---
Page 2
University Daily Kansan Thursday, Jan. 11, 1962
Freedom and the Wall
Two girls, university students, walk along the still streets. It's dark. They're talking and laughing now and then as they play a children's game of hop-sketch with the shadows.
In another city, two more girls are walking along a street — a quiet street because there is a curfew. There is no laughing. The few words spoken are almost whispers. There are shadows, but no hop-sketch.
THE DIFFERENCE? Two girls are students at the University of Kansas, USA, and two are students at Humboldt University, East Berlin.
Without further explanation, we recognize immediately that between these girls there is more than distance, more than a language barrier, and more than a mere variety of professors and textbooks — there is a world. A world now separated by a wall.
If education and the zeal for knowledge is inherent, if questions are the natural outcome of studying, then would a wall really make any difference to these students? Won't people always want to learn—regardless? Or is it possible that the wall can itself change education? Can a wall rewrite histories, can it tell people the answers before they have questions—can a wall change thought?
YES, IT CAN, it does, and it did. The girls receive different educations, one curriculum slanted to the west, one to the east.
Humboldt University was once among Europe's greatest and had a history rich in the tradition of Kant, Hegel, Goethe and Leibnitz. It no longer exists as more than a grave for spirited German thinkers and philosophers. The Nazis buried it, and at the funeral buried also the mandate to free education.
Humboldt now survives as a dreary institution with about 10,000 students, many of whom have vanished into East German jails along with their
professors. Ordered to sign up for the East German army or be expelled, the students recently wrote to the Free University of West Berlin, "Help us! We do not want to shoot at you!"
Two girls walk along the streets, no laughing,
no hop-sketch.
KANSAS UNIVERSITY also has about 10,000 students. Though not as old, it is rich in vitality and spirit, the desire to accomplish. It breeds questions, nurtures competition and depends on individuality. Instead of a grave, its professors and students are resurrecting the thinking minds of history and philosophy, and creating the inventing mind of tomorrow's histories.
Two girls walk along Jayhawk Boulevard laughing.
Can students learn anywhere? Is there such a thing as academic freedom, or it is only an ambiguous ideal existing without violation?
WE TALK ABOUT THE "LIMITED, tersely selected material" available to students on the other side of the wall. We talk and complain about the fact that two girls cannot laugh as freely on one campus as on another. We talk about the restrictions of students behind the wall. But what do we do about it? Nothing.
And what can we do? We can educate ourselves more aptly and fully. We can learn that there is a difference in degrees of academic freedom, and we can learn that those differences produce two kinds of people—Communist-inspired and democratic-inspired.
WE CAN LEARN that freedom of the mind cannot be harnessed within a wall if given a chance to break the chains, and we can learn that one person, one student body, one country is enough to break the vacuum seal over the student, any student, anywhere.
Two girls walk along the street—laughing?
—Kelly Smith
Editor:
... Letters ...
Thankfully two editorials were presented relative to the Eichmann trial, for the inherent symbolism involved is presented in a narrowed short-sighted view by Mr. Koeh for the Kansan. The broader view is more closely approximated by the quoted editorial from the Milwaukee Journal. A quick review of the following few points is only an attempt to illuminate some of the many points which bear review by Mr. Koeh and must be considered to put the trial in proper perspective.
THE THEORY BEHIND the trial was definitely not "an eye for an eye" since no punishment of an individual could atone for Germany's national guilt and the heinousness of Nazism; he was tried to show that justice and retribution will be forthcoming regardless of the span of years and that the world will, though slowly, enforce justice. What type of justice or trial did the Germans or Eichmann offer for their victims to entitle them to martyrdom?
This trial was not for personal vengeance since a quiet murder in
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS by Dick Bibler
Argentina without any international implications would have served for that purpose. The difficulty of bringing Eichmann to trial in Israel in open view of the world was done to support international law — not in defiance of it — in the same manner of the Nuremberg Tribunal. Eichmann and the Nazis did their work as secretly as possible for even they knew they were doing wrong and feared public reaction.
"LOOK=IF I KNEW ALL THE RIGHT ANSWERS I WOULD NOT BE TEACHING!"
TO PREVENT OR LESSEN emotionalism — who wouldn't be stirred at hearing a recounting of the barbarous torture and slaughter of mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, children, etc. — the court was closed or brought to order upon any initiation of a disturbance. Unanimously all syndicated and private reporters remarked at the fairness and decorum of the trial despite the content of the overpowering testimony. In contrast Eichmann and the Nazis took pride in their lack of emotion.
In addition, all monies associated with the trial, for example from the news media, are being donated to charity by the Israeli government so that only good would be forthcoming from the trial.
Eichmann's sentence was to die — a just sentence and not a harsh one. Were he to live he'd be in daily fear of meeting a "Nazi type court."
ISRAEL AND THE JEWS, 17 years after the worst episode of genocide and inhuman actions the world records, have in accordance with prophecy indeed acted "as a light among nations" by acting as just and righteous men and adhering to the Law of Moses even when confronted with one of the main instruments of their possible extinction. Truly this is in keeping with the Book. Would other countries or religious groups, if in a similar situation have acted similarly? Would Catholic France, Protestant England or Southern Baptists act similarly if Hitler and the Germans decided to remove from the world all Catholics, Protestants or Baptists?
Milton Diamond Lawrence graduate student
the took world
By James E. Gunn Administrative Assistant to the Chancellor for University Relations
SLAN, by A. E. van Vogt. Ballantine, 35 cents.
NOT AVAILABLE
2 WITHOUT SORCERY, by Theodore Sturgeon. Ballantine,
35 cents.
60 cents. PASS TO OTHERNESS, by Henry Kuttner. Ballantine, 35 cents. THE LOVERS, by Philip Jose Farmer. Ballantine, 35 cents.
Ballantine Books, one of the leading publishers of science fiction in paperbacks, has brought out two classic science fiction novels and collections by two classic science fiction authors.
"Slan" burst upon the science fiction world in 1940 like a supernova. In a poll conducted by a critic almost two decades later it still was ranked as the best science fiction novel of all time, if my memory serves me right. It also is one of the few books whose titles have introduced new words into the English language. You may not find "slan" in your dictionary, but after 1940—at least in science fiction circles—a mutant superman was a "slan."
Not a great writer nor a great thinker, van Vogt is a great storyteller. He was part of the sudden eruption of science fiction talent that lit up science fiction in the late 1930s and early 1940s, an eruption that included Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, Henry Kuttner, Isaac Asimov, and a few others.
Van Vogt discovered a narrative gimmick that served him well: every scene of 600-800 words he tossed in a new idea. Often this led him into plot predicaments from which there was no way out; he is accused of leaving his conclusions as loosely wound as a kitten's ball of yarn. But the device also kept his stories driving ahead at a pace which allowed no reader to drop off.
"Slan" starts with a little boy and his mother, telepaths, being hunted down the streets of the world's capital city by its police, of the mother being brutally killed, and of the boy struggling desperately to escape the massed forces of a world. It builds up from there.
$$
** **
$$
From that period of about 1939 to 1949—to which science fiction fans look back with longing—come two collections, one by Theodore Sturgeon, "Not Without Sorcery," and the other by the late Henry Kuttner, "Bypass to Otherness."
The Sturgeon collection, as the title suggests, contains some fantasies, including the classic "It." (Science fiction, I might insert here by way of explanation, has been defined as "explained" fantasy; to science fiction fans it makes a difference.) Not as technically skillful as Sturgeon's later work, the stories nevertheless have a youthful vigor that writers seem to lose as they learn more about their craft.
Henry Kuttner, who wrote so prolifically that he used a dozen pen names, including some like "Lewis Padgett" which became more famous than his own, created some of the truly classic works of short science fiction. Often they were about children, like "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" and "When the Bough Breaks." "Bypass to Otherness" contains some more classics: "Call Him Demon," "The Piper's Son," "Absalom," and "Housing Shortage," among the eight. Ballantine promises that this may be the first of three volumes.
$$
** ** **
$$
Philip Jose Farmer belongs to that group of writers whose first published story blazed them into public awareness. That story, published in 1952 in one of the lesser magazines, was "The Lovers." The phenomenon has happened often enough in science fiction to be worth an anthology of "famous firsts."
When I read the story in 1952 I thought it, though compelling, awkwardly, almost painfully, written. Here, after almost as great misadventure as a space opera hero (including winning first prize in a publisher's contest and never being published), is the much smoother and still striking story of a rigid, theocratic society seen through the eyes of one tormented man—and how he finds an unhuman kind of love.
Here was where Farmer began to blaze his trail of sex-themes through the Victorian forest of science fiction. A little light has begun to filter through.
Daily Hansan
University of Kansas student newspaper
Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904, trivweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912
Telephone VIking 3-2700
Extension 711, news room
Facebook 276, business office
Member Inland Daily Press Association. Associated Collegiate Press. Represented by National Advertising Service, 18 East 50 St., New York 22, N.Y. News service: United Press International. Mail subscription rates: $3 a semester or $5 a year. Published in Lawrence, Kan., every afternoon during the University year except Saturdays and Sundays, University holidays and examination periods. Second class postage paid at Lawrence, Kansas.
NEWS DEPARTMENT
Tom Turner Managing Editor Linda Swander, Fred Zimmerman, Assistant Managing Editors; Kelly Smith, City Editor; Bill Sheldon, Sports Editor; Barbara Howell, Society Editor.
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
Ron Gallagher ... Editorial Editor
Bill Mullins and Carrie Merryfield, Assistant Editorial Editors.
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Tom Brown Business Manager Don Gergick, Advertising Manager; Bonnie McCullough, Circulation Manager; David Weins, National Advertising Manager. Charles Martinache, Classified Advertising Manager; Hal Smith, Promotion Manager.