The Vanishing Intellectuals

In a few days the once great University of Jena, where Schiller and Hegel taught and Schopenhauer and Karl Marx studied, would celebrate its 400th birthday. The East German Communists were determined to make the most of the occasion. Under banner headlines last week, the Neues Deutschland carried an article urging the faculty on to greater and greater efforts in behalf of the "socialist reform" of the university. Among the signatures at the bottom was that of the university's rector, 63-year-old Josef Haemel. But on the very same page the paper carried a news item of quite a different sort. Haemel, said the story in almost unbelieving tones, "misusing the confidence put in him by the government," had fled to join "the atomic-war strategists."

His defection dealt a blow to East Germany's intellectual pretensions, but it was not unique. He was but one of 5,000 refugees who crossed into West Berlin last week, in a steady flow that has ceased to be news. The special character of the current exodus is the large number of intellectuals. Among them, in the first six months of 1958: 124 university professors and lecturers, 83 chemists, 483 physicians, 1,385 schoolteachers.

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