Friday, March 13, 2009

Telling detail

Sometimes a little detail can make a familiar big story come to life again. Here's an example from The New York Times, which now rewards actual subscribers by letting us search its whole archive and download up to 100 articles a month.

The article, "Exiles' University Hails Its Charter," appeared April 25, 1941, as the New School's Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science, popularly known as the University in Exile, celebrated receipt of a permanent charter and the right to award doctorates with a banquet for 500 guests at the Plaza Hotel. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter sent rousing words - the school "represents the trusteeship of civilization and embodies the solid hope for its maintenance and renewed conquest" - but the telling detail, the one that makes the value and significance of the University in Exile clear, is this:
We've all heard the lore of the "rescue" of Europe's "endangered intellectuals," but conjuring up in imagination these books - some of them copies of other books which perished in the bonfire on Bebelplatz in Berlin - makes the meaning of the school's "trusteeship of civilization" palpable. We now know, as they perhaps only sensed then, that The New School had saved not only books from burning, but their writers.