Artikel über Nina Rubinsteins Disputation 1989 in Frankfurt

Nazi Refugee Returns for Ph.D. Final

[1] New York Times

By DONATELLA LORCH Published: November 27, 1989

LEAD: When Nina Rubinstein fled Nazi Germany 56 years ago, she escaped to France with few possessions except her books and the doctoral dissertation that she had just completed - on political emigres. She never had a chance to defend her thesis before faculty members or to receive a degree.

When Nina Rubinstein fled Nazi Germany 56 years ago, she escaped to France with few possessions except her books and the doctoral dissertation that she had just completed - on political emigres. She never had a chance to defend her thesis before faculty members or to receive a degree.

On Dec. 4, the 81-year-old Miss Rubinstein will return to Germany in hopes of being awarded a doctoral degree from the Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe Universitat in Frankfurt. There she must successfully defend her thesis, which she left in an apartment in Paris as she fled Hitler's invading armies in 1940. The manuscript was sent to her in New York after the war only to be buried on a shelf in her Manhattan apartment for more than 40 years.

Miss Rubinstein was offered the chance to argue for her thesis after several friends and university professors brought it to the attention of university officials in Frankfurt last year.

The thesis means little to her now, said Miss Rubinstein, a retired United Nations interpreter. But she and her supporters regard the chance to receive her degree as a symbol to all those who were denied degrees and an education in Hitler's Germany. University officials in Frankfurt said they knew of no case in which a dissertation completed before the Nazi takeover was defended after the war. Laughs in Disbelief

In the soft winter light that filtered through the azaleas and African violets on her windowsill, Miss Rubinstein's small wrinkled hands smoothed out the crumpled edges of her thesis, which she was rereading in preparation for her defense. She laughed in disbelief at how the long-neglected document would take her back to Germany to collect a degree she should have received in 1933.

Of course, I'm pleased, she said. But on the other hand I'd like to be back here already. Germany doesn't exist for me because of the Nazis.

Miss Rubinstein, who is fluent in English, German, French and Russian, worked as a Russian interpreter at the United Nations until she retired in 1968. The Ph.D. she expects to receive, she says, is an important gesture by a German university finally willing to recognize that it was wrong to deprive a student - any student - of a rightfully earned degree.

The thesis, a sociological study of the French aristocracy's exile after the 1789 revolution, mirrors Miss Rubinstein's past, her half sister, Hanna Papanek, said. Homeland 'on Wheels'

Miss Rubinstein describes herself as a permanent exile with a homeland on wheels. Her apartment is like herself: small and neat but with an inextinguishable vitality. Books in French are stacked near Russian and German works. Several portraits of Albert Einstein lean against a bookshelf, along with a series of photos of her cats, near Mexican leather cushions on a blue shag carpet.

Miss Rubinstein was born in Berlin and grew up in Denmark. The daughter of Russian Jewish exiles, she and her mother moved back to Russia in 1917, where her mother worked for the Socialist provisional government. But the family was forced to flee again in 1918, after the Bolsheviks took power, and they moved back to Berlin and then to Frankfurt.

At the university in Frankfurt, she studied sociology under the renowned professor Karl Mannheim, and her dissertation - The French emigration after 1789 - a study of the sociology of political emigration - grew out of her experience in her own community of Russian political exiles. Nazi Student Rescued Manuscript

I was supposed to defend in the spring of 1933, she recalled, patting her 247-page manuscript written in German. Karl Mannheim had accepted her thesis but he fled Germany soon after the university suspended him. And the university did not act on the dissertation, Miss Rubinstein said.

We heard that the Nazis had occupied our building and my thesis was inside, sitting on my desk, Miss Rubinstein recounted. Unable to go in herself, she asked a Nazi, a fellow student of Mannheim's, to cross the barricades and salvage her manuscript.

Fearful of persecution and with her work safely in her hands, she escaped to Paris in 1933, moving with the tightly knit group of Russian Socialist exiles. Again in 1940, with Hitler at the doors of Paris, Miss Rubinstein, a dual enemy of the Third Reich as Jewish and a Russian Socialist emigre, was forced to flee, boarding the last overcrowded train for the south of France. Everything was left behind, she said, including her unfinished dinner.

One of Miss Rubinstein's neighbors, a young French woman, packed the precious books and the thesis, hiding everything on her parents' farm and tracking down their owner in New York City after the war.

I think she was very impressed with my family, Miss Rubinstein said about the French woman. We were very poor but we had a telephone, so she'd always come by.

Miss Rubinstein's half sister, Hanna Papanek, a professor of anthropology at Boston University, unsuccessfully tried to get the work published in Germany 10 years ago. Three years ago, David Kettler, a political science professor at Trent University in Ontario, took a professional interest not only in Miss Rubinstein's life but in the manuscript's professional content. He brought it to the attention of university officials in Frankfurt last year. 'An Important Ethical Question'

David felt there was an important ethical question involved, Prof. Papanek said. This isn't a matter of atonement. It's a matter of a university recognizing that it failed in its responsibilities to its students, not just to Nina.

In Frankfurt, Miss Rubinstein will be joined by eight of her closest friends and relatives, including the French neighbor who rescued her precious library. The reunion is also part of the celebration of the school's 75th anniversary.

This has a special meaning to both Nina Rubinstein and the university, Lothar Brock, dean of the Social Science department at the university, said in a telephone interview. It is a good occasion not just to talk about these people but to have them here. Prof. Brock said that Miss Rubinstein's case was very unusual and that he did not know of any similar situations in other German universities.

In Miss Rubinstein's apartment there are few mementos of life in Germany or France. One of her most precious possessions is the enameled green Continental typewriter on which she wrote her thesis.

It's amazing what a difference of 55 years makes, Miss Rubinstein said.When you get a degree 55 years late, the whole world is aghast.