A Teacher of Many Pasts

PROF. Henry W. Ehrmann is a man of many pasts. He has been a refugee from Nazism, an underground worker, journalist, attorney, French soldier, social-science researcher, educational consultant to the U.S. Government, and teacher-scholar. When he came to Dartmouth last fall from the University of Colorado he was in search of still another new experience.

"I wanted to be part of a different kind of academic community," he told a recent visitor to his third-floor office in Thornton Hall. "I thought a small, highly selective male college in a rural environment would be ideal.

"You see," he continued as he rocked back in his chair and gazed out at the white walls of Reed Hall, "I have begun to have more and more doubts about the effectiveness of teaching large lecture classes. I like to lecture and I know such techniques have their place, but it is essentially one-way communication. At Colorado I found myself lecturing to hundreds of students - some excellent, some average, some poor - with little chance for the give-and-take of discussion. The chance for two-way communication in smaller classes and seminars with more uniformity of intellectual capacity appealed to me."

And after two terms of teaching he says:

"I've discovered that what I came to Dartmouth for is here."

And, it can be added, he brought to the College what it sought when he was invited to join the Government Department.

First of all, his credentials as a teacher-scholar are impressive. He was named Professor of the Year at Colorado last year. This award cited his "comradeship with students, an unusual teaching philosophy, and a long list of contributions to the University." He had organized the International Relations Club there and was active in many academic extracurricular activities of the students. On the side of scholarship he has contributed some seventy articles and reviews to professional journals both here and abroad. They have dealt with European and American politics, constitutional and international law, legal philosophy, and intellectual history. Among his books are Interest Groups on Four Continents,Organized Business in France, and French Labor from Popular Front toLiberation. He has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, of the editorial board of the American PoliticalScience Review and of the Fulbright Awards Selection Committee. He is currently serving on the Research Awards Committee of the Social Science Research Council. He received a Rockefeller Foundation grant for a comparative study of lobbies in American and European politics and this summer will teach in France as a Fulbright Lecturer.

This background alone makes Professor Ehrmann a valuable addition to the faculty, but he also brings some special expertise at a propitious time. Much of his work has involved comparative studies of politics. The College is now investigating ways of introducing a broader comparative approach to several fields in the belief that it offers the best way to combat parochialism and cultural ethnocentricity.

During his fourteen years at the University of Colorado he has been a visiting lecturer at several European universities and at many in the United States.

"I've been called on to teach European politics to Americans and American politics to Europeans, and comparative politics to both," he says.

He has found American students extremely interested in European politics - "though not always in the details of European politics." Europeans are often quite knowledgeable about American politics through the period of the New Deal but tend to be unaware of the tremendous transformation of our federal system after World War II.

There is one lesson that impresses both, though, and that is "that it is possible to live democratically within a system that is not identical to your own."

As was indicated at the outset here, he has had opportunities to compare governments and their effectiveness from not only the scholar's somewhat detached view, but also from the cloak-and-dagger operative's wholly involved view. To go back to the beginning:

Professor Ehrmann studied law in his native Germany at the Universities of Berlin and Freiburg and completed his legal apprenticeship in German law courts when Hitler came into power. He was put in a concentration camp for antiHitler activities but his family was able to bribe his way out. He fled to Czechoslovakia and eventually to France. There he earned his living by journalism, by cataloguing data of French history, and by editing a medical magazine. He also joined a small group of German exiles who worked underground to organize, as he says, "laudable but sometimes odd and naive attempts to overthrow the dictator." It was there too that he met and married a fellow-exile, Claire Sachs, whose father had been editor of a liberal German newspaper before his assassination by the Gestapo.

With the advent of the shooting war in 1939, he worked as a civilian with French intelligence and then joined the French Army for "those few unhappy weeks" before the collapse of France.

His name was high on the list of men Vichy France agreed to hand over to Hitler and so the Ehrmanns headed south and hiked across the Pyrenees Mountains to Spain. He sailed to the United States from Portugal in 1940. He became a research associate at the New School for Social Research in New York, then in 1943 joined the Office of War Information, and then the War Department to take charge of the reorienting of German prisoners of war. In 1947 he began his 14-year stint at the University of Colorado.

Professor Ehrmann has found Hanover the pleasant place he had expected. He enjoys chamber music and the piano and has joined the "Old-Timers' Ski Club," organized by John Meek for those 50 and over. His two sons moved East with him. One is at Amherst and the other at Wesleyan. The Ehrmanns now live on Webster Terrace in a house overlooking the Connecticut River and are settled in.

"Yes," he repeated as his visitor started to leave. "What we were looking for - it's all here."

Henry IV. Ehrmann, Professor of Government, enjoying the kind of give-and-takewith students he relishes at Dartmouth.