Letters, Aug. 17, 1931

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Curtius & Kin

Sirs:

May I call your attention to remarkable statements regarding Dr. Julius Curtius, German Foreign Minister, to which I cannot be reconciled.

In your issue of June 15, you mention Husband Curtius as "a family man, devoted to his small children." Yet, in TIME, July 27 issue, I am amazed to find that 'German Foreign Minister Curtius had something real to smile about. Word had just reached him that he was a grandfather."

In congratulating Dr. Curtius, I cannot help but marvel at his children's unusually fast growth. My probable reason for noticing this error (if error it be) is that I was very much amused at your first description of family man Curtius and his bachelor friend. Brüning. Though a "bungler" and lacking genius, you must admit that Husband Curtius is no ordinary man, according to the above statements.

EDWIN A. HALL JR.

Binghampton, N. Y.

Husband-Father-Grandfather Curtius has six children: Barbara, 23, who married Hans Bernd von Maesten and whose son, Johan, was born July 19; Klaus, 25; Wolfgang, 20; Verena, 18; Dorothea, 16; Christel, 7.—ED.

Wisconsin's Nardin

Sirs:

The rightly admired brevity of Tune, for once, might have been profitably stretched a trifle in the characterization in your issue of July 20 of "Frances Louise Nardin, dismissed dean of women at the University of Wisconsin, as "the 53-year-old, unmarried dean.'1 I am sure that "understanding, sympathetic, hard-fighting" are descriptive terms which the great majority of the thousands of women students who have come in contact with Dr. Nardin in her 1,5 years' work at the university would have liked to have seen added, especially because they would have precluded any chance of an erroneous view which a too-ardent Freudian might have gotten "with half an eye."

As a reader I appreciate the news judgment of your magazine in grasping the importance and general interest of the fact that Dean Nardin was notified that her name was not included in the budget for the next fiscal year at the university. Disciplinary power at Wisconsin University now will rest with a committee on which the Dean of Women and the Dean of Men have no vote. Too few realize the enormous task faced by a dean of women in these days, standing as she does in the center of a dramatic clash between the "new liberalism" and standards of conduct which parents who trustfully send their immature and eagerly searching sons and daughters to the university believe to be beyond any challenge. . . .