For Aschauer, proudly giving me a tour, the piece de resistance was the time switch on the door of each. With a deadpan expression he demonstrated: when you enter the toilet, you set the clock for five or ten or twenty minutes, depending on how long you estimate it will take. This turns on the light and the ventilating fan. When the timer has ticked back to zero, both are switched off again, thus conserving electricity. (If you guessed wrong, you either finish in the dark or reach out into the hall to dial yourself more time.)

He had recognized me at once. The first surprised grin was followed by embarrassment. Neither of us wanted to mention Paola, so we concentrated on the Schloss. Was it not remarkable what the Americans had done? There was even talk about an elevator someday. We were standing on the terrace. The Americans didn't do that, I said, pointing at the boxwood mazes, roses, lilac bushes, graveled paths across the velvet lawns, stone sea horses still guarding the steps down to the lake, and beyond them a floating carpet of water lilies. He was pleased, but then he looked at me looking across the lake and politely excused himself.

Three hours later the terrace was full of people: a wine reception for the incoming group. Our hosts were the permanent American staff at the Schloss, Director Rasmussen and his assistants, and their wives. These people -agreeable young Midwestern academic types- lived in the Schloss all year and traveled about Europe interviewing and recruiting students. They had nothing to do with the teaching of courses but were supposed to make each new crowd of strangers feel welcome. "We're basically cruise directors," said Nora Rasmussen, a handsome freckled matron from Minneapolis.

"Well, there seems to be some confusion as to how it all began," said her husband in response to a question from Professor Lamason's wife. "I have the impression that Boswell Hyde had something to do with it, shortly after the war, but I've only been here two years and my predecessor served for three years, and I've never met the man who ran it before that, so one might say that the Academy's origins are shrouded in the mists of time!"

I was tempted to dispel the mists of time, but my glass was empty and I saw that Freddie Minto was demonstrating the mechanics of a Weinheber to a tall very pretty blond. "You hold the glass under here, and just push up like this, and that lets the wine run out-- Oh, this is my friend Graham Anders, Miss Astrid" leaned forward, almost touching his nose against her badge --"Königsmark, from the University of Helsinki, Finland."

"Helsingfors," said Miss Königsmark, moving back a step. She had long straight hair, and she was a little taller than Freddie.

"What's the difference?" Freddie asked.

"You don't know Finland, I see." She looked very serious.

"Tell us about Finland," I said.

"We have in Finland Finnish Finns and Swedish Finns. Two languages. 'Helsinki' is Finnish. 'Finland,' the word, is Swedish. The Swedish word for Helsinki is Helsingfors, so if you say 'Helsinki' you must also say 'Suomi'--"

"--which is the Finnish word for Finland," we all said in unison.

She had a nice laugh.

"Well, I'm glad we've cleared up that problem," said Freddie, handing her the glass he had just filled.

She turned to me. "Are you a professor too?"

For the third time that afternoon I had to explain that I was just an ordinary lawyer, that I was enrolled as a student, and that nobody had told me what I was supposed to be doing here.

"Give him time," said Freddie. "He'll find something to do."

We wandered over to meet the Yugoslavs, the only contingent from eastern Europe and thus the most glamorous. There were four of them. two were squat, bald, friendly, talkative and fairly important -a public prosecutor from Belgrade, a provincial appellate court judge; the other two were younger, taller, darker, entirely taciturn. (An Austrian girl suggested, sotto voce, that the second pair had been sent along to watch the first.) The younger two had the same serviceable answers for every question: Are you a lawyer? More or less. Do you live in Belgrade? More or less. Do you like Salzburg? More or less. After the third or fourth of these responses, they joined in the laughter. Their gold teeth gleamed.

The cocktail party at which one is expected to mingle is an American invention; Europeans consider it rude to walk away from a stranger without a formal good-bye. The American wives kept tactfully busy breaking up conversations, introducing people, integrating the shy ones who stood awkwardly around the edges.

Nora Rasmussen took my arm. "Graham, do come over and meet a very nice Dutchman, he's with the Dutch delegation at Brussels."

The Dutchman was very tall and very fat, carefully dressed in a blue blazer and gray flannels. He was leaning against the water gate, smoking a pipe. I did not understand his name when we were introduced, but I saw something in his eyes, something that clicked even before I focused on the celluloid badge on his lapel: Eduard Onderdonk.

"Well well, the Sergeant Anders! No longer a sergeant, hey?" He shook my hand warmly, grinning. "We all change a little, don't we? But I have changed too much, I know it." His face darkened. "I was so sad about Peter Devereaux, the poor fellow."

"No one here has heard of him."

"Not heard of him?" Onderdonk made a sweeping gesture encompassing the lake, the Schloss, the crowd of talking laughing people on the terrace. "It's all his! All his work, his idea! They must have heard of him."

"Apparently not."

Onderdonk shook his head. "So change the times. And poor Professor Kaufman. I cannot understand such a story, such a persecution."

"Yes," I said. "That was a pretty dreadful story."

We began to walk along the water. The gravel crunched beneath our shoes.

"But tell me how could such things happen in America? This McCarthy. These committees of Congress, they can force a man like Kaufman to appear on television and simply destroy him because he will not betray old friends. . . ."

"Well, there's nothing I can say," I said. "I suppose there were reasons. The Hiss Case, the Rosenberg Case, the Communists taking over China, the Korean War, the country was hysterical about Communism, the fear and madness of crowds. I guess it just happens sometimes. People were afraid, afraid that the Communists were going to take us over."

"But it is very bad for your country, you know. After the war, everybody in Europe loved everything American, we were so interested to do everything the American way -well, you remember how it was here-and now?" He pulled down the corners of his mouth. "I'm not so sure."

"But you came back to the Academy," I could not resist saying.

"Oh yes. Oh certainly! I was very happy to be invited. There are still many things you can teach us. For instance the antitrust laws, restraints upon competition, we don't know enough about these things. Business organizations, regulation of securities, labor laws . . . Tell me, you know this Professor Minto?"

"Sure I know him. He brought me over here. He's an old friend."

"Is he. . . is he a well-known professor in America?"

Well known? "Yeah I guess so. Reasonably well known. Why?"

"Oh, some of the others, the wives of two of the American professors, this morning I was showing them around the Schloss, and they seemed to be a little irritated . . . I should not say this to you, I think, but . . . Has he written anything? Any books? Is he an expert in some special field?"

"Has he written anything? No, not much I suppose, but he's a brilliant teacher. We always liked his classes best of all. What did those women say about him?"

Onderdonk shook his head. "Nothing, nothing. I'm sorry I spoke about it. I only had the feeling that they did not consider him . . . they were surprised that he was asked to teach here, because he is not so well known."

We had reached the edge of the park, where the stone goddess still meditated upon the Untersberg. A soft evening breeze rippled the water and the windows of the Schloss reflected the setting sun. On the other side of the lake, in the shadow of the trees, the lights in some of the houses came on. Onderdonk looked over, began to ask a question, then changed his mind and covered himself by lighting his pipe.

"A fantastic place," he said, rocking back on his heels, the pipe clamped between his teeth, his hands in the pockets of his flannels.

"Have you seen your friend von Schaumburg?" I asked him.

"Yes." He took the pipe out of his mouth."We corresponded sometimes, and then when they came into NATO I worked with him on several matters . . ." He glanced at me. "Of course you know--"

"Yes, I know."

"We saw them here at a Mozart Festival -1958, it was."

"How are they?"

"Quite well, apparently. He is successful in the government, she is still very beautiful. No children apparently, they live in Bonn and Berlin--"

"No children?"

"No, it seems sad for her, doesn't it? You can never tell about these things."

"Were they staying over there?"

"No, in an hotel. Do you say an hotel, like the English? I think she rents her houses to other people."

"And the Schloss?"

"The Schloss she still rents to the Academy, I suppose."

"What exactly is his job in the government?"

Onderdonk looked down and pushed some gravel around with his shoe. "Well . . . At the time we worked together, he was sort of a liaison between their Defense and Foreign Ministries, but today . . ." His face turned up and his eyes met mine. "I think today it is the sort of job . . . the sort of job where one does not ask too many questions. You understand what I mean?"

"Yes."

"Yes." Onderdonk suddenly looked very thoughtful. "Perhaps we speak about this. At another time. All right?"

"Sure." I had no idea what he was talking about.

"Look, they are going in to dinner," he said. "You know, I think we are in the same dormitory. It's the corner window, there at the top, is it not?"

Next day we got to work. Directly after breakfast there was a lecture, which lasted about an hour; then ten minutes or so for questions from the audience, then a coffee break, then a period for study, then lunch. After lunch the students separated into different seminars, each conducted by one of the professors. The lectures were planned to give a broad description of the American legal landscape: torts, contracts, the federal system, judicial procedure, the Bill of Rights, the role of the lawyer in American society, our system of legal education -general topics of that sort. I never did like listening to lectures, and of course I was generally familiar with the subjects under discussion, but in his own way each speaker put the imprint of his personality into them, and this made them extraordinarily stimulating and interesting even to me.

Porter Lamason: a red-haired giant from the oil fields of Oklahoma, former all-star halfback, the nearest thing the Europeans had ever seen to a real cowboy. He had carried on a passionate love affair with the Constitution of the United States and its interpretation by the Supreme Court, and with his quiet drawling voice he brought to life not only the law but the social background behind the landmark cases like Marbury v. Madison and the Dred Scott decision and Brown v. Board of Education.

Clinton Bergstrasser: son of a tobacco farmer in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania; sarcastic, brilliant little peanut who had spent his professional life in the maze of antitrust laws, first in a Wall Street firm defending the United Shoe Machinery Company against the Department of Justice, then as a professor of law, writing the classic Bergstrasser on Government Regulation of Industry and now as Deputy Attorney General in charge of the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice. During the question periods he debated with French and German lawyers and judges who questioned the economic and political justification behind American antitrust philosophy, and these arguments carried over into the coffee break, with Bergstrasser slouched in a chair at one of the tables in the dining hall, surrounded by students, chain-smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, stubbornly defending the Sherman Act and the Clayton Act and the Robinson-Patman Act against all corners.

Justice Steinberg: the oldest member of the faculty, a poor boy who must have worked very hard, first in his family's grocery store, then as a court stenographer attending law school at night, then as a committeeman, an assistant district attorney, a trial judge . . . always being nice to everybody, always being active in community affairs, always doing a good job, always waiting patiently until the boys wanted to "balance" their ticket . . . and now he was a member of his state's Supreme Court. Not a hack; a kindly man, paunchy and bald, excitable, talkative, enthusiastic, and for a lawyer with his career, surprisingly scholarly. Having had no experience as a lecturer, he lacked the practiced savoir-faire of the professors. He began by reading ponderous essays about the American judicial system which he or perhaps his law clerk had prepared, but then something would remind him of a story and he would take off his glasses and tell us about incidents that had really happened in his court; it was through these anecdotes that we heard the most vivid descriptions of judicial machinery at work, and I suspect that it was through these anecdotes that all of us -Americans and Europeans- began to see for the first time that the problems that have to be solved by the legal process are much the same everywhere, because people are people.

And Freddie, of course, was Freddie. At first I worried about him; I was not sure how he would look against this competition and how he would go over with this audience. I needn't have worried; he was terrific and I was proud of him. Like any good actor he had examined the house and adjusted his act accordingly. No war stories. He spoke about a wide variety of subjects: American Law Schools and How They Work; The Case Method; What About Statutes? How Uniform Is the Uniform Commercial Code? Administrative Law and the Federal Agencies; How Lawyers Become Judges. . . .

The question period was sometimes the best part, and the roughest questions usually came from the other Americans. Justice Steinberg had his own ideas about how lawyers become judges. The European faces turned back and forth, like spectators at a tennis match.

One morning Freddie spoke about the role of the lawyer in the American business community and the development of the large law office -a phenomenon still unknown in Europe. First he told them how it all began, in Wall Street: Paul Cravath and William Nelson Cromwell and Emory Buckner and some of those fellows, but then he said that he could tell them more about the history of another firm, a firm that is older if not as big as the big New York offices, a firm in which your colleague Graham Anders back there is a partner, in which Graham's grandfather had been a partner, in which Freddie's own father had been a partner, a firm that perhaps typifies what he was trying to describe to them. And then he told the stories I had heard so many times, from so many people, but in a way I had never heard before: he talked about Frederick Dean, the brilliant orator, who filled the Supreme Court chambers whenever he argued a case, who refused to talk on the telephone, whose waiting room was crowded with important people seeking his advice; he told them about Judge Conyers, the little hunchback, the planner, the organizer, the recruiter of ambitious young men; he told them about Frederick Minto and George Graham; he told them about the banks and the insurance companies and the railroads -and he told them about the locomotive works. He told them all these things in a completely detached way, like a newspaper reporter or a novelist, and it made me feel strange to sit there -behind me the open casement window and the sunshine and the breeze stirring the leaves and an occasional cackle from the chickens of the Schlossbauer across the road, beside me Astrid Königsmark leaning over her notebook, her long hair brushing her suntanned arms, writing down every word exactly as the Radcliffe girls always had, around me the gilded mirrors and the inlaid wood and the commedia dell'arte paintings of the Venetian Room, and up in front there Freddie Minto in a tweed jacket and a sport shirt, his hands in his pockets, strolling up and down in front of the class, talking about that other world, the world in which I was living out my life.

But then I was suddenly snatched out of my pleasant reverie by the intensity of some of the American questions fired at Freddie. Porter Lamason, his chair tipped back against the windowsill, his huge freckled paws folded comfortably across his stomach: "Tell me, Fred, is it, do you think, a good thing for the country that these enormous law factories get first crack at the best lawyers, the best legal talent in the country?"

Silence in the room. The Europeans watched. Freddie looked across the heads, his eyes narrowing, his tongue moving very deliberately into his right cheek.

"Why, Porter, I think you're being much too modest. I had always understood that the best law students in the country generally wind up professors at the Harvard Law School!"

The class roared, and Lamason grinned, but Clinton Bergstrasser, sitting beside him, raised his hand. Did Conyers & Dean feel it had any responsibility toward poor people? Did it ever advise the men who worked in the locomotive works?"

"Graham? Help me out here."

All the heads turned.

I said a few words about how we send one man a year to the Public Defender for a month's tour of duty. I said that most of our partners serve on the boards of charitable organizations, for which we do free work.

"And you feel that takes care of your responsibility to the public?" asked Bergstrasser.

The coffee bell rang.

They assigned me to Freddie's seminar, and I wished they hadn't done that; it put a strain on our relationship. We met three afternoons a week a dozen people around a long table in the Chinoiserie. Freddie had decided to demonstrate how the Common Law adjusts itself to changing concepts of social justice by having us read and talk about one specific line of cases -cases involving the liability of a seller or manufacturer for defects in his product. We began with English cases from the eighteenth century, in which the buyer was told to beware, and worked ourselves gradually through Judge Cardozo's opinion in MacPherson v. Buick and many other cases to modern concepts which force the seller to beware, or to insure himself. We read about implied warranties and express warranties and waiving the tort to sue in assumpsit. This is second-year law school stuff at home; for people working in a foreign language it was no picnic. I was amazed how well most of them did. They sat in the library night after night, fighting their way through fifty or sixty pages of American court decisions, sometimes forced to look up every second word in the law dictionary. I found that I could be helpful by answering questions for them, by explaining the legal procedures which often make opinions so hard to understand. ("You have to start by asking, 'Who is suing whom for what?'") and by showing them how American law students "digest" the guts of a case.

During the class discussions I tried to remain in the background as much as possible, but when we got to a place where Freddie wanted to have a certain point hammered home, he would call on me, and most of the time I could see what it was that he wanted, and give it to him, but of course every teacher who tries to build a session toward a certain intellectual climax gets mad if there is an interruption, and that is what happened, right at the best part of our second afternoon.

"Okay, that's very good, Mr. Krstic," Freddie was saying. "Now, do you think the result would have been the same if--" and there was a knock on the door. It opened a crack and there was Aschauer, in his green apron. "Verzeihung die Herren, ein Ferngespräch fürn Herrn Doktor Anders, aus Amerika!"

I tried to slip out as quietly as possible, and of course Freddie knew it wasn't my fault, but he didn't like it.

The telephone was in Rasmussen's office, a large whitewashed room on the ground floor. He was not there, but one of the Austrian secretaries indicated that I could sit in front of his desk. I picked up the telephone, and for a few moments I heard only the various long-distance operators talking to each other. Then one of our Conyers & Dean girls said, "Mr. Anders? How are you, sir? just a minute please, for Mr. Boyle. . . . Peg, I've got Mr. Anders now.... Go ahead, please. . . "

"Hello?"

"Hello?"

"Graham?"

"Yeah!"

"Can you hear me?"

"Yeah, I can hear you fine. What's the matter?"

"Graham, you know what that little bastard did?"

"Who?"

"Fleischer. You know what he did?"

"No. What`d he do?"

"He went and brought suit, a stockholders' derivative suit."

"You mean against the Warfield acquisition?"

"Right. Went into federal district court for an injunction."

"What's the allegation?"

"What? Can't hear you."

"What's the basis of his complaint?"

"Oh God, everything you could possibly think of: Abuse of discretion, waste of corporate assets, violation of the Securities Act, irreparable damage to Boatwright--"

"How does he get a violation of the Securities Act?"

"He says you negotiated the transaction, he says the one-thirtythree exemption wasn't available to you--"

"Oh nuts to that, he'll never make that stick--"

"Well, I don't suppose he'll make any of it stick, but what are we going to do in the meantime? We can't close with Warfield with this thing hanging over us, even if the judge won't grant him an injunction. And meanwhile we had to announce about the dividend cut and the stock is trading off again and the goddamned bankers are getting the wind up."

"Well." There didn't seem to be much for me to say. "Who's handling the case?"

"What? Oh, Shoemaker & Levy, your good friend O'Bannion, who else?"

"No, I mean for our side."

"Well, we've got half the office in it by this time, now that we're in court we need litigation people, I've got Ames Mahoney to work with Pat Forrester, and some of the younger boys, but damn it, Graham, I wish you were back here--"

"Ellsworth, I don't see what I could be doing--"

"Look, the reason I called, I'm sending you a copy of the complaint by airmail, and I want you to look at it and give us any ideas you have. Will you do that? And think about the whole problem in general, will you? I mean if this Warfield thing is going to fall through, we're going to have to think of something else, you know. I mean, I want you to give all this some thought, will you?"

"Sure, of course I will, Ellsworth."

"Because frankly I'm beginning to feel a little tired, Graham. I don't seem to enjoy these fights the way I used to."

The line hummed. I didn't know exactly what I should say.

"Are you there, Graham?"

"Yes, I'm here, Ellsworth. If you send the complaint tonight I should have it early next week, and if I get any bright ideas, I'll give you a call."

"Yes, do that, will you?"

"Yes, of course."

"How is this school of yours? I still don't understand what you I're supposed to be doing over there."

"Well. it's quite interesting, but a little hard to explain."

"Well, have a good time, Graham. You can tell me all about it when you get back."

"Okay, Ellsworth. So long. Give my best to all the boys."

I sat there and looked at the telephone, feeling guilty. I tried to put my mind to work on the Warfield problem but it seemed far away. At the other end of the office, the Austrian girl clattered away on her typewriter. I looked at my watch and decided that it would disturb Freddie even more if I tried to go back into his seminar. At that point the door opened and Rasmussen came bustling in, carrying a handful of mail.

"Have you finished your call? I hope the connection was all right, a call from the States is still a pretty big deal over here, they're not really used to it down at the post office. Say, while I have you here, could I ask you to help us with a project?"

He wanted me to help organize the Bierabend, a traditional amateur night: pitchers of beer in the entrance hall and performances by the various national groups. It didn't much matter how good the shows were: they could be songs or skits or instrumental performances, whatever talents happened to appear, but the point was to find a leader for each country and to encourage each country to work up its own act, and then maybe to give a little overall supervision, to put the whole thing in order. "It doesn't have to be elaborately rehearsed, it should be as spontaneous as possible. The point is to get them all working together and having fun together, it can be the best possible icebreaker. Wou'll give us a hand, won't you?"

What could I say? "Sure, I'll do the best I can."

He dumped the pile of letters on his desk and sat down. "Great, that's great, I knew we could count on you. I think we should have it a week from Friday, because they tell me I've got to entertain another group of fat cats." He was unfolding one of the letters.

"What kind of fat cats?" I asked.

"People the home office has interested in the Academy. Foundation executives, rich people -it takes one hell of a lot of money to run this place, you know, and we're always scratching to make ends meet, one grant or another is always about to run out . . . it's really quite a struggle." He looked less ebullient suddenly. He looked tired. I felt as if I had wandered behind the scenery at a play.

"You have people like that dropping in here all the time?"

"Well, of course we don't like them just dropping in," he said. "Because that interferes with the sessions and makes the housekeeping impossible, but we try to organize the visits a little, and this time of year when people come for the Festival . . . well, it gets pretty hectic. We've got this bunch coming next week, and right after that we've got to have a reception for the local dignitaries, got to keep them happy too. . . ."
 

Preface

BOOK I
1961 - A Point of View
[1] The annual meeting of the stockholders of the Boatwright Corporation
[2] What are you going to do about Boatwright and what are you going to do about yourself?
[3] Have we learned anything this evening, Doctor?
[4] Producing results?
[5] Alexander's Feast
[6] How'd you like to go over to Salzburg for a month with me?

BOOK II
1947 - An Island
[7] You're not going to Berlin. You're staying here.
[8] All right, we're the Military Government.
[9] The Americans are teaching us to be democratic instead of fascistic.
[10] Well, this is Fasching.
[11] Letters after Ash Wednesday
[12] Say Boris is at Schloss Fyrmian.
[13] THE AMERICAN ACADEMY IN EUROPE - Prospectus for the First Session
[14] Learn to think of people as individuals.
[15] Parlez-moi d'amour, redites-moi des choses tendres.
[16] Not one thing left to show that you've ever been on earth? - "Sources of Soviet Conduct"
[17] A Countess, a Prussian Officer and a Ländler
[18] Now this part of your life is over and I'm sending you home.
[19] A father who's too busy to watch his son die. - The Spring of 1961
[20] I cannot sell Schloss Fyrmian to the Academy.

BOOK III
1961 - A Change of Air
[21] The first thing I saw was the Festung Hohensalzburg far in the distance, silhouetted against the shadowy curtain of the high mountains.
>[22] Next day at the Academy we got to work - Graham, you know what Fleischer did?
[23] Im weißen Rößl am Wolfgangsee
[24] Brockaw writing a thesis on Austrian baroque architecture? - Boatwright Corporation and Boris Fleischer, plaintiffs
[25] You know there a Mr. Devereaux? Mr. Armistead Devereaux?
[26] I think always of Peter Devereaux.
[27] It sounds like an act of desperation, and it won't hold up in court.
[28] In those Oklahoma Hills WHERE AH WAS BOW-AHHHN!
[29] ... that we should meet again like this . . . I think perhaps there is a reason.
[30] "Is there here an American by name of Brockaw?"
[31] This is Boris Fleischer!
[32] "Does Hans work for Gehlen?" Paola shook her head. "More the other way around."
[33] Won't you please come home? Everybody needs you, I most of all.
[34] With this Waffenstillstand you have time now.
[35] You're going to regret this for the rest of your life!
[36] We Europeans would not do it. None of us. - People think you need medical attention.
[37] Will they trust you?
[38] Some things about the U.S.A. are perhaps rather important, and to us impressive.
[39] You're going to need a good lawyer.