Word: berliner
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Leuna, along with a group of German P.W.s. The Russians provided him with phony "German" identity papers, but never bothered to make him take off his British uniform. Last week Noel saw his chance. With the help of a sympathetic German fellow prisoner, he bought a ticket to Berlin, boarded a fast express at Leuna after the Russians had made their routine inspection and rode uninterrupted into Germany's British zone. His superiors accepted his tale and sent him to a hospital to fatten up. "I've been thinking about that girl," mused Private Moncaster bitterly last week...
...first secretary at Britain's Washington embassy during World War II, broad, black-haired Isaiah Berlin developed two bad habits: he was always late to work (he likes to sleep until 10:30), and always the last to appear at a dinner party. No one minded. His flashing dinner talk never failed to charm Washington hostesses and capital pundits. And his brilliant reports on U.S. thinking and doing made him Winston Churchill's most penetrating official observer of wartime America...
Last week, Philosopher Berlin was still observing. He had returned to Oxford to take up his old job lecturing on philosophy at New College, after teaching for a year at Harvard. In the British weekly Time and Tide he told what he had learned about the postwar U.S. university...
Higgledy-Piggledy. But of course, added Berlin, "many of these excellent young people could not . . . either read or write, as these activities are understood in our best universities. That is to say, their thoughts came higgledy-piggledy out of the big, buzzing, booming confusion of their minds, too many pouring out chaotically in the same instant . . . Somewhere in their early education there was a failure to order, to connect and to discriminate...
...Epics. But the congestion and confusion, Berlin decided, had also a more sinister cause. U.S. universities, he found, were plagued by an enervating sense of guilt-a "state of mind of academic persons . . . whom war service or some other sharp new experience has made painfully aware of the social and economic miseries of their society. Like the youthful Kropotkin ... a student or professor in this condition wonders whether it can be right for him to continue to absorb himself in the study of, let us say, the early Greek epic at Harvard, while the poor of south Boston go hungry...