3 The New York Years (1931–1953)

296 9 Ernst Mayr—the Man
the interview in full. As a result, he received a lot of “hate mail” among which was
a letter of a French colleague at Harvard, a professor of Romance languages.
“Like all young Germans, I grew up with the feeling that Jewish people are ‘different.’
Jewish schoolboys were just Jews.Theywerenottreatedbadly,butperhaps
were somewhat envied, because they had usually good marks. I believe that Jewish
classmates had no friends among the non-Jewish boys and vice versa. We had no
Jewish relatives, only our cousin Alfred Pusinelli married a Jewish girl (Lotte Eger)
which caused some displeasure in the family, although she was an unusually nice
girl. Alfred and Lotte later lived in Berlin and I was—strictly platonically—almost
in love with her. However, I don’t think I would have married a Jewish girl.
Like almost the entire German upper class my family was slightly anti-Semitic.
My father, as prosecuting attorney in Würzburg (1908–1913), handled many lawsuits
because of wine adulteration, and the adulterators were almost exclusively
Jews. This was one of the reasons for his anti-Semitic position. My father made
a great distinction between the old German Jewish families that he recognized as
German without reservation, and the ‘Jews of the East’ who had immigrated from
eastern Europe, especially Poland and Galicia, during the preceding 50 years. He
considered them ‘outsiders.’ My mother’s attitude was very international and I do
not remember her ever making anti-Semitic remarks.
In Greifswald, I belonged to a student fraternity, the Gilde, developed from the
Youth Movement. It was distinctly ‘right wing,’ but not Nazi (in 1924–1925). At an
annual meeting on Lobeda Castle (Thuringia) I had a public dispute with a leading
member of the Gilde (later the Nazi leader, Gauleiter, of Thuringia). Following
Günther’s racial classification he accepted only blond and blue-eyed people as good
Germans. When I asked him whether the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had
blue eyes, he was so furious that he proposed I be expelled as ‘un-German.’ His
application was turned down.
There were almost no Jewish people at the University of Greifswald, except the
chemist Pummerer and a lady assistant at the Zoological Institute, about whom
many students were very enthused. On the other hand, Jews were of great influence
in Berlin, whereto I moved in 1925, but ornithology did not interest them. I believe
none of Stresemann’s PhD students were Jewish, not even Theodor Elsässer. There
were several Jewish professors, e.g., the philosopher Dessoir, but they were not
considered as such. This was the height of the Weimar Republic and the Nazis
were gaining in strength. They proclaimed that Berlin was ruled by Jews. The best
hospital in Berlin was the Charité. When I rather naively mentioned that I was
interested to do my intern period as a young medical doctor there, I was told with
a smile that only Jews had a chance at that institution. Gay [1968] described in his
book on the Weimar Republic the Jewish domination of theater, the musical world
and the arts. This did not bother us in the biological sciences, but it did those in
physics. On the other hand, we were disgusted by the blunt anti-Semitism of the
newspaper ‘The Stormer’ (‘Stürmer’).
Several years later in New York I lived in the International House and later in
an apartment with two other bachelors, some of whom were part-Jewish and for
this reason in America (Rosental, Koch-Weser, Lenel). After getting married with