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While Boston newspapermen and photographers watched train, bus, and plane terminals one rainy Monday morning early this month, Fornier--Chanceller Heinrich Bruening of Germany slipped quietly into his Lowell House apartment.
An hour later two janitors steed guard at the main gate, barring reporters from the inner courtyard. Thus did the tall, bespectacled German signify his intention of avoiding what might prove embarrassing interviews.
Not to leave the press high and dry, Dr. Bruening issued a statement on the day following his arrival.
"It is with great pleasure that I have returned to Cambridge at the invitation of Harvard University," the statement read, "to give a seminar during the winter in the Department of Government, until the time when I am going to Oxford to take up my duties there as a visiting lecturer.
"I am returning to a certain extent to the life for which I was preparing myself before the war and which I exchanged for active politics. My life has now again returned to the academic sphere, but in spite of all contradictory rumors this does not mean that I am not following events closely.
"In my lectures given at different universities in this country I have not hesitated to define very pronouncedly my attitude as in opposition to any form of government which is not based on law and justice. But in all that I say and do I will nevertheless be guided by the sincere love of my country which has nothing to do with any transient form of government it may have."
Coming from the man who had, figuratively speaking, told Der Fuehrer he could go due south, the press seized on the last paragraph as "an attack on Hitler," or "a veiled thrust at Nazi Germany," and having had its little splurge abruptly dropped Dr. Bruening in favor of a four alarm fire in East Somerville and the current war on sex crimes.
Meanwhile the scholarly, Bruening merely smiled, placed another imported cigarette in his holder, and smoked in academic contentment.
Today he sits quietly in the panelled study of his Lowell House apartment waiting until such time as he will be called upon to deliver his course on "International Economic Policies." Hardly the figure of a sinister plotter, as the Goebbelu press so liken to paint him, he is a pleasant, mild mannered German, possessing just the slightest trace of an accent.
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