Prosit

When the G.I.s took over Germany, they closed Heidelberg, Germany's oldest and most famed university. It was a sorry parody of itself--and had been for ten years. When, in 1936, educators from 32 nations went to Germany to pay their respects on Heidelberg's 550th birthday, they found themselves officiating at a wake. The Student Prince atmosphere of Heidelberg, the beer mugs, the sabers and the sashes were gone. SS uniforms and swastika flags had displaced them.

In silence the assembly listened as a Heidelberg professor, Nazi Ernst Krieck, shouted: "We do not recognize or know truth for truth's sake or science for science's sake." Some recalled a letter which had once beckoned Spinoza to his chair at Heidelberg, it read: "You will have the utmost freedom of philosophizing."

Last week, after a thorough housecleaning by the U.S., Heidelberg reopened. The new rector, a professor of surgery before the war, 55-year-old Karl Heinrich Bauer, told his audience of German students and U.S. generals: "Without tolerance there is no democracy, and without democracy no German future."

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