Please note: Martin Meyer will not be presenting his paper at the conference.
An author in her own right, Robert Lowell's first wife Jean Stafford spent some time in Germany before and after the Second World War. After graduating from the University of Colorado at Boulder in the mid-1930s, Stafford spent half a year at the University of Heidelberg on a grant by the German Academic Exchange Service. Between September 1936 and April 1937, however, Stafford seems to have been interested more in the experience of the foreign than in studying with Johannes Hoops, the renown philologist and Beowulf scholar. "Heidelberg was the requisite Studentjahr (!) in her literary development, the romantic break with philistine America," Ann Hulbert states in the most recent biography about the writer (The Interior Castle: The Art and Life of Jean Stafford [Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1992], p. 41).
Apparently, Stafford's German education included as many travels as she could afford. One of these trips took her to Nuremberg where a gathering was staged by Nazi supporters. Stafford's account of how she and fellow American travelers reacted to the show put up there is likely to come as a surprise. In lecture notes for a presentation given at Barnard in 1971, Stafford recalls being shaken emotionally by the event: "I was swept along on the tidal wave of this well-organized collective conniption fit; my cortex ceased to be in charge and the optic thalamus took over. If a recruiter had come by and asked me to pledge myself for the rest of my life to the NSDAP, in all likelihood I would have done so. . . . Once the circus was over and we were in [. . . ] the night train in the third class carriage back to Heidelberg we came to our senses and were shocked by our primitive behavior" (qtd. from University of Colorado archives in Hulbert, p. 49).
Stafford left Germany in the following spring, but came back for travels and visits in the 1940s and the 1950s. Germany does not only feature in her "Letter from Germany" published in The New Yorker in 1949, but also in other nonfiction as well as in a number of short stories and some passages of her novels.
Taking an approach that could be called "bio-historical," I will explore Stafford's Germany, what "Germany" stands for and its function in Stafford's life. Apart from resorting to published books and articles, I may be able to include unpublished material from archives. In making use of Edmund Wilson's book Europe Without Baedecker (1st ed. 1947; 2nd ed. 1967) in this paper, I will finally try to put Stafford's work into the context of the postwar years. At the dawn of the Cold War, they stressed the Atlantic partnership between America and Europe through books such as Wilson's, Dos Passos's Tour of Duty (1946) and Discovery of Europe: The Story of American Experience in the Old World, ed. Philip Rahv (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1947).
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