Recollections of Rudolph Binion

Robert Aldrich: A Pioneer of Psychohistory and Cultural History

Those of us who knew Rudolph Binion will remember his teaching, his scholarship, and his friendship. I met him when I was a first-year graduate student at Brandeis University in 1975, and he supervised my doctoral thesis. I did not follow his path into psychohistory but wrote on French regional history. As a young student, like those hundred others whose theses he supervised, I was struck and initially intimidated by his extraordinary intellect, but soon heartened by the kind and encouraging attention he gave to all. His enthusiasm for sharing knowledge—whether lecturing on a text of intellectual history that he knew by heart, testing a new idea for his own work, or engaging with a student’s novice research—made him an exceptional teacher. He gave us graduate students a feeling of a teaching reaching back to his own mentors, Jacques Barzun at Columbia and Louis Chevalier at Sciences Po in Paris, and reaching out to the “universal company of scholars.”

As a scholar, Binion’s contribution was enormous. One of the first to respond to calls for the systematic integration of psychological theory into historical writing, he became a pioneer of psychohistory and he showed a great capacity to grow and innovate within this field. Not all of his techniques and arguments won consensus amongst colleagues, but all respected the depth of his research and the originality of his interpretations.

In a brief tribute, it is impossible to sum up Binion’s scholarship, but After Christianity seems emblematic of his work (and remains one of my favorites of his books). Here, Binion took a major theme in the new social and intellectual history, the secularization and de-Christianization of Europe, and mapped three central examples of the transmutation of Christian beliefs in the post Christian world: notions of the last judgment, original sin, and absolute truth. Here was Binion at his best, grappling with large issues, displaying the long view of history, and writing on the cusp of the new cultural history. Cultural studies was a field that perhaps never claimed him, though he was one of its leaders avant la lettre—reading the classics against the grain, interrogating texts, identifying transnational connections, and using an interdisciplinary

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method.

Rudy, teacher and scholar, was also a dear friend. It was a pleasure to see him in Boston, Paris, and on two occasions in Sydney. In one visit, he gave his brilliant analysis of Romanticism as a conference paper, and in another he offered his striking insights into the Black Death as a keynote conference address. While he was here, we discussed ideas on two seminal French political figures that became, in these pages, “De Gaulle as Pétain,” and I tried out thoughts that eventually turned into my books. In between, we went for walks along the Sydney Harbour foreshore, and with Eléna had a trip to Queensland, where they enjoyed the beautiful scenery of Australia’s tropical north.

Rudy performed many acts of kindness for students and friends through his long career, and his influence remains. Not only will I continue to reread his writings with pleasure and receive from them great insight, but each time that I write something myself I will visualize his handwriting in the margin exhorting me to clarity of thought and clarity of prose.

David Beisel: Appreciating Rudy

I’d heard about Rudolph Binion long before I met him. Back in the mid-1960s, a colleague of mine (we were both young graduate students in our first full-time college teaching positions) was a PhD candidate of Rudy’s in European intellectual history at Columbia. My friend would occasionally share a lively story about his mentor’s brilliance. When Rudy moved on to Brandeis University, my friend, through Rudy’s generosity, was able to finish his degree at Columbia.

I finally met Rudy face to face at an American Historical Association Convention in New York City. It was sometime around 1969 or ’70. He was presenting a paper in an early panel on psychohistory (in the days when the American Historical Association still welcomed psychohistory panels). He offered his audience

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some new ideas centered on the “dual path” in Hitler’s unconscious contract with the German people. It was based on his then fledgling notions about adult trauma and adult traumatic reliving which he’d begun to explore in his psychobiography of Frau Lou. I remember asking him after the presentation, “How do you do this work?” He replied, “You just immerse yourself in the documents and wait for the psychological insights to emerge.”

My next encounter with Rudy’s ideas was through a series of pieces published in early issues of The Journal of Psychohistory that led to his provocative study Hitler among the Germans (1976), which I still use as required reading in my advanced psychohistory course. I was also powerfully influenced by several essays he published later in his collection, Soundings: Psychohistorical and Psych literary (1981).

There followed some personal interactions at summer workshops of the Institute for Psychohistory, but I really began to get to know Rudy during an automobile ride to and from the first all psychohistory conference held at Stockton State College in October 1978. Lloyd de Mause did the driving. I sat in the back seat. On the long drive down and back, I witnessed a lively debate between two friends, Lloyd blaming everything in history on the evolution of childhood, Rudy arguing for adult traumatic reliving, both occasionally asking, “What do you think, Dave?” with me trying to sort it all out.

Like so many others, I admired Rudy’s scholarship: his extraordinary grasp of historical facts and interpretations, literature, art, film, and intellectual history, as well as his mastery of languages, but I grew to admire most his remarkable generosity and commitment to his profession. Early on, unsure of my own footing as a potential psychohistorian, Rudy encouraged me to submit something I’d written even though I was convinced the editor I had in mind wasn’t interested in the piece. “You might be misreading him,” he told me on a drive from LaGuardia to Manhattan. “Submit it anyway.” He was right. It broke the ice and started me on the interdisciplinary road I’ve been pursuing ever since.

Over the years, we became good friends. He invited me to visit him in Massachusetts, arranged for me to speak at Brandeis, and was interested in offering a prompt critique of any writing I

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wished to send him. We disagreed on many things, but always with good humor and respect for each other. I cannot recall all the many, many times I ran into people in the historical profession who sooner or later mentioned that Rudy had taken the time to look at their book-length manuscript, had made telling comments, and had improved their work. It seems to run into the hundreds. Yet he never boasted about any of it: he just went about his business with a quiet dignity and a genuine desire to help.

Thanks to the initiative of Paul Elovitz, we were able in the past few years to do some psychohistory panels together in New York and Paris. I was happy to participate in two or three symposia on Rudy’s work in Clio’s Psyche. In the last decade, my wife, Sheila, and I got to know his wonderful wife Eléna. We continued to marvel at the depth and breadth of his scholarship and continued to admire his persistence in maintaining the highest scholarly and intellectual standards. Not long ago I was pleased to be able to dedicate a paper to Rudy as a token of thanks for all he’d done for me and for so many others.

We talked for the last time in a long phone conversation just a few days before his death. He told me he was exhausted, that all he could do was move a single finger, and that he was heading home to hospice care in a couple of days. Despite it all, he said with a twinkle in his voice and I’m sure with a twinkle in his eye that if I’d written anything recently I should send it along to him! I’m sure he would have given it his best effort. My life, like that of so many others, is dimmed by his passing.

Mary Coleman: One of a Kind

Immense and wide-ranging intellectual pleasure is what I associate with Rudy Binion. An evening with him would be a lively discussion and argument on an incredibly large range of topics of which he had great depths of relevant information at his fingertips.

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He was a clear thinker and an elegant writer. His concepts of traumatic reliving by groups inform my political thinking to this day.

His enormous generosity in helping other scholars was matched by his brilliance. He was one of a kind.

Samuel K. Cohn: Passionate Outlier

I met Rudy at the beginning of my first year teaching at Brandeis in the fall of 1979. It was not the spring before at my interview, as he was fond of reminding me: “Had I been there you never would have got the job.” As marginals and outliers, Rudy and I became allies in the department, and perhaps because of this, he read a draft of my first book written at Brandeis, Death and Property in Siena, 1205-1800: Strategies for the Afterlife. Unbeknownst to me, one of the book’s central theses was “relived trauma”: the double reaction to the Black Death—the second strike of 1363, not the big one of 1348, which triggered a long-term shift in mentality across social classes in Siena and later, I discovered, across many regions of Europe.

From then on, Rudy neatly and at great pains set his angry red pen against every book manuscript that I drafted (barring my last, when compassion persuaded me to let him off the hook). Though at first I was startled by all the red and the objections he raised, I soon welcomed them. The direction of our intellectual exchange was certainly uneven, but not one-way. Rudy would bark his commands: “Find this” and “What about that?” On moving to Cambridge, my soon-to-be wife was alarmed one midnight when a Brooklyn accent crackled down the line (I was away at a conference). The day before I’d told Rudy about notes I’d taken on a source. At midnight, he felt the urge to consult them, and to this woman he’d never met came his demands: “I need it; I need it; I need it!” (The “it” referred to my notes.)

My last e-mail to Rudy on Friday May 13, 2011, when I

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knew he was on his last legs, held a confession: “You have influenced me more than anyone intellectually. Of course, given the product, this might make you feel less well.” (The first version read “might kill you,” but, given the realities, I edited it.) Rudy was wont to complain that he was never cozy at home in any field, but rather raced from one to another: antiquity to heavy metal, calculations of French fertility to literary criticism, art history, and much more. It is this model of scholarship that has inspired my hopscotching from one period to the next and across disciplines, leading to deep academic insecurity.

I have been away physically from Brandeis and Rudy since 1993 (officially, 1995); yet when I lecture and write, Rudy’s cut to the-quick remarks and style regularly ring in my ears. These messages will live on with many of us and through his writings will instruct and inspire many now unknown others, long after we’ve left the scene.

Jay Y. Gonen: An Insufficiently Recognized Scholar

Rudy was a dear friend. He was affectionate, humorous, and generous to a fault with his time and energy. Therefore his company was usually not only great fun but also presented a challenge because of his habit of questioning other persons’ thoughts in addition to his own. He thus influenced me not so much by the force of his personality as by the force of his ideas.

His book Hitler among the Germans was so titled in order to set the focus on the relationship between the individual and the group. For me this work served as a prime illustration of the validity of Freud’s famous assertion in the first paragraph of his book on group psychology that from the very first, individual psychology is at the same time group psychology as well. What is more, Rudy’s

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emphasis on the reliving of traumas on both the individual and group levels struck a responsive chord in my heart. We developed a particular interest in each other’s thoughts. Looking at German history I saw plenty of trauma underlying the German aggressive behaviors and looking at Jewish history he saw lots of current aggression springing out of historical trauma. Consequently toward the end of his life he planned to write a book on Israeli aggression fostered by the Holocaust but, sensing perhaps that his life was growing short, he switched plans and wrote instead a summation of his studies on the compulsion to relive traumas.

I was sometimes disappointed by the fact that he did not receive more recognition than he actually did. He certainly deserved more of it if only for his multidisciplinary erudition. He shocked me in being more knowledgeable than me with Plato and Aristotle even though I studied them in college. And his book Sounding the Classics, which treats the issue of what makes a literary work a classic, should by itself be a recognized classic in the field of literary criticism. I have recently written my own literary criticism manuscript, which I planned to dedicate to my school teacher and literary critic, Baruch Kurzweil. Since Rudy made generous editorial contributions to this work I am now going to dedicate it to both of them upon publication.

Amy Hackett: Observing a Binion Eureka Moment

As a first-year graduate student in Rudy Binion’s seminar at Columbia in 1964-1965, I came the closest I’ll likely ever come to observing a “eureka” moment. The occasion was a student paper on Belgian neutrality submitted by Walter Barge (died 2009 after a career of teaching history), who was at Columbia as a U.S. Army officer. Walter had written his paper from the perspective of military-diplomatic history, but had included biographical information on Leopold III, including the automobile accident in which the king

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was at the wheel when his wife, Queen Astrid, was killed. Rudy described the particulars of his dilemma and his intellectual breakthrough in “My Life with Frau Lou,” in the anthology The Historian’s Workshop (1970).

What I primarily want to recall here was the moment when Rudy strode into the seminar, a gleam in his eye, and—as if it were the very moment of insight or revelation—rolled out the psychological connections between that auto accident and high diplomatic history. In addition to his sheer brilliance, and an omnivorous mind that encompassed and saw the psychological underpinnings of art history, literature, films, and demography, in addition to the usual stuff of history, it was that sense of almost naïve enthusiasm that, to me, characterized his scholarship: a gleam in his eye.

Patricia Herlihy: A True Friend

Hospitality, humor, wit, and whimsy are some of the qualities of Rudy Binion I recall during my long friendship with him. In 1973 when my late husband David and I first arrived in the Boston area, the Binions were the first to invite us to dinner. A mutual friend had told Rudy of our moving from Wisconsin to Cambridge. Over the years the Binions and the Herlihys spent many pleasant days at the beach and evenings playing games with our young children. In Italy, as in Massachusetts, we had heated discussions about politics, art, and literature lingering over several glasses of wine. Rudy was always engagé and engaging—I treasured Rudy’s friendship.

While he deeply enjoyed life, he also endured serious illnesses with an admirable stoicism. I salute my departed friend in

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sorrow and with affection.

Paul F. Jankowski: Rudy the Man and the Lasting Gift of His Friendship

I knew Rudy Binion well. I knew the man of letters, whose erudition and originality opened a new domain of psycho-cultural history and yielded creations that will outlive all of us. I knew the man of words, who delighted in language, read his colleagues’ and students’ drafts with undisguised interest and attention, and unfailingly improved them. I knew the man of the classroom, who inspired and helped his students and those of others until the very last weeks of his life. And I knew the man, who gave to some of us the lasting gift of his friendship.

Brett Kahr: A Wonderful Conversationalist

When in 1983 or 1984 I had Rudy Binion lecture at the University of Oxford in a public lecture series on psychoanalysis, he kept the audience enthralled, speaking without notes about his work on Lou Andreas-Salomé and Adolf Hitler. We formed a deep link based on our mutual academic interests. Although he had already established himself as a senior professional and I had only just begun to enter the field, he treated me as an equal colleague and he offered immense practical encouragement to me over many years.

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Since Rudy traveled to Europe frequently as part of his many research trips to endless Continental archives, we usually met in London and always had enjoyable meals together. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, we would meet at least once yearly, and I came to know Rudy increasingly well. He was an extraordinary conversationalist, always proving to be the most engaging and captivating of interlocutors: he seemed to know everything about everything and to have read every book in its original language. He had absorbed everything he read with profundity, wearing his erudition very lightly. I never ever had a sense of Rudy boasting about his scholarly achievements and, unlike many others, he had a huge capacity to have a mutual conversation.

With remarkable fluency, Rudy spoke French, German, Italian, and probably several other languages, allowing him to become a citizen of the world. Consequently, he exuded a sense of camaraderie transcending national and international borders in his personal and professional relationships. Not only did Rudy delight us all with his wonderful conversational skills and lingual abilities, but he could also be extremely funny, and he never failed to make me laugh. He had the rare capacity to be funny without offending anyone else in the process.

When the Atlantic Ocean kept us from meeting directly, Binion never failed to send many postcards as well as letters. Knowing of my interest in the history of parent-infant interactions over the centuries, he always sent me a postcard of a rare painting, usually Medieval or Renaissance, from a tiny museum from some remote corner of, for example, Bavaria, which I had never seen before. Thanks to Rudy, I now have a collection of several hundred obscure photographs which document the way in which the Winnicottian “holding” and “handling” of babies by their mothers has improved across six centuries. Rudy’s thoughtfulness in remembering this particular research interest of mine touched me greatly.

Fortunately, Rudy did have the pleasure of seeing his last book, Traumatic Reliving, appear in print earlier this year from Karnac Books of London. I feel quite pleased to have introduced Rudy to Oliver Rathbone, the publisher of Karnac Books, who immediately saw the genius of Rudy’s study of “traumatic reliving,” and who offered to publish it on the spot.

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Wallace Katz: My Friend Rudy

Rudy Binion was one of the most engaging men I have ever known. The secret of his charm was his innocent love of life, culture, and friendship. Though his critical faculties were in sharp relief in his scholarly work, he had a great deal of common sense and was often the person to whom one turned for practical advice about career and family, as well as advice about books, one’s own work, or almost any aspect of humanistic interest. He was a devoted friend who never failed to answer an e-mail, who was always there with a kind remark, and upon whom one could rely in time of need.

I wrote my master’s essay with Rudy when he was at Columbia in the early 1960s. He was my teacher as well as my friend. When I taught at Wesleyan, he lectured about Leopold III and acted as the outside reader of my tutees’ exams. We spent time together in Paris—walking, eating, talking.

I remember Rudy most as a conversationalist. Though I believe we agreed about the larger things, we disagreed ad infinitum about smaller things: were movies collective events or dominated by individual directors; historiography only concerned itself with how things happened and not why things happened; Paris was despoiled by La Defense; who was the better teacher, Jacques Barzun or Lionel Trilling.

For various reasons, probably because our lives followed different paths—I left academia and worked in government—I lost track of Rudy for many years. About five years ago we got back in touch and Rudy invited me to Brookline and we made plans to go to Cape Cod to be near the beach and swim. Even after some 30 years, we were still the same good friends. Rudy’s conversation was as fluent, learned, and brilliant as ever. He greeted me as if I had just stepped around the corner a few hours before to buy some groceries. We talked about our work: I had begun writing a historici-

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cized autobiography; he had just finished Traumatic Reliving. He showed me some of the stories and poems that had “popped out of his head” like magic. We both marveled over Eléna’s cooking.

I never expected Rudy to die such an untimely death; I thought he would live way into his nineties or past 100. Just a few years ago, he was as hardy as a boy. In many ways he never stopped being a boy—as intellectually curious, as avid for experience, as full of high spirits, and as quietly mischievous as a boy in his early teens. He was a great spirit, whose youth and light will survive his passing.

Stephen Kern: Scholar, Teacher, Friend

My friendship with Rudy began one glorious fall day in 1964 at the Columbia University sundial, when, after his seminar on European intellectual history, we co-analyzed Rousseau—I supplied the biography, he, the psychoanalytic theory. Over the decades, our friendship developed at increasingly warm meetings from Chicago to Paris. He inspired me as a teacher, friend, and scholar.

He pulled me through my dissertation on Freud and then continued to read my manuscripts, while I in turn read his. Reading the manuscript of Hitler among the Germans in the third-floor study of his home in Brookline, I began to separate myself from Rudy’s towering influence by marking whatever I did not understand. For example, I urged him not to use the word “irrecusable” because no one would know what it meant. Rudy insisted that it was the right word—which it was. He searched for the right word as diligently as did Flaubert and would not give it up for any reason once he found it. His language was unusual and precise, a delightful mixture of scholarly rigor and playful street talk.

An early memory of our friendship is of a march in 1965 from Central Park to the United Nations Building to protest the war in Vietnam. Most protestors were in jeans, but he was in a suit and tie. When it started to pour, most participants ducked into shops,

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but he fixed his powerful jaw and said, “I came here to march to the

U.N. building, and I’m not going to let a little rain stop me.” So we slogged on together, his shoes squishing with every step. I was proud to be studying under someone with such determination and moral integrity, as well as scholarly achievement.

Our friendship blossomed after my student apprenticeship years. When I wondered why I was spending thousands of hours researching books, I thought of his regular ten hour days as I remember them from one summer together in Brookline: at work early every morning, lunch at 1:00, dinner at 7:15, then a couple more hours after dinner until a beer around 10:00. How lovely those cold beers were at the end of hot summer days. How he worked me without knowing it, because I was too ashamed to knock off early, and so pushed on, knowing that he was in his study hammering away. His scholarship was magnificent, written with exemplary concision and endlessly inventive phrasings.

The empty skies he refers to in his poem called “Bach”—his favorite—well describe the sense I have of a scholarly world without Rudy Binion. His work inspired me as a monument to what is possible at the highest levels—prodigious research, penetrating thought, delightful imagination, and elegant writing. Personally, I will miss most his abundant warmth, sharp wit, deep humanity, and love of life.

David Lewis-Hodgson: A Generous and Superb Scholar

I first became aware of Rudy’s work and ideas some 30 years before we eventually met, through his articles in the History of Childhood Quarterly: The Journal of Psychohistory, on which he was a contributing editor. Later in the 1970s, while studying the

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psychology of the Third Reich, I read his excellent and meticulously researched book Hitler among the Germans (1976).

When in 2000 I was researching my biography of Dr. Edmund Forster, the neurologist who treated Hitler (most likely for hysterical blindness) in 1918, I approached Rudy, out of the blue, to request his assistance. Not only did he willingly make his extensive research archive available to me, but his kindness even extended to inviting me to stay at his apartment while reviewing the material. It was an act typical of Rudy: warm-hearted generosity, an aspect of his personality I came to appreciate ever more strongly in the years that followed our first meeting.

Rudy was an exceptional individual who was fortunate enough to find in his wife Eléna a kindred spirit and devoted companion. He was a superb scholar, an outstanding historian, and a true friend. My world—our world—is all the poorer for his passing.

Jennifer MacDonald: History, Acting, and Tomatoes

Despite having seen Professor Binion in the hospital shortly before his death, it still came as a shock—not least because he was someone that I felt probably would live forever. Such was the immensity of his person. It is no easy task to put to pen my thoughts and feelings for someone who holds a special place in my mind and heart: he was both a good friend and a supportive, ever patient, mentor. I will miss him dearly.

I am grateful to Professor Binion for introducing me to psychohistory. Though I have yet to complete my dissertation, it will benefit from the insights of psychology. He willingly considered all my theories and worked with me to better understand what I saw. You couldn’t ask for more in a supervisor. All who knew him would also agree that he wielded his red pen with finesse, fairness, and a sharp critical eye.

As his former teaching assistant, I will always regret his un-

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willingness to record his “Thought and Culture” classes: they were an intellectual treat to every student in the room whether or not they realized it at the time. Not only did Professor Binion have high expectations and demand much of his students, he was exceedingly generous with his time and ever willing to help out any student in need. Indeed, his generosity towards his graduate students extended well beyond the campus to countless dinners, social gatherings at his own home (even more after meeting Éléna!), and a happy willingness to attend social gatherings organized by his students.

While I have many memories of him, I would like to share two. The first is of a party hosted by his graduate students in honor of his 70^th birthday: I was one of five students together with his friend Alvin who performed a play he had written some years earlier. He supervised the rehearsals and “worked with us” until we got it right. The play was great fun and very entertaining for the many partygoers. I don’t think anyone who was present will have forgotten.

The second memory involves a neighbor, a tomato plant, and ripe tomatoes. I had a meeting planned with Professor Binion late one morning. He arrived at his office breathless and perturbed, worried that his driving had been overly erratic on his way to Brandeis and he told me this story: prior to leaving home, a neighbor suggested that he avail himself of newly ripened tomatoes. Liking tomatoes, he agreed and proceeded to place ripe tomatoes on the floor of his car behind the driver’s seat. Having loaded all the tomatoes he thought he could use, he drove off. However, every time he came to an abrupt stop (a typical stop for Professor Binion!), tomatoes began to roll forward under the seat and under his feet. Panicking as more and more tomatoes continued their forward roll, he began to toss them out the window—finally having to resort to opening his door to scoop them out onto the road, even as he feared the sound of police sirens in response to his driving. I remember little more of our meeting because by then we were laughing hysterically.

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Paul Monaco: Fondly Remembering My Mentor

When I was a student at Columbia in 1964, I met Rudy. I took his course in Modern European Intellectual History and it changed my life. Because of his influence, I now have a PhD in history from Brandeis and a teaching career. He was my mentor; I was his humble student. I could never approach his depth of knowledge, his facility with languages, or his commitment to the life of the mind.

For all his powers of the intellect, Rudy nonetheless was the sweetest of souls and the kindest of hearts—a real mensch. I hadn’t seen him in more than two decades, but we kept in touch long distance. When I heard of his passing, I felt an enormous loss for myself and for this world.

Melanie Murphy: The Most Profound and Ready Reply

Rudy Binion was my advisor in the Comparative History doctoral program at Brandeis University from 1989 to 1997. Subsequently, we had a lot of contact by letter, email, and occasional visits until his death. I still cannot quite believe that I will not be hearing from him again. His replies invariably would be prompt, considered, informative, witty, and responsive. If the reply was not virtually immediate, he would apologize. Simple availability and good manners were the outward sign of some defining aspects of Binion’s nature and character.

Rudy was a gentleman, in the sense that he was honorable and well-mannered as well as urbane and socially skilled. He was as open and interested in discussion from the first day I met him until the end. From first to last he was knowledgeable and sincere,

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as well as wryly good humored. To say he was the same person as a professor, colleague, and friend is not to denigrate his professionalism but rather to underscore his integrity, the wholeheartedness of his commitment to intellectual endeavor, and to personal links with others at various stages of it. There were not different Rudolph Binions for different people. He was too much of a scholar and thinker, and too decent a person, to be a snob or a game player; he was who he was. When he was my advisor, particularly when I was writing my dissertation, Rudolph Binion’s quick turn-around time never ceased to amaze me and was enormously helpful as I sought to complete my degree.

Thirdly, as a teacher, advisor, and historian, his careful, in-depth responses to what I wrote, which routinely came back within days of any submission, enabled me to keep my momentum and enthusiasm. This was true even when he pointed out weaknesses, which always came with specific suggestions such as “please take these proposed corrections to heart.” The careful, clear, and coherent critique that he provided in a critically timely fashion is one reason he was an excellent teacher and dissertation advisor. While it was very responsible of him, I never felt it was a strain for him; history and working with future historians may have been his professional duty but it was also his keen interest. His letters of recommendation, one in particular on short notice, were enormously helpful in my career.

There are so many other aspects of Rudy Binion—his spacious and inclusive ideas about history and his willingness to tread new ground and allow his students to do so also are but two important ones—but here I have mentioned what particularly stood out about Rudy, he of the profound and ready reply.

Peter Petschauer: A Great Loss

The death of Rudy Binion deeply affected me; a brilliant scholar and a great loss to all of us.

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Paul Salstrom: Memories of Rudy Binion

In 1980 I moved to Waltham, Massachusetts to work on a PhD in Comparative History at Brandeis University. At least ten years older than most graduate students, I was also unaccustomed to academic life. Among the most erudite scholars at Brandeis was Rudolph Binion. Over the course of the 1980s we gradually became friends and I learned that Rudy wasn’t merely erudite but very considerate—willing to overlook a great deal in order to be of help to all sorts of people in any possible way.

Yet Rudy wasn’t a doormat! When his psychological sleuthing led to solving the historical mystery of Hitler’s compulsion to destroy Jews, he made his findings known—despite the personal attacks which he surely knew would follow, attacks to which he was very sensitive.

As his teaching assistant I was totally enthralled by his lectures on the inner dynamics of the lives of cultural innovators. As his research assistant I observed how he organized and distilled source material for his 1986 book After Christianity. From Rudy’s example I learned to write about history the way a detective pursues hunches and to focus on the hunches I most cared about.

But what Rudy most cared about was never clear to me. He was obviously idealistic but I lacked knowledge enough of his background and life experiences to try to guess why. Among my previous friends none had been anything like him. I would like to see photos of Rudy throughout his lifetime; maybe they would help me understand him better.

One formidable obstacle to understanding him was his intelligence. I had never known anyone so brilliant. His invariable wit surely enlivened many days for each of his friends. His interior monologue must in fact have afflicted him with more brainstorms than he could manage to even jot down in his myopic scrawl, not to mention to fully develop for publication. But he didn’t sink under the weight. Whether to edify editors or humor his own perfection-

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ism Rudy kept putting at least some of his brainstorms in print.

I feel he succeeded best in his last book to appear in print, Traumatic Reliving in History, Literature, and Film (2011). Each of the historical cases of traumatic reliving that he summarizes there is a gem—Lou Andreas-Salomé, Otto von Bismarck, King Leopold III of Belgium, the 1800s’ European revolutions modeled on the French Revolution, the Black Death, Jewish history, and an entire chapter on Charles de Gaulle maneuvering in the shadow of Marshal Pétain during the French political crisis of 1958. I wish Rudy had used even more of his psychohistory case studies there, especially his study of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 still living under the shadow of Prince Rudolf’s 1889 suicide at Mayerling.

Who will take on Rudy’s mantle? Who can? We have lost not just a kind and faithful friend but a peerless psychohistorical innovator.

Olga Shutova: On Losing a Special Colleague and Teacher

It is so devastating to realize that teachers and colleagues are gone. Rudy Binion was sparkling with agile and sad humour, he was a brilliant intellectual in everything that he did: teaching, writing, publishing and lecturing. Psychohistory in Belarus moves on. Historians and other intellectuals “plunge in” and ask themselves Binion’s questions: “Why is this happening?” “What’s going on here unconsciously?”

Jacques Szaluta: My Ego Ideal

Fortunately, over 20 years ago I had the satisfaction of being personally able to express my appreciation to Professor Rudolph Binion at a psychohistorical conference. I told him how pivotal an impact his direction had had on me. It began in 1960 when

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I took my master’s seminar with him at Columbia University in modern French history with a class of ten students. I recall that soon after the course began, he spoke to us in a grave and inspirational manner regarding the research we were about to embark on. He advised us to select a topic of great interest to us, since we would be working on it for a long time. I recognized that this was a serious business, as we were preparing to become professional historians.

Clearly, Professor Binion was an eminent historian himself and a role model for all of us. I considered several topics and then became motivated to study Marshal Pétain! Significantly and pertinently, he was the most controversial figure in French history, and I did not like him. We were instructed to write a paper and submit it to the entire class as well as to the professor. When my turn came, the class collectively responded benignly to my work but Professor Binion was critical. Privately, he asked me if I was going to write a condemnatory essay on Pétain. He said that I was being polemical. I was jolted, but I recognized that he was right—a consequential moment for me.

Professor Binion made a lasting impression on me. His class was like no other I had ever had. We were seated around an attractive, rectangular table, which served to enhance discussions. He was a humane, fair, decent, erudite, well-intentioned man, and he had a purpose to prepare us for a life of scholarship. The class was not easy, but I respected him for holding us to high standards. One person, upon being critiqued, just dropped out of Columbia.

In the course of my professional career, I often heard the following aphorism: “A good teacher is a tough teacher.” Professor Binion was a good teacher. Yes, he was demanding—and outstanding. I feel fortunate that he was my teacher and had an enormous influence on me. To his credit, when I was defending my doctoral dissertation, one of my examiners said to me, “I see that you have no ax to grind with Pétain.”

I feel privileged to have had this remarkable man as my teacher and mentor. He was an “ego ideal” for me. Thank you, Professor Binion.

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David G. Troyansky: We Were All His Students

What astounded me over the years was Rudolph Binion’s mastery of so many areas of scholarly pursuit, from the history of ideas and politics to culture, society, and historical demography. The ease with which he made connections between art, literature, politics, and population was dazzling.

We met in 1976, when I enrolled in the comparative history doctoral program at Brandeis University. That year he coorganized a seminar in family history, and the experience led me to my dissertation on old age in 18^th century France. He put me in touch with leading French scholars and there was never any tension between their advising and his. His attention to my prose and his advice about my argument were essential contributions to the dissertation and the resulting book. At that same time he was also advising students writing on economic development in Burgundy and censorship in Hesse-Cassel, which gives a sense of his breadth. It would be hard to identify what tied those projects together, except perhaps his seriousness toward our work and his ability to support even as he challenged.

Rudy was an extraordinary combination of head-in-the clouds intellectual and down-to-earth friend, colleague, advisor, and editor. He was a spellbinding lecturer, speaking in whole explosive paragraphs while gazing toward the heavens (and the ceiling), and a generous, intense conversationalist, completely focusing his blue eyes and total attention on his interlocutor. Our conversations continued for years, unlimited by geography. We corresponded by e-mail, but receiving snail mail in his inimitable, crabbed handwriting was a special pleasure.

Primarily I work in social and cultural history, but Rudy’s example allowed me to think more broadly—he disdained sub disciplinary categories and fashions. In his late works, which

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ranged from psychohistory and demography to literary, art, and film history, he simply followed his curiosity. His enthusiasm for research was infectious, but so was his enthusiasm for the arts, which he included in much of his historical work. We talked about our archival projects, art, music, literature, and the theater. In recent years we would meet up at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

His generosity and hospitality were well known. He always spoke with interest of former advisees’ work, but took particular joy in the brilliance of his latest students. His students became colleagues, but some of his colleagues felt they were also his students. When I invited a former colleague of Rudy’s to speak to my students, he remarked upon our both having studied with him, even though he had been a faculty colleague of Rudy’s at Brandeis. Another colleague, a former college president, commented on Rudy’s masterful editing and writing over the years. We were all his students and will all miss him.

Tim Wright: A Generous and Realistic Friend

The subject line of one of Rudy’s last e-mails to me was simply: “My demise.” I mention this to show that, while Rudy’s death is a great loss, it was anything but a shock. More than anyone I have ever known, he faced death with a mind unclouded by wishful thinking of any sort. The content of the e-mail focused on his plan for his beloved wife Eléna to accomplish the transfer of a gift iPod she had no use for to me, who had lost mine.

That was Echt Rudy. Completely unsentimental about himself, utterly nurturing toward a former student, no matter how way-

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ward—I had never completed my dissertation at Harvard and had become a public junior high school teacher.

After taking a fascinating trip with Rudy and his then wife Alice to Eastern Europe in the mid-1960s, I had lost contact with him for 20-some years, assuming he would have no interest in pursuing a friendship with so disappointing a protégé.

When I became a documentary filmmaker, I needed a letter of support from a “humanist” for a grant application. Knowing few other academics, I contacted him again. He immediately wrote a glowing letter of support, full of freshly researched detail about my project and me, which materially helped me get the grant.

What made his own work so extraordinary was that he was both an original thinker on a grand scale and a tireless researcher of minutiae. This mastery of both grande and petite histoire made him unique. His brilliant deciphering of Hitler’s mother’s doctor’s and pharmacist’s near-illegible notes, as an example of the latter, and the original conclusions he drew from them, as an example of the former, are incandescent.

Interestingly, in his last months he once said, wistfully, he would have become a novelist or a poet by choice but financial prudence initially caused him to become an historian. To that repressed impulse I think we owe the wondrously novelistic style of his historical writing. Every budding historian should be urged to read his Frau Lou.

For every small kindness he was given in his years of failing health he was exaggeratedly grateful, while continuing to give more than he got at every turn. He loved women, beautiful women even more. He would hold forth with arm upraised and finger pointed toward the sky when my wife and I visited him, declaring “Karen,” followed by some outrageous claim made with a twinkle in his eye.

We will not forget him; my wife and I will plant a tree similar to the tree he looked out on when he was writing at his home in Brookline in a place worthy of his memory.

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Irvin D. Yalom: A Generous Colleague Even As He Faced Death

Rudy Binion was kind enough to read my recent novel that has a subplot set in Nazi Germany. No matter how arcane the question he inevitably seemed to know the answer and graciously offered me considerable time in the last weeks of his life. I’ll think of him and pass along his gift when I am next asked for help by a writer.

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