Max Ufer

I have received a book in pristine condition.  Why should that trigger a blog post? Because the book comes to me through the inter-library loan service of the Minneapolis Hennepin County Library - the loan is extended by the Wilson Library of the University of Minnesota.

The book is Ernst Klee's 2001 Deutsche Medizin im Dritten Reich.

The better school districts in Minneapolis teach German, if only at the high school.  Like America in general, this area is ethnically German. In the years after the Civil War, disease in Memphis drove the inhabitants of Germantown as far up the Mississippi River as one could then travel: to the St Anthony falls.

The book is pristine, untouched. The bookmark ribbon was folded double across a small inner signature: it is otherwise also pristine.  How could such a book stand untouched at a university with a Holocaust document center?

The book lacks a subject index, but has an index of persons. It opens with a photo and a quote from the closing chapter on Max Ufer and the Max Planck Society.

Here is a PDF on The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute under the Third Reich.

Many years have passed since I stood before the photos at the Dachau memorial: somehow one photo in the Ernst Klee volume seems now to burn in my memory: the ulcerated face of a child.

Ordinarily I would have posted this under my blog on the quaint tourist town of Marburg.  It is not, after all, the first time that I have found a book surprisingly pristine - or with uncut pages - in a university library. But not a book such as this.

German remains one of the languages of science at a great university such as that of Minnesota.  Surely there is a simple explanation.

The book has no review at Google books.


Here is the amazon link for this book.

Here is the Ernst Klee author link at amazon.