Emigre years in Switzerland and the U.S.
Following the Nazi accession to power in 1933, Vordtriede emigrated to Switzerland, where in 1934 he was introduced to the German Jewish philosopher Edith Landmann in
Basel and through her affiliated with the
George Circle, even adopting
George's distinctive calligraphy as his own handwriting style. He matriculated at the
University of Zurich in 1934 with a major in German philology and a minor in English philology, taking courses with such noted academics as
Emil Ermatinger and Bernhard Fehr, an
Oscar Wilde specialist. Prevented from seeking employment by the terms of his student visa, he managed to keep his head above water by working part-time as a private tutor and writing articles and book reviews for the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung under various pseudonyms (Werner Salasin, Werner Stoutz, and r. e.). Thanks to a travel stipend, he was able to spend the summer of 1937 in
Cambridge, England. Finding the situation in Switzerland increasingly untenable, he chose to emigrate to the U.S. in 1938. At pains to conceal both his homosexual orientation and his Jewish ancestry on his mother's side, he maintained that he had been driven into exile on political grounds. Vortriede's passage to New York aboard the luxury liner
SS Nieuw Amsterdam was paid for by the English author
Robert Hichens, and he was subsequently supported by grants from the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom, personally meeting with its general secretary,
Prince Hubertus zu Löwenstein, in 1943. He enrolled at the
University of Cincinnati, where he was employed as a teaching assistant and earned a master's degree in 1939 with a thesis entitled "
Hölderlins Spätstil als Mittel zur Deutung seines Weltbilds". On a summer jaunt to Europe, he was caught off-guard by the outbreak of
World War II and, as a German passport holder, interned as an
enemy alien in France. A few months later he was able to return to the U.S. In New York City he became acquainted with the poets
W. H. Auden and
Chester Kallman,
Saint-John Perse, the author
Richard Beer-Hofmann, and the sociologist Christiane Hofmannsthal-Zimmer (the daughter of poet
Hugo von Hofmannsthal) as well as the emigre
Klaus Mann. The poet
Robert Duncan was his lover in
Woodstock, New York, where he briefly owned a house (alluded to in the multivalent title of his 1975 memoir
Das verlassene Haus, "The Abandoned House"). He was a teaching fellow at
Rutgers University and in 1941 was reunited in New York City with his mother, who also emigrated from Germany. He taught briefly at
Central Michigan College before he and his mother moved to
Evanston when he enrolled at
Northwestern University for doctoral study with a major in French literature and a minor in German literature. There he worked as a teaching assistant and completed the Ph.D. in 1945 with a dissertation on "The Conception of the Poet in the Works of
Stéphane Mallarmé and Stefan George". He was immediately hired at the rank of instructor by
Princeton University, where he taught German for two years, and in 1946 he was naturalized as a
U.S. citizen. At this time he became acquainted with the literary scholar
Erich von Kahler and the writer
Hermann Broch. His sister Fränze arrived in the U.S. in 1947, initially residing in
Philadelphia. Vordtriede was recruited by the University of Wisconsin as an assistant professor in 1947, and he also taught at the
Middlebury German Summer School in 1948. He was described by one colleague as a popular teacher "who brought animation to the classroom", for example "by acting out in class the role of the village girl who dreamed of marrying a count" in
Gottfried Keller's
novella "Kleider machen Leute". He chose to go on personal leave for the academic year 1952–53 to bolster his academic track record by publishing numerous book reviews and articles, especially in the pages of the Wisconsin German Department's house journal
Monatshefte. Although he did not yet have a book publication, he was duly promoted to an associate professorship with tenure at the University of Wisconsin in 1954. He now served as a dissertation director for the first time, supervising Roland Hoermann's 1957 thesis on
Achim von Arnim's symbolism, and he was awarded a
Guggenheim Fellowship in 1957. Beginning in the late 1950s, he made frequent trips to Europe, also visiting his former home in Freiburg. In Madison, he resided in the modest digs of the bachelor faculty housing on the top floor of the University Club. Following his promotion to a full professorship in 1959, still without a book publication, he supervised the doctoral dissertations of Don Travis (on
Stefan Andres, 1960), Henry Geitz (on
Franz Grillparzer, 1961), and Philip Glander (on
Varnhagen von Ense, 1961) before surprising his colleagues by announcing at a departmental meeting his decision to resign from the University of Wisconsin after fourteen years and to relocate to Germany, where he intended to break with the academy and become a freelance author. ==Return to Germany==