People From Berlin

"I paint people not because of what they are like... but how they happen to be."

"URGENT SUBTLE CONCISE ROBUST"

"I am only interested in painting the actual person; in doing a painting of them, not in using them to some ulterior end of art. For me, to use someone doing something not native to them would be wrong."

"When I look at a body I know it gives me choices of what to put in a painting; what will suit me and what won't. There is a distinction between fact and truth. Truth has an element of revelation about it. If something is true, it does more than strike one as merely being so."

"My colour has no symbolic function whatever. I don't want any colour to be noticeable. I want the colour to be the colour of life, so that you would notice it as being irregular if it changed. I don't want it to operate in the modernist sense as colour, something independent. I don't want people to say, "Oh, what was that red or that blue picture of yours, I've forgotten what it was.""

"I always felt that my work hadn't much to do with art; my admirations for other art had very little room to show themselves in my work because I hoped that if I concentrated enough the intensity of scrutiny alone would force life into the pictures. I ignored the fact that art, after all, derives from art. Now I realize that this is the case."

"I think half the point of painting a picture is that you don't know what will happen … that if painters did know what was going to happen they wouldn't bother to do it."

"Teaching here isn't so bad. Once you accept as one of the ineluctable laws of nature that kids will continue to say "Silas Mariner" and "Ancient Marner" and "between you and I" and "mischievious" and that the administration will continue to use phrases like "egregious conduct" and "ethnic background" you can go on from there."

"Your lesson plan is excellent — except for the Emily Dickinson line: "There is no frigate like a book." The sentiment is lovely, the quotation is apt — only trouble is the word "frigate." Just try to say it in class — and your lesson is over."

"Mythology is studied in the school system because most of us come from it."

"How can I take seriously such mimeographed absurdities as "Lateness due to absence," "High under-achiever," and "Polio consent slips"? —SylDear Syl, I'll match yours any day with "Please disregard the following." —Bea"

"If a teacher wants to know something why doesn't she look it up herself instead of making we students do it? We benefit ourselves more by listening to her, after all she's the teacher!"

"Frances Egan, the school nurse, left her nutrition charts long enough to tell me there was nothing that could have been done. "Evelyn had a rough time with her father," she said. "Once she came in beaten black and blue." "What did you do for her?" "I gave her a cup of tea." "Tea? Why tea, for heaven's sake?" "Why? Because I know all about it," she said, shaking with anger. "I know more than anyone here what goes on outside — poverty, disease, dope, degeneracy — yet I'm not supposed to give them even a band-aid. I used to plead, bang on my desk, talk myself hoarse arguing with kids, parents, welfare, administration, social agencies. Nobody really heard me. Now I give them tea. At least, that's something." "But you're a nurse," I said helplessly. She showed me the Directive from the Board posted on her wall: THE SCHOOL NURSE MAY NOT TOUCH WOUNDS, GIVE MEDICATION, REMOVE FOREIGN PARTICLES FROM THE EYE... Are we, none of us, then, allowed to touch wounds? What is the teacher's responsibility? And if it begins at all, where does it end?"

"With me they get a solid foundation, the disciplines of learning. In my class they don't get away with hot air discussions and exchanging their opinions and describing their experiences. What opinions can they have? What have they experienced? What do they know? That's an affront! They learn what I know."

"When I tried to tell McHabe that it would have been more valuable to let Ferone keep his appointment with me than to kick him out, he let me have it: "When you're in the system as long as I," he said (They all say that!) "you'll realize it isn't understanding they need. I understand them all right — they're no good.""

"A teacher is frequently the only adult in the pupil's environment who treats him with respect."

"Being a female, she spurns him on."

"Paul asks how I would have handled a love letter from a student. I don't know — by talking, maybe, by listening. I don't know. How sad that we don't hear each other — any of us. Major issues are submerged by minor ones; catastrophes by absurdities."

"Why did you fail me? I didn't do nothing!" The reply, of course, is: "That's just it."

"One of my students had written wistfully of a dream-school that would have "windows with trees in them.""

"My words never reached him; I could almost hear them drop, one by one, like so many pebbles against a closed window."

"I had used my sense of humor; I had called it proportion, perspective. But perspective is distance."

"We got this jerky sub. she don't know a thing and she's trying to teach it."

"I don't allow anyone to talk to me like that. So you're lucky — you're a teacher."

"The clerical work is par for the course. "Keep on file in numerical order" means throw in wastebasket. You'll soon learn the language. "Let it be a challenge to you" means you're stuck with it; "interpersonal relationships" is a fight between kids; "ancillary civic agencies for supportive discipline" means call the cops; "Language Arts Dept." is the English office; "literature based on child's reading level and experiential background" means that's all they've got in the Book Room; "non-academic-minded" is a delinquent; and "It has come to my attention" means you're in trouble."

"When I had asked why they were taking English, a boy said: "To help us in real life.""

"The building itself is hostile: cracked plaster, broken windows, splintered doors and carved up desks, gloomy corridors and metal stairways, dingy cafeteria (they can eat sitting down only in 20 minute shifts) and an auditorium which has no windows. It does have murals, however, depicting mute, muscular harvesters, faded and immobile under a mustard sun."

"During what was presumably my lunch period, Admiral Ass (a Mr. McHabe, who signs himself Adm. Asst.) appeared in my room with Joe Ferone. "This boy is on probation," he said. "Did he show up in homeroom this morning?" "Yes," I said. "Any trouble?" the Admiral asked. There we stood, the three of us, taking each other's measure. Ferone was watching through narrowed eyes. "No. No trouble," I said."

"The cardinal sin, strange as it may seem in an institution of learning, is talking. There are others, of course — sins, I mean, and I seem to have committed a good number. Yesterday I was playing my record of Gielgud reading Shakespeare. I had brought my own phonograph to school (no one could find the Requisition Forms for "Audio-Visual Aids" — that's the name for the school record player) and I had succeeded, I thought, in establishing a mood. I mean, I got them to be quiet, when — enter Admiral Ass, in full regalia, epaulettes quivering with indignation. He snapped his fingers for me to stop the phonograph, waited for the turntable to stop turning, and pronounced: "There will be a series of three bells rung three times indicating Emergency Shelter Drill. Playing records does not encourage the orderly evacuation of the class.""

"Like most chairmen, he teaches only one class of Seniors; the most experienced teachers are frequently promoted right out of the classroom!"

"Teachers try to make us feel lower than themselves, maybe because this is because they feel lower than outside people. One teacher told me to get out of the room and never come back, which I did."

"You teachers are all alike, dishing out crap and expecting us to swallow it and then give it back to you, nice and neat, with a place in it for the mark to go in. But you're even phonier than the others because you put on this act — being a dame you know how — and you stand there pretending that you give a damn. Who you kidding? We're dirt to you, just like you're dirt to the fatheads and whistle-blowers who run this jail, and they're dirt to the swindlers and horn-tooters who run the school system."

"In Memory of Those Who Died Waiting for the Bell"

"The ceiling fell? The ink ran dry? A student dared to smile? Of every new disaster I prove myself the master By sending out more circulars, more circulars to file! A missing kid? A kissing kid? A paper on the floor? For every major crisis One remedy suffices: More circulars, more circulars, to put into a drawer!A crowded cafeteria? A substitute's hysteria? A visitor from Syria? A missing Book Receipt?I merely send out circulars To add to other circulars To add to other circulars Numerical and neat!"

"Landau was the son of a well-to-do Berlin gynecologist (who invented the myomectomy operation)... his mother was from the banking family of Jacoby, and Landau grew up in a Jacoby house amid other Berlin banking families. ...Landau married Marrianne Erlich, daughter of Paul Ehrlich... Ehrlich had been a fellow student with Landau's father. Thus Landau grew up a well-connected and well-to-do person... he was also something of a prodigy. Legend has it that at age three, when his mother forgot her umbrella in a carriage, he replied, "It was number 354," and the umbrella was quickly reacquired. ...Landau was also something of a cynical snob."

"It is one thing to reflect, as Bieberbach did, for instance on the relative pedagogical merit of different ways to introduce π in a calculus class: geometrically via the circle, or in Landau's way via the zeroes of the cosine, with this function being defined by the power series. And it is quite a different matter to use such reflections as a basis for the forced removal of a distinguished colleague from teaching. Bieberbach's behaviour came all the more as a shock as nothing in his previous biography seemed to prepare one for it..."

"The present work is inspired by Edmund Landau's famous book, Handbuch der Lehre von der Verteilung der Primzahlen, where he posed two extremal questions on cosine polynomials and deduced various estimates on the distribution of primes using known estimates of the extremal quantities. Although since then better theoretical results are available for the error term of the prime number formula, Landau's method is still the best in finding explicit bounds. In particular, Rosser and Schonfeld used the method in their work "Approximate formulas for some functions of prime numbers"."

"The thorough analysis of even simple problems in arithmetic may require the application of advanced mathematics. A striking example is that of the distribution of prime numbers. The solution of this problem lies in finding a general formula which tells us the number of primes that lie in any given numerical interval. ...Edmond Landau ...wrote two large volumes analyzing this problem without solving it, using the most advanced mathematics known at the time. Even in the elementary aspects of mathematics we are thus dealing with complex topics which make great demands on our mathematical skills."

"Hilbert's solution of Waring's Problem was ready to be presented in the joint seminar with Minkowski in the middle of January 1909. After Minkowski's death, Hilbert presented his solution to Göttingen Academy on 6 February 1909, dedicating it to the memory of his friend, who had done so much for number theory. From then on he missed Minkowski, but carried on the seminar with Edmund Landau, Minkowski's successor. In looking for a successor to Minkowski, Klein and Hilbert looked for a young mathematician, whose achievements were still ahead of him. This requirement ruled out Adolf Hurwitz, and the final candidates were Oskar Perron and Edmund Landau. The decision was made by Klein, who said: 'Oh, Perron is such a wonderful person. Everybody loves him. Landau is very disagreeable, very difficult to get along with. But we, being such a group as we are, it is better that we have a man who is not easy'. Landau, though a worthy successor with respect to number theory... showed no interest in geometry and even less in applied mathematics, not to speak of mathematical physics. ...Hilbert knew that in executing his plans concerning physics, he could not count on Landau."

"The principal events... took place in the early months of 1933... By April the Nazis had almost total control of Germany. One of their first decrees, on April 7, was intended to bring about the dismissal of all Jews from the civil service. ...University professors were civil servants ...Of the five professors teaching mathematics at Götingen, three—Edmund Landau, Richard Courant, and Felix Bernstein—were Jewish. A fourth, Hermann Weyl, had a Jewish wife. ...the April decree did not apply to Landau or Courant, since they fell within the Hindenburg exceptions. ...It did not help that Götingen at large was rather strong for Hitler. This was true of both "town" and "gown." ...(That grand house of which Edmund Landau was so proud had been defaced with a painting of the gallows in 1931.) On April 26 the town newspaper... printed an announcement that six professors were being placed on indefinite leave. ...One holdout was Edmund Landau (the only Götingen math professor... who was a member of the town's synagogue). Relying on the integrity of the law, Landau attempted to resume calculus classes in November... but the Science Student's Council... organized a boycott. Uniformed storm troopers prevented Landau's students from entering the lecture hall. With singular courage, Landau asked the Council leader, a 20-year-old student named Oswald Teichmüller, to write out as a letter his reasons... his reasons were ideological. He... felt it improper that German students should be taught by Jews. We are accustomed to think of Nazis activists as thugs, low-lifes, opportunists and failed-artists... which, indeed, most of them were. ...they also included in their ranks some people of the highest intelligence."

"Not only the physical but also the intellectual landscape of German-language mathematics in the early 1930s would be impossible to imagine without German-Jewish mathematicians. Indeed, some fields of mathematics were completely transformed by their contributions. Number theory was transformed by Hermann Minkowski and Edmund Landau, algebra by Ernst Steinitz and Emmy Noether, set theory and general topology by Felix Hausdorff, Abraham Fraenkel and several others—to mention but a few examples."

"He possessed an enormous capacity for work - up to 12 or more hours a day. ... He worked to completely rigorous rules. We were once 'working' together in Cambridge, and started immediately after breakfast. I presently said: excuse me for a minute or two. 'Two minutes 47 seconds.' ... He was completely non-musical (as were Klein and Hardy). ... When G. H. Hardy wrote after the First World War to the effect that he had not been a fanatical anti-German, and felt confident that Landau would wish to resume former relations, Landau replied: 'As a matter of fact my opinions were much the same as yours, with trivial changes of sign.'"

"In 1933 Landau was dismissed from his [University of Göttingen] chair on the grounds of his race. An important colleague... Ludwig Bieberbach ...wrote the following lines in a treatise on Personality structure and mathematical creativity: "In this way... the ultimate reason behind the courageous rejection which the students at Göttingen University meted out to a great mathematician, Edmund Landau, was that his un-German style in research and teaching had become intolerable to German sensitivities. A people which has seen how alien desires for dominion are gnawing at its identity, how enemies of the people are working to impose their alien ways on it, must reject teachers of a type alien to it." The English mathematician Godfrey H. Hardy... responded to Bierbach... "There are many of us, many English and many Germans, who said things during the (First) War which we scarcely meant and are sorry to remember now. Anxiety for one's own position, dread of falling behind the rising torrent of folly, determination at all costs not to be outdone, may be natural if not particularly heroic excuses. Prof. Bieberbach's reputation excludes such explanation for his utterances; and I find myself driven to the more uncharitable conclusion that he really believes them true.""

"My book is written, as befits such easy material, in merciless telegram style ("Axiom," "Definition," "Theorem," "Proof," occasionally "Preliminary Remark")... I hope I have written this book in such a way that a normal student can read it in two days. And then (since he already knows the formal rules from school) he may forget its contents."

"The multiplication table will not occur in this book, not even the theorem,2 \cdot 2 = 4,but I would recommend, as an exercise, that you define2 = 1 + 1, 4 = (((1 + 1) + 1) + 1)and then prove the theorem."

"I will ask of you only the ability to read English and to think logically—no high school mathematics, and certainly no higher mathematics."

"Please don't read the preface for the teacher."

"Wir Mathematiker sind alle ein bißchen meschugge."

"Any book that revisits the foundations of analysis has to reckon with the formidable precedent of Edmund Landau's Grundlagen der Analysis (Foundations of Analysis) of 1930. Indeed, the influence of Landau's book is probably the reason that so few books since 1930 have even been attempted to include the construction of the real numbers in an introduction to analysis. On the other hand, Landau's account is virtually the last word in rigor. The only way to be more rigorous would be to rewrite Landau's proofs in computer-checkable form—which has in fact been done recently. On the other hand Landau's book is almost pathologically reader-unfriendly. ...While memories of Landau still linger, so too does fear of the real numbers. In my opinion, the problem with Landau's book is not so much the rigor (though it is excessive), but the lack of background, history, examples, and explanatory remarks. Also, the fact that he does nothing with the real numbers except construct them. In short, it could be an entirely different story if it were explained that the real numbers are interesting! That is what I have tried to do...."

"Press, Jews & Mosquitoes...are a nuisance that humanity must get rid of in some way or another. I believe the best would be gas?"