Interview with Cora Lee Kluge

Cora Lee Kluge #845 Transcript

RL: This is Bob Lange with the Oral History Project of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Today is January 30, 2007. This interview is with Professor Cora Lee Kluge of the Department of German and this is side one of tape one. Cora Lee, to begin the interview if for the record you would tell us when and where you were born, and a little bit about who your parents were, and a little bit about your early growing up years?

CK: Alright, go ahead and interrupting me and making this a shorter or longer bunch of explanation as ever you see fit.

RL: I will.

CK: I was born on April 25, 1941 in Lawrence, Kansas. I'm the oldest of six children, five girls and one boy. My parents were both academics. My father was a PhD in Mathematics from Harvard University and my mother was a PhD in English literature from Stanford. They both were associated, my father many more years 00:01:00than my mother, with the University of Kansas in Lawrence.

RL: So your father's from the east and your mother was educated in the west.

CK: Not, right. My father's from the south and my mother's from the north. My father--

RL: How did they meet then?

CK: My father grew up in Mississippi basically he spent some time during the World War I era as a child in Texas, in southern Texas. My mother is local her, my mother was born and grew up in Janesville, Wisconsin. They both were young rebels, I suppose being educated as is rebellious, they both were young rebels and they had interest in, and then took degrees in high education, my father going from the south to Harvard with scholarships and my mother, unable to find work during the Depression, simply kept taking positions as teaching assistants and found that this promoted her education to a PhD degree. So I'm from Lawrence, Kansas, I used to say dead-center American. If your mother is from the 00:02:00north and goes to school in the west and your father's from the south and goes to school in the east I think it makes good sense that you wind up in Kansas. But you asked how they met! My parents were related and they knew about each other even though they didn't know each other from many years ago. My mother always called her mother-in-law cousin Lou, my two grandmothers are first cousins and although one of them married and lived in the north and one of them remained in her home in the south, they were relatives. I am my own third cousin as I say, one side and down the other.

RL: So your family roots though on both sides are southern?

CK: My family roots on both sides are southern, my mother's father was from the north.

RL: I'm interested, actually, in the fact that your father, raised in 00:03:00Mississippi, went to Harvard. That would have been before World War--in the early part of the twentieth century. Isn't that kind of an odd juxtaposition? I can't imagine there would have been support for him to go north.

CK: From his family or?

RL: From his family.

CK: You're right, you're asking about when that might have been. My father was born in 1905 and my mother in 1908. My father died about a quarter of a year ago having reached the age of 101, my mother lived to the age of 96 and just passed away a couple of years ago. I don't think there was really any feeling, this was the middle of the 1920s, against going to school at a fine institution like Harvard. He had a B.A. degree, or a B.S. degree, I don't which it was called, from the local college where he'd grown up. That's Mississippi College, which also was a family institution, one of my great-great-grandfathers had helped 00:04:00found it and been on the board of directors there for many years. He studied sciences, he studied chemistry, and mathematics and I think after he'd been out of school a couple of years he had taught most of the courses they had in both of those subjects, he wanted to go one and he found someone who was, at his department, who was willing to support him and give him a chance. I think that his family thought that was a very fine opportunity, but when he would go and stay for a full year, he never went back home on a frequent basis. It was not easy, he said he was way behind all the others when he got to Harvard so he spent years studying hard to catch up.

RL: That's interesting. Well Mississippi of course is such an interesting phenomenon in the United States of America, you known it's interesting to think of someone in the 1920s leaving Mississippi to go to Harvard, and that must have resonated in your family somehow growing up.

RL: And your mother, getting a PhD at Stanford?

CK: That's right.

RL: How did that happen?

CK: She studied at Beloit College and was interested I think originally in fields like history and classics, she went on to Pomona College in southern California and took a master's degree, or the equivalent of a master's degree, in classics and taught for high school and taught in the high schools in Tulare, California for several years. I'm not quite sure why she went back to school, I think it had something to do with trying to continue to support herself in education. In Stanford she continued with both classics and English and finished the PhD in English literature, the degree was granted the very same day she got married, which I suppose explains a little bit of why she became a home keeper rather than a college teacher although she had taught at Wilson College in Pennsylvania for two full years by the time she got married.

RL: So, now you were starting to tell me, when I asked how your parents met, that they were related.

CK: They were related and people in the family thought they ought to meet each other. So they did. My mother was teaching at Wilson College and my father was in the east for some meetings probably, something like that, on a Christmas day and they got together and took a look at each other and it took a couple of years before they decided they really wanted to get married. But as I recall my father pursued my mother.

RL: [laughs] And so then, because your father was committed to a career in academics, he got the job at the University of Kansas in Lawrence?

CK: I suppose. After finishing a PhD at Harvard in mathematics, I think mathematicians don't have an awful hard time getting a job these days but this was 1932 and it wasn't easy to get a job in any field anywhere. He taught for a number of years, he taught for about four years I believe four maybe five years 00:07:00first at Rochester and then at Brown University and then got a position on his associate's recommendation at the University of Kansas and went out there. He went there I believe it was in '36, possibly '37, and stayed there for the rest of his life. But my mother was a teacher at Wilson College and she resigned that position to get married and go to Kansas.

RL: And did she ever go back to work as a scholar?

CK: Oh yes. When the youngest who were twins who were about eight years old, she persuaded my father to let her return to teaching. There are wonderful stories about that too. She went to see the dean of the college, she was a friend of the family, and said she would like to teach and he smiled very genuinely and said what would she like to teach, what did she think she could do, and she said well she could teach English composition, or English literature, or should could teach Latin. So they gave her positions just little positions like that. A few years later the same dean called her into his office and said there's a rumor 00:08:00you have a PhD degree is that true, they didn't know who she was at all. Finally, toward the end of her career, she was spending all of her time in classics, she did a lot of the teaching in Latin, took care of the teaching assistants in Latin, and taught mythology courses and specialized courses, all kinds like that. That was what she did finally, it was a woman's career I think.

RL: Is it fair to say that it's not a surprise that you became a scholar in your own right considering the influence from both of your parents?

CK: I think that's quite fair to say. Of the five daughters, three have PhD degrees and all are in education. My brother is not, he's the odd one, he's a lawyer.

RL: So now you're born in the early 1940s. Talk, if you would, about what it was 00:09:00like growing up in Lawrence, Kansas in the 1940s and early '50s. I think of Kansas as kind of a both Midwestern and sort of southern state.

CK: Kansas is very Midwestern and it's very northern. It's only recently that I've begun to realize what a unique sort of part of the world I grew up in. The line between the north and south runs from north to south right there where I grew up, it doesn't run east to west like most north-south divisions do. Between Kansas and Missouri there was from the time of the Civil War a very strong feeling Kansas was a northern state, Missouri was a southern state. The University of Kansas is about thirty miles from the Missouri border and a lot of the young people who go to Kansas are from Missouri, there's strong rivalry there, much stronger than say between here and Minnesota or between here and 00:10:00Illinois. Missouri has southern traditions, southern cuisine, southern architecture, southern language, much more than Kansas, especially the Lawrence area that was settled by New Englanders. It's Midwestern. People say oh you're from the eastern part of Kansas, there it's rather like Missouri it looks pleasant. Well, perhaps, but I like western Kansas too with the rolling hills and the wide openness. I feel very at home there. Kansas, the University of Kansas town had about nine thousand inhabitants when I was born. When I went to college there, there were about nine thousand students. Now the area probably is pushing a hundred thousand inhabitants and the college is more like twenty-five to thirty thousand students. It's blossomed. The University of Kansas in Lawrence had other unique cultural parts that I never thought were unusual. The 00:11:00old Haskell Institute, it's one of the few federally funded institutes for education of American Indians, is right in town and as a little girl I used to go down and watch the Indian dances and see all the young people, and the costumes, and the music and felt that everybody did that but I see, having grown up and moved away, that I'm more versed in that than most people are.

RL: Yes. Was Kansas at big reservation state, were there a lot of Indian reservations in Kansas?

CK: There were a lot of small Indian tribes but I don't know why this institute was put there, I think that was a decision that came out of the blue. The Indians from later were down south of there, mainly in Oklahoma, but this was just a central institute and I believe back in those days it was one of four in the country of these institutes. To get there it was kind of a combination high school and junior college and for admission you had to be at least twenty-five percent, full-blooded Indian. The idea was that you would go from there back to 00:12:00your reservations and use some of the knowledge that you had gained. Many of the young people wanted to stay and go to college so there was always this push and pull effect.

RL: Now did you go to the public schools?

CK: Yes.

RL: Any, as you think back on your elementary and middle school education, any particularly important teachers? Were you a particularly bright girl?

CK: Oh I was terrible. I was bright and I was probably fairly stuckup. I don't think I was a pleasant person who--I was bookish, I don't think that I was a person I would have liked any more at all. Teachers who influenced me back then? More in college and less in high school and public schools. I can't remember any of the early years that were particularly influenced by people.

RL: You spent a lot of time with books I assume?

CK: Oh yes, I read and I was the little know-it-all. [pause]. I've lost my train of thought.

CK: I also stopped going to school at the age of sixteen. I had skipped a couple of grades and I approached the high school teacher, the high school principle, one day with the grand news that the University of Kansas had called me and offered me admission to the university and admission to the honors program, which was fairly free, that was a ticket to everything I wanted. The honors program simply meant that the deans were my advisors and any program of studies I would put together at all they would probably sign-off on, I could take any number of courses and I could simply view the university as my place to go out and explore. They let me into the honors program, I was sixteen years old, I had one more year of high school ahead of me and I told the principle that I thought I wanted to do that so good-bye and he said well they had four-year development 00:14:00program and I was only three-fourths developed. So he advised me against this but I did it anyway. I finally entered the university in 1957 and graduated from high school by their decree in 1958. So I was young, I was very young and I was I think just interested in--I was interested in doing well.

RL: Looking back on it do you still think it was the correct decision to enter university at sixteen?

CK: Oh yes I do, I wish I had spent a longer time at the university--I also finished the university in three years--I would have done better to take more courses. I only finished one major in the long-run although I had several sort of on-hold, needing only one or more courses. I wish I'd gone a bit further in history, that's perhaps my real field, but I had then a B.A. degree in German.

RL: Okay I want to ask you one piece of cultural history. You would have been 00:15:00maybe thirteen, fourteen when Brown vs. Board of Education decision came down.

CK: That was what '52, '53 wasn't it?

RL: It was '54.

CK: '54, alright, I was thirteen.

RL: Were you aware of that, was there much discussion? Were the schools in Lawrence segregated?

CK: I was aware of that, it hit the news, Topeka was only about twenty miles away. Lawrence was, I suppose, not segregated but white. There were very few Black people in Lawrence to the extent that when I was young and went to the south--and I did it nearly every year--I was always surprised by the Black people there, at first it struck me as something very strange. Who were these people and what could that all be about? Lawrence was basically a white community, it was a university community. When I got older than that I was quite 00:16:00aware of what was going on. The only, I think the only, maybe the best hotel in town was a place where the family simply would not go at all and it was because they refused to serve a Black young woman who had been given a scholarship at the university, the scholarship granting committee, and it was the AAUW, the women's group, would always entertain the winner of this group every year with a banquet at the hotel. And when the hotel figured out who was getting the award that year, they refused to serve the banquet, that is they refused to serve the winner, so the banquet was not held in the family, my family, the Prices, would not go to the hotel. There was a segregated swimming pool later, I even went to the pool a number of times but it didn't take very long for my mother to build her own pool and then the family had a swimming pool because we wouldn't go to a segregated pool. I developed some pretty strong attitudes.

RL: Interesting. It's certainly one of the major issues in American history, 00:17:00that of race relations. And of course Lawrence--I'm so interested in Lawrence and Bleeding Kansas and the raid on Lawrence I think.

CK: Yes, well I was very aware of that growing up.

RL: Were you? Is that talked about?

CK: It was the old--was it the governor's home? Certainly the territorial governor's home had been between Lawrence and Topeka and Governor Robinson, his home had been on top of the university hill in Lawrence. Certainly we knew all about that.

RL: So that was--so you were aware of that growing up?

CK: And this is why I say Kansas was violently northern and Missouri, just a short way down the road, was what we considered to be a southern state.

RL: Yeah, yeah it's interesting.

CK: My knowledge of Blacks came from contact with Mississippi and not from my contact in Kansas.

RL: And you were saying just a few minutes ago that you spent summers in Mississippi?

CK: No, I spent time--it was never whole summers--but the family would take trips there one or two times a year.

RL: Oh I see.

CK: My father's parents also lived to be a very old ago and we would go down there, we would visit.

RL: So you were seeing the south before the Civil Rights era?

CK: Oh yes.

RL: So you're at the University of Kansas, you're admitted early, and you finish in three years. Would you talk about your initial involvement in German and also about key faculty at the University of Kansa who influenced you?

CK: You were asking about key faculty. There were a number of people and they weren't necessarily in German. Excellent professors: Oswald P. Backus, the something--I don't know the third or the fourth, he had a number that went with it. He was a person who was a very big influence in my life, he was a person who had a--let's see if I can get this right--I think he had a bachelor's degree and a master's degree, I don't know which was which, all of his degrees from Yale 00:19:00except his law degree, which was from Harvard. He had a bachelor's and a master's, one was in Russian language and literature and one was in art history. Then he finished a PhD in history and specialized in medieval Russian, the development of law and things like this, and then when he found out that he was in a bit over his head on that angle he went and got himself a degree in law from Harvard. So he knew his law and history, and art history, and the language and was one of the early people who went to the Soviet Union and studied Russian things in Russia. And he taught Russian history from the culture point of view, a lot of bringing in slides of all the great architecture and art of Russia. That was my idea about how this kind of thing should be approached. Backus, Ozzie Backus we called him, I was his assistant one year, he was one of the big influences in my life. Some of the best teachers I had, one of the I think very best teachers I had in German was Eugene Norwood who had a PhD from the 00:20:00University of Wisconsin here and wound up as the--now what was he? Was he a dean at the Parkside College in the Kenosha area? Is Parkside in Kenosha?

RL: Yes.

CK: And in middle years he taught in Kansas, he was an excellent German and German literature teacher. There are others that I could probably mention but--so history was one of my big fields, this I liked a lot. There was--I'm going to have to withdraw and think about what his name was, an Austrian history professor who was in the dean's office and he was a big influence too. I don't know why I can't say his name, I'll bring that one back to you. So various teachers, various people who did that. We had a lot of good things going. We had a program there at Kansas for a while where native Germans, and we had some, 00:21:00they were refugees of the World War II period, were teaching their own field in their native language, they would teach the big art history course but they would teach one session in German and I was always signing up for things like, I thought that was a good way to study things too. German literature was never my only major, it was German and something, German and philosophy, German and history. So it was always that German was what was going along to be the support for the other thing I was studying and what stuck, and what I stayed with all the time was the German. And I think I still use German as a tool, I preach studying a foreign language as a tool towards something else here. That's something that makes my own department a little hostile, but I think that's a perfectly good reason why one should study say Russian, or German or French, it's because you want that angle on something. I wanted music, I wanted philosophy, I wanted history.

RL: Did you go to the university already predisposed to an interest in German?

CK: No. I had had one year of high school German, I had no predisposition except I did think that the whole country of America should become more international. I was predisposed to thinking that maybe learning foreign languages would be a route to doing things good for the future. I wanted to be a foreign language teacher, I wanted to be a high school foreign language teacher and I had studied some Latin and I had studied some German and I simply was sixteen years old and didn't have a clue what I was going to do.

RL: Do you remember how it was that you picked German as a modern language as opposed to French or Spanish?

CK: I had a little Spanish but that was more in what we called the junior high school--we didn't have middle schools--and that was sort of an after school thing, never amounted to much, but they hired a German teacher when I was coming 00:23:00through so that was one of the reasons. Another thing I'd like to say is that back in those days, and I think it lasted quite a while--I'd have to think when it stopped--German was for many people the interesting foreign language, it was the East and West language, it was the language that gave you some exposure or some way to get into what was going on in eastern Europe, as well as in western Europe. The scientists wanted German because they knew they could get scientific knowledge with German. My father said it was very fine if you knew Russian, you could get then all you wanted of what was going on big in Russian mathematics, but if you didn't it was nearly as good to know German because of course the east Germans were translating the Russian language documents into German immediately. So if you're interested in the political system or the modern developments, or post-World War II history or sciences, German was what you needed. I think the smarter students, the brighter students were in German.

RL: So at Kansas, did you end up with a double major of German?

CK: No but I lacked only one course in history to have the double major and for years I had little nightmares about doing that, I would go back to the dean's office and say take my bachelor's degree back, let me take one more course and get the double major and they would all say oh we're so sorry but we can't do that. I still, I think, have more a historian's approach to a lot of what I do.

RL: Oh interesting. So you finished Kansas in three years and you entered in 1957 and so you finished in '60?

CK: I finished in May or June of 1960. That was the year, that was the only year, I lived in the dormitories and that was because my father held a one-year position as a guest teacher at Caltech [California Institute of Technology] that year and my father and my mother and my younger sisters, all four of them, were in California and my brother was an undergraduate at Harvard and I lived in 00:25:00Kansas. So I moved into a dormitory.

CK: They made me a Phi Beta Kappa and I think that it might still be true, I was the youngest Phi Beta Kappa ever from the University of Kansas. They honored me with other people at the Phi Beta Kappa dinner and they brought me up to someone else who was going to sit at the head table, this woman was going to be honored as the oldest Phi Beta Kappa in presence, she was probably in her mid-90s and she and I were nicely introduced to each other and we both laughed, we had been neighbors, I had known her all my life.

RL: Oh interesting!

CK: So there I was, nineteen years old, I actually had been picked as one of the Kansas Fulbrights that year.

RL: Really?

CK: I had applied to go abroad, I had never abroad yet and of course foreign language majors usually go much earlier nowadays. But I had applied for an Austrian government grant to go to Austria or a Fulbright to go to Germany and 00:26:00they picked me finally as one of the Kansas--one of two specially selected by the state from Kansas--and then they picked me for the Austrian business too and said I could go on into the competition, it wasn't yet sure, it had to be approved at the national level with the German Fulbright or I could accept the Austrian one right away and I jumped on the Austrian one, I went to Vienna. But later I found out that I was turned down for the Fulbright even though I was a Kansas nominee. They didn't want me to be so young, they thought I was too young to send me so I had no Fulbright whatsoever, the Austrian government grant should have been coupled with a Fulbright travel grant but I had to pay my own way and went to Austria for that year between the ages of nineteen and twenty and then I came back and went to Stanford.

RL: Okay, so you had a whole year in Vienna?

CK: A whole year, ten months in Vienna, but a whole year in Europe.

RL: So you were nineteen and this is 1960 and Europe is still--my sense of 00:27:00Europe then it is still in the aftermath of World War II.

CK: Even more so in Vienna, even more so in Austria than in Germany. I saw a lot of Germany being rebuilt. Austria had been divided into four occupying powers, as had the city of Vienna, and that had only stopped in 1955. So here I was living very close to the Iron Curtain between Czechoslovakia and Hungary and Austria and also in a city that was just recovering from the end of the occupation period. And all of Austria, and I suppose the further east you went the more it was true, tended to be quite anti-American.

RL: Talk about Austria some. You know Austria is so often seems like a footnote to Germany.

CK: Not at all. But it was a strange--

RL: When people think about it.

CK: It was a strange country. It still is I think. Vienna is a world capital, 00:28:00less important now than it had been in some centuries, but it was living in the memory of its past. One-fourth of the population of all of Austria lived in Vienna and Vienna was a very poor city trying to recover from the war and living totally in the glory days of its past. It was a strange and sad place to be in many ways. Western Austria was more wealthy and it was more open to the West and it was more beautiful to my sense, not as dirty and not as poor and not as downtrodden.

RL: Were you--how should I say this--were you happy to be in Austria?

CK: Delighted, I loved it. I loved it. I attended classes in the morning, especially history classes I loved and theater history classes. In the afternoon I would read in the national library, beautiful buildings, and in the evening I discovered there were three things that were almost equally expensive that I 00:29:00could do. I could go to the theater or the opera on standing room, or I could go to a coffee house and read and write there, or I could go home and heat my room. They were almost equally expensive and that was something like thirty-five, forty-cents an evening for one of those opportunities, and of those the most expensive was heating the room. So I usually could be found in the opera or in the theater, just lapping it up, I would sit in line or stand in line to get a standing room only ticket and while doing that I would read the text of what I was going to be hearing and I would go home late at night, I lived not very far from the center of Vienna, go home late at night and crawl into a cold bed. But that was the way I lived there for that year.

RL: This is side two of tape one of the ongoing oral history interview with Professor Cora Lee Kluge. Cora Lee you were just talking at the end of the other side about the triple comparable expenses of heating the room versus culture and 00:30:00it seems like Vienna was quite a rich experience for you and that you were--that we were talking during the break--that you were also in Vienna during a time of considerable international significance as well. What was that?

CK: Well it was simply toward the end of when I was there and I think probably it was in the month of June in 1961, Kennedy came, Kennedy with his wife Jackie Kennedy, came to Vienna and had a conference with Khrushchev there. I remember that other students--I was sort of vaguely attached to the Fulbright group even though I wasn't official a Fulbright, the Fulbright group helped find a room for me to live in and do other things. I used to travel around the country with them. My friends from the Fulbright group and I would run up and down the streets and try to see this and that person driving by going here and there, it was quite well-known where they were going to be and what meetings they will be holding on which days. So that was Vienna as I knew it, it was a place, it was a center.

RL: You made reference earlier to a certain amount of anti-Americanism, particularly maybe in eastern Austria. Did you encounter difficulty as an American in Vienna?

CK: No, nothing that I would find to be hostile at all. I was rather amazed one day I was living on about the third floor of a big apartment building near town and one day a young man, considerably older than I was, approached me in the stairwell and said he had heard me speaking English and his daughter had been having trouble with English, he thought that I spoke English quite well and he would consider having me as a tutor for his daughter except that I spoke with such a horrible American accent. There was, I think, in Vienna at that time, in Austria all together at that time, the feeling that English was spoken properly by the English and Americans were very definitely a sub-culture. This was to a 00:32:00certain extent the feeling in Germany too but it persisted far longer in Austria. I don't know to what extent, today that may have disappeared all together, but Americans were not wonderfully versed in the English language as far as they could tell.

RL: And generally American were regarded as uncultured?

CK: No, just simply as part of what had happened, as part of the cause of what had happened, in connection with the outcome of World War II. Oh yes but also uncultured, they thought they knew how we behaved, I run into that a number of times. You know the feet on the table and chewing gum thing that must be what we do all the time and later when I lived in East Germany during what my friends called East German Times, during Eastern times they were sure that I wasn't a typical American because they had seen was typical American women were like. I said how would you have seen that? Well they watched television, they knew Dallas and Dynasty. So I've always been accused of being not quite typical.

RL: [laughs]. Again I was asking you on break if you knew Gerda Lerner who is another one of the significant faculty at the University of Wisconsin and she makes--

CK: I knew her, but not well, I knew her from a distance I would say. And what she's written of course.

RL: And as a native of Austria she had made observations to me about the particularly virulent nature of anti-Semitism in Austria as compared to what she thought it was worse than what was in Germany. And I'm wondering if you have opinions on that.

CK: No I don't but from what I have known altogether about outlying districts, that is the feelings in the Baltic countries and the feelings in eastern Europe where the Nazis were involved, the people there were much more radically pro-Nazi and supporting the German program than from what I know was true in 00:34:00Germany itself and many people said that was because they had more to gain from involvement with the Germans and more to lose if they turned aside, that is, anti-Semitism in Riga was very strong and anti-Semitism in the Sudetenland was very strong, that is pro-German feelings, pro-Hitler feelings, that was where it was perhaps stronger than other areas. I think the people who belonged to the homeland were more secure in their own feelings of how things should go and people who were brought in were eager to show their trueness to the cause.

RL: Was that true for Austria too?

CK: That I don't know but it may have been, it may have been.

RL: Did you travel a lot in Austria or were you pretty much in Vienna?

CK: I traveled some, some in connection with Fulbright people and some simply because friends of mine would invite me home. I did see some of the beautiful 00:35:00mountains and I went down into [inaudible] to see some of the good scenery there, sometimes in connection with conferences and sometimes just basically with friends.

RL: Is the German spoken in Austria identical to the German spoken in Germany?

CK: No. No, although when people speak High German it's basically the same, but it's a little bit laughed at the way Bavarian German is. I've found since I've been here, since I've been away from Austria, that I can understand Austrian language much better than most people can. I used to attend the folk theater, the volkstheater, in German too, in Austria too and in some of the good plays and the good comedians who would speak with a very good, strong, Viennese dialect. When I was here I used to attend the conferences where sometimes these things would be quoted and I'd sit next to a person, a wife of a faculty member I can think of right now, from Germany who didn't understand what was being 00:36:00quoted and I was always leaning over to her, telling her what the joke was or telling her what was being said.

RL: Interesting. Now you also got up to Berlin?

CK: Only on the way back. My first trip to Berlin was in August of 1961. It was a time when the wall was being built quite tranquilly, there was no way to get to Berlin through East Germany except to fly in and fly out, simply train and--I didn't have a car--but train traffic through the eastern zone was not very possible. I flew in from Frankfurt and flew out again a week later from Berlin to Frankfurt and then I went on up to London before I took a boat back home to New York. I've been across the Atlantic Ocean three times by boat. But I was in Berlin, I forgot, I was there about a week and I've forgotten exactly when I 00:37:00went but I left on Thursday evening and was quite amazed by the security at the airport, there were elbow to elbow an East German and a West German policeman checking the passports and I had stamps all over my passport, there would be no way that that passport could be used twice to leave Berlin, it was definitely stated that I had left Berlin Thursday evening and on Sunday morning, when I was in London, news of the building of the wall hit the television sets. I can remember that I was very surprised and couldn't believe what I was seeing, simply wall being built with mortar and bricks and I thought what can that all be about and how long will that stupid idea last. Well that lasted a number of decades. The person in whose home I was staying in Berlin was the mother of one of my father's math colleagues. This was a young mathematician whose original home had been Germany, he taught at the University of Kansas, and I had known his mother in Kansas and she said oh stay in my apartment, come and spend time 00:38:00with me while you're in Berlin. So I was living in Zehlendorf with her and she was telling me how to go to the museum in Dahlem to see all the wonderful things from Egypt and all this kind of thing and I was interested in going into downtown Berlin so I would walk through the Brandenburg Gate and I would go down to see the staatsoper in East Berlin and all of these things. It was probably more dangerous than I knew, but--

RL: But while you were there--

CK: A half a week later there was no wall there when I was there but, you know, it just wasn't the good place to be caught or have trouble.

RL: But Berlin was still open that week that you were there?

CK: Yes, it was open.

RL: Yes, it's sort of like Kennedy's assassination, I think many of us remember the wall going up, that it was quiet.

CK: I remember and I remember where I was, yes, very, very well.

RL: Yes it was quite extraordinary.

CK: So I was there in Europe the year before all of these events took place, it was sort of the end of an era.

RL: So you leave Europe after this year and you're returning to the United States and one question I have for you: by this time do you regard yourself or recognize yourself as an intellectual and a scholar knowing that you're going to have an academic career?

CK: No, I knew that I was going on to school, I still was very much a little girl, I turned twenty while I was in Vienna. And I came back, I had used a year of Austrian government grant and I had successfully postponed a Woodrow Wilson Scholarship. So I came back with that in the bag and I knew where I was going to take it and I'd been to Stanford to look at their program. I came back, packed my bags, and turned around went off to California.

RL: Okay. And this was for a master's or a PhD?

CK: I had signed on for a PhD program. What had appealed to me there--they had what they called the humanities program, you could enter the humanities program, 00:40:00the graduate program or the humanities, which is what it was called. Anyway, the humanities program, you couldn't take a degree in humanities by itself, it was always a degree, something and the humanities: history and the humanities, English and the humanities. I had signed on for German and the humanities. It was kind of a series of seminars, if anything, probably rather like the great books courses and great books programs, that we were doing a lot of good work in English translation with things from the Greek period on up and with multidisciplinary approaches, that was always what I had wanted to do. So I did a degree in German and the humanities, actually I took no master's degree, I was the last person--possibly the only person--in Stanford to never had a master's degree and that was because I was struggling very hard and working very hard to pass the humanities exams at the time when all my colleagues in German were passing the master's exams. It wasn't a matter of a master's exam, back then 00:41:00they required a thesis. I didn't write the thesis, I did the humanities exams and the next year they changed the rules, if you were in the humanities program--and I think no one had to write the thesis, it was sort of almost an automatic master's degree on the way to the PhD.

RL: Interesting.

CK: So I just went on through.

RL: And how many years did that take you?

CK: Far too few. They kept trying to show that I was an example that it was quite possible to go roaring through in record time. I finished exams, prelims, for the PhD in the fall of '64, I had come in '61, I finished that in '64 and went back to Europe to write a dissertation and started here, at the University of Wisconsin, in 1965 in the fall. I still think people should spend more time. I used to say sitting in the bathtub and reading. More time, especially in the humanities.

RL: Now you were doing your dissertation out at Stanford as--?

CK: I finished my exams, I knew what I wanted to do with the dissertation and I went to Europe to do it.

RL: Okay and what was that?

CK: It was on Friedrich Schiller and Wilhelm von Humboldt, again a very interdisciplinary sort of topic.

RL: And what was your thesis?

CK: The thesis? I wanted to study their relationship on a biographical, aesthetic theory, history level. What also was in it? The best chapter was on the aesthetic theory and that was published finally by the [Schiller Yearbook?], the influence of Humboldt's early ideas on the development of Friedrich Schiller's aesthetic theories.

RL: Oh interesting. So you pass your prelims at Stanford in 1964?

CK: In October.

RL: In October of '64. And then do you leave immediately for Europe?

CK: Yes. I drove a very small car, a very small VW that I owned, a bug, home to 00:43:00Kansas. I had been writing letters around trying to find employment for the next year after I finished the thesis so I was trying to put out feelers. I knew where I wanted to go, I wanted to go to the Midwest, to--I said--a large state university and the reason for that was I thought they would have the best German libraries and I was right.

RL: Because of the immigration patterns?

CK: Mm hm, the state university thing was a political thing, I thought education should be public education and I knew it from both sides, I knew Stanford and I knew Kansas. I wanted to be at a state university and the Midwestern universities and I applied at three that I thought were sort of what I wanted to do and I got contracts from all three, I had my choice.

RL: Which other two did you hear from besides Wisconsin?

CK: Ann Arbor [Michigan] and Urbana [Illinois].

RL: Big German libraries there? At Michigan and Illinois?

CK: If anything, Michigan had a better library.

RL: Really?

CK: I'm glad I didn't go there because of how the department was and the directions it was moving in, I got the right one.

RL: And why did you select Wisconsin?

CK: I liked the program, I liked the library, they liked me. I don't think I was thinking particularly that it was my mother's home but I actually was here, I was here early in November on my way to Europe to write my dissertation. It was just a few days before, it was probably within the week of the election in 1964, Johnson am I right and Goldwater?

RL: And Goldwater, yes.

CK: Because that weekend--my brother was studying in New York at NYU at that point and I went from here to Ann Arbor and after Ann Arbor I went to New York and I spent that weekend stomping around in cold New York City picking up the 00:45:00most wild kind of election literature. I had already voted as an absentee, I went to New York and the first thing I did was to spend the night listening to the radio to see what all was going on with the election returns. That was that week. I tended to move around and do things at memorable junctures in history.

RL: Yes, you certainly do. So when you--you had had your offers from the three universities at that point?

CK: No. I had written letters and on my way to Europe I made calls at, and put in appearances at, Madison and Ann Arbor. But before Christmas I had my offers.

RL: Okay.

CK: I had four offers, the other one was from Davis in California and it was simply not exactly at all like the others, I suppose I had applied there because they had a job opening and I'd been close, I had been at Stanford and I put out a feeler and got an invitation.

RL: Okay and this was for a faculty position as an assistant professor?

CK: Mm hm.

RL: Okay. And so you finished--

CK: This was, these were good years for finishing with a PhD in a foreign language, these were the post-Sputnik years and everyone was building up foreign language departments, Wisconsin had overflowing classes and not enough teachers to teach all the things they had going. It was quite possible to get a good position.

RL: So you were offered a position to start the fall of 1965 then?

CK: That's right.

RL: Okay and this was teaching German and German literature?

CK: Yes it was teaching German and German literature. I was teaching a lot, I believe my first semester I taught fourteen hours--people don't like to do things like that now--but a lot of it was language courses and introduction to literature courses.

RL: So you're here in the fall of 1965 and I would be interested for the record to have you reflect on what the department was like in those days because German 00:47:00at Wisconsin certainly has had a stellar reputation over the years.

CK: The department was in Bascom Hall. Smokey Seifert [Lester W. J. Seifert] was the chair, most of the faculty members were men. The great people in the department were people like: John Workman, Smokey Seifert. New, fairly new, and perhaps one of the people who had been interested in at least getting me here to visit and maybe had promoted my coming here was Ian Loram, I had known him already in Kansas. I can't say all of the--Martin Joos was here, the linguist. It was a good solid department and back in those days candidates for a Letters 00:48:00and Science degree either took a B.A. or B.S. degree and that depended a lot on whether they went on quite a distance in the mathematics or into foreign languages. If they wanted foreign languages they to complete twenty-eight hours worth of foreign language, that was for the B.A. degree, they needed less mathematics. So it was either calculus or a lot of foreign language. That made, to a certain extent, the upper requirement courses a bit strange because there were people on the verge of flunking out as well as people who were very good in trying progress toward a German major, it could be very hard to teach a class like that.

RL: Oh I can imagine. Were you well received as a woman in the department?

CK: Yes, I think so. Again, I never really figured out how people viewed me. I was very young and I was [pause], but I'd always been this way even at Stanford I thought the German Department was all cut up into categories of students and 00:49:00most categories had exactly one student in it. There were the were the native Germans and there were the Native Americans, there were the humanities program and the non-humanities program, there were the married and the unmarried, there were you know, we were all just in our little pigeonhole. I'd been very happy at Stanford and I found the reception for me here to be quite good.

RL: Who was dean then at the college? Did you have to interview with the dean?

CK: I don't think so, I don't remember that at all and I don't remember who the dean was.

RL: It might have been Kleene [Stephen Cole Kleene]

CK: I think it was probably the person before Kleene. I knew something about Kleene because I taught some of his sons in German classes and also my father had known him as a mathematician.

RL: Yes.

CK: I think it was the person before Kleene but I can't tell you who that was.

RL: Ingraham [Mark H. Ingraham]?

CK: Ingraham was another mathematician whom my father knew and I knew him, I once approached him and said I was Baley Price's daughter and oh yes we had a 00:50:00good conversation about that. I think Ingraham had retired by the time I--was there someone between Ingraham and Kleene? I'm going to have to look back. I pretend to know something about the history of the University of Wisconsin, but I believe Kleene was after I came here, Flemming was the president, the chancellor.

RL: So you're working full-time, you're teaching a lot. Is fourteen hours three courses or was that--?

CK: No, it was a whole bunch of little courses. There were some three-hour courses, there were some four-hour courses, that was fourteen contact hours. We also had an honors program in the department where the better students would get an extra hour--I never figured out why that was necessary--but they would be promoted with a little more, get the good students together and do extra things like extra reading or extra approach or more fun doing whatever. I taught a couple of the little one-hour courses so probably it was three, four good courses and then a couple little one-hours special sections.

RL: Now are you also developing your research program at this time?

CK: People did that on a more minor scale I think, I published a couple of articles but that was just about the end of it.

RL: What was your intellectual interests in German culture at this point? Were you doing more work on Schiller?

CK: Schiller, classical period. That was basically it. I considered myself in modern literature, we didn't really have culture in those days, we had literature and language, we had literature and theology in the department. I said modern literature but I meant 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.

RL: Now you said that the department was a solid department. Was this the time when the UW's German Department was considered the best in the nation?

CK: We had a really good, excellent, reputation in the late '60s and all through 00:52:00the '70s, but we'd had an excellent reputation that went back to about the year 1900. Way back from the early years I think the chairs of a lot of the big departments throughout the nation had all taken PhDs here and that was under the time of Hohlfeld [Alexander Rudolf Holhfeld], Hohlfeld was the old grandmaster of the German Department in Wisconsin. He died he in the year 1956, he had come here in the year 1900 from Vanderbilt and his students were everywhere. He had been the advisor, he had--Doktor Vater we called it in German, the Doctor Father of sixty-four students. That still is the record in the department.

RL: Wow.

CK: So his candidates have gone out and done everything. So it was a long 00:53:00tradition but I hink it certainly lasted through the time when I was here first. We had a young person in the department who had come in 1959--so about five, six years before I did--and that was Jost Hermand, he stayed here and has been the classic German Department person, he retired about a years ago but he's still teaching.

RL: So what is your career path at this point? Are you embarked on a process of getting tenure?

CK: Well I was at that point. I got married, I got married and then that sort of put an end to a lot of those things. I got married and I had a number of children.

RL: When did you get married now?

CK: I got married at Christmastime of 1967.

RL: Okay so you had been a professor here for two years?

CK: Mm hm and things went along for a while, everything was fine. I had a child in 1969 and another one in 1970, and then my husband took the junior year abroad program to Germany and I went along. So I took that year off and while I was 00:54:00there they did funny things in Wisconsin like blow up the math building, a lot of unrest and bad things were happening and I wrote from Europe and said that I thought I would like to go on to a part-time position for a while.

RL: You continued as a full-time faculty while you were--?

CK: Right up to 1970.

RL: While you were having children you were also full-time faculty?

CK: Mm hm, right up to 1970, through the spring of 1970, and in the fall of 1970 we were in Europe and I was not employed and when I came back I took a part-time position.

RL: In German?

CK: In German. They wrote me and said what kind of part-time would like, you know, what would I like to do and I said well I had been teaching three courses--I guess that was a rule that had been put in--and I thought I would like to teach two courses instead of three. But this did things to me as far as my status with the University, was that were not foreseeable at the time.

RL: Now did you have tenure at this point?

CK: No I didn't. No I didn't. Being on part-time took me off the tenure clock and they dumped me into the category of lecturer saying the only title they had for part-time people was lecturer. So I became a lecturer at a two-thirds appointment in the fall of 1971.

RL: And you were aware they were doing this?

CK: Oh I was aware of that and I worried about it a little bit. I approached people and said how will this work and what about when I want to be full-time again and what about when I want to get back on the tenure clock again. And I had letters that said what would happen. Stop this now?

RL: This concludes side two of tape one.

RL: This is a continuation of the oral history interview with Professor Cora Lee Kluge on February 27, 2007. Cora Lee, when we left off last month we were just 00:56:00at the point when you were returning from Germany and taking a two-thirds position in the department as a lecturer with the understanding that when you were ready to resume full-time, you could get back on the tenure track. So to start, you come back in 1971 and you return to the department as a lecturer and you're continuing teaching your same courses only just two rather than three.

CK: That's more or less true. At the end of the year 1970 I had been exploring by mail with my department chair, that was Ian Loram, the possibility of my coming back as a part-time person. I had two small children at home, later I two more children. I have a letter--this of course led to their having some 00:57:00questions to how this would work. I had five years of an assistant professorship behind me and I was now asking to be a part-time person. So Professor Loram went to the Dean Kleene who wrote to Professor Loram about how this could be done for me. I have a copy of a letter from Dean Kleene to Ian Loram [pause] that's not even true, I have a copy of a letter from the University Committee to Dean Kleene. Dean Kleene had appealed to the University Committee to say how would this work and they said that, that would be alright, I could be retained on a part-time basis, that this and that would happen, that my part-time appointment would not count toward probationary time, that at no time the Department should be committed for more than one year, that this is no agreement for a full-time appointment in the future. Professor Loram wrote to me offering me a job. He 00:58:00stated in his letter--and I had asked about this--that if for some future year the Department of German should wish to offer me a full-time appointment, this would put me back on the tenure clock and I would have to go up, at that point or during that first year, for tenure.

RL: The first full year that you're back?

CK: The first full year, that would be my sixth year, that would be the end of my normal probationary time. So no one had ever promised me a full-time appointment or going up for tenure but they had made provision about how this would happen should the department wish to do this and I felt secure that the department would be interested in entertaining such a possibility from me in the future. I thought that the way this was to be done had been spelled out and I felt fairly secure that I would be alright doing what I was doing.

RL: Now this is the date of this letter?

CK: The letter from the University Committee to Dean Kleene is the 2nd December 1970, this is in the middle of the year we're in Freiburg. The letter from 00:59:00Professor Loram to me offering me this position is January 25, 1971. I would be offered, the department is now offering me or the Dean is offering me, for 1971-'72, a part-time appointment with the rank of lecturer. This would make me a part-time faculty member. At this point there was no academic staff. However, because all part-time people were given the title of lecturer I would be a lecturer not on tenure track and I would go along like that. It was a one-year appointment, renewable, and it would not count toward probationary time and there was no agreement for a full-time position in the future.

RL: But you took that feeling secure that when you were ready to go back to full-time, the department would treat you fairly?

CK: Yes, and since the mechanism for how this would be done had been spelled out, even at the Dean's level and University Committee level, I thought that there was no great jeopardy ahead for me.

RL: So your work schedule was two-thirds time?

CK: I was teaching--yes, well that was another thing. I had started here teaching, I believe, twelve hours per week as an assistant professor and in the course of my first years here it had gone down to ten hours a week. But people were usually talking at that point about no so much how many hours but how many courses one would teach. I had been teaching courses and I understood that this would take me down to two courses a week. And that was all very well and good, that was the way it was done for a number of years. At some time after that then 01:01:00they decided that since I was a lecturer and, after that also a member of the academic staff, it's my memory--I'm sure there's documentation in the university for this--it's my memory that the academic staff was created in 1974 and the lecturers were put into it. So I never accepted an academic staff position but I was simply dumped into the academic staff category when it was created so then I was, in 1974, a lecturer in the academic staff and part-time. And at some time along about then they decided that lecturers would teach twelve hours so they were again going to up my teaching commitment, it would be two-thirds of twelve hours instead of two-thirds of ten. Various things happened to my classification without my agreeing to the classification when it happened.

RL: Interesting. Now, what are you teaching at this point, courses that you had been or are you developing new courses?

CK: I was teaching courses I had taught. I was, I believe, fairly 01:02:00quickly--certainly later on--I was teaching a certain number of the undergraduate courses, not more, because of the number of hours they met and teaching two four-hour courses or four contact hours per week would fit my schedule in such and such a way. I basically taught the undergraduate program.

RL: Oh I see. Now with your status as lecturer, were your colleagues in the department treating you the same as when you were faculty?

CK: Absolutely, I was a lecturer, I was a faculty member, my letter said so--there was no academic staff. I was a part-time faculty member and I was a voting member of the Department of German and everything was going along just as it had been before only I was teaching fewer classes. My husband was the chair of the German department, I was very much a part of everything, they knew me, we entertained in our home. Everything was going along just fine and later when I 01:03:00began to pursue different ranks and more opportunities at the university I found that a number of my colleagues thought I had had tenure long since. The treatment, my treatment, at the Department of German was always very excellent.

RL: Now at what point do things start to change? When are you ready to get back on the tenure track and go full-time?

CK: Well it's hard to say. I actually went back to full-time before I was ready to go back on to full-time. I had a third child in 1972 and a fourth one in 1974 so my hands were full, my plate was full, I've always had contended that one child is two hands-full and two children are two hands-full and three children are two hands-full and you never have more than that but you keep on going. My fourth child unfortunately developed leukemia and died quite quickly in the year 01:04:001980, in the first few months of the year 1980. And at that point, perhaps, I became more free. The other children were growing up, the youngest one was not quite eight when that happened and she insisted that she would certainly never be the baby, she didn't like any idea that she was now my youngest one. So along about 1980 perhaps things changed.

CK: They would have changed anyway, but in the fall of 1980 I was approached by the chair of the department who said that for some reasons that he knew, that I didn't know at the time, we had a third semester German course with no teacher. The T.A. had resigned on the spot rather quickly and would I take over this course. And this was the fall of 1980, this was a few months after my daughter died, and I thought it would a really excellent idea to make my hands even more full and to spend more time out of the house. So I said of course I would be 01:05:00delighted to do that. Later on I found that this course had been far too much for this teaching assistant, it was full of a bunch of--I don't know what rowdies and students who couldn't be managed and all this kind of thing. I had a wonderful time with the course, I never found that it was unmanageable at all, there were a couple of people who were quite bright who spent some time looking out of the window but it doesn't bother me when students do things like that. So I had a good course and I was--

RL: What was the course?

CK: It was the third semester German course, just one of the routine language courses and I can keep a course like that busy and happy. Things were going along very fine. Well meanwhile my contracts, such as they were, with the University had expired. The reason for this was that as was stated in this letter from 1970, January of '71, I was to have a year-by-year appointment. And that I believe became more than Dean Kleene wanted to deal with after a while, he was finding my name on his desk on an annual basis and my letter of 01:06:00appointment had to be redone and all that kind of thing. So he told the German department that he would entertain three years of appointment for me and I had two, three-year contracts with the university. If that started in 1974 then this third year was up in 1980, so as of 1980 I was not really under contract to the university and in the fall of 1980--quite against what they had originally wanted to do to me, that was keep me in this category only as a part-time person, I took on this extra assignment and now I was full-time again. In the fall of 1980 I did that and I was without a contract but teaching a full-time load for a year and a half or something like that beginning at that time. Then someone saw that here I was teaching full-time and that was not correct so they 01:07:00decided to insist that I be on full-time. I was jerked out of one class rather suddenly--I would have to look that up again--either in 1982 or 1983, I think it was 1983, in the spring. In fact that's still part of my CV as far as I know, that I had been full-time again beginning in 1980 with the exception of this one semester where I was told no way would I take another course, I would have to be a part-time person as per old agreement with the university. I had, meanwhile, also sat on a committee that was trying to setup indefinite appointments and other such positions for members of the academic staff. We worked very hard and defined the requirements, and the prerequisites on how people would be judged, 01:08:00and all this kind of thing. Most academic staff member then, as now, were not teaching people so we had certain requirements, you know certain amounts of good service and all this kind of thing, and letters of recommendation and their records would come up. It was kind of a tenure agreement but not for faculty members for academic staff. I helped to develop all of this and the department decided to try to give me an indefinite appointment--I've always thought that's an awkward word, it sounds like you're about to be fired--but I wanted an indefinite appointment and I was put up for an indefinite appointment and my own committee, which I didn't meet with the days they were dealing with my case, turned me down. They said no way this is a person who should be competing with the faculty, not with the academic staff. And I said oh isn't this too bad for me, but I agree with you completely. So there I was again with no indefinite appointment and no faculty position and no full-time position and nothing at 01:09:00all. I started to, I guess at that point, I started to pursue what I considered to be a certain kind of justice or perhaps a better position with the university. So beginning in 1983 this whole thing started really rolling and got settled when I was not promoted but appointed to a tenured position as association professor in the summer of 1992.

RL: Now let's go back to when you decided to pursue this, after academic staff turned you down. The dean at that point of the College is David Cronon [E. David Cronon].

CK: Yes.

RL: I'm assuming.

CK: Yes. I'm assuming too. Yes, I'm sure. He's the one who let the department know that I was not to have a full-time load in the spring of 1983 when I had been having a full-time load on a course-by-course basis for the years before that, for the few years before that.

RL: What was the first major thing that you had to do in your pursuit of 01:10:00justice? Did the department have to go to the dean on your behalf?

CK: I went to my chair, my department chair, who was Charlotte Brancaforte, a woman, who simply said to me that she didn't even understand the problem. I found her to be rather unhelpful; she didn't know what the problem was and what I was trying to do. What did I do after that? I wrote a letter, which must be from that time--I have a copy of it here but it's simply a carbon copy of various letters that I was writing--it's a ten-page statement here, which I define as--my name's across the top--I wrote it, it says this is a two-part 01:11:00statement containing part one, a short history of my employment relations with the University of Wisconsin and part two, a list of my current grievances. It is not dated but my current grievances have to do with what happened in 1983 so I presume I wrote this in the summer of 1983. It does occur to me that I was not awfully specific about exactly what I wanted, I talk here about my grievances. One of the things that had bothered me was that I became clear to me that I wasn't going to make progress with the academic staff since I should be a faculty member, and I wasn't going to make progress as a faculty member if I couldn't do research and better my publications list. Meanwhile, they were asking me to teach more courses than others. At some point the German Department even moved from a six course per year load for faculty members to a five course 01:12:00per year load, but this was only for faculty members and this didn't involve me so I was teaching more than the others and I was now being asked to not take an academic staff indefinite appointment, which would have given me at least some security because I wasn't fit for that but should be competing with the faculty. But I couldn't compete very well with the faculty because of a number of things. I was applying for various research grants and the research grants kept coming back to me stating these are only for eligible faculty member, not for the academic staff. So I found myself to be in a catch-22 position.

RL: Indeed.

CK: I said--and people said well she's been around here since 1965, that was when I started here as an assistant professor, I had been an assistant professor until 1970, then all this extra time had elapsed, another twelve, thirteen years and they said now she had been here eighteen years where is her publications list. And I said let me try and the longer I was ineligible for things, the more 01:13:00time went by, the less opportunity I had to show that I was doing anything year by year. So I said lets do it now, lets do something so that I can get myself at least a secure position and maybe the position that I want. That didn't answer your question at all, your question was how did I--what was my first step. I started running around like a chicken with her head cut off and every time I came to a door they would slam it in front of me so I didn't know quite what to do.

RL: Who in, lets say 1985, who could have made the decision to end your running around and reinstate you? Could the dean of the college have done that?

CK: I presume that the dean of the college together with the University Committee could have worked out an arrangement. I don't know that for a fact but when things began to move, when first the German Department was told that they 01:14:00could put me up for tenure sort of spur of the moment, okay go ahead and do that if you want to do that, it was the dean who said yes I would entertain a dossier that tries to promote her to a position of tenure. That came from the dean and the dean passed that dossier on to the Humanities Divisional Committee where it fell flat. I was turned down at that level too.

RL: And what year would that be?

CK: That was in the spring of 1991.

RL: Okay. When you said--

CK: Or maybe not, maybe 1992. I think that was--1991 or 1992. By the way, at that point I was also in trouble. I had been doing good work in the German Department, among other things I had developed a course in business German, 01:15:00which was taking off like gangbusters. It was a big and active course and I was doing lots of things and I was learning lots of things and I said to people this is not a required course in the German Department for the undergraduate major but it ought to be, it teaches you about how things are going along in modern Germany. And a lot of my students liked it a lot. But when the academic staff developed its awards for distinguished this and distinguished that, the German Department put me up for the Distinguished Teaching Award and I won it the first year, the only teaching award for the academic staff in the whole university. When I got that award I was, at the time, trying to get a faculty position, I found this to be a little bit awkward. So I went over to a wonderful reception at Donna Shalala's house, she was honoring with a big reception all of the winners of all of these awards. And we were having great fun, a number of the winners of awards were people I knew and for some reason we were all feeling 01:16:00rather cocky and we gave kind of fun little speeches to receive these honors and we were allowed to invite a number of people to be our particular friends and supporters at this event. I invited a number from the German Department. And I prepared my speech not knowing what others would do. One of the other awardees was Judy Craig that year. There were several who were lighthearted the way I was, but I was the first one and I gave a very short address on the topic of the difference between the faculty and the academic staff. Some of my colleagues in the German Department heard that I was going to speak on that topic at the reception and they said you wouldn't dare and I said why not, I'm only going to live once. It brought down the house, it's a very fun little lecture, I would do it again at the drop of a hat but I did feel kind of awkward cleaning up on the academic staff award while fighting the University for a faculty position.

RL: Oh yes. Did you get any reaction from Shalala? Was she aware of your situation?

CK: I'm sure she was, she was at the time, if she hadn't known before. She later got in on the act, it wasn't she herself who was doing these things but her provost whose name was Ward, David Ward. That was later.

RL: So when you said earlier that in the mid 1980s you were running around like a chicken with your head being cut off, what doors were you going to that were shut to you? Were you going to the Provost, were you going?

CK: No I wasn't but they would send me a letter saying you know if you're going up for tenure alright. They would send me indications via my chair saying don't mention your research, you are not in a position where your research would even count, in fact we would count it against you because that would mean you are spending your time doing things that you are not even supposed to be doing as 01:18:00your full-time employment for the University of Wisconsin. So I said but I do want to be a faculty member. They said okay, faculty members have to do research so I would look in all the corners for any sort of a research grant that I could apply for and I would apply, and they would turn me down, and I would apply for the next thing and get turned down again and then I would talk to the dean or answer a letter or go to the chair, I would say how am I going to do this, tell me how I can do this, tell me what I should be doing. I'm teaching a heavier load, I like to teach, this is fine, but where can I turn. And I did find a few little pieces. I got myself a very highly-competitive [IREX?] Award to do research in East Germany. I was there in the mid '80s, that was 1986, a lovely time to be in East Germany. I spent a summer there doing research, they didn't ask my if I was a faculty or an academic staff member. I did apply for--and this 01:19:00was right at the end of my attempt to leave the academic staff--I applied for a graduate school research grant. Again, I had done that several times and they gave it to me conditional upon the fact that I got a faculty position because they could give it only to a faculty. So that became another point of contention when all this came up.

RL: This was--how did you keep going? This was pretty--

CK: I was busy enough. It helps to be busy.

RL: This was pretty discouraging on the part of the University.

CK: Yes. Please remember that my department was fully behind me. I think I would have stopped going to work altogether if it had been a difficult atmosphere then. When I was turned down for this tenure decision--perhaps that was early in 1992, I've said '91 or '92--the Department sent a committee to appeal this, 01:20:00straight at the dean and Jost Hermand, our Vilas professor, came to me and said of course I'll be a member of this, I'll go, this is fine but I'm afraid we're going to get turned down. And I said yes I know you will get turned downed but this is the next necessary step in this procedure, go and do it, get turned, come back, that's all I'm requesting that you do. And he did and they did and then we moved to the next level.

RL: And what was the next level then?

CK: Well, you see I had so many things going that now we're talking about the tenure decision itself. The next level of course was to go to the Committee on Faculty Rights and Regulations, which would hear appeals of statements made by the Divisional Committee. The Divisional Committee had ruled against me and the dean had then gone along with that, I had hoped that maybe the dean would overturn the Division Committee recommendation--he had done that kind of thing at least twice in my history, in my memory--but he did not. So I said alright, I 01:21:00will appeal this tenure decision with CFRR. And I went to CFRR and they said to me oh no you don't, we only deal with faculty. So I said how does this work then, I'll go to the academic staff people who have something--there's an academic staff appeals committee. I took it to them and they said oh no you don't we never deal with tenure decisions. So I went to, I believe I went to, the Chancellor's office at that point and said here's the pickle I'm in, what am I going to do. And the Chancellor persuaded the CFRR group to set us an ad hoc committee to review the decision that had to do with me.

RL: This is Shalala?

CK: This is Shalala. She told them to be sure--she's not a faculty member and you do not have to hear her appeal, but you are the ones who are used to hearing 01:22:00appeals of this sort and I would like to request that you set us an ad hoc committee and deal with this case. So sent all my documentation over to CFRR and they agreed with me unanimously.

RL: That you should have tenure?

CK: That I should have tenure. This happened late in the spring of 1992. So I had the Divisional Committee against me, the dean in the middle, the CFRR on my side unanimously. By this time I already had a lawyer in the act too. My lawyer went to see David Ward. No, David Ward or the dean. I believe she went to see David Ward. And she waved the CFRR report in front of him saying this is the only brief I need for a court case and at that point I was appointed to an associate professorship with tenure and because of the timing on that, that 01:23:00meant also that I had the fall semester off with a graduate school research grant because it had been given to me conditionally.

RL: That is--

CK: It's a story isn't it?

RL: A story. It really is.

CK: I remember that it was a hot day, maybe June. This was late in the spring of 1992. I remember that late in the afternoon I was in my kitchen, the phone rang, and here it was, someone in the Chancellor's Office saying that David Ward, the provost, wanted to speak with me. And I remember thinking I wonder if I want to speak with him. It was a hot evening and my father was sitting on the porch and I was having a cookout with my father and things were fun. And he simply came on the phone and said we offer you tenure, an associate professorship, and then of course the graduate school grant for the fall. So I phoned my lawyer and said we got everything we wanted. But that was the last step, there was nowhere else to 01:24:00go except that far. After that it might have become a more public court case.

RL: Is the critical decision here, when you decided to go to the Chancellor's Office and that Shalala then requested CFRR to ad hoc your case?

CK: Probably. The other thing I could have done and I suppose this is what many people thought I would do, would be to go off and sit down and agree with them. But I wanted to pursue the appeal and when I found I couldn't do the appeal either through academic staff channels or through faculty channels, then I simply went to the top and said where do I start, I'm caught in the middle.

RL: This concludes side one of tape 2.

RL: This is side two of tape 2 of the ongoing interview with Professor Cora Lee Kluge. Cora Lee, you got tenure. Now, you were saying during the break that many 01:25:00people were unhappy with you for pursuing this.

CK: I don't know if they were unhappy with me for pursing it or unhappy with the dean for somehow allowing this to happen, but they were not happy having been overruled. They were in Europe, they heard that I had been given an associate professorship and I think they didn't like the fact that they had been overruled.

RL: This is the Divisional Committee?

CK: This is the Divisional Committee. They thought the matter was totally settled when they went against me and they were surprised and they were quite unhappy.

RL: Do you think, do you see an element here of sexism or was it hierarchy? Or was it both?

CK: My lawyer saw age discrimination in it. She was surprised about that. She had talked to several people who didn't know me and who were on the Divisional 01:26:00Committee and they had said things like: "Let's see, how old is she anyway? She must be approaching retirement." In fact I was fifty and I didn't feel I was that old. But she saw some age discrimination in it. I will say that I laugh now sometimes--I've laughed in this interview--and said this is kind of really a funny story, that I think I had a totally mismanaged career. Quite aside from the fact that I kept getting defined and pushed into things and allowed this to happen and I requested part-time employment and things were not well-defined and structured for a person who would want to have a family too. I think that I should have paid more attention if I wanted a university teaching career. I think perhaps when I'm feeling very bad about things that the medieval monks who had no marriage and gave their lives to teaching and to research had it right, 01:27:00they gave all they had in one direction. I was doing too much, I was not looking out for my career and the paths that it should take. I'll say there was certain fault in my structuring of what I was doing. I started very young, I was the daughter of a woman with a PhD who had it all, she had six children and a good teaching career and I certainly thought that maybe that was what people should do. I'm an old-fashioned woman as well as a modern one and I got caught in the middle.

RL: Yes. That seems to be very clear. Now as you look at the status of women faculty today at the University--and I'm assuming that the University is more receptive to part-time faculty and so forth.

CK: It is structured now, there are ways and there are time-offs and there are 01:28:00stepping aside from the tenure clock and there's help for people with small children at home.

RL: And are you pleased with that evolution?

CK: I think I am very much. Another thing I see however--and this only private within the German Department--is the fact that many people I think because of their careers, maybe I should have done, choose not to have families and choose not to have children. The German Department has no women faculty members now--is this even true?--I think absolutely zero women faculty members now who have children at all. Most of them are unmarried, very few of the members of the German Department are married. Even the men don't have children. There's one exception I think, one of the men has four. But basically people are retreating from having a family and a university career too. This we see more in Europe I think than in America but people are beginning not to get married, and not to 01:29:00have a family, and not to--they don't do as much, they think more of their career, they put career first. But this university I think has made some steps in the right direction so people could choose to do both.

RL: Now when you think about the process one of my questions to you were who some of the key players were who were making decisions. Clearly David Cronon, Danna Shalala, and David Ward were involved. Who were some members of the Committee of Faculty Rights and Responsibilities? Do you remember?

CK: I can look it up but I don't really remember. One person I know was on the Committee was Cyrena Pondrom because she was the first one--I was on my way in to see David Ward because he had called me and asked to have an interview with me, but up to that point I had not known, and even he that day didn't tell me what had happened in the CFRR meeting, it was Cyrena Pondrom who said, "You 01:30:00don't have a clue do you? We went one-hundred percent in your favor." And I hadn't known that had happened.

RL: Were you able to lobby the CFRR?

CK: No.

RL: So they're quite insulated, they--

CK: Well I don't know not able to--their names were in the phonebooks, all these big faculty committees were in the phonebook. I looked it up when I saw who was on the Committee. I probably noted--and I can't remember any individual person on the Committee except Cyrena Pondrom and that was because I ran into her and she told me what had happened. I can't remember any of them and I would not have chosen to lobby them if there was any such thing, my documents were all in writing and there they were and this was a normal appeal process.

RL: So you got tenure in the summer of '92?

CK: That's another story. Sometimes I really feel discriminated against. I got 01:31:00tenure in the summer of '92 and at that point there was a little sort of extra gift that you got in the way of a cash bonus when you got appointed, when you got tenure. I used the wrong word. When you were promoted to tenure I think it was something like three thousand dollars or two thousand dollars or something like you got as a little gift for this having gotten tenure. And I didn't get it. The reason was I hadn't been promoted to tenure, I had been appointed to tenure.

RL: Wow!

CK: This happened in the summer of 1992 but something went through the department administrator's desk that might have had the new title on it, but certainly--I guess it had the new title on it, maybe it had something else on it--but it indicated to everyone that I was now an associate professor and the whole German Department was running up and down the hall saying, "How'd she do that? What's happened now? Now what's going on?" No one understood what had gone on at all.

RL: And in the summer of 1992 you're feeling pleased?

CK: Oh I was feeling very pleased and I was feeling that the University had dodged a big bullet and some other people even from other universities who knew some of my story said the University has had a big one coming for a long time. Had I chosen--had that not gone through and I had gone to court I think I would have had a fairly public drubbing of the University as one of the options.

RL: And clearly David Ward was aware of that?

CK: Clearly Donna Shalala was aware of that. Donna Shalala was the Chancellor, David Ward was simply the person she had given the job to. I was a little worried about going to see David Ward. He called me and wanted to talk to me and I didn't know what he wanted to talk to me about--this was after CFRR. I told then my lawyer who was in Mexico, she was on vacation, and I said you know I 01:33:00want to go see David Ward, I don't want to say no I'm going to wait until I have a lawyer in tow--she was going to be back in town in a day or two. So she said alright I'll trust you, you go there, but don't say anything--well that's not exactly my style either--don't say anything, listen to what he has to say and ask for another appointment and I will be there in two days and we will go together then in two days. So here I was, I was going to be a really brave person and face the big bear all by myself and I telephone my brother who's a fairly sophisticated corporate lawyer in New York City--not New York, he was there for a long time, but in Washington, D.C.--and I said I've been summonsed by the provost now and I'm supposed to go and my lawyer says don't say anything. What should I do and how should I behave? Now this is my little brother, I didn't know him like this at all and he didn't answer at all in the way I thought he was going to, he said, "This is a theatrical performance that you 01:34:00have to do. Dress all up, nice business suit, get yourself a good-looking leather notebook, go and sit down across from him and say to him, 'Would you repeat that?' And write down lots of what he says and slowing down and saying, 'Do I understand correctly that you're doing so and so?' and then at the end of all of this say to him, 'I need time to think about your offers.' And then you can bring your lawyer the next day." So I thought well this doesn't sound like too hard a job so I did exactly that and I wrote down lots of things and I asked a few questions and then I said I would like to come back to see you tomorrow morning and he said I have appointments at--I have an appointment at eleven but I could arrange to meet you at ten. I said I will be there at nine-thirty and he wrote that down. I said I'm bringing my lawyer, he said I'm bringing my lawyer. 01:35:00And that was our next-day's meeting. And meanwhile I found out what CFRR had been all up to so I knew how crushed he was feeling and the next day I said nothing, my lawyer did the talking.

RL: And what did David want to see you about?

CK: Couldn't figure it out. He actually rather scolded me. He wanted me to know that I, as a member of the academic staff, had no right to presume that I could get tenure as a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin. I think he wanted me to cry, I had that feeling, or back down. I don't know that he gave me a big opportunity I think to make him feel a little bit nervous. It's possible he was feeling nervous before we started, but her certainly was feeling nervous when we were done.

RL: Your brother gave you good advice.

CK: So did my lawyer. Are we talking about who people are?

RL: Yes.

CK: You didn't ask me who my lawyer was?

RL: Oh yes, who was your lawyer?

CK: Which reminds me of another person who helped me here. My lawyer was Jacquie [Jacqueline] Macauley, the former wife, now dead, of Stewart Macauley of the Law School. I had gone early--you kept asking me and I couldn't think of these things--I had gone early to see Gordon Baldwin of the Law School, he's a neighbor of mine and I knew him, not well, but I knew him a little bit through outside things and knew that he was a person interested in faculty rights, faculty positions, faculty appointments. So I went over and showed him all of this and at a certain point, maybe it was second visit or so, I said I think I need help. Things are not going right, I'd like to know who I can turn to, who would you recommend, who can I take this to? And he said I have the perfect 01:37:00person for you, it's Jacqueline Macauley, the wife of my colleague Stewart Macauley. So I went to see Jacquie Macauley and she said tell me about your case and I gave her a lump of material--very much like that one over there--and said here it is. In twenty-four hours she phoned me up and she said--just like a university person to have it all organized--"Let's talk." She said, "Let's get them." [laughs]

RL: [laughs]

CK: The Divisional Committee, the chair of the Divisional Committee, was David Hayman.

RL: Who is that?

CK: He is a now retired professor of Comp Lit [Comparative Literature]. He never did forgive me for what was going on.

RL: Because you were trying to overturn the decision?

CK: Because I did overturn the decision of the Divisional Committee. They were all about quality and standards and I was all about this isn't fair, how can you--whatever. I knew all about the history of the requirements laid out by the 01:38:00Divisional Committee for the standards, if you wish, for getting tenure. They changed very radically between 1988 and 1989. In '88 the statement was there were these three categories: teaching, research, and service; and one of the first two should be very strong and the other two categories including service should be adequate. In '89 both of the first two had to be very strong and service had to be adequate. So the more time went on, the more the regulations were being stiffened and the more difficult it was going to be ever to make me look like what I wanted to look like.

RL: But you were saying there was one member of the Divisional Committee who was happy for you?

CK: Oh I don't know. Daniel [inaudible], Daniel is his first name isn't it? He was a colleague of mine, he and I rode the elevator frequently together in Van Hise Hall. I believe the Divisional Committee's vote, the one time they voted on 01:39:00this, and there was a technical abstention, there was one abstention beyond that, there were a whole lot of no-votes and there were no-yes votes. So this essentially went very hard against me. But after I got tenure Daniel [inaudible] stopped me in the elevator and congratulated me. David Hayman wouldn't speak to me, he wouldn't even look at me. But I expressed my surprise to [inaudible] who was a gentleman and a very fine man. He said, "You won. You proved your point. Congratulations."

RL: A point in his favor. So it is of course an extraordinary story and admirable in terms of your perseverance that you got tenure. I'm also intrigued by the vision of you with four small children in the late '60s and early '70s 01:40:00continuing to teach, having a first-rate academic career. What was that like? How did you do it?

CK: Well I've indicated, maybe it was a second-rate academic career, I certainly was a person of divided interests, but I've also said it was a mismanaged career. The one thing I did right was to keep my foot in the door. I don't think I would have been completely happy just being a person at home or a person doing volunteer work with the public schools, I liked my university work, I liked my students there.

CK: One thing I hadn't been ready for was when my children went to the university, they all were undergraduates here at the University of Wisconsin. They discovered immediately that I had a reputation at the University, at work, that was nothing at all like their view of me at home. And I on the other hand had not been prepared that they would find this out. I thought that I was their mother whether I was on this side of town or that side of town and I discovered 01:41:00that I wasn't, I was a totally different animal once they discovered that their friends knew, "Oh yes, Professor Nollendorfs, that's your mother?" And then of course I had long since gotten used to being not Mrs. Nollendorfs, but the mother of Carlis or the mother of this and that, my children had reputations. So suddenly, very early, we discovered that we had personalities and we had careers and meaningful activities that had nothing to do with our relationship as mother and child.

RL: Was your reputation on campus one of rigor?

CK: I don't know. I'd like you to interpret this for me, this may be, will be, our last remark today. I did hear the grapevine. They said I was hardnosed, but fair. Whatever that means.

RL: It means rigor.

CK: I suppose I was rigorous. I also discovered teaching foreign languages, which I did a lot of, that's something that can bore a college student. If people, if the class, got dull, if the things got bogged down I would simply 01:42:00make it a whole lot harder, I would bring in more material and stir the interests and I think that's what kept things going.

RL: I think that's a good place to stop and we'll pick up your teaching and research the next time.

CK: Thank you.

RL: This is a continuation of the oral history interview with Professor Cora Lee Kluge on June 5, 2007. When we left off the last time you'd begun talking a little bit about your reputation on campus as rigorous but fair. What I'd like to turn our attention to now are the courses that you taught, courses that you developed, courses that you particularly liked or that you found to be difficult. If we could get an overall picture of the teaching component of your career on campus.

CK: Well I think basically I've been involved with the undergraduate program. 01:43:00I've taught absolutely beginning German, people who've never had anything, and I've taught all the way up through the senior seminar courses. We have a capstone seminar that is a themed course and I've done it once or twice. Basically I've done things that speak to what I was trained to do, that is I do culture and literature more than linguistics, in fact I don't do linguistics except for language teaching. I have done work with the eighteenth century, with the nineteenth century, and I do go up into the modern period with undergraduate literature and culture courses. I've also taught my share of the conversation/composition courses, so grammar review and writing and the simple language skills.

RL: Do you mind teaching those?

CK: I love them.

RL: Really?

CK: I absolutely love teaching beginning language.

RL: Why?

CK: I have no idea, I think it's one of the challenging things a teacher can do. First of all I think we talked last week about how--or last time we talked--about how this can be far beneath the dignity of a college-level student. You're learning to say very simple things like "I run" and "I play" and things like that. But so how to fascinate the student and how still to develop a student's knowledge of a language from the many points of view that students from. The first day of classes if everyone has had absolutely no German, then they're at the same point. The second day they are not at the same point. Some people pick things up with their ears, some people pick things up off the paper, some people pay attention to how things are pronounce, some people pay attention to how things are written. Some people are quite glib and can speak rather freely but not correctly at all and others want to nail down the grammar correctness. They're just all over the map. How to get people to move ahead as a 01:45:00group with this kind of sort of all-purpose skill? It's like teaching a baby language but you're not teaching a baby language, you're teaching maybe twenty people in the class who all have a different perspective to their own native language.

RL: Were the kids, the undergraduates, who signed up for beginning German mostly Wisconsin kids or did it vary?

CK: Most of the students I've taught have been Wisconsin kids. I would say basically two-thirds to three-fourths Wisconsin and the rest of them from nearby places like Minnesota all the way up to New York or foreign countries. The foreign students for example are very different in their approach to language study. They are people who have studied language. The people from Asia who've learned English--and English isn't that different from German. And you can use all sorts of technical grammar vocabulary and they know exactly what you're talking about, whereas a number of the American students have no knowledge of 01:46:00language and how it works and they sometimes are really throng for a loss at what the proper approach to things should be.

RL: And why were students taking German?

CK: Every reason. I worked for many summers as part of the SOAR program [Student Orientation, Advising, & Registration], the summer orientation program for new freshman; and I would work, the years I did it, we were in Union South and I was sitting at a table on the balcony way up on the third-floor. People would send students out who had specific questions for me, but I was exposed to all the parents who would walk by. And the parents would come to me and say, "Why should my student learn anything in the way of foreign language? Why should my student, who talks about a junior year abroad, why would that be a good idea for this student?" And I would say let me tell you a few things and we would talk, and talk, and talk. They were perfectly convinced that a major in a foreign language or a double-major in a foreign language would be an excellent idea, plus a year abroad by the time they had gotten through with me. What was your question? You 01:47:00said why would they do it?

RL: What were the reasons?

CK: What were the reasons? They would say, "Well my chemistry professor says not only that I must learn a foreign language but it has to be German." Sometimes one of the science professors would take this tact. My own father who was a mathematician knew German and French, at least for reading skills, he said for a mathematician nowadays it would be very fine to know Russian, but if you didn't it was just as good to know German because the East German people, the East German mathematicians, would translate the Russian mathematics on the spot and you could have it all that way. So sometimes it was related to a field of interest. Other times they would simply say, "Well my grandmother does not speak good native American-English, but does speak German and I want to be able to find out what she's all about." They wanted to know their own family background, they wanted to know maybe philosophy or music or history--there were some reason why a German language skill would be a good idea. Some of them were into medieval studies or medieval history and wanted German plus Latin so they'd have 01:48:00things from several points of view. There are all sorts of reasons why you would want a foreign language or this one more than other ones.

RL: Have the number of undergraduates who have wanted to learn German during your tenure here on the faculty, has the number stayed stable, has it gone up or down?

CK: Both. It was very strong and very strong with American political-governmental backing the early '60s, we had the Sputnik program and then the big move to really support foreign languages and support graduate studies in foreign language and increase the number of people. I think I was part of that movement. Increase the number of people who teach foreign languages at the college level, so it was very active then. And then it fell-off somewhat and German rebounded again at the time of the reunification of Germany. People were simply interested in the political status of that country. It rebounded I 01:49:00think for three or four years and then it fell-off again. Altogether foreign language studies fell-off, less so in Wisconsin than at most universities in this country. We've maintained a foreign language requirement as most universities did not and our programs have remained strong.

RL: Oh the UW still has a requirement?

CK: Oh yes.

RL: And what is it?

CK: It's a something or equivalent. If you have enough in high school you don't need to take any here, but I think it is up through the third semester or equivalent. And since we give what we call "retro-credits," that is we give credit, college credit, for being able to skip some when you come in, many students are interested in taking one semester here to prove that they get retro-credit from what they're able to skip. This retro-credit is kind of a testing out and the test is to take the next level in college. So if you take the placement test and place so that we say, take the third semester course, you 01:50:00take the third semester course and you get a B or better here, then you're given credit for all three semesters. The first two semesters are not graded, they are college credit, credit for a hundred and twenty hours. And for many students they turn out to be extra, that is over and above the hundred and twenty credits because you still need to complete a major and do all the requirements.

RL: Do you ever get enough for a pattern of students who begin taking German and become so entranced that they go on to major in it?

CK: Yes, there are students like that. There are students who come in as freshman who know they want to go into international business, they know that, so they're in the college for the first two years, when they are applying still to be taken as juniors into the Business School, they take German, they know they want to do well, they two or three semesters--or four--while they're waiting to go into the Business School. The students seem very far ahead, ahead of the professors around here and, to a certain extent, ahead of their own 01:51:00parents. They know what they want to do, they want to take on international capabilities while going in to a more work a day workforce. And others, others want to be in pre-med, but you know you can major in German or major in something quite different and be a pre-med student and get admitted a medical school. So they want to be humanities and medicine, they want to have this breadth in their perspective or maybe they want to have an international breadth, so they German as a major and then go into medicine.

RL: Now you talk about teaching introductory German and that you loved it. What other courses did you love teaching?

CK: I did not love the ones that most professors did not love and that was the composition/conversation ones. Trying to help students write with dignity in a 01:52:00foreign language when they don't really have good control over the foreign language can be very challenging. I've done it, I've marked papers; I've helped with first drafts, and second drafts, and third drafts. I say I have enough credit in German 225, which is the beginning course at that level, to have a Bachelors Degree in the subject. I've done it but that is really difficult and sometimes less rewarding teaching. I've also taught people to write in English and sometimes that can be painful to the point of being quite similar. Their sentences don't hang together well and their logic is faulty and you know you point out all of this and then we do it again, and do it again, and again. But people do improve and that I think is the reward of that. I've liked teaching the elementary, that is the beginning, language literature and culture courses. That is, courses like twentieth century German literature and culture or--

RL: Is that taught in German?

CK: Taught in German. It's a fifth semester level course. The sixth semester 01:53:00level course like that is my absolute favorite and that's the more historical aspect. So sort of beginning about the end--well beginning perhaps with Goethe but going through 1900. The nineteenth century German literature and culture course, that I loved teaching. And then I've often taught the classical period, Goethe, Schiller, [inaudible]; those authors but for majors. And I've often taught the nineteenth century course as well, so those are the ones that I've specialized in.

RL: This concludes side two of tape 2.

RL: This is tape number 3, side one of the ongoing interview with Professor Cora Lee Kluge, June 5, 2007. We were talking about the courses that you taught. Did you ever teach anything in English for people who were interested in German culture, but were not fluent in German?

CK: No, I was about to mention these. Our department has traditionally thought of itself so highly, we've said we don't have to move in to teaching courses in English--we've got enough clientele to do everything in German--but recently this has not been the case. We are under some pressure from the Dean's Office to up our per-instructor credit, our equivalent credits, how many credits are generated by a particular professor. We had a number of courses that were, according to modern statistics, rather severely under-enrolled and since we do not have just lots, and lots, and lots of German majors we couldn't really go without having under-enrolled courses. But we've begun to think in terms of what things in German literature particularly can be attractive to people who don't know German and I've been part of that movement. I was first part of that movement when I started teaching the business German course here. I did not teach that in English, I taught it in German, but I had a lot of students from 01:55:00graduate departments around the university, I had students who were undergraduate majors part of this movement that I told you about, the students who wanted to go into international business so they were doing that. They were doing this either before going to a year abroad or a semester abroad or after they come back, and I found that to be a very fascinating course. I taught a lot of it out of modern journalism, either magazines that were pointed at the business world or magazines or newspapers that were simply part of the current events theme. I started teaching this I believe in '88 or '89, but in any case it came with the reunification of Germany so we got into a lot of wonderful things such as the reclaiming of property that had been in the family and how people in the east were being re-taught to think like capitalists in the West and all this kind of thing. I even went over to the Business School and took a course, but this was the very next summer after I'd come back from a year, from a three-month tour in East Germany myself and I found a lot of the things they 01:56:00were saying to be absolutely hilarious--this was completely contrary to the way that I'd seen things done in eastern Germany of course. So I was having a lot of fun with that. But I taught the course and I revved it up to kind of a really good course, I even won the Academic Staff Teaching Award and I think it was on the basis of all the teaching materials I had put together for that course. I would teach everything from economic, geography, right down to the social security and support system and all that kind, and unions and all this kind of thing in Germany, the history of the whole thing. That was an eye-opener to me and I think a course that was a very reasonable course for German majors or for not German majors. So I taught that. Then eventually that course also became one of the under-enrolled courses and it hasn't been taught in three or four years, maybe even more. There still are people in the Business School who go abroad to Freiburg for a semester or to Vienna for a semester and get a lot of business 01:57:00school--I think not at the university but at institutes that are connected to the university there. So that was one of my first forays outside of German literature and culture and then to another thing.

CK: Lately I've been teaching German-American studies in a course that was at the level--it was called German 278, which was a topics course. We think we are going to get it a course number of its own. The topic I taught was the German immigration experience and this has been a very highly enrolled course. One semester it was the largest class in the German Department, this semester it was the second largest class. I'm trying to teach it every spring semester and that's taught in English, although three or four students in it do know German or even are German majors.

RL: I would like to take that course.

CK: Yes, that's a great little course and that's---you know this is a do-it-yourself teacher here. This is a field that I wasn't educated in as a graduate student but it is one that I've moved in, in the last twenty-five years 01:58:00or so and I've now made it into a course that is popular, particularly I think in the state of Wisconsin, and it has led me in to work with the Max Kade Institute that I do today. The Max Kade Institute incidentally is, has largely been, I think exclusively, found its director in the German Department. Some of the directors, some of the recent directors, Joe [Joseph] Salmons and Mark Louden have been linguists so they are interested in German dialects as spoken in America and particularly in Wisconsin or maybe even wonderful things like the influence of the German immigrant on American English, whatever that is. They have series of lectures called American Englishes, the various Englishes spoken in the United States. But that's the linguist take on this, I teach German-American studies as part of American history. It's a new perspective on it and a new part of what was an American history that people don't know about. What were the immigrants thinking, what were they doing, what was their part in 01:59:00the development of the United States?

RL: Is that why when we were talking off-tape before the interview, when you were talking about the movement of German-Americans from Milwaukee to northeast Kansas in 1859?

CK: Yes, that's exactly--I do this kind of work. Actually that was for a conference. I'm connected with the Society for German-American Studies, which has been in existence since about 1970. I'm actually one of their officers again now. But their conference this spring was in Lawrence, Kansas, which is my home-town--I'll always go down to Lawrence whenever I can join some reason to go down there.

CK: And I have known, and have used a book by John Ise, I-S-E, called Sod and Stubble, it's his--I'll have to backup and tell you who all he was. He was, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Kansas, a recently retired and very beloved professor of economics at the University of Kansas. He was born in about 02:00:001890, he retired about 197--that doesn't make sense--about 19, I don't know, mid '50s or something. Does that make sense? Was he about the right age then? I think that's true. And he had been the most beloved professor, he had a PhD in economics from Harvard. His background was that his parents were both immigrants from Wüttemberg who had wound up as Kansas homesteaders in the middle of Kansas, back in the days when it was absolutely nothing. They had married in the 1870s and had raised their family of a dozen children or so out there in the middle of nothing and this was their one child, I think child number nine or something, who got himself a fancy education and became a college professor of economics. So I knew all about this background. What I didn't know was that I was going to find through his novel of his parents, called Sod and Stubble, what 02:01:00their background was, the fact that they were Wüttemberg immigrants who had originally come--his father had been involved in the Civil War and had been part of an immigrant family who came to Ohio somewhat earlier, but his mother was a daughter of immigrants who came in the '50s to Theresa, Wisconsin. In Sod and Stubble John says he has no idea where that is, they said it was near Racine and he's looked on the map, he couldn't find it. But there they were and Rosie Ise was born in 1855 in Theresa and then her parents moved down to Kansas in 1859. So here I'm hooking up a whole bunch of things. I had also lived and done research near Stuttgart where her family had come from there so I started looking in to genealogies, and histories, and histories of the town from which they had come. And I knew something about them, what their situation there was like and what had brought them, that is his mother's family, to Theresa and then from there down to Holton, Kansas in 1859. I thought this is the dumbest move 02:02:00they could make. He said that his mother's family had found lumbering hard around here and the winters long and well I can relate to that, but why would they move to Kansas just at the outbreak of the Civil War when Bleeding Kansas is right on the map and all this kind of thing? I put all this together and I say here I'll talk about her pre-Kansas background, she comes from Wüttemberg through Theresa and what are the political and the economic situations that lead her from Germany to Wisconsin and then on down to Kansas. I find out it's a whole movement of people who are doing this. This is part of American history, this is a part of American history that people don't know about, partly because of the language, partly because American historians haven't worked up this part of the history--it's sort of underground, it's sort of sub-visible--and I think it's part of our country's story that has to brought out.

CK: I've just published, I should have in my hands in ten days I think it is 02:03:00now, a copy of my new anthology of German-American literature. Major authors, none of whom are known. They wrote in German in this country, even their own descendants can't read what they wrote any more and they aren't known in Germany because they published here. These are excellent writers who are revealing the situation here to a public which is no longer alive. I've finally given up, I used to say go home and study German, but now I say we have to bite the bullet, we have to translate this stuff into English, we have to get it known. And the conclusion to this anthology I wrote says simply, what is American literature? What language was it written in? I have come to the point where I'm unwilling to say it was written in English. It wasn't, it was written in all of the languages from the countries from which the immigrants to this country came. It's got to be taken in to consideration, we are an immigrant country, that is our background, and American literature was written in the languages that the 02:04:00immigrant writers wrote in, as well as the Anglo-Americans language, which was English. What makes American literature American? Well it's not like German literature, that was written in German, in possibly in Austria, in Switzerland, but was written in a particular language. American is not a language. You can't say it was written in American. It was written in English? Well, maybe but what about all the other parts? The common thing here is the American experience and then forget what language it was written in, it was written in all of that. So that's the kind of thing I do, I go deeper in to history, literature, culture through one: I'm a very limited person, I can deal with the German and the English but no more. But I think we have to take an attitude that we've got a wealth here that we are no longer even seeing.

RL: It's interesting to me when you say that, that course on the immigrant experience is popular. It suggests that undergraduates are aware of the 02:05:00immigrant nature of American.

CK: Absolutely, they know, and I say to them how many here--you know, thirty-five students in the room--how many of you are from a German immigrant family? Well that's already eight percent. How many of you have German last name? Same eighty percent. How many of you know something about your heritage? Well, sixty percent. You know they know who they are. They are basically--and this was disappointing to me at the very beginning of the course--they're basically not humanities majors, they're not German major, most of them. Most of them are in social sciences or natural sciences and they are looking for humanities credits so this, you know this will fill that. But they say of all the courses they find in the catalog that would do that, this is the one that appeals to them. So I get them going, you know, we read and read and read, we study the maps, we study things that they're interested in. They say my grandmother was from this town, where is it? I point this out to them. I say you write a paper, write about something that would interest you and conceive of the 02:06:00paper this way: you go home, maybe at the end of the semester, and some local interest group, say maybe the rotary club, would like you to make a presentation at one of their events. They want to know what you're doing in the course, the German immigration experience, and you want to present something that will fascinate them. So students come up, well can I do a history of this town in Wisconsin? I say perfect. Can I do a history of my family? Perfect. Can I do German culture in Milwaukee? Wonderful. You know, whatever you want to do. Some people even go into their own little area, they want to know about the Amish culture say in the east, in Pennsylvania, what is their experience with modern America? Perfect I say. You know, just whatever you want to do, I'll help you find sources and you write something that fascinates you about some aspect of the course.

RL: Do you get many Jewish kids who of German-Jewish decent?

CK: I have had a few but basically I would say their interest in the course is 02:07:00not in something that modern. I usually do the course something like 1850 to the end of the First World War or to the beginning of the First World War. So the Hitler period doesn't--I'm willing to entertain that. I had a fascinating student this time I won't tell you his name, but he's an undergraduate, I think he was a junior and a pre-med student, and certainly didn't look like what I would call an Anglo-American. I didn't know what his background was, he had a very very long and complicated last name, spoke perfect English. And he came up to me and asked for a letter of recommendation at the end of the course and I said you know of all of this I don't know your background but was there something that particularly appealed to you in this course? And he said oh well, yes--I've forgotten whether he said he was born in Bombay or some place like that--anyway, his parents were and he came--I think he was born in Bombay and came when he was about two-years-old to this country and his, I guess, Indian 02:08:00educated parents and total American upbringing. But he said you know when you started talking, when we talked about an article that was written my Marcus Lee Hanson--who is one of my favorite, now long dead, immigration historians--he has an article called "The Third Generation Immigrant," what the experience of the immigrants through their generation is. The first generation the man who comes to the place is going to have a hard time and he knew about that ahead of time. He's got to clear the land, he's got to find work, he's got to somehow support his family, he's in the business of making it in an uncomfortable situation, he knows that. He comes and he does it. The second generation is now a little annoyed. His parents are foreigners, he wants to be like the Americans who are just the standard run of the mill, you know, forget the foreign language at home he doesn't want any truck with that, the group of foreign friends who come, the foreign traditions. He's sort of is standoffish about all of that. The third generation has a different take on this, now they're interested in the 02:09:00grandparents again. He said you know that's exactly the way it worked in my family. He said that really spoke to me, I was interested in seeing that that is a common experience of the American immigration society. So this young man had said--you know coming from a totally different Indian background--he said bingo, really hit me.

RL: Now is this course on the immigrant experience cross-listed with history for instance?

CK: No. No. So far, and I've said we have to give it its own number, it was buried this last spring. I've taught it springs. But this year it was lecture two of German 278. Well 278 is topics in German culture and lecture one was Nazi culture and lecture two was the German immigration experience. And a lot of students didn't even click far enough down in to the timetable online catalog 02:10:00that they saw it was there. We want to give it a number of its own so that German X, Y, Z is always the German immigration experience. And we have a number of faculty members I think who can teach it, including--I mentioned some linguists and then me as a German-American culture person. History--I do this from the point of view of American history I think. People used to say German-American literature, that's second, third-rate literature. Well, maybe, you know if you're comparing it with Goethe, maybe, but that's not the point here. The point is that it is American history and who really is fascinated with the people in American studies departments in German who want to know what's going on among the people who emigrated from those lands, I think those are the people we really speak to and I want to take my little German-American literature anthology and take it back there and say look at all this stuff. And I've written introductions to all the chapters and exposed all the wonderful resources that are at the libraries here in Wisconsin. I think this is going to 02:11:00open up a real, real hotbed of interest among the people over there.

RL: Cora Lee, I want to ask you to carryon a bit with what you've been saying in terms of reflecting on the value, or changing value, of studying foreign language at a time when English seems to be coming increasingly dominant in the world.

CK: Well my native language is English and I suppose if I had to step way back and choose which language I would like as my native language, English isn't a bad one to be left with, that is a big language in the world. I do have the potential of reaching a fairly wide audience. But still it's good to know a foreign language. First of all it gives you a perspective on your own country 02:12:00that you don't have if you know it only from the point of view of people who live in it. I can go to Europe and read European newspapers and find out what the view there of what's going on in American politics is like. And I've got a different, a very different--it may be wrong just as our perspective in our newspapers I wrong--but it has given me a another point of view of how to see things that are going on here. It gives me an understanding of foreigners, it gives me the ability to be a little more flexible when I'm in a foreign country whether or not I know the language because I can see the perspective of foreigners. I can live among foreigners, I can see foreigners here. I can maybe speak English better so that foreigners can understand it, speak it more clearly, more slowly because I've dealt with people in a language that isn't my native language. But then beyond that I know only one other language, mine happens to be German, but I think whatever language you choose for whatever 02:13:00reason--you may know Japanese because that's your heritage or you may have chosen to study Spanish because you think it's very useful in the America of today where a lot of the immigrants are Spanish-speaking immigrants, or some other language--you choose one, you choose two, you are then able to operate not only in your own English language community, but in that one other community that you can deal with. It gives you an internationalism, at least opened up to that one language part of the world that you would otherwise, I think, not have. Students nowadays know they want to have an international aspect to their development and they know that means language. They want to study another language, they want to study sociology but they want to study sociology and Spanish so that they can operate in conferences in Spanish-speaking countries. 02:14:00They want to study French and history just simply to know that part of the historical aspect of the United States. My own son studied here as an undergraduate, German and journalism, and went into marketing research. He wanted to be able to work in the German-speaking world. He finds that this may not be as cleverly seen as he would like to see within his own company, they want to send him now--he did work and live for a number of years in England and took part in conferences in Geneva and Zurich--but they now want him to go and take the marketing research directorship of their company in Mexico City. He says this doesn't seem quite right, I don't know Spanish, I cannot live and be accepted and really get into the culture there the way I can in a country where I can speak the language. He, I think, knows what a number of the young students 02:15:00in our university know: a foreign language gives you advantages in that part of the world that maybe are necessary to be a good representative of your own culture or a good worker in their country, in their land, in their community, whatever the community is, in business or in law or in things like that. One of my favorite students [telephone rings in background]. One of my favorite young students was not a student here, he was a native German, but I've told his story a number of times and I think he has opportunities and possibilities that people in this country can hardly dream of. He was a native German who had spent time as a young student--maybe as a high school exchange student or something here in this country--knew English very well. He went back to Hamburg and got himself a law degree and then he came to this country and got himself a law degree at New York University and got himself admitted to the bar in both New York and in 02:16:00Georgia. So he can live in Atlanta, live in New York City; he can represent firms in Hamburg where he also is a member of the bar, he can couple up all this part of the various communities. He knows American law, he knows Georgia law, he knows New York law; he knows German law, and he knows how to represent it to companies that need to represented in the other country. My own brother worked for a number of years with a major law firm in New York City and they said we've got lawyers all over the place who can do German and French, no problem there, but we had one--no we had two--he said we had two young lawyers who knew Japanese. One of them had been a young woman who grew up in Japan, her parents were missionaries and then she had a law degree and she works for the company. The other one had taken an undergraduate degree in Japanese studies at a western university and then taken a law degree in America and had gone to Tokyo and 02:17:00become the first American ever to take a law degree at the University of Tokyo. So this person knew Japanese and American law. These two lawyers in a major firm in New York City, they said our major problems with regard to them are first we can't keep the work off their desks, everybody want to talk to them; and secondly we can't hire secretaries to work for them. Big problem. German, French, no problem, we can do all of that but we can't do enough for our two Japanese lawyers.

CK: This is the kind of thing that the modern world had to do; we have to get foreign language competence. We have to understand what our students are understanding and have for the last ten or fifteen years. Maybe a German degree is not a really good idea if you are an undergraduate at an American university. Who wants to study German? What are you going to do with that? The famous old thing. But the University of Wisconsin has roughly--I think the number is still roughly seventy undergraduate German majors who are not German major, they are 02:18:00German double majors. They are majoring in German and something else and I believe in most of their cases--and I think I'm speaking of at least two-thirds, maybe more of our double majors--in most of the cases their real field for their future is not the German part of the double major, but the other part. They're thinking of the German part simply to give them an international aspect and capability that they can use in at least one area in the world. They can attend conferences in chemistry in Switzerland, they can do something or other, they can do something that breaks them out of just the small--should I say this?--narrow, United States part of the world.

RL: Does that cause any intellectual sadness on your part as you see a gradual decline in the number of students interested in German just for German?

CK: No, what's the matter with having an avocation? Perhaps this is why I studied German too, I use German as a tool, as a tool for history, a tool for philosophy, a tool for music, a tool for this or that. German is what stuck but I had double major interests all along and I'm still using German as a tool. Perhaps in my German-American studies work I'm using it as a tool to study American history. But German is a good tool. Of course it's a good literature too and I can teach the literature to help people learn the language and culture, but I think that's--we aren't like a German department in a German university. No department of English studies or American studies in Germany is like one in this country either. We are a department here that is educating Americans in a field and in a language capability that simply helps them be who 02:20:00they are in a modern world.

RL: Is that true would you say across the board for foreign language departments at the university?

CK: I would think so. Who would come to this country, who would come from anywhere, to a university in this country and study German hoping to become a German journalist? [telephone rings in background] You just can't do that. We can't even train simultaneous translators, we don't do that either. You have to practically be a bicultural person grown up in both German and in English but we can give them a capability to look at things from a different point of view, to be Americans who can function in a German world and to be Americans who can appreciate German culture or who can know German literature; who can read, have read, a great deal of this. And of course a few people will be the pinnacle of our little field, which is become a professor at a university, either probably in this country teaching other people German culture, literature, language so 02:21:00that they can become what they're going to be.

RL: Now with German, aside from Germany and Switzerland and I suppose a bit in Poland and Russia; is German useful say in Africa or Asia at all?

CK: There are parts of Africa that have had a German colonial presence and where some of the university work is done in German--I think not exclusively in German, there's more French in Africa. To a certain extent, to a small extent, all through the world I think it is. Germany, Austria, Switzerland, some major communities in South America still--

RL: Oh Argentina.

CK: Argentina. Some smaller communities in say Canada, the Baltic states: Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia; maybe Finland, Sweden--now that we aren't talking 02:22:00just simply about the communist Baltic states. The states around the Baltic get together and have conferences and have Baltic interest groups, historical conferences, all sorts of things. The question was always what language do they operate in? The answer is basically when they have conferences the languages of the conference are usually German and English, those are the ones that most people can offer at least one of. So papers would be delivered in one of those two languages and discussions would be held in one of those two languages. Perhaps that's the sadness of a small language culture; they have to say well these are the two larger languages that we will operate our conferences in. Of course for some of those countries--Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia--the obvious answer would be Russian, but they have sort of turned away from Russian as a language of common ground because of its Soviet history.

RL: This concludes side one of tape 3.

RL: This is side two of tape 3 of the ongoing oral history interview with Professor Cora Lee Kluge, June 20, 2007.

Cora Lee, we wanted to pick the interview up today with a review of the German Department from the time that you joined it up until today, your observations about key players, significant issues. So perhaps to start you would, again for the record, say when you joined the department and perhaps talk a little bit what it was like in those early years.

CK: Well I've been in the German Department in Madison, at this point, longer than anyone else. That is of faculty members who are still on the staff and not 02:24:00retired now. I came in the fall of 1965, the next year Klaus Berghahn came in the fall of 1966. Professor Hermand [Jost Hermand] was the one example of someone who had been here longer but he retired as of a year ago; so I am not only the woman who has been here longest, but the person who has been here the longest. When I came the department was different. It was approximately the size it is now, it was building up because of new and greater demands on German language instruction. The university was growing in terms of student population and the language requirements were very high, students had to have six semesters of foreign language and literature or culture; or they had to have calculus. So 02:25:00it was a high mathematics requirement or a high foreign language requirement.

RL: Oh it was one or the other?

CK: One or the other. If you chose to do the calculus then you needed only four semesters of foreign language, which is a good hefty bit of a foreign language in any case. But a number of students were trying to do all six semesters because they couldn't have the math. I thought that their you could do both or you could do neither of them. If you were in trouble with calculus you might be in trouble with six semesters of foreign language too. But we were teaching a lot of students right up through sixth semester and we were teaching a growing number of students just elementary language skills.

CK: When I first came I believe I was teaching fourteen hours a week. Now people feel stressed if they teach two classes and sometimes that's five or six hours a week. I probably had as many as five different classes, some of them were one-hour discussion sections, kind of a weird system. The really talented 02:26:00students were given extra help. I never saw the point of that but we could do all sorts of things; I could teach them how to read quite quickly by starting with an elementary text with lots of repetition and lots of words that had English equivalents. And the really good students were moved through in a kind of more speedy way except that the end of the first semester they were still just ready for the second semester. Later we started a system where the honors students were given an intensive course and could skip a semester among the four semesters. So it was really paying off for them in terms of how many semesters it would take them to complete the language requirement.

CK: There were people here who were on the verge of retirement when I came. Walter Gausewitz had just retired. Sieghardt Riegel was still here teaching. Roe-Merrill Heffner had retired. Smokey Seifert was still a young man as far as 02:27:00I was able to see, he was the chair when I came. John Workman had been here for many years, he had probably been here since during the Second World War and had nailed himself down a position as a graduate teacher of literature and of pedagogy, he ran the teaching assistants program and he also was the [long-year?] and very revered editor of the journal Monatshefte. So these were some of the people I knew when I first came.

RL: And were you well received as a young woman in the department at the time?

CK: I think I was, yes. I think I did the work they did so there was no question that I was a full-fledged member of the department. I had been hired as an assistant professor. I think I was well received. I was the youngest person here by far, I was twenty-four years old when I came.

RL: Were you the only woman on the faculty?

CK: Oh no, not by any means. Lida Kirchberger, who was the age of my mother, was a very respected person. Her husband died, Hans Kirchberger, who had been a lawyer and a member of the court during the Weimar Republic in Germany. He was here and his wife who was native English was with him. She was the first person ever to attain the rank of full-professor in the German Department. When he died in about 1968, she then retired, she was considerably his junior so she was here just the first few years that I was here. She retired and moved to Germany and then later she came back and moved to New Mexico where she had a son and lived the rest of her life until she died in 1997. I stayed in touch with her. She was here. Irmengard Rauch who went from here to, I believe to, Urbana in Illinois 02:29:00and then later, she still now is at the University of California in Berkeley. She was here. Evelyn Firchow who now is a member, maybe retired already, at the German department at the University of Minnesota, was here. There were other women in the department.

RL: Smokey Seifert hired you?

CK: He was chair when I was hired, yes.

RL: Had you, did you have to interview with a lot of people when you were hired?

CK: I interviewed with the whole department. I was picked up at the airport and taken to a very large table at Tripp Commons, the whole German Department was there waiting to have lunch with me. It wasn't anything like an interview that one would have nowadays. I don't even believe that I was really introduced to the upper administration, but I met the whole department and I was hosted by the 02:30:00department. I was shown through the library, which interested me [to] no end; I was able to compare it with the, I would say, rather much poorer--in the field of German literature--library at Stanford University. And I was at that point I had left Stanford, it was October or November of the year 1964, I was on my way to Germany to write my PhD dissertation so I interviewed in that season in '64 and then I came back in '65 as a new assistant professor.

RL: And those first years you were teaching basically the language, you weren't teaching literature?

CK: Well, language and the beginning literature, the literature courses that one would have to have as part of the general college requirements if one were not doing the calculus course. Oh yeah I taught right up through all of the 02:31:00undergraduate program, including majors. And we had a solid summer program so I would teach sometimes a course or two in the summer school.

RL: What were the issues or were there none in the department at that time?

CK: The department was hiring a number of young Germanists from Germany and was trying to build its international reputation. Jost Hermand had been here since 1959, they hired Klaus Berghahn who came in '66; they hired, who came with me, Ernst [inaudible] who left after a few years and went first to Minnesota. They had hired Max [inaudible] who was a Germanist from Germany although he had been a few years at the University of Kansas before he came here. He and I came at 02:32:00the same time and we had been in contact at Stuttgart, he was in Stuttgart and I was just north of Stuttgart the year before I came here at the Schiller Library and Museum there. So it was building up the department and some attempt to have more native Germans in it.

RL: On balance, do you think that was a good thing?

CK: Certainly. I think a German department, a foreign language department in general, I think has to have a good balance between native Americans and native speakers of the foreign language. I think that basically now we have probably two to one, two Americans to one person who grew up in a German culture, and I think is at least a minimum. I think fewer Germans and that would be a poor thing, we have to have our certainly solid base of native German speakers. We used to have more native speakers among the graduate students and that has 02:33:00fallen back a bit, we still have some but I wish our German department had more native speakers of German.

RL: At that time and maybe now, when the Department gets together do you speak mostly German? Did you then, do you now?

CK: No, we speak mostly both. I would say probably we speak a little more English than German, but again probably it has to do with who is talking and who is talking to whom. I would say both. When we have parties, both languages are current.

RL: How about departmental meetings?

CK: Departmental meetings and departmental business is conducted in English, although there're no rules. I think that basically is the rule but if someone has something to say in German, that certainly is allowed.

RL: Now I believe, and we just said off-record, you met your first husband in 02:34:00the department? He was a professor here when you came?

CK: When I came he had just been promoted to associate professor, he had been here since 1962 I believe. He was a native Latvian.

RL: Oh?

CK: Who had come to this country, he was born in 1931, and came to this country in 1950, among the first wave of displaced persons who came out of Europe to America at the end of the War. He came in 1950. He had spent his teenage years near Muenster in a village that basically was given to a Latvian group, to I guess young professionals, they were doctors and judges and teachers. He said he had a wonderful high school-level education in this Latvian village in Germany where there were teachers galore and everybody was really growing up. But also he learned to speak German quite natively at that time and there. So he came to this country, he was first in Texas, he followed his family who had followed 02:35:00employment to Lincoln, Nebraska and got himself a B.A. degree in Lincoln and then went on to graduate school at Ann Arbor, Michigan. And after finishing a PhD in German he came here in 1962.

RL: Then you came in '65.

CK: I came in '65.

RL: Was it difficult being a husband-wife team in the same department?

CK: Well I don't know. We never noticed it was particularly difficult. We figured it was one of our strengths, but I think probably it was one of the problems of my career, that is one's husband is a very poor advocate. He was many years the chair of the department so I played a wife of the chair as well as member of the department and when it came to promoting me, he was a poor person to help get my career moving.

CK: To say nothing of the fact that we had children and the children were another reason that my career was perhaps somewhat mismanaged, I was in charge of being the hostess and the mother and the person like that.

RL: Well you talked about that some earlier on the tape when we talked about the difficulties of when you became a T.A. and then came back into the department.

CK: I was never a T.A. here. A faculty member and then wanted to be a part-time faculty member because of that--

RL: Part-time faculty. And then you were reclassified, yes.

CK: Possibly it's true, possibly the medieval monks knew what they were doing when they said teachers should be monks and should not be married, it gives you a certain focus on what you're doing that I've, I think, regained only in the last few years. [telephone rings in background]

RL: Yes. Cora Lee let me ask you about Jost Hermand who certainly looms as a 02:37:00major figure in the life of the department and observations about other key figures that were instrumental in making the department as prominent as it has been.

CK: Well we could name a few, two of whom are still here. One is Jost Hermand, one is Klaus Berghahn. Another prominent figure who left a while back is David Bathrick who went from us to Cornell. That seemed to be a move back east, back to his home in the east. There are others who were rather prominent figures, but those are some of the big ones. Klaus was a person who did research in the 18th century and moved into Jewish studies. Jost Hermand--one of the graduate students said once, there is coverage. He could do almost anything, his fields were anything from the 18th century through the very modern times, he also is equally well-versed in art history, and literature, and German culture and 20th 02:38:00century and [inaudible]. He has so many major emphasizes in his back pocket that it's really true, he is the coverage person. He, early, became a well-known publisher in a number of field, he would publish things in Germany and in this country and achieved a major status. Other universities, not only here in this country, but also in Europe tried to hire him away and he always felt quite comfortable here. The German Department knew very well that we needed him and he didn't need us so he had full range of what courses would he like to teach and if he wanted to take a semester off there was very little we could about it. So he became a guest lecturer through the world and I think he liked the libraries here, he liked the way he was able to setup his life around his research. He also was a person who became the advisor of most of the PhD dissertationists, no 02:39:00one had more than he did except for Alexander R. Hohlfeld of the early part of the 20th century. Hohlfeld himself had sixty-four PhD students and once, recently, Hermand asked me what that total was and when I said it was sixty-four he said well I'll never make that--but I think he is close, I'm sure he's up in the fifties.

RL: So he kept all the PhDs?

CK: No, not all of them, but he certainly had more than the others, he had far more than his share and he did very well by his PhDs. He helped them through logjams, there are students who get stuck at a point and can't move on. He wanted to make sure that his students did it, did well, and got jobs and he was a very good shepherd and guardian of the PhDs who worked with him. A number of major young Germanists throughout the country are people who studied with Hermand. So he was absolutely major.

CK: We were talking about the fact that the department is full of factions. Yes, 02:40:00but then the History Department is too and many other departments are. I think, for example, history are we talking about far-eastern history or American history, European history, which century--you know everybody's got a little different division of what kind of history and then also approach to history and what political point of view and all this kind of thing. In a German department we were also cut up by where we grew up, native German or not native German, were we young or old, were we this school or that school; were we women or men. You know we were all--I always felt myself to be a category of absolutely one and I think we did fairly well that way, we didn't always agree but we always had lively debates and usually could come to resolutions. We respected each others work and we sometimes fought bitterly.

RL: Would you say it was a relatively--for a group of intellectuals--are relatively congenial or relatively contentious department?

CK: Through the years mostly congenial and there were some times, probably times of political unrest on the campus--and we know which times we mean, 1970, 1980--also times when the teaching assistants were having trouble with contracts and things like that. Those were difficult times in the German Department because of the fact that some of the teachers supported the teaching assistants and supported the political left and the riots and all of that; and some did not.

RL: And where were you in all of that?

CK: Part-time. I was basically one of the more conservative people.

RL: You did not support for instance the T.A. strike?

CK: I was not one of the walk-out people, no.

RL: Was there lasting impact in the department based on where faculty stood at these difficult times? When the times passed?

CK: Yes, but it lasted only a certain number of years and then it I think has been rather eliminated with time. It's not something that has made people bitter toward each other forever.

RL: Did you ever aspire to be chair of the department?

CK: Absolutely not.

RL: Why do you say--?

CK: I'm far too intelligent for that. Because what I really like to do is read and write and do research. I'm not interested I suppose in administration. I can do certain parts of administration quite well. I write good letters, I can follow all the rules and setup all the things but that's not where my heart is.

RL: Who have been the very good chairs of the department would you say?

CK: Well I think one was my first husband, I think he was a person with, among 02:43:00other things, vision for what a German department should be like, what the role of the German department should be, what the role of Germanists in this country should be. I think he had some vision and some leadership potential.

RL: And when was he chair?

CK: He was chair from [pause]--oh dear--the early '70s or maybe about the mid '70s, one would have to look that up. Maybe '74-'75, maybe before that, until 1980 and then he was chair again from about 1983--you see I don't even know. But he had two major slots of time when he was chair and I think I'm right about the middle years, he stopped being chair in 1980 and I think he took the chairmanship again in 1983.

RL: Other strong chairs?

CK: [pause]. Well as strong as he was I don't think I would name anyone. A very strong chair in recent years was Marc Silberman. He was chair until about three or four years ago. Marc Silberman has been a very, very excellent chair--full of energy, full of leadership. Those would be my two, my picks.

RL: Let me ask you something else, you mentioned Klaus Berghahn got interested in Jewish studies. When the whole concept of Jewish studies developed here at Madison, was the department particularly interested, or indifferent, or did it 02:45:00have a reaction?

CK: Well I think we were interested, I think we had enough knowledge of which way the department, which way the field of German studies was going that we realized this was something big. Klaus Berghahn--unless I'm mistaken, you would have to ask him specifically about this--got into it because of the 18th century role of the Jewish population in German culture, people like Moses Mendelssohn and people like Lessing [Gotthold Ephraim Lessing] and things like this--the 18th century was his field and the strong role of the Jewish intellectuals of that century I think had attracted his attention and made him aware of what all was going on there. He wanted to know it for the 18th century and then he followed it on up, he moved quickly into the 20th century and the Holocaust and then from there into historical studies. He's really made that his own field and become a very respected figure in that.

RL: Does the department have courses now cross-listed with Jewish studies?

CK: Oh yes. Oh yes, and he teaches some of them, Klaus Berghahn does. We've had other people of Jewish background in the department, including Marc Silberman. But Marc Silberman is basically not interested in pursuing German-Jewish studies as one of his fields, he's in film studies and downplays any--I'm mean that's simply not one of his fields, that's not one of his intellectual fields and I don't think that I've ever heard him even state that he is of German-Jewish background. It just isn't one of the things he does.

RL: I can't remember frankly if I've asked you this or not--if you have any students of Jewish background who are interested in learning German?

CK: I'm sure I do and I don't think I know about it. Sometime you know we excuse students for Jewish holidays and things. Sometimes a student will come to me and say tomorrow is thus and so and I won't be here, but that would be the only way 02:47:00I know who are the Jewish students and who are not. I grew up in a community that had plenty of hidden Jews, maybe I simply didn't recognize them, maybe--I don't know what, I consider it part of the American population. I'm just not well in tuned with who is of Jewish background and who isn't.

RL: What are the issues in the department today, Cora as you look at it?

CK: The issues have to do with our declining number of credit hours. We are trying very hard to keep ourselves strong in the eyes of the dean who governs things like hiring new people and the dean's problems with the budget have led him to believe that credit hours are what one should look at most in determining 02:48:00what the staffing needs of a department are. We have for many years run small graduate courses because we have a small number of graduate students. On the other hand we think we are one of the major departments in the country when it come to producing PhDs in the field, but still with only say six to eight students in a class the dean thinks we're totally over staffed. We are beginning to teach English language, we were one of the last departments in the country to do this, instead of teaching everything in German we now teach some English language courses, which are cross listed which attempt to pull in students who don't have German background in to fields that are ours. For example my course on the German immigration experience, this is a popular course among students who have no inclination, no intention, of taking German courses but they're looking for humanities courses that might interest them and they are well aware that they are of German background or that Wisconsin is of German background and 02:49:00they want to know what that was all about, what that part of American history really was like. So we're trying to teach larger, widely appealing courses to larger numbers of students.

RL: Do you an opinion about that? Are you sad to see the number of courses taught in English increasing?

CK: Not particularly, I like teaching in English. On the other hand I'm sad about the problems that have led to this. I would like to do both, I would like to have a very strong German department with lots of enrollment in German and lots of students wanting to increase their ability to work on an international level by knowing foreign languages and by studying German culture, at least as a double major. But I see no reason why we shouldn't have lots of fun teaching the 02:50:00kinds of things that we can teach best in English, that is we work with the old German documents, we know American history from the German point of view, and if we can make appealing classes to large groups who know no German out of that material I'm all in favor of it.

RL: To wrap up this side, what's your assessment of the future of the department, the future of German studies here at the university?

CK: I think we are at a crossroads. We've been at a crossroads for a number of years, certainly the last five years or more, and I think time will tell, perhaps time in the next five years or so what direction the German Department is going to go. I hope we are not going to become a lot smaller with fewer staff members; I hope we're going to stay strong as a department that can teach in German and have interested students from a number of other fields. We certainly 02:51:00are moving away from teaching as much beginning, elementary foreign language and this is seriously affecting our ability to support graduate students as teaching assistants. Exactly how we're going to solve all the current problems, I'm not quite sure.

RL: This concludes side two of tape 3.

RL: This is a continuation of the oral history interview with Professor Cora Lee Kluge. This is tape number 4, side one, August 28, 2007.

Cora Lee we wanted to pick this interview up with an overview of your research program and then some detail about the most significant aspects of your research.

CK: Well I guess one could consider most of my research as having taken place since about 1990. Before that I was for five years assistant professor and then 02:52:00a member of the academic staff and my research was frowned upon as not part of my assignment. My research falls generally in to two areas: German literature and philosophy and history and things of that nature from the 18th century, that's where I started. I characterize my work as interdisciplinary and intercultural; I did a lot with British-German relationships, Schiller and Humboldt originally, later Schiller and Edward Gibbon--that's a project that I've only begun and I hope to get around to it. I became interested then in areas such as American education, the history of university education in America; also, the professional history of German studies in America. That started before I came to Wisconsin but really took off when I got here and was a 02:53:00member of what I considered the pivotal German department in the history of German studies in the United States. Related to that I suppose, and definitely driven by my work here in Wisconsin, has been my interest in German-American studies. Wisconsin is the center, one of perhaps very few centers but I would consider it the center, of documentation and literature written by the Germans who immigrated to this country. This puts me directly in the 19th century, so 18th century British and German studies and then 19th century I do German-American studies and history of American education from the point of view of American history. So I'm considering it be essential as a separate way, another way, to view the development of this country through texts that most people don't have access to and haven't known. My work here makes me a little 02:54:00bit more like what's done in American studies institutes in Germany. Their interested in this as part of emigration history and what happened in America. Most Germanists, most people who do German-American studies in this country are in German departments so they are not doing it from the American historical development point of view but from the other way around. My new anthology--I would say most the research work I've done is simply in connection with publication of texts that I found, that is editions and my digging up the important editions, the important materials, and then writing editorial introductions to go with them. This puts me again squarely between American studies and German studies, the texts I publish are in German, they're of 02:55:00interest basically to people who are working in Germany and not to people who working here because of the language barrier. And now I'm facing questions like do I want to help translate these things into English, that would be a very time-consuming job, or do I want to simply continue to work with them in German and publish and do research on them, perhaps for the German market.

RL: Do you have a favorite area of research? Your work on education versus your work on Schiller? They seem to me to be different.

CK: No, I had said those are my two areas of interest. They are different but in their breadth they are similar and I think one led to another.

RL: And we may have touched on this in an earlier session, I simply don't remember, how it was that you developed such an intense interest in Schiller?

CK: Well that was through graduate work in California, I was at Stanford University for my PhD. I would say my interest in Schiller was simply an interest in classical literature and then my dissertation topic, which was on Schiller and Humboldt came through my interest in Humboldt, which got me in to the education theory on the development of education. I was a member of a very interesting interdisciplinary graduate seminar on Wilhelm von Humboldt as a graduate student at Stanford. It was taught by Kurt Mueller-Vollmer who became my Doctor Father, he was a Germanist in what was then the Department of Modern European Languages, later German Studies at Stanford. And the other teacher was Gordon Craig, the famous German historian at Stanford. So I worked between German and history and things like that. At Stanford also was where I got to 02:57:00know George Mosse, he was there for a semester and taught courses simply as a visitor but I knew that he was here and when I came here I hooked up with him again somewhat. I've always been--I was a member of a graduate program in the humanities at Stanford. You couldn't major in humanities but you could do German and humanities or English and humanities, or philosophy and humanities so the breadth of the program, breadth of study is what was always my field.

RL: And then how did you get in to German-American education, how did that interest you?

CK: German-American studies?

RL: German-American studies?

CK: Simply through the libraries here, what was here, and the tradition of the department. I think possibly it was first through my interest in the history of the Department of German in Wisconsin, that once you look at that you're right in the middle of German-American studies. Alexander R. Hohlfeld who was the department chair from about 1900 or 1901 until his retirement in the mid '30s 02:58:00was very interested in redefining a German department in America as something very different from a German department in Germany. He was interested in intercultural literary relations and supervised a number of dissertations on the reception of various German literature figures in America and on German theater in America, I think that was his pet-project; he never really got around to it, he didn't do the work but he had a number of collections on German theater in America. He was very interested in studying the German element in America as being his point of view for doing German studies in this country. Other than that he--

RL: Was he from Germany?

CK: He was from Germany. He was born in Saxony in Meißen or Dresden or some place like that. He was educated in Germany, he did teaching abroad or graduate 02:59:00student work abroad in both France and England, and he married a young American woman whom he had met in Europe; he came with her I believe in the 1880s, maybe late 1880s, and his first position in this country was at Vanderbilt. He came here in about 1900 directly from Vanderbilt. And he was also a sort of bilateral person, other than his work with German-American studies and his long years of being the head of the German department here, he was a very well-known Goethe scholar. So he had all of that. I believe he also originally did work in medieval literature, he was very broad in his approach.

RL: It makes me want to ask you, historically have the bulk of faculty here been natives of Germany?

CK: We have to talk about different periods. I suppose at the beginning either natives of Germany or German-American with a strong native language German 03:00:00background, but not always, not completely even then. I would have to think about who the members of the faculty were in about 1900. I think still not all of them, particularly the linguists, were not native Germans. When I got into German studies I suppose it was somewhere between fifty percent and thirty-three percent or so were native Germans and the rest were Americans and I think that's about the way the German Department is now here, maybe a quarter of them to a third of them are native Germans and the others are not.

RL: How important do you think it is that there be native German faculty in a department like this?

CK: I think it's very important to the extent that we want not only to teach German as a language, but also to maintain very strong ties with German scholars 03:01:00in Germany. This is why we also very much approve and try very hard to keep a steady flow of visiting professors from European universities. Our students need to go abroad to study there, to do their work there, and we need the contact that comes from having people from there come here.

RL: Yesterday when we were talking about your work on Schiller and Gibbon you said that that was several years away from completion.

CK: I'm a slow worker. That's an absolutely fantastic project. I was given an IREX Scholarship, those don't exist anymore to my knowledge. An IREX was rather like a Fulbright for Americans who wanted to study in east European, back in those days, Soviet influenced other countries. And they were highly sought after 03:02:00in this country, particularly for Germany because German was the language that most people knew and they sort of looked hard and long for people who were able to go and do research in some of the lands. But these were truly exchange scholarships so that when one person went from here to East Germany with an IREX, an East German scholar could come and be here. They were highly approved of by the East Germans who wanted to send people in the natural sciences and medicines and things like that. And I had gotten such a scholarship to take me for three months and I used my scholarship in the summer of '86. To Jena and Weimar my question was--it had to do with Schiller and Gibbon--I noticed that a very well-known first lecture in the field of history that Schiller gave was very highly copied from an early writing by Gibbon on the same subject. And my 03:03:00question was, in the Anna Amalia Library [Duchess Anna Amalia Library]--that's the one that tragically burned a few years ago--in that library in Weimar, which was a library that Schiller used just before he gave this lecture; was there a copy of the Gibbon writing? And I wrote to the library, I wrote them a few times, and I got all sorts of information back that they couldn't, they didn't, answer my question. They didn't answer yes and they didn't answer it no. So I wrote to IREX and said well I would like to go and take a look. It took me I think about two hours of entering through that door to find out, yes, there was a lovely leather-bound edition of the Gibbon lecture in the library and not only that, it was part of the library's original holdings from the mid-18th century, I'd have to lookup the date when the Anna Amalia Library was established by the mother of Karl August, the Duke there. This things is leather-bound, this volume that I was looking for, is leather-bound and has her initials A.A. right on the 03:04:00front cover. Well that was my answer. Of course he could have, and probably did know, the work and indeed this was an interesting find to say the least. I wrote that up and submitted it to the Schiller Jahrbuch and it was accepted and published with the comment that it at least brought to the German speaking world, to German scholars, brought their attention the fact that Gibbon was a very major figure in the 18th century in Germany. But of course then here I'd spent two hours answering my question and I had three months to live in East Germany so I had all sorts of fun. I read a lot, I learned a lot about the very poor condition of libraries over there to a certain extent. But I ordered lots of books and I went into the subject and found out that Gibbon was not only influential for Schiller and for Schiller's aesthetic theory, but he was influential in the structuring of legal studies in Germany. German law is based 03:05:00on Roman law as opposed to, in England, which is common law and quite something different from what we have here or there. Very influential in legal studies. Very influential in history. Very influential in religion, in the question of the historical development of the Christian religion from other religions, something that was very much [inaudible] in the early 18th century. So here, this is what I would like to do as a work on Edward Gibbon in Germany, that's probably very close to what the title will be. This work is not brand new to me. I think I did it quite different but there is a scholar from the end of the 19th century whose name is--I believe his first name is [Jacob Berenese?] who started this work. He put together a sort of outline of at least part of this and did not finish it in his lifetime. So I've said well this is the work that still might kill me, I don't know if I'll ever get myself wrapped around that one. 03:06:00This work brought me back not only to Schiller but also to Schiller in literature because it's my conviction that a lot of Schiller's treatment of the Wilhelm Tell history is also based on work done by Gibbon. I cannot prove that, I cannot prove that it was even possible because the early Gibbon work on the subject was never published until the mid 1810s and by that time Schiller had been dead for ten years. It's not to my way of thinking totally unlikely that maybe Goethe got a hold of it when he took a trip to Switzerland in years earlier and brought it back to Schiller who became the one of the two of them to write the Wilhelm Tell history as a play. But I simply cannot prove. Gibbon himself didn't like this early work that he did and he thought in his work somewhere is the statement that he had all the copies committed to fire. Well 03:07:00this is completely wrong because it has been published, there was a copy that was published in the 1810s, but the direct--other than showing similarities--I can't make any proofs of the fact that this was indeed an influential text for Schiller's treatment. So, you know, more detective work, more interesting things but that's my interesting 18th century project that would still take some of my time.

RL: Do you work on that every summer when you're over in Germany?

CK: No I don't. If anything I spend summers with my German-American studies and summers when I'm in Germany I've been connected with a little summer school for English, which I am deeply involved with now and very committed to as an enterprise that's important for at the beginning of its time--it first ran in 1991, it was important for the reunification of Germany and important for, I 03:08:00guess I would say international relations. So I spend about a month every summer, five weeks specifically, doing that.

RL: What do you do there? Do you teach?

CK: Yeah I teach. I taught for a number of years there but for the last four or five years--someone said this year's my fifth year--I've been the director of the academic program. So I'm actually supervising other people, I'm also teaching, I'm also supervising the young group of teachers who teach. The teachers are all native speakers of English. This summer just more than half were from England and the rest were from America. They are basically university students, either undergraduates or graduate students, and I line them up and make a team of them. We teach an age range of something nine or ten years old up through retirees who want to learn English and at all levels of proficiency. We have adult beginners, we have people who are just about to finish an [inaudible] 03:09:00in Germany with English as one of their strong suits. It's a school and camp. It's a lot of fun for the kids who go there.

RL: And where is it?

CK: It's in Wust, it's directly west of Berlin, about an hour outside of Berlin along the Elbe River in the Landkreise in the area whose capital is Stendal in Germany, it's in Saxony-Anhalt. It's about ten kilometers from the birthplace of Bismarck, good old Prussian area.

RL: Oh boy I'll say.

CK: And it is where I met my husband about ten years ago.

RL: Oh at that camp, at that program?

CK: He's a native German but was hired to be sort of the security system and the go-between between local youth and people in the school and also the free-time 03:10:00and athletic component to the camp. Most of the students live in tents on the town's sport field so it's--you know it's camp as well as school and it's just a lot of energy and a lot of fun. That is what I do with my summers.

RL: Now let me turn a bit to your German-American studies research program. What have been the key components of that?

CK: Oh dear. I've worked with a number of writers from the 1848 Revolution. I guess that's by accident, I was not looking into the Revolution but I was looking in to important writers and their publications in America. I found some who are known, some figures who are known in Germany, but with the comment that after the Revolution they simply went to America and they have no further information. I have further information on those so I was picking up their work 03:11:00in this country. There was one that I read about--I don't know why I got interested in him. Oh I know, because I was working with one of his journals that was published all around America. But there was work on him in Germany which said he had written as a young man in Germany this dramatic poem called "Babylon," which unfortunately has disappeared. And I said disappeared my foot, I know exactly where it was published. So I published that one. It was serialized in his journal here in this country, but it's a very rare journal, it was the first year when the journal--which later became a monthly journal--came out every week and in very large-page newspaper form. I believe at this point that the only copy of that in the entire world is in the State Historical Society here in Madison. There were thirty-three installments to this play, unfortunately, a couple of the issues are missing in our bound volumes that are here so I had only thirty of the installments. I looked all over for the other 03:12:00three and discovered nothing is as rare as it is and had to give up and publish these thirty. But that was a young man who was in touch with Karl Marx and the worker's movement and the '48 Revolution and did a lot of other things. Interesting figures. And then from there I have just moved on and published on a few more things. The latest business that I did was an anthology of German-American literature where I read an awful lot and chose what I thought would be representative and interesting figures. I have a group of nine who have individual chapters and a chapter on poetry and that came out a few months ago.

RL: Now this work has excited a lot of interest in Germany, is that correct?

CK: Well it has excited some interest in Germany. I've been pointing it out to people and there have been some sales over there. It may sell there better than here simply because the texts are in German. Here I get lots of even high school 03:13:00teachers who would love to use the book in their classes until they hear that the language of the primary material is German. It's important. I call the anthology Other Witnesses, this is another perspective on the development of American, it's the one that simply isn't known. Whether I go here in America to German departments or go to Germany among people who are well-read, if I list the name of my nine basic writers, they haven't heard of any of them. These are unknown figures who published in a foreign language in this country and their texts have disappeared, they weren't read in America and they weren't known in Germany so it's a point of view that has vanished.

RL: Oh that is a real scholarly gift to America isn't it?

CK: Their gift, the gift of these writers.

RL: No, but you're bringing it in to the mainstream.

CK: Well if I bring it out, still people have to be able to read. So people say 03:14:00to me well even if you publish this stuff how does it give it to the American reading public? Point well taken. If they still can't read the language then we have to do something else. So I used to say everybody go home and study German and lately I've been saying we've got to translate some of this stuff. It's of course something that German students can use on the spot. I say the anthology is a real treasure for anyone doing American studies in Germany who wants a dissertation topic. You know I reveal in my introductions, I reveal all the scholarship and all the whereabouts of pieces--fascinating material but we still don't really provide access to things. My current project is to--the title of the project was to provide access to two collections of German theater scripts in Milwaukee, but again these are German language again. I want to develop a bibliography. I'm convinced that a number of these theater scripts were of plays 03:15:00that were perhaps performed in Milwaukee, not all of them were performed, but most of them were never published, they were simply printed in form or even we have handwriting or typescripts of things that were made available to theaters. So never really in published form. I think this is a real find but everyone says well still, even if we provide access, what about the language barrier? There is a language barrier problem here.

RL: Let me ask you as you talk about your German-American studies, what kind of relationship--do you have a relationship?--with the German-American community of scholars in Milwaukee, at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee? Are there colleagues and resources over in Milwaukee for you?

CK: There are resources, I think colleagues at universities basically are not really in this area, German studies in universities and colleges in Milwaukee have shrunk a lot. Our colleagues who are really interested in this kind of 03:16:00thing are out more in the museums and public sector in Milwaukee. I find a lot of people very interested in the history of Milwaukee and the German backgrounds of Milwaukee and even, to my surprise, some of those don't know German. The interest in the German language stuff is going down and the colleagues who deal with this in universities are somewhat disappearing, but materials are still there that are very important materials at the Milwaukee public library, materials in the archives of the UWM. These things still exist and they need to be--what should the word be?--exploited, they need to be used. I think it would be very much in our interest to be able to use them from here, that is to have university people here access and find out what's in these materials and not just wait for German scholars to come and do things that we can't do with them. This is my interest in German-American studies.

CK: The other thing that I do in the way of research, and I guess this would have to be categorized as sort of soft research, is the Max Kade Institute's outreach program. We are supported by a Friends of the Max Kade Institute organization, which puts out a newsletter for which we write here. This is interesting tidbits of scholarship, things that I publish that come out of my research but these are not really extremely academic writings. We like to give lectures around town, we like to invite people to see what we have, we like to share our findings with people like that; so this is simply outreach type of research. Point out to people who are here and who seem not to be aware of what is simply under the surface here in the way of historical background.

RL: This concludes side of tape 4.

RL: This is side of tape 4, Professor Cora Lee Kluge.

Cora Lee, I want to ask you to turn your attention now to the Max Kade Institute of which you are currently the Director, admittedly a new Director, but if for the record you could talk about how, what the Max Kade Institute is, how it came to be here at the University and then how it has evolved over its tenure as part of the UW.

CK: Max Kade was a German-American pharmacist, he was in to pharmaceuticals, I suppose pharmacy was his field, might have been chemistry. He made a fortune in the early part of the 20th century, I'm a little hard-pressed to give you exactly his dates of life, I believe he died in about 1962. But a lot of his 03:19:00fortune came from his development of cough syrups and things like this; he also was a very astute investor of his monies and left a considerable fortune, which is under the care of the Max Kade Foundation whose home is New York City. As a German-American he was interested in, and for many years one of the strongest, maybe perhaps the strongest focal point of his foundation's interest in supporting things, had to do with German-American things, German-American studies, German-American visits back and forth. The Max Kade Foundation that I knew originally supported things like the building of houses for German students, for German-American students, for American students at American universities where they could speak German and keep their interest in German things up. For this university, the Max Kade Foundation has supported for many 03:20:00years a visiting professor which is partly underwritten by the Max Kade Foundation in New York, this is for one semester I think every year or maybe every other year, partly underwritten by that, partly underwritten by the College of Letters and Science here. So we got a visiting professor that helps keep our German Department abreast of things that are going on in Germany. There are a few, a handful of Max Kade centers, that's one word for them, Max Kade institutes, Max Kade houses throughout the United States.

RL: These are all post-World War II phenomena?

CK: Yes, I'm quite sure of that. I don't know, they might all be post-about 1960 or so after his death, it might have started then. This particular Max Kade Institute was opened in 1983 so it's fairly new. Its first director was Jürgen Eichhoff who left this institution and went to Penn State University where he 03:21:00also founded a sort of Max Kade center, which was simply I think a large room in the German Department floor there. Jürge Eichhoff was interested in language and then German dialects as spoken in this country, particularly in Wisconsin, he's a person who made a lot of tape recordings of German dialect speakers. These tape recordings are now part of our holdings here as part of the record of German language in America. After Jürge Eichhoff the next director I believe was Charlotte Brancaforte and then Frank Gentry was the director for a short period and then Joe Salmons [Joseph Salmons], another linguist, and then Mark Louden, another linguist. And beginning in 2004 he and I, Mark Louden and I, were co-directors for a period of two years and then I became the director I 03:22:00believe in May of 2006. So I've been the director for just more than a year. The tension in this, the lovely tension, in our Max Kade Institute has to do with the split in interests--I suppose you could call it that--the diverging interests either in German language in America or in German literature, in literary texts and culture in America. That's my [inaudible], it's been in the hands of linguists for a good deal of its life and I think they have done excellent work. I really like what they've done with mapping out the German as it's spoken in this country and with showing German influence and with tracing language death; the bilingualism, the language that came here, the development of the isolation of German speakers and the gradual movement away from German language to American language. Mark Louden was a speaker, is a speaker, of 03:23:00Pennsylvania Dutch so he's able to do things like that. This has been a very active Max Kade Institute. The Max Kade Institute is not a teaching institute, we don't have classes and therefore we don't have a lot of the support that teaching parts of the University have, we exist mainly on soft-money.

RL: Oh from the Max Kade Foundation?

CK: No, not at all, we apply for research grants and we apply for this and apply for that and we spend a lot of our time trying to find projects that can be supported by this or that. We do have the original grant that was given to help establish this and we don't want to have to dig into that further than we've already had to. We want to make ourselves on some sort of an ongoing sort of basis where we get more money than we have, more state money than we have had up till now. The budget crunches of recent years have made this fairly impossible. 03:24:00We are directly under the dean of the College of Letters and Science, we are not related by any sort of law to the German Department although all of our directors have been members of the Department of German.

RL: Oh the Institute is not part of the department?

CK: It's not part of the Department of German. I am lent, if you wish, by the Department of German to be a director here but the German Department picks up some of that, the legal line is from Max Kade Institute to the dean, the dean could appoint whoever he wants as the director here.

RL: Oh interesting. Now, I would think that the German Department greatly benefits by having a Max Kade Institute here.

CK: Well to the extent that we're very active and do very good work, of course they benefit. On the other hand, they have to give a lot to keep this going 03:25:00because they're giving up some of their faculty position, namely me, to be director here.

RL: And how much of your position does it take to be director?

CK: I believe that the percentage that's written down in the university if forty percent, forty percent of my appointment is here as director.

RL: And that's guaranteed by the college?

CK: I am paid by the college and my tenure home is the Department of German. By agreements, and I never have really understood exactly how this goes, by agreements they maybe within the German Department I am released from one course per semester to be the director here.

RL: What are the major program interests right now of the Max Kade Institute?

CK: Well we do have this new project which has some funding from the University's Graduate School for the theater scripts collections of Milwaukee. 03:26:00We simply are trying to establish what they are and to develop a bibliography of what's there. This has unfortunately never been done.

RL: What else are you planning to have the Institute work on?

CK: Well we have--Mark Louden, the former director, is working on a sort of outreach and educational material brochure and CD with samples of German dialects in America, historically brand new ones as well ones that go back a couple of generations. That is one of the--it's called German Words, American Voices, that's an outreach and educational piece of material. Right now those are the two big research projects here, other than that we have a major library and archive here, we have an archivist who works on that. We do a certain amount of publication, in-house, our publication series is marketed through the UW 03:27:00Press but we are the imprint company. Right now we have nothing in the hopper, we have nothing that's about to be published, nothing that I'm working on. The last one was the anthology which came out in June.

RL: Do you have graduate students working here at the Institute?

CK: Only when we can support them. The German theater scripts project does have a two-semester project assistant, yes.

RL: Are you optimistic about the future of the Institute?

CK: Sometimes. Sometimes we realize how little support we have gotten and wonder if it really is going to be coming along at some time in the near future. The college hasn't had a lot of money to give us either for administrative staff or for any other purposes so we basically are a soft-money business. We believe that we would be able to get more help from the Max Kade Foundation in New York 03:28:00to help us get in to new and more appropriate quarters. We have far outgrown this house, particularly because we share it with the Center for the Study of Upper Midwest Cultures and our library is, first of all, not in any sort of a good climate controlled condition, and it's making our house absolutely burst at the seams. We believe that we can get help when we get more help from the college and we're kind of waiting for that to happen.

RL: Now is there a lot of private money in Wisconsin--I suppose this is a common observation all the great German-American fortunes--does any of that money come the way of the Max Kade Institute?

CK: We keep trying. It's difficult but we're trying to get more support, more financial support for the Institute. I would say it has been minimal and no 03:29:00great big gifts at this point yet.

RL: Does the Institute have a--well you were speaking earlier about a Friends group--do they raise money?

CK: They do raise money, they support some of our projects in some ways but all gifts to the Max Kade Institute have to come through the UW Foundation. So while they can help us with, for example, the publication of the newsletter which essentially is their newsletter and the mailing of that kind of thing. And in a way the Friends group while not wonderfully able to give us support yet, help us with the outreach and the publicity aspects. We have members of that around the state, and around the nation, and in Europe too.

RL: You know I just sit here and I think about the Schlitz's and the Pabst's.

CK: Well Pabst--there's the Pabst mansion and the Pabst historical work in 03:30:00Milwaukee but I think they're doing their own thing. Some of the groups I think really have rather run away from their German roots.

RL: Really?

CK: This may have happened earlier in connection with world wars, some of them don't want to be reminded of that and aren't interested in that. Even the Max Kade Foundation, although very helpful to us, seems to be turning its attention more toward medical studies and sciences and that of course was one of Max Kade's own basic interests. So exchange programs that would bring young medical researchers and medical students to this country as well as simply German-American studies, which has rather fallen out of fashion I'm afraid to say.

RL: Now you mentioned George Mosse earlier. Is there a German-Jewish community that is interested in Max Kade?

CK: There is a German-Jewish community and I think they're interested in German-Jewish studies in the Jewish studies programs. George Mosse himself was a very wealthy man and he gave money to the History Department and to the Jewish Studies Center and I think those were his fields rather than German-American studies.

RL: Does the Max Kade Institute have a working relationship with the Center for Jewish Studies here on campus?

CK: That I don't know. A number of different groups on campus have approached the Max Kade Foundation and a number of different groups on campus have received some funding for conferences, for this or that or other things. There's a linguist group on campus that is approaching the Max Kade Foundation for help with their next conference. The Max Kade Foundation has been supportive of a 03:32:00number of programs all around campus, including scholarships for students studying abroad, they helped a number of years ago to build a student dormitory in Freiburg and we have for our junior year abroad--it's now called the academic year abroad program--we have a certain number of spaces there for American students because that funding helped to develop and ensure that building for us. It's not just for us but there's a lot of, I don't know how many spaces, are guaranteed for the Wisconsin program.

RL: Now you have said that some of the work of the Institute is of international interest?

CK: Yes, not only our development of our own materials that we have here in Wisconsin but also our ability to develop the linguistic backgrounds, the linguistic German backgrounds, of America. This I think gets the attention of 03:33:00German scholars in Germany, they are interested in this subject, they're very interested. We're interested in immigration studies, they're interested emigration studies. They want to know where the Germans who left in the 19th century went and what their fates were like and in a way we can couple our research here with research being done on that end. Our recent book published about nine months ago or so, published last fall, entitled Wisconsin German Land and Life does this, it finds communities along the Rhine that emigrated to rural areas here, what was the situation of the people there before they left, what was the emigration like and what did they need and what did they do when they got here.

RL: Was Wisconsin the destination of choice for Germans emigrating from Europe? Is Wisconsin the biggest concentration?

CK: Wisconsin is the biggest concentration; Wisconsin is the most German of the states as people pointed out in the First World War that was sort of a point against us. But Wisconsin became a state in 1848 and along about that time--first of all the revolution in Germany, but then also the economic problems that led to the emigration of a number of people in the first half of the 1850s: bad crops, bad weather, plight of people who didn't have a place to live and a way to feed their families--along about the time when a number of Germans were looking for a place to move to, was when Wisconsin itself was looking to attract settlers from Germany. Wisconsin was trying to attract people to develop the land, to build the railroads, to establish the communities here and went to Germany and advertised it as a place where a lot of Germans are, 03:35:00you'll feel right at home, you'll fit in. This became a big attraction for the Germans who were leaving Europe in the middle of the 19th century. We made an educational poster about, I believe it's nearly two years old now, a year and a half or so; the title is "How German is American?" finding some of the German roots, finding some of the maps of concentration, finding some of the signs of the German population in the language of this country and the traditions in the fact that hundreds of communities across America celebrate an Oktoberfest, even though they have no German backgrounds. What was going on, where were they, who were the people who came and this was the big German center, which is why we have all the texts. The educated Germans in Milwaukee had libraries, they had information, they gave a lot of this in the first part of the 20th century 03:36:00between the wars to the German Department in Wisconsin saying we know that you will be the place that can carry German studies in this country forward better than Milwaukee can.

RL: Are there places in Wisconsin where German is still spoken?

CK: Yes, minimally. We hear of them and the linguists go out and check them out and yeah there are pockets of German speakers still. Not as much as there were. Into the World War I era there were communities not far from here, in Dodge County and other counties between here and Milwaukee where into the second and third generation of families living there, emigrants from Germany, German was still the language spoken at home, yes.

RL: Interesting. This concludes the oral history interview with the accomplished 03:37:00and engaging Professor Cora Lee Kluge.