The First Class of Fulbrighters - Fulbright-Kommission

My Germany
by Donald H. Crosby
More common than the rubble heaps were the construction sites. Here workers put the finishing touches on the Munich Bahnhof.
NO DOUBT my fellow grantees of the pioneer class of
Fulbright exchange students, 1953-54, will have interesting
tales to tell of the “swinging life” on the S.S. Independence,
the vessel that carried us all from New York to Genoa in the
fall of 1953. I, alas, was too busy looking after a seasick wife
and a cranky toddler to have very much fun!
Besides, I had other concerns. Being 27 years old at the
time, I was aware of the fact that I and my fellow grantees
had spent approximately fifteen of our formative years,
1933-1948, in what one can only call an anti-German environment.
Our group would therefore be the first, entrusted
with the ticklish task of building bridges between the USA
and Germany—the country that had not only suffered “bad
press” from 1933 onwards, but had been the formal enemy
of the USA between 1941 and 1945.
Not until after the Berlin Airlift did Americans begin to
read favorable reports on the “spirit” of Berliners, praise
which slowly began to be applied to all Germans, who by
now were something like our “allies” in the Cold War.
Despite some initial skepticism—Time magazine had never
heard of Konrad Adenauer!—the formation of the Federal
Republic was greeted as a hopeful sign of a reborn—and presumably
better—Germany. Since the friendship between the
U.S. and Germany was both young—it dated from 1949 at
the earliest—and fragile, a great responsibility rested on our
shoulders. Our Class of 1953-54, therefore, had had approximately
five years—not a long time, historically speaking—
to adjust to the “new” Germany—this after fifteen years of
unremitting negative propaganda! How we comported ourselves
in Germany, how we would interact with Germans,
how Germans might interact with us: these were factors with
the potential of determining the future of the Fulbright
exchange program in Germany.
At this point I should point out that I wasn’t quite
representative of the Class of 1953-54, many of whom did
not speak German well and had enjoyed only limited contact
with German history and culture. By contrast, I was a
semi-finished Germanist blessed with near-native fluency
in German; in addition, I had been immersed in German
music since the age of ten. My Germany, therefore, was the
Germany of Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Wagner, Goethe,
Schiller, Kleist, and Moerike. One can imagine how conflicted
I was during the Nazi-years and especially during the war
years, when I was torn between my patriotic duty to “hate”
the Germans and my heartbreak at reading of the destruction
of cities, that to me, were repositories of German history
and culture.
Given my preparation for life in Germany, my integration
into German life was easier for me than for my classmates,
yet even I encountered surprises: “pillboxes” left over