The name Harry J. Marks will not be familiar to most scholars of modern central European history. Marks (1909–1988), a Jewish-American historian of German social democracy, published little in the way of monographic books and articles. He left behind, however, a trove of letters and personal documents that charted a life of intellectual and political encounters, including witnessing firsthand the Nazi consolidation of power, brief membership in the American communist party in the mid-1930s, and testimony as a friendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1953. Marks's daughter, the literature scholar Carol Sicherman, draws on this source (archived at Thomas J. Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut) to situate his life in the turbulent currents of the Jewish-American-German experience from the 1930s to the 1950s.

Marks was born in New York City to a striving middle-class family of East Prussian descent. He was the valedictorian of his graduating class at the Fieldston school and was admitted to Harvard University in 1927 at a time when Jews were unwelcome and administrators fretted over the institution's “Jewish problem.” Drawn to modern German history, specifically that of the SPD, Marks spent the summer of 1931 studying German in Heidelberg. He returned to enroll at the Humboldt Universität a year later, easing into a cultured circle of assimilated middle-class professionals, students, and academics and attending lectures by Friedrich Meinecke, Werner Sombart, Hermann Oncken, Dietrich Gerhard, and Hajo Holborn. Along with Gerhard, Gustav Mayer became Marks's most important intellectual influence, encouraging the young American to delve more deeply into the contemporary history of the SPD.

Beyond a close circle of friends, he kept to himself and avoided most other students, particularly the growing numbers drawn to the Nazis. Studious and self-involved, he soon became more attuned to the political turbulence swirling around him. His views of the events following Hitler's appointment as chancellor reflected that of many educated, liberal, middle-class Germans: that the country had been duped and bullied by “barbarians” who did not represent “the true Germany.” By that point confident in his ability to pass as a German citizen, he traveled about the region, witnessing the boycott of Jewish businesses in Weimar, yet nonetheless capable of feeling “a sympathy for the right wing which I lacked before” after conversing with locals at an inn in the Harz Mountains.

Marks became a sympathetic listener and part-time English tutor as his friends lost their jobs and prepared to emigrate. There was little more he could do, though he did promise his friend Ernest Engelberg—by then a devoted KPD activist—that he would “try to spread the lesson of the German development” in the United States. His friendship with Engelberg and a brief acquaintance with Karl Kautsky drew him further to the left. In September 1933 he departed Berlin to resume his studies at Harvard. The remainder of the book is devoted to Marks's engagement with, and disengagement from, communism. In 1934, he gravitated to the CPUSA via various party-related student leagues. He conducted weekly study groups on Marxism-Leninism at Harvard University and MIT and participated in peace demonstrations and protests against the warship Karlsruhe's docking in Boston harbor and Ernst Hanfstaengel's visit to Harvard.

Unfortunately, Marks's most elaborate commentary regarding his attraction to communism came in his self-serving and obsequious HUAC testimony. To the HUAC subcommittee, he claimed to have joined out of idealism fueled by his experiences in Germany. Sicherman concludes that while her father was not an activist intellectual by temperament, he was inspired by Engelberg's example and, once back in Boston, by the commitment of fellow students, including Sarah (“Bunny”) Frager, to whom he would propose marriage as she sat in jail following her arrest at a demonstration against the Karlsruhe. Once married and struggling to complete a massive dissertation on German social democracy, however, Marks detached himself from the party. The reasons seem to be more personal than ideological or political (his father had learned of his membership by accident). His recent experiences in Germany, his own leftward gravitation, and not least his relationship to Harvard in the mid-1930s, where the administration of James Conant was bending over backward to accommodate visiting Nazi dignitaries and dispatching representatives to Germany to celebrate the Nazi spirit in science, seems not to have influenced his analysis of the SPD in his dissertation, which remained unpublished.

Despite strong letters of support from William Langer and other scholars, Marks could not find a university teaching position until 1946, when he began teaching at the University of Connecticut. His communist past caught up with him within a few years. In March 1953, the university's board of trustees declared that the institution would not hire or employ communists and would fire anyone who refused to cooperate in investigations of “subversive activities.” When asked to serve on a university committee created to smoke out “subversives,” Marks informed the provost about his own past. Abandoning whatever civil courage he possessed, he denounced his colleague Emanuel Margolis as a communist to university officials following an argument over the Korean War and Stalin's antisemitism. Shortly thereafter, Marks received a summons to appear before the HUAC in Washington. He did so, claiming now to be an ardent anticommunist while praising the committee's work and naming names, albeit selectively.

Why did Marks cooperate? To the HUAC, Marks claimed to be motivated by anticommunism. More pressing was the threat of losing his job. Sicherman succeeds in maintaining critical distance from her subject and contextualizing, if unevenly, the intellectual and political trajectory of her father's life (his responses to World War II are not discussed). She deals forthrightly with her father's compromises, though I found her insistence that he did not give the HUAC any names its investigators did not already have to be rather beside the point. Her book is not simply parochial family history and should be of interest to students and scholars of the specter and reality of political oppression in academic culture.