944.

Posted by Ben Brumfield at May 23, 2006 07:38 PM