UMUC Lecturer — Berlin and Bitburg

In October 1961, the Evening Telegram reported from Munich that Lauren E. Ekroth had been assigned to the English Department of the University of Maryland, European Division, with station at Bitburg, Germany. The dateline and the description of UMUC’s Munich headquarters at McGraw Kaserne place the announcement inside the institutional machinery of post-Army university teaching across Europe. The article described the UMUC system: a two-year day college for servicemen and dependents in Munich, plus night classes across Europe, North Africa, and parts of Asia enabling students to earn degrees while still in the service. Ekroth was now one of its lecturers.

What the October 6 announcement did not mention — but a letter he published in the Evening Telegram twenty-five days later made clear — was that he had spent the six months before Bitburg in West Berlin. That timing places him in the city during the construction of the Berlin Wall on August 13, 1961, the single most dramatic event of the Cold War: the night the Soviet-backed East German government sealed the border with barbed wire and began erecting concrete barriers through the center of a divided city. In his October 31 letter, Ekroth wrote: “Six months in West Berlin was more than enough to convince me that the Soviets are not playing games.” He was twenty-six years old, a former high school drama lead and speech teacher from Superior, Wisconsin, watching the Wall go up. Bitburg, a U.S. Air Force base in the Eifel region of western Germany, was his first formally announced UMUC station — the beginning of an overseas teaching career that would carry him across four European countries and two Muslim countries before he returned to Minnesota for his doctorate.