***************************************************************** * * Titel: "Reminiscences" Autor: Denis Paul - Aberarth, England Dateiname: 26-2-96.TXT Dateilänge: 53 KB Erschienen in: Wittgenstein Studies 2/96, Datei: 26-2-96.TXT; hrsg. von K.-O. Apel, N. Garver, B. McGuinness, P. Hacker, R. Haller, W. Lütterfelds, G. Meggle, C. Nyíri, K. Puhl, R. Raatzsch, T. Rentsch, J.G.F. Rothhaupt, J. Schulte, U. Steinvorth, P. Stekeler-Weithofer, W. 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Those articles and excerpts from * * articles which the subscriber wishes to use for his own * * private academic purposes are excluded from this * * restrictions. * * * ***************************************************************** In February of 1995, Dr Rothhaupt sent me photocopies of a pamphlet written by Victor Gollancz on Buchenwald, a long letter by him to the News Chronicle, and a letter to him from Wittgenstein mentioning both (a quite formidable letter, to which I cannot imagine how he replied -- but his daughter tells me that his reply is printed in Victor Gollancz by Ruth Dudley Edwards, from where it has also been printed in Wittgenstein Studies). Dr Rothhaupt asked me if I could contribute any recollections of my own about the impact of Buchenwald and about any related topics. Since then so many anniversary details have been broadcast and printed that my memory has been both jogged and replenished, and in some cases disagreements with other people's memories have surfaced. One detail is that many people have said that we knew nothing about concentration camps before Buchenwald and Belsen were liberated (or Dachau by the Americans -- I forget which happened first) but there is no doubt whatever that we knew a great deal about them -- except, of course, that the extremity of ill-treatment in them was unknown to us until those terrible pictures of corpses were published. Nor did we have any idea of the numbers of Jews and others killed in them, nor of the rapidity with which they were killed once they arrived at the extermination camps; and I must admit that the full facts on those points took many years to penetrate to my consciousness. Nevertheless, that concentration camps existed and were pretty horrible places was a fact available to us all. In my own case this awareness was reinforced by knowing so many Jewish refugees -- in particular nurses who were training in Lewisham Hospital, where I was doing my own medical training as a member of the Friends Ambulance Unit, which I joined in March 1944. It was impossible not to be aware of their anxieties about their families. Then there is the question of the attitude of the British population in general to the area bombing of Germany. Suggestions have been made that people who had experienced bombing in England were enthusiastic about our own bombing. Now as to awareness of comparative scale: I have to admit that I did not experience the very worst of the first bombing of the East End, which happened in daylight raids in the late summer of 1940, when I was safe in Kent viewing the 'battle of Britain' above me but not endangered by it. A few weeks later I took to coming to London of a weekend to join my parents, who lived in the City, when the East End and the docks, not so very far away, were being night-bombed; and I was certainly relieved that the bombs did not drop a little further west. Then the City itself was bombed. On the night St Pauls was saved we went up on our roof and saw fires all around us, though St Pauls itself was blocked from our view by a taller building. Another weekend our own immediate surroundings were hit by fire bombs, the building next door was gutted and the rest of our street was badly damaged. The fire brigade, having no water, could do nothing for us, and my father and his staff had to do the best they could on their own, using water from roof-tanks (pumped by him from the chalk and sandstone water-table, an option buildings in London are no longer allowed). About this time, Bristol and Coventry were bombed, and in respect of these there was a very significant difference. Bristol came first, and the Government tried to play down the seriousness of the bombing. Only many years later, living in Bristol, did I see photographs that made clear how devastated it had been. At the time, the official line paid off as far as the ignorance of the rest of the country was concerned, but Bristolians saw the matter differently. They were extremely angry that their sufferings had been denied, and made their views felt. As a result, the government made no such attempt when Coventry was bombed (Coventriert, as Goebbels put it) but let the country know what had happened. With the bombing of the East End I think some betwixt and between line was taken -- we knew that the bombing was serious, but not exactly how serious, especially in the case of the daylight bombing that began it. Nevertheless, when intensive area bombing of German towns began with the '1000 bomber' raid on Köln of May 1st 1942, it was clear, and the authorities intended it to be, that something of a quite different order of magnitude and horror was being undertaken. Moreover, as the 'area' technique was developed and refined we were told all about it -- for example that smaller bombers were left out when there was no need to make use of the propaganda number '1000' because fewer larger bombers, working to a more concentrated timetable, could achieve more destruction. This change took place rapidly: under its influence I registered as a conscientious objector in the autumn of 1942, and throughout 1943 and 1944 the progression continued. Occasionally there were reports of the precision bombing of particular targets, but for the most part there was no pretence whatever that precision was in question -- except for the precision of bombing within a precisely defined and marked area. As to the popular attitude to this, I remember one particular evening when the bombers for such a raid were routed over London in the hope that we should all be cheered by the thought of the revenge that was being taken on our behalf. This must have been in the summer of 1943, when I had left school and was working free-lance for my Oxford scholarship. I stood on the roof from which I had seen the fires of the City and, in the late dusk, heard above me the throbbing of the engines of the waves of bombers. It was a terrible sound. In the following days the Government received reports that the population, far from being enthused, felt deeply disturbed. Bombers on their way to Germany were never sent over London again. In 1944, when I was working in the wards in Lewisham, my father told me that he had heard a new kind of bomb going over, and shortly afterwards I encountered these in Lewisham: the V1s or doodle bugs. The way they worked fascinated us by its Heath Robinson simplicity. They were pointed roughly in the direction of London, and when they ran out of fuel their engine stopped and they dropped. I heard this happen when I was off duty in a Lewisham street one afternoon, and fortunately, when the engine stopped with every indication that it was pointed at me, it dropped a block or two away. One of these things dropped close to our FAU sleeping quarters and we were moved (along with the doctors, who were also bombed) into the nurses' home, at the other end of the hospital. Then the V2s followed, one of them close enough for us to receive the casualties from it -- certainly a much larger number than the V1s ever produced. When I left my nursing-training to train out of London as a cook they were still falling, not in enormous numbers, and when I returned as a trained cook to the FAU hostel in the Middlesex Hospital in west-central London towards the end of 1944 I was not aware of them as a threat. An item in a recent radio programme to the effect that a late V2 fell in the East End of London close to the end of the war was a shock and surprise to me. Perhaps it was a reprisal for Dresden. The bombing of that is another instance where my impression is that the general population were not at all enthusiastic about what was being done on our behalf. We were more interested in the bombing of individual targets that might help the advance of Allied troops. Meanwhile, D Day had taken place while I was still at Lewisham, and I was in Casualty when the news came. I remember the excitement of one of our refugee nurses -- who then apologised to us pacifists, of whom myself and another were on duty, as if we wanted the Allies not to be fighting. In my own case I was quite clear, and still am, that the war needed to be fought, and my pacifism was a protest against our manner of fighting it with area bombing. My colleague of that occasion left soon afterwards to join an FAU branch of the Hadfield Spears unit, which was doing medical work with the Free French. Another FAU section working with the Free French was called by them more prosaically SI 84155, and a member of it, Bill Spray, later headmaster of Leighton Park, was one of the FAU people who entered Paris with the Free French in advance of de Gaulle. Indeed, except for tank cover, he was in advance of the rest of the Free French (I have heard radio-recorded evidence of this intriguing fact). Another colleague of those days has pointed out to me that if I had declared that my objection was to area bombing, not to the war as such, I should never have been given any exemption at all, and I owe it to the War Department, who later supported my undergraduate studies, to make this clear. It was not intended deception. The Allied advance in France led to the German Army withdrawing its V1 launching sites from range of London and training them on Antwerp, just as a particular FAU section, which I was later to join, was sent there, and it used its ambulances to take V1 victims to hospital. This section included Bruce Hunt, who had a scholarship in mathematics to Trinity College Cambridge, and, having got his war service under way with less delay than me, was released in time to go to Trinity in October 1946, and there read 'Moral Sciences' under Wittgenstein instead of mathematics. In the Geach section of the 1946-7 Wittgenstein lectures book, he is to be found as Mr Hunt on pages 17 and 29. This FAU section was an adventurous one, and after Antwerp it prided itself on 'keeping up with Guards Armoured' and crossed the Rhine on their tail, to be presented with the problem of supervising various refugee camps for 'displaced people' (or 'displaced persons' as they were always called, with a euphemism that I have never understood) -- mainly Poles who were in some cases anxious to return to their country and in other cases anxious not to. My own departure for the Continent was held up because I was deemed to be, as a cook, too useful to be allowed to go. I graduated to conducting a training course of my own at our Middlesex hostel and then settled down to being the leading cook there. Whether this duty took me beyond VE Day I cannot remember, but perhaps I was at home on that day, because I certainly spent it more quietly than I might have done if I had been in our hostel. Consequently I have no VE memories to offer. Then or later, however, I was moved to a final stage in our cooking training, which was to study dietetics at the Hammersmith postgraduate hospital. I was left there longer than our usual stint and made full use of its postgraduate facilities, learning much more than dietetics. Perhaps I had been forgotten. It is almost as if destiny kept me there until a vacancy occurred in Bruce's section, instead of posting me to the first vacancy anywhere. During this time of study I was allowed to live at home and I was there when the news came through of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. My father heard it first and was not clear as to the details, but he quoted the word "fission", from which I inferred the truth, and I immediately telephoned one of my refugee friends at Lewisham to tell her. This prompts me to an aside as to what was known at large about the possibility of nuclear fission. The common phrase used in the thirties was "the annihilation of matter", based purely speculatively on Einstein's papers of 1905. My apprehension came from a science fiction book called Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon (who was in the Friends Ambulance Unit in the first World War). He must have used the word "fission" or I should not have reacted to it, yet the book must have been written before Hahn's experiment of 1938. Fictional anticipations of the atomic bomb would make an interesting study. I remember a prediction in a schoolboy magazine (the Modern Boy) of 1937 or so that the matter in a sugar cube, transformed to energy, could drive the Queen Mary across the Atlantic. Recently it was reported that the Express had carried a headline about the possibility of an atomic bomb, but when, and based on what evidence? To return to my commission: I remember the VJ celebrations as extremely subdued in comparison with VE. The fact that two atom bombs had been dropped on Japanese towns was not a source of joy to us. Nor had the bombing of Tokyo been -- the news that reached us indicated that destruction there had exceeded even the damage inflicted on Berlin and Hamburg, possibly even Dresden. In my own case, a film by Disney about American plans for winning the war against Japan by long distance bombing made me view pessimistically the fate Japan would suffer in being conquered. I can even remember the cinema in which I saw this, in Curzon Street, but I cannot remember the exact time -- in the middle of 1943 most probably. It made me feel that I was living in a lunatic asylum. Nevertheless, there was no question of Japan and South East Asia being a forgotten theatre of war, in my own consciousness or that of the general population, as has been claimed so often recently. That the effort had to be made, and would be appallingly costly in soldiers' lives (as it proved to be, in spite of being cut short by the atom bombs), was plain for all to appreciate. The Disney idea of its all being done by bombing was patently a dream (or nightmare, I would rather say, in spite of the fact that the only alternative we could foresee was equally a nightmare). A propos of this, reports have recently been reminding us of the frightfulnesses of the battle for Okinawa. I do remember that we were informed of this, and that the prospect of worse battles on the main islands of Japan weighed on us, but we were not told of the scale of casualties, American, Japanese and Okinawan, nor do I believe that the fact that more American soldiers fought in it than the entire Allied forces landing in Normandy was made known to us. For light relief I have a cook's reminiscence. Well before VE Day, let alone VJ Day, vanilla pods came on the market and were bought by me eagerly for my confections: lovely, juicy, fresh things, far superior to the pods we buy now. They must have come from somewhere in South East Asia, so progress against Japanese armies in the conquered territories had certainly begun, and I suspect that this particular liberation was achieved by British and Commonwealth forces, while the Americans were moving island by island across the Pacific. After VJ Day I was not released from my medical studies until, perhaps, late September, and by a slow journey I did not join Bruce until October, by train past the ruins of Essen, and by ambulance at night through the even worse ruins of Hannover. My destined section, in its Drang nach Osten, had pushed into the Russian zone, where it helped to staff an Übernachtungslager for Polish refugees being returned to Stettin, as we still called Szczecin. These refugees were warned that they had to make their minds up. If they let the army take them to Stettin, within the new frontiers of Poland, they would not be allowed to return. The refugees who staffed our camp, however, were exempt from this rule -- they had explicit permission from the Russians to return to the western zones when the operation was over. My section's activities were diminished by the fact that the army had improved its vetting procedures. We were basically there to transport sick people or imminently pregnant mothers to Stettin, but with these better sorted out before being allowed on the transports at Lüneburg we had little to do, and I was lucky to be allowed to go to Stettin just once, in an ambulance taking a near-term mother who had slipped through. Stettin was an utter ruin from American daylight raids -- it still smelt of death. One of my private tasks there was to find an old German couple in the streets and ask them, in return for a loaf, to post a letter from one of my Lewisham friends to her mother in Budapest. It arrived safely, and was the mother's first news of her daughter. Long before this transfer of eastern Poland to Russia and eastern Germany to Poland had taken place, Churchill defended the proposal in the Commons (and I now understand he had already done so when proposing it at Tehran) with the simple argument that our bombing had killed so many Germans that they would not be needing their eastern provinces. Until the reference to Tehran, I had never seen this justification mentioned anywhere, but I would swear on the holiest writ that Churchill made it in the House and that it was broadcast on the BBC news. The rule that the staff of our Übernachtungslager were to be allowed back led to an adventure when my first 48 hours leave was due. (This terminology meant that one was allowed 48 hours at one's destination, and the whole trip could easily take a week or more.) I had arranged to visit a friend (Roger Newsom) in our Berlin section. As I was about to set out in an army convoy from Dessow, the village of our camp, our military commander asked me to take with me a Ukrainian from the staff who needed treatment for TB. He gave me a pass, written in English and signed by himself, but he had neglected to have it translated into Russian and signed by his Russian fellow- commander. At the border the officer leading my convoy said that he could not risk hiding the Ukrainian, who was in the back of my truck; he would have to be declared to the Russian inspection team. This convoy commander knew perfectly well that a Russian pass was needed -- how his commanding officer failed to is a mystery to me. As the Russians approached, he said that of course I was free to do as I wished, but if the Russians took our charge away he would never come back. Perhaps I would go with him to make sure that he was safe. To the surprise of the Russian officer, when he examined the English pass and declared it to be useless and pointed the Ukrainian to the back of his tiny car, I got in with him. We were driven to a house in a village where we were kept in a side room and fed a rather thin stew. A civilian commissar was in charge (I remember him rolling vile shag cigarettes in torn off bits of Pravda), and he had an interpreter, an extremely old woman with a shawl over her head. When she found that my German, which I had only just begun to learn, hardly existed, she questioned me in French, and I managed to explain to her in school French that my charge was a special case, being a member of the camp staff, and that he needed hospital treatment in Lüneburg. Either my French was not good enough or my word was not taken, because I was ushered back to the side room and nothing was done. Night began to fall. Suddenly the door to the commissar's office was opened and in it I saw a small group of soldiers from our liaison office, headed by a corporal who was clearly a linguist, and accompanied by an FAU colleague from our Lüneburg section. My convoy commander had reported our plight and we had been rescued. Following the liaison team, who drove in 15cwt trucks at fearful speed, we drove in our FAU ambulance to Lüneburg, crossing the Bailey (pontoon) bridge over the Elbe, and only able to slow down when we were on its far bank. This episode is the only seriously brave thing I have ever done in my life, and I imagine that the Ukrainian is the only person whose life I have ever saved. I cannot remember by what means I arrived in Berlin. Roger showed me everything he possibly could, and it was a shaking experience. Nothing prevented us from entering the Russian sector, and we did so. Besides our FAU transport, we travelled on the S Bahn and the U Bahn, an experience I repeated forty one years later when I took my younger son to Berlin after a visit to the Frankfurt book fair. I remember travelling back from Berlin rather grandly by sleeper, which, as far as the train journey went, I also repeated with my son, except that we had to manage with an ordinary carriage. Soon after this we were allowed to work, as we had long wished, with the civilian population: as soon as soldiers were allowed to 'fraternise' with German civilians, relief groups were allowed to tend to their needs. The transfer took some time, and Bruce and I formed an advance guard, sent to Oberhausen, our appointed town, to prepare the way for our colleagues. Our first task was a depressing one. Whereas all other FAU sections, and so far as I know all other Red Cross sections of any kind, had conveniently moved into houses already requisitioned by the military and vacated for their benefit, Bruce and I had to do the requisitioning, visiting houses near the Rathaus, where we were to be given an office, and knowing that whichever house we chose would have its inhabitants evicted, to be given alternative but certainly inferior accommodation by the local Wohnungsamt. This experience was something of a strain on us: Bruce, who after taking his degree became a Dominican friar and then a Benedictine monk, had a tender conscience, and I was not exactly devoid of one. A few of our colleagues arrived from Dessow in time to celebrate Christmas, and the remainder in the early weeks of 1946. In the summer of 1946 I discovered that there was a prison in the town -- bang in the centre, in fact, half way between the Rathaus and the railway station. It wasn't an enormous building, and it certainly didn't have the standard prison architecture shared by Strangeways and Spandau. I thought my duties ought to include inspecting it, and so I asked one of our secretaries to ring the local chief of police and make an appointment for me, which he obligingly did. I was shocked at what I found, an atmosphere of aimlessness and depression, and by two details in particular. One was the shortage of food and the thin soupiness of the diet. This was based on the general civilian ration, which at the time was extremely low, but whereas the general population could manage to get a little extra on the black market, prisoners had to manage on the basics. The other detail was the work the prisoners were doing. There is something demanding about mailbags. They may seem pretty dull stuff to penal reformers but they have a certain style. Finishing a mailbag gives one satisfaction. The prisoners in Oberhausen were making envelopes -- indeed, they were not even making them, they were folding them and sticking them down, already cut out flat and gummed for them -- all they had to do was fold them and lick the flaps, leaving the one last flap for the customer to lick. This was just about the most unexacting and uninspiring task that any prison planner could have invented. Some weeks went by thereafter, until my secretary reminded me that I hadn't written my report, so I sat her down and dictated one to her. She was rather impressed, I remember, by my ability to do so off the top of my head -- but it was no accomplishment, because I remembered everything as vividly as if I had inspected the place that morning (and still do, I might add). My report was typed, signed and sent off to our FAU headquarters (part of the Red Cross headquarters under which we and other relief agencies worked). In it I emphasised the need for more food, in spite of the apparent unfairness of giving prisoners more than the standard ration, and more emphatically still I declared that something more demanding should be found for prisoners to do than envelope sticking. I expected some kind of acknowledgement, but none came. Instead, within a very short time indeed, a general order was circulated to all Red Cross and Army units from the Control Commission office in charge of prisons. No-one was to be allowed to visit a German prison without the express permission of that office. Nor were my recommendations acted upon. By now, of course, the food must be a little better, but a report about Nick Leeson's work in his Frankfurt prison made that sound exactly the same. This turned out to be a misunderstanding. He had not been sticking envelopes in the sense described above, but putting their contents into already manufactured ones, and then, no doubt, sticking the flaps. There is an economic detail I must mention while I am pitting my memory against other people's. Economists who ought to know better persist in using the word "hyperinflation" to describe the state of the Rentenmark (the successor to the hyperinflated Reichsmark) between the end of the war and its replacement by the D Mark, as if there were no difference in respect of inflation between the states of affairs following the first and second World Wars. As soon as the occupation began, the Allies set a rate of 40 Rentenmarks to the pound sterling, mutatis mutandis for the other zones, to take account of the fact that the Rentenmark had already been effectively devalued by German war expenditure. This rate stayed, but it was purely theoretical. Soldiers were paid at it in Rentenmarks which they were allowed to use in NAAFI shops and canteens. Very quickly soldiers discovered that they could sell cigarettes to Germans for Rentenmarks at absurd rates and use their profits in NAAFI. This practice was a terrible drain on the British Treasury, and the authorities were extremely slow to take the obvious step. This was not to pay soldiers in sterling, which would have floated away on the black market, but to issue their pay in special vouchers which were not exchangeable with Rentenmarks at all, and let them exchange these for sterling only when they came home on leave. If this decision had been taken earlier (or, sensibly, from the start) it would have saved the Treasury a great deal of money, but it would not have affected the basic situation in Germany, and nor did the eventual introduction of BAFSVs (pronounced Baffs) when it came. This was that the external value of Rentenmarks, in so far as they could be exchanged at all, was falling constantly, but prices, wages and the charges for basic services (such as postage and trains) were fixed. This simply followed the system adopted during the war by the Nazis to prevent money-inflation from manifesting itself in the form of price-inflation. Recently, commentators have said that nothing was left of the Nazi administration and everything had to begin anew, but this is not true: many aspects of the old administration survived and were simply given new officials to work them (and many of those survived too). The rationing system, the Wohnungsamt and the price-and- wage-fixing system remained as they had been. The economic consequence of this state of affairs was simply stagnation. This was evident to us all, though I did not understand why until, at Oxford, I studied economics. However, a clue was offered to me one day when a woman came into our FAU office in the Rathaus and asked for a Bescheinigung with which to buy a saucepan. My secretary had to explain to me: because Rentenmarks were next door to useless, shopkeepers were unwilling to put their goods on display and sell them over the counter. They kept them hidden, and exchanged them only for other goods or food or cigarettes (the western zones' reserve currency, and I assume the eastern zone's too). If we gave this woman what she asked for she would be able to produce it in a shop and buy a saucepan at the controlled price. I instructed my secretary to devise a Bescheinigung and type it and stamp it and I signed it, and the woman went away happily. Another consequence of inflation combined with price controls was only shadowily in my awareness, and I saw it more clearly when, after obtaining my Oxford scholarship, I came to Hamburg for the Summer Semester of 1948, when I observed overloaded trains, not only bursting with passengers inside but with passengers on their roofs clutching sacks of potatoes. These slow but long distance trains were colloquially called Kartoffelzüge, sacks of potatoes not being allowed on express trains (D-Züge). Because railway tickets could be bought with Rentenmarks at controlled prices, people were willing to travel from one end of Germany to another, taking with them their family treasures, swopping them with farmers for potatoes or other food, and returning, if necessary perched on the roof. Ever since I studied economics and came to appreciate the significance of these phenomena, I have had a horror of price and wage fixing or anything else that deserves to be called an economy-distortion, and I have retained those two war cries to express my horror: "Bescheinigungen" and "Kartoffelzüge". Bruce must have returned to Oberhausen during the Christmas vacation of 1946, for he told me many stories about Wittgenstein and their walks and talks together -- or perhaps I am remembering meetings in England, for in the early summer of 1947 I was sent home, temporarily, to organise two visits of young Germans under the auspices of the Friends' Education Service (which being educated insisted on an apostrophe). In retrospect I could kick myself for not having the gumption to arrange for these young people to visit Cambridge and in particular Trinity, where Bruce would certainly have been willing to show them round and might even have coaxed Wittgenstein into meeting us -- though this happened in the long vacation and he may not have been there. Instead I arranged a visit to Eton, where there was a Quaker housemaster. Noticing how everybody who possibly could invited themselves to join this trip I stayed in my office in Friends' House, and did not come to know Eton for another twenty five years, when my dealings with it were professional, concerning potential pupils. One of Bruce's stories was about Wittgenstein's interview with him when he asked to be allowed to read Moral Sciences. Why did he want to study philosophy? To find the truth, Bruce replied. What did he mean, Wittgenstein asked -- the truth about this table and these chairs? I find this reminiscent of the remark in Band VI, pages 177-8, 19.6.1931, frequently printed from a later revision, accusing himself of talking about the "world" in the Tractatus instead of this tree or table. Another was about Wittgenstein's use in his lectures of the "Wie magst du Eier?" and "Weiche, Wotan, weiche" story. Bruce, on one of their walks, had explained to him an indecent meaning of the word "Eier". He protested emphatically that if he had known this he would never have used the illustration in a lecture. He did not, however, delete it from his 1946-9 notebooks and neither did he from his final text. My memory of Bruce's voice as he caricatured Wittgenstein's protestations ("Oh, no, if I'd known I'd never...") rings across the years to other protestations. "Our uncle would never...", for example. Recently I found another. Reading again the 1946-7 lecture notes, edited by Geach and others, I noticed in Geach's preface some remarks about Frege. Wittgenstein respected him enormously, and so he could not have said to anyone that he had wiped the floor with him. This is supposed to have happened during the second of two visits -- in the first Frege wiped the floor with Wittgenstein. Quite possibly the second wiping was someone else's invention, but that is a matter of fact, not of "could not have". I am afraid that I cannot see any contradiction between Wittgenstein's respect for Frege and his claiming (when young) to have once (when younger) wiped the floor with him. Nor can I help suspecting that Wittgenstein himself set this tone of protested perfection (which he did not of course keep up in his private asides in the notebooks). Another example is (addressed to Malcolm) "If you knew anything at all you would know that I am never unfair to anyone". It intrigues me that Bruce Hunt is omitted from the official lists of Wittgenstein's listeners in 1946-7, presumably because a future Benedictine is not considered important enough to mention, whereas Iris Murdoch, who told me in 1948 that she had arrived in Cambridge too late for his lectures, is so listed. My return to Oberhausen was brief, merely for tidying up old work and making farewells, and I left to be 'de- mobbed' and take up afresh my studies for an Oxford scholarship, in which I was now able to offer German with my philosophy. As soon as I obtained this, my father offered to pay for me to go to Hamburg University for the 1948 Summer Semester, and with the connivance of a Miss MacLean at the Foreign Office, who agreed to pretend that I was already an undergraduate, I did so. My memories are far too many to note here, though I must record that when the currency reform came I was living in a German household and experienced it first hand (except that I had no Rentenmarks to change). The proliferation of goods in the shops seemed miraculous, and so did the opportunity of travelling to Oberhausen in civilian comfort. My first visit had been by military train, comfortable enough; my second had been by civilian train before the reform, and was unbelievably crowded; my third was bliss. Conscience prompts me also to record that old habits die hard, and that I was never able to give up my assumptions as an honorary member of the occupying forces (theoretical pacifist or not). I did much the same on a further visit during my first long vacation, in the summer of 1949. When I arrived in Oberhausen in 1948 for this third visit at the end of my semester I was met at the station by my old chamber maid, Elsbeth Szymanowska, and took her in a huge Maybach taxi to the Rathaus, where I chatted to my old secretaries while the taximeter clocked up. They were still completing forms I had signed the previous year and sending them in to the military. In particular I wanted their help in using a military Schnelltriebwagen, which called at Essen for the benefit of travelling officers. I had never used it, but I knew it existed and I hoped to take it to Koblenz, from where I was going to explore the vineyards of the Mosel. All I wanted to know was the time it stopped at Essen, and its platform. Otherwise, I was quite confident of knowing the ropes well enough to travel on it. I did not even ask my secretaries to type me a Bescheinigung. This business done, I went on chatting. Then I delivered Elsbeth to her mother in a slum in south Oberhausen and took my taxi on to the home in north Oberhausen of an absent former secretary, whose family I was to stay with for the night. Her stepfather, Herr Wittkamp, was astounded by the taxi fare and thought I was being overcharged, but I told him what detours and delays I had indulged in and he agreed that it was reasonable. At the then rate of exchange (of ten to the pound) this extravagance, even in newly established D Marks, was well within my student means. I took an ordinary train to Essen the next day and waited for my Schnelltriebwagen. It was not full of Allied officers, as I expected, but of German officials. I showed my passport to the guard, made use of the gift of the gab, and paid not a penny. Getting off at Koblenz I then, of course, had to pay my way, and reached Zeltingen. Returning I stopped at Bonn, where I met Erich Heller and made my peace with him, though why I needed to is not part of this story. With some newly acquired Zeltingen wine from Studert as thank-you presents I returned to Hamburg, made my farewells, and caught my train back to Liverpool Street. I hope it counts as a Wittgenstein reminiscence to say that my first encounter with the Tractatus was a post graduate seminar chaired by Ryle (permission to attend given by my tutor, Isaiah Berlin). My second encounter with Wittgenstein's train of thought was a set of lectures given by Antony Flew on personal identity. My third was a small postgraduate seminar (under the same aegis -- Isaiah was deputising for Zeus at the time, and Olympus was the Garden Quad at New College) on the logic of scientific induction given by Toulmin. Iris Murdoch also attended, and this was when she told me that she had come from a year spent in Cambridge, just missing Wittgenstein's lectures because of his retirement. For one of these Toulmin sessions the room he was supposed to use was locked, and I invited the seminar to my own rooms on Olympus. All that happened in my first term. An encounter by typescript followed, when Hilary Rubinstein lent me his black market copy of the Blue Book, which I found electrifying, and then Michael Dummett lent me his typescript Brown Book, which I found less so. Later Hart, another of my tutors, lent me his copy of the Blue Book as well, stipulating that if I lost it I should pay him five pounds (sterling), that being the rate in those days for having a Wittgenstein typescript copied by a typist. In my last year I read a paper on the Tractatus to an extremely underpopulated meeting of the Jowett society, attended at least by Elizabeth Anscombe, but all I remember of it was getting something wrong and Miss Anscombe putting me right. I had met her, I should explain, as a committee member of the Aquinas Society, and came to know most of her circle: Peter Geach, her husband; Yorick Smythies and his wife Polly, who has recently come to my memory by a chance meeting with Yorick's talented son Danny, to whom she stood godmother; Kreisel; Ben Richards; and someone who I now think was the sculptor of Wittgenstein's gravestone. Kreisel, who was on dropping-in terms from his post in Reading (Elizabeth was so hospitable that she left her door permanently unlocked lest any of her friends lacked a lodging), told me two things which I should like to record. The first was Wittgenstein's explanation of Tractatus 5.1361 (5.0443 in the Prototractatus), where "Aberglaube" is italicised in the standard version but unitalicised in the Prototractatus. Wittgenstein had wanted the German to run "Aberglaube ist der Glaube an den Kausalnexus", leaving emphasis to be expressed by the word-order, and favoured the English translation "Belief in a causal nexus is sheer superstition". This rang so strongly in my memory that for many years I believed that the remark really did begin in print with "Aberglaube", until my conscience forced me to check. Kreisel's other tit bit was to tell me that Wittgenstein had been interested in the Beaufort scale (of wind strengths) as exemplifying the meaningfulness of uncalibrated criteria. Nowadays the scale is calibrated in terms of wind-speed, in knots, but when invented by Admiral Beaufort it considered such matters as the wind which would just give a man o' war steerage way, and such like. This might appear to be related to Last Writings Vol I, 910 (on amateur weather predictions), and 922 (see PU pt II p 228), but it is not. I am quite confident that Kreisel had understood the old Beaufort scale correctly and had explained it to Wittgenstein correctly. Beaufort would never have talked about imponderable evidence or said such things as "I'm under the distinct impression". He would have said "look -- the wind is blowing the white horses into spray -- it must be at least..." A modern yachtsman who uses Beaufort's criteria to judge wind force and then, for better precision, checks from his instruments, is not putting imponderable evidence to the test. In those days (that is, in 1952) I was familiar with many manuscript notebooks and a few typescripts, including TS 209: this was known then as the Moore Volume, and its blue 'durchschlag' paragraphs were pasted onto the pages of a large, well-bound office volume (not an account or ledger volume). Commentators frequently confuse it with its top-copy origin, TS 208 -- described by Russell as "a large quantity of typescript", a different matter altogether. Elizabeth also showed me the twin Bemerkungen I&II, which is hardly known now as an intended entity because of its perplexing presentation on the Cornell microfilms. Near the end of 1952 I was appointed assistant to RW Revans, a research statistician at the Coal Board, and my visits to Miss Anscombe's house in Oxford grew less frequent, but intermittently they continued until 1967, when, while I was lecturing in mathematics at the Nottingham College of Education, I completed my 'Certainty' translations, to find that, unable to wait for the opening section, which she had only just found, and losing my translation of another section, she had completed them herself. My meetings with Yorick Smythies, alas, hardly continued beyond 1957, when he gave me his war-time copy of Investigations, TS 239, now housed in the Wren. He died in 1978, and I cannot be certain whether he lived to receive Trinity's letter of thanks for it. My final remarks concern the economics of those days. In 1951 and 1952 I did various pieces of scattered research which included a detail connected with my 1948 memories of the Währungsreform. The Swiss National Bank, in the very years when the Rentenmark was falling to pieces, found itself in the fortunate position of being able to supply Swiss francs to foreign investors who were desperate to put their money into any currency that seemed safe. For a number of years the Swiss enjoyed a large import surplus, financed by these currency sales. In other words, they supplemented their (at the time) modest export of goods by exporting francs. Now, of course, matters have stabilised, and the Swiss trading balance is kept in credit by 'financial services' that are not so alarmingly large in proportion as they were just after the war. The benefits to the Swiss of this trade in francs must have been known to the founders of the Bank deutscher Länder, as the Bundesbank was first termed. Readers of Marsh's book will know that one of its initial problems was lack of gold and foreign currency. To the international financial community it must have been evident that the new D Marks were a potentially excellent currency and, more important, were significantly undervalued (as my story of the taxi illustrates). In other words, they were a good buy, and they bought them. Rapidly, the Bank obtained the reserves it needed for safe working, and in due time the D Mark was up-valued to a more realistic level. To defend the Swiss National Bank I ought to add (as has recently become clear) that it was not lacking in gold when it encouraged the international purchase of Swiss francs. Recently, Greece and other countries have been claiming from Germany the value of the gold looted from their banks by the Nazis. This gold, and more, will have been taken in turn for reparations (a polite word for "looting") by the four occupying powers -- in what proportion I do not know. If Marsh is right there was certainly none left for founding the Bank deutscher Länder with. The bill ought therefore in fairness to be passed on to the ex-occupying powers... except... Except that I do believe that there is also a German debt to the Allies, as imponderable as Wittgenstein could have wished, whatever was taken in reparations. This has been admitted by some Germans in acknowledgement of help provided by the occupying powers, the most substantial being the American 'Marshall Plan' (wasted for Britain by the chronic tendency of the Labour and Conservative parties alike to try to overvalue the pound -- in this case for the purpose of preserving the sterling area). On the other hand, horrifying stories have been coming to light of allied atrocities: for example, neglectful treatment of Wehrmacht prisoners of war by the American army; and at Oxford I was told by an American who was present at the capture of Frankfurt that the town was given over to loot for 48 hours before order was restored. (I must add, in contrast to this, that the American occupation of Oberhausen, as I was recently told by one of my ex-secretaries, was exemplary.) My own memories are from an intermediate time between capitulation and Marshall Plan, and are of the efforts of military commanders appointed to supervise the government of German towns, and, superseding them, Control Commission officers. The German officials I knew in Oberhausen were in a state of shock in 1945 and 1946 -- one almost had to hold their hands. By 1947 they were beginning to take charge. By the time I visited my old town commander in 1948 he was hardly more than a figurehead -- but in the early days matters were very different. I worked so hard in the winter of 1945-6 that when I had a passport photograph taken in March 1946 (around my twenty first birthday) I looked like an old man. I wish this photograph had survived to verify my story. I well remember the shock of seeing it when it came from the photographers. The Marshall Plan was a gift, while the most significant contribution to German recovery, the D Mark itself, was earned: yet there were still allied contributions to it. It was not something dreamed up by Erhardt and realised by a wave of his wand. American economists added their expertise, and I believe British ones too. Most important of all, whatever the composition of the team who planned its introduction, the co-operation of the occupying powers was essential to ensuring that their requirements were put into force with an absolute absence of favouritism or corruption. The result was a currency reform whose perfection has never since been repeated anywhere (not even in Germany itself, when the Ostmark was absorbed). Since 1948, and more to the point since 1989, many countries have either attempted or dreamed of attempting a currency reform on the model of the German Währungsreform. What is never appreciated when such proposals are made is the ruthlessness with which, once the exchange rules were formulated, they were kept to. This was owed solely to the occupying powers. We can be quite sure, having observed currency reforms that have failed, that in Germany in 1948, without the iron enforcement that the occupying powers provided, exceptions would have been made, and that the allocation of these would have brought with it corruption and favouritism. That the absorption of the Ostmark was carried through without that kind of thing is an index of Germany's maturity -- but instead of many little temptations to corruption there was one big one, namely the Bundesregierung's desire to show the world with what generosity it could afford to take the Ostmark into the west German economy. The details of the price paid for this by other members of the European community are now financial history, and this is hardly the occasion to mention them, especially since the Bundesbank has recently begun to be more accommodating to the rest of us. I am very glad of this because it removes my own big temptation, which is to see everything in a time-mirror which has 1948 as its focal point. Fortunately, for my research on Wittgenstein that is indeed an appropriate date on which to fix attention, as I hope shortly to show.