Ulric Neisser

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heavy even in German, so I was often just called "Der kleiner Dickie," which means "the chubby little kid." When Hitler came to power the Weltwirtschaftsinstitut could not long survive: its members were all anti-Nazi Social Democrats and most of them were Jews. Foreseeing this development, my father had already negotiated for a position at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. For safety's sake he left Germany almost immediately; my mother and sister and I joined him in England a few months later. We sailed for the United States on the ocean liner Hamburg, arriving in New York on September 15, 1933. I was not quite five years old. Soon after our arrival we settled in Swarthmore Pennsylvania, living for seven years in a big comfortable house near my school and then for two more years in two other houses. (We were in the last of them on December 7, 1941). My parents chose Swarthmore not for its college (which I came to know only later) but because it was an intellectual community with a convenient commuter train to Philadelphia. They enjoyed life there, and I did too. My father had a good academic salary; we lived well, and I had no idea that America was going through a great depression. Swarthmore is where my memories begin, at age 5. I have no recollection of my earlier experiences in Kiel, of speaking German, or even of the German governess to whom I was said to have been very attached. There is a photo of me wearing a sailor suit aboard the Hamburg, but I have no recollection of it: remembered life begins when I started kindergarten in the USA. Like boys everywhere, I was desperate to belong to my peer group. Becoming a baseball fan was probably part of that effort. As a player I was a dead loss, the kid who was always chosen last. (That experience may have contributed to my lifelong sympathy with the underdog: I am a committed infracaninophile.) Another part of the same effort was finding an acceptable name. "Ulrich" was excruciatingly German, and my friends couldn't even pronounce it. Luckily a common American nickname was already in place: "Dickie." I decided to stick with it, and have been Dick Neisser ever since. Later I dropped the "h" from "Ulrich," again to be less German. In a further phase I briefly added a "Richard" to justify the "Dick," but that soon seemed stupid and I gave it up. "Ulric" and "Dick" are both natural now. Enduring high school When the war began my father went to work for the Office of Price Administration (OPA), and for a year we lived in suburban Washington. When the job didn't work out, he quit OPA in 1943 to take up a professorship at the Graduate Faculty of the New School in New York. The job was ideal because a number of other refugee scholars - many of them his friends - were already teaching there. We moved to a middle-class Long Island suburb called Floral Park, and I enrolled in the nearby high school. I wish I could report major intellectual developments from my three years at Sewanhaka Central High, but in fact there were none. The courses were easy, my grades were good, and I was soon a member of the "Honor Society." (In practical terms this meant access to a room under the stairs where we played bridge.) That was OK but I was afraid of girls, poor at sports, and incompetent even in Shop. Once I got a medal for proficiency in Latin, but what good was that? I thought of myself as an outsider, and of my few friends as weird. Maybe I was weird too. For my first two Sewanhaka years the war was still on, and it consumed much of my interest. With Germany now the official enemy, I was even more motivated to be 100% American. Perhaps as a result, I began to distance myself from my family: not rudely and 2
perhaps not even overtly, but with feeling. Hans and Charlotte had foreign accents, scholarly interests, European cultural values, academic friends. I would have none of all that; their ways were not for an American boy like me. This deliberate rejection was successful, and I became 100% American in thought and deed. But success came at a price: not wanting to have anything to do with grown-up culture, I essentially wasted my adolescence. It is in high school that kids begin to read novels, play instruments, write poetry, form political identities, fall in love. I did none of those things. I never even went to New York City, which was only an auto-plus-subway ride away from Floral Park. In later years I have tried to catch up on what I missed in adolescence, but I'm still a bit behind. Another factor may also have been important. I knew myself to be a smart kid, but my father the German-educated professor was even smarter. On one occasion when a school assignment required looking things up, I asked my mother why we didn't have an encyclopedia in the house as other families did. Her answer was simple: "Because your father knows everything." (Half a century later, I'm still not sure if she was joking.) One way to avoid that particular competition was to stick to things outside Hans Neisser's expertise - baseball, for example. In many other ways, however, it was a good life. As the spoiled younger brother of an older sister, I was indulged and rarely criticized. My parents never tried to indoctrinate me in anything. On the contrary: for some reason that I don't yet understand, they were surprisingly reticent. This was the 1940s, and yet there were no discussions of socialism, communism, and democracy in our house. Did I just not listen? Whatever the reason, I grew up with almost no views on such matters. An even stranger example concerns the Nazi persecution of the Jews, which had determined the course of our own lives. To the best of my recollection, we never talked about it. One consequence of this silence was that I didn't even know my father was Jewish! Thus I also didn't know that I was Jewish myself (at least by the Nazi criteria), and that I would surely have ended in a concentration camp had we not left Germany. This seems an odd thing not to know, but to the best of my recall I learned it only years later, in reminiscent conversations with my mother. In contrast, I knew quite a lot about my mother. Although she had rejected Catholicism in her youth, Lotte still retained a strong religious sensibility. (Perhaps for that reason, my sister and I were formally christened just before our Atlantic voyage.) Once settled in America she became a Presbyterian, joining a church in Swarthmore and then another in Floral Park. To please her I joined them too, though I was fairly dubious about the God hypothesis. My father never accompanied us to church; I took it for granted that he was some kind of non-churchgoing Lutheran. As far back as I can remember, it was assumed that I would become a "scientist." Where this strong conviction came from I do not know; certainly not from knowledge of science itself. I had a chemistry set, but was never very interested in it. The science courses at Sewanhaka were not exciting. Popular accounts of Einstein's theory of relativity were available, but I had no real grasp of it. In my senior year I read up on atomic bombs and nuclear fission as part of a science competition, but was quite aware that I didn't really understand the material and unsurprised when I failed to win. As for psychology, I don't think I had ever heard of it. Senior year was marked by the acquisition of a first girl friend; we smooched in a clumsy sort of way, but I was still socially awkward. Soon it was time to apply to college: Harvard was my first choice. I took the SAT and the Miller Analogies Test, getting a perfect score on the latter. I applied to the Harvard Club of Long Island for support, and was interviewed by the radio 3
Page 1: From G. Lindzey & W.M. Runyan (Eds.
Page 5 and 6: and pencils, were asked to duplicat
Page 7 and 8: they accepted me into the graduate
Page 9 and 10: of processing. This was already a r
Page 11 and 12: J.J. Gibson was simply not interest
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Ulric Neisser

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