On Monday, July 11, attendees at the penultimate summertime Lunch Colloquium of the Emeritus College had the great pleasure of hearing Herbert W. Benario, Professor of Classics Emeritus, speak about "Two Famous Incidents" of "Opposition to the Nazi Regime." A conflict in scheduling at the Luce Center, the usual site of our Colloquiums, made it necessary for us to shift sites, and we appreciated the invitation that made it possible for us to meet instead at Emory's Center for Continuing Education in Executive Park, where the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute offers an interesting array of classes to all comers throughout the year. We might note that the OLLI setting was particularly appropriate for Herb, who embodies lifelong learning better than most, and who often shares his learning in OLLI programming.

 

Gretchen Schulz provided the brief introduction that Herb had insisted upon-though she entertained herself and (it is to be hoped) him and others as she did so by quoting from the Wikipedia entry on this "US-amerikanischer Klassicher Philologe" who somehow rates an entry written in German. It traces his time at Emory from 1960, when he "wurde [dort] berufen," to later, when he "wurde zum Full Professor ernannt," to later still, when he "trat in den Ruhestand." Of course, we all know that Herb's many years of retirement (almost thirty, and, we think, therefore more than any of our other members can boast) have not found him very retiring at all. Far from resting in "Ruhe," he has continued to research and write and publish and present, and he has continued to travel all over the world to do so, though, as he explained at the start of this presentation, he may well have spent more time in Germany than anywhere else, working in the wonderful library and museum collections that survived the horrors of the Second World War. With the measured and mesmerizing speaking style that is all his own, Herb took us with him through the streets of Munich, then the streets of Berlin, where his abiding curiosity prompted him to raise questions about monuments of various kinds he encountered there, plaques on walls or sidewalks, pillars, statues, and so forth. Sometimes, even those living near such memorials couldn't explain their significance. But often, conversations with locals--and then follow-up research--revealed the stories behind these things. And it was two of these stories--inspiring stories of resistance to the Nazis, right in the middle of the country, right in the middle of the war--that Herb shared with us at this Colloquium.

 

The first was the story of "die Weisse Rose" movement in Munich, memorialized in a square before the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich where the pavement contains tile reproductions of pamphlets critical of Hitler and the Nazis that students from the University circulated in 1942 and 1943. The square itself is called Geschwister-Scholl-Platz after Hans and Sophie Scholl, the brother and sister who (with their friend Christoph Probst) were central in that movement against the ruling regime. A maintenance man at the University observed Sophie and Hans dumping out some pamphlets on February 18, 1943, and four days later, after a trial before the infamously unjust Volksgerichtshof (or People's Court), they (and Christoph) were dead, guillotined at Stedlheim Prison. Others were arrested, tortured, "tried," and executed, as well. Word about these events did make its way beyond the borders of Germany and Nazi-occupied territory, and, as Herb reported, copies of the sixth and final pamphlet of the group were dropped over Germany by Allied planes in July of 1943. Herb's handout encouraged those of us who'd like to know more to read The White Rose, by Sophie and Hans's sister Inge (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1983; first published in 1952) and/or Sophie Scholl: The Real Story of the Woman Who Defied Hitler, by Frank McDonough (Stroud, UK: The History Press, 2009). A fine film is available, too: Sophie Scholl: Die Letzten Tage (2005). And in 1986, Udo Zimmermann composed a chamber opera about the White Rose (Weisse Rose); the May edition of Opera News reports that an updated version of that opera has been recorded. Herb expects it will soon be available in Woodruff Library.

 

Herb also told the story of the so-called Rosenstrasse movement, a resistance movement that both began and ended in the winter of 1943, just when "die Weisse Rose" movement was reaching its dreadful conclusion. This time it was "Aryan" women married to Jewish men who collaborated to protest the sudden arrest of their husbands in Berlin in February and March of 1943. The men (some 1800 of them) were being held in a building on Rosenstrasse, and the women used to gather outside, pushing at the guards, and chanting "Give us back our husbands." Though violence certainly threatened one day when machine gunners arrived and confronted the women, the gunners suddenly packed up and left the scene, and word came that the men would indeed be released (even those who had already been shipped to Auschwitz). The building is gone now, though there is a rose-colored memorial column (full of information) in front of the site. But what caught Herb's eye this time (and led to his research on the incident) was a set of related sculptures in a nearby park, created in the 1980s and installed there in 1995. The set, called "Block der Frauen" or Block of Women, shows imprisoned men and grieving women cut into huge hunks of stone. And letters also cut into the stone celebrate how "the strength of civil disobedience" and "the vigor of love" overcame "the violence of dictatorship." Like the White Rose movement, the Rosenstrasse movement has been the subject of books and films. Herb's handout recommended books by Gernot Jochheim (Frauenprotest in der Rosenstrasse) and Wolf Gruner (Widerstand in der Rosenstrasse). And it listed a 2003 film (directed by Margarethe von Trotta) called Rosenstrasse.

 

The comments that followed Herb's presentation were interesting, too--not least in their emphasis on "the way we were" back in the years of the war that Herb had been speaking about. Most of us in the room were youngsters then, or babies, most with fathers fighting far away and some with mothers doing jobs on the home front that women hadn't done before. Herb, who was a little older, has vivid memories of following the news on the radio from his family home here in the States. But Rudi Makkreel remembers following the news--sometimes listening to Churchill--on the illegal radio his family managed to keep hold of in their home in the occupied Netherlands. And Bee Nahmias was actually living--or trying to live--with her family in Berlin. Nor should we forget Mort Waitzman, Mort who was sitting right next to Bee, Mort who was old enough to enlist in 1943 (just weeks before the incidents of which Herb spoke) and help make the news others were accessing on their radios. (Many of you heard Mort speak to one of our Colloquium crowds last year about code-breaking in London, landing on D-Day, liberating Paris, fighting in the Netherlands and in Belgium, and then marching into Germany, opening labor camps and concentration camps along the way.)

 

As Gretchen later said to Dick Hubert, a newcomer to our group of attendees and (as she happens to know), a long-time devotee of WWII shows on the History Channel, "I told you you'd enjoy this Colloquium and this group of attendees. As you have heard, we ARE the History Channel." And there's nothing virtual about our reality.

--Gretchen Schulz 

Click here to see Herb's handout 

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My interest in sleep began during the early 80s when I noticed a disconnect between what the literature was describing in terms of what it was like to live with narcolepsy and what a close family member had experienced. From that initial introduction to sleep medicine, my interest shifted from neuroscience to excessive daytime sleepiness.  Since that time, my research has focused on excessive daytime sleepiness, whether due to pathology (narcolepsy) or insufficient sleep.  The Staff Nurse Fatigue and Patient Study, which I directed, was the first to document the adverse effects of nurse work hours on patient, nurse, and public safety. I am currently finishing a study evaluating the efficacy of combining sleep extension with a diet and exercise protocol to promote weight loss and planning my next study evaluating a novel intervention for mild obstructive sleep apnea.

The Emory Program in Sleep

The announcement of Ann's Emory appointment