A Scholar’s Scholar

When you enter academia, you assume a number of usually unstated yet generally understood responsibilities. They include keeping up with your specialization, staying abreast of general research trends in your field, maintaining a critical eye, staying current with pertinent books and scholarly journals, preserving high standards, doing original research, sharing that research with the public, and encouraging the work of others. Peter Petschauer’s scholarship exemplifies these qualities in abundance. He is truly a scholar’s scholar. Reading the research of colleagues, attending their presentations, and offering suggestions on how they might improve their work-in-progress are all part of Peter’s regular professionalism. I offer two examples.

A few days after publishing an essay in a current issue of The Journal of Psychohistory, I received a lengthy email from Peter suggesting by implication I consider the long-term course of Russian history—one of his specialties—and how trends begun centuries ago shed light on Vladimir Putin’s actions in Ukraine today. In a second email a week or so later (and because German history is also one of his specialties), Peter called my attention to a newly translated work by French historian Johann Chapoutot, Free to Obey: How the Nazis Invented Modern Management (Europa Compass, 2023; French edition, 2020), which shows how Nazi Germany influenced the administrative structures of U.S. corporations.

Peter’s activities are so varied, far-reaching, and profound that I will leave it to others to detail his many accomplishments. I focus here mainly on his book, An Immigrant in the 1960s: Finding Hope and Success in New York City (Perspektiven Presse, 2020), a pathway into the quality of Peter’s character and the strength of his scholarship.

The book is about Peter’s life, the second volume (perhaps the third) among his autobiographical books. The first, In the Face of Evil: The Sustenance of Tradition (Perspektiven Presse, 2018), recounts his childhood years growing up on a farm in the Dolomites during the Second World War. It is the story of the “four mothers” who nourished him in his childhood and later years. If we add to the mix his courageous study of his father’s life (Der Vater und die

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SS: Erich Petschauer und das NS-Regime, Weger Buchhandlung, 2007), published a decade before, his book An Immigrant in the 1960s can be seen as the third volume in an autobiographical trilogy.

The book stands alone as a historical study as well as a document of personal experience. I believe it can and should be seen as a tale of the challenges confronting immigrants in general as well as a document contributing to the historical literature on immigration. It is an obvious contribution to our current worldwide decades-long demographic, geographical, and political debate on immigration. In terms of method, it is a timely example of keeping up with one’s field since it draws on the latest technological advances in scholarship. Half of the 59 entries in the book’s Endnotes come from online sources.

We learn Peter arrived in New York City on a steamer from Germany when he was 17. He knew no English. America existed for him as an idea that had been formed, as for millions of other German youth, by reading the massively popular Western novels of the German writer Karl May. He immediately recognized that New York bore no resemblance to May’s fantasies of the Old West.

Peter moved in with family members in New Jersey, began work in a local factory, then became an usher and later an elevator operator at Radio City Music Hall. He went on to the Crayola crayon company and from there to Standard Brands before landing on the accounting staff of New York University Medical Center.

Family members encouraged him to register for night classes at New York University (NYU). After attaining his undergraduate degree, Peter went on to graduate study in history and was awarded his doctorate in the fall of 1969. The story of his immigrant journey in America takes on the hue of a true Horatio Alger story—German farm boy to U.S. university professor—a journey, he adds, aided by his being a White European in racist America,

From personal experience, I know NYU’s history program was a rigorous and demanding training ground rooted in the rigors of 19^th century Teutonic historiography with its expectations of proof based on massive authenticated documentation, mastery of the secondary literature, and the maintenance of a critical angle of vision. The attention to detail Peter learned there is no better evident than in the way he treats facts and sources in his scholarship today. Sprinkled through his Immigrant book are to-the-penny ac-

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countings of his monthly rent as he moved from apartment to apartment, the amounts he was able to save through various economies, the costs of university attendance and daily food expenses, and changes in his yearly salaries, adding (in parentheses) their dollar equivalents today.

Peter is an advocate for social justice and was shocked when he discovered segregated waiting rooms, bathrooms, and water fountains in the American South. He believes his immigrant experience contributed to his empathy. I think he is right here but also believe his empathy originates from Peter’s essential core of goodness. He speaks for all minority groups. As but one example, his commitment to restoring women’s rightful place in the historical record is demonstrated in his groundbreaking study, The Education of Women in Eighteenth-Century Germany: Bending the Ivy (Edwin-Melon Press, 1989). Among other things, that research uncovered a large group of German women painters, hitherto unknown, who were hard at work as artists in the 18^th century. This became a partial inspiration for his later novel, A Perfect Portrait: A Novel of Eighteenth-Century Germany (Perspektiven Presse, 2016).

Although I have known Peter for four decades, I learned many new things about him—and us—as I read Immigrant, especially how our lives are closely parallel. We both came to NYU’s history Graduate School at the same time. We both spent countless hours in the Reading Room of the 42nd Street Public Library. We took the same graduate history courses at different times and were mentored by the same graduate professors. Yet somehow, we never crossed paths until the early 1980s.

Our graduate instructors were awe-inspiring. If it needs to be proven how important teachers are, I note that virtually every one of the 37 contributors to Paul Elovitz’ anthology, The Many Roads of the Builders of Psychohistory (2021), mentions a professor who had a great impact on them. The same NYU historians who had the greatest influence on Peter and me were Minna Falk, Leo Gershoy, and Frank Manuel. They were demanding, held themselves and their students to the highest standards, and were models of true collegiality.

If you studied German history, Minna Falk was your supervisor. A master of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s history, Minna was the only woman on the NYU history faculty and one of the few women in any history faculty in the U.S. She suffered from the bi-

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ases of the time and was not awarded a full professorship until 1963, following decades of dedicated service.

Peter’s doctoral dissertation was on the early life of Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst, a princess from a small Saxon principality who later became Catherine the Great of Russia. Peter’s dissertation was an exercise in the psychology of adjustment and to his mind was meant to discover what in Sophie’s childhood prepared her to make such a rapid adjustment to the Imperial Russian court. (Today Peter thinks he was also trying to make sense of his own immigrant experience.)

Each of our dissertations required extensive digging in the German archives. Peter spent 1967 in Germany. So did I. His research was centered at the Stadtbibliothek in Stuttgart and included many trips to the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich. I spent all of 1967 in the Bavarian archives in Munich as well as at the Staatsbibliothek there. I imagine us sitting in the same archival room close to one another, each unaware of the other’s presence, so deeply immersed were we in our own documents.

At several places in his Immigrant book, Peter reveals himself as a psychohistorian. He quotes Freud on the dangers of autobiography (p. 5), references Bessel van der Kolk’s 2014 study of trauma, The Body Keeps the Score (p. 29), cites colleagues Howard Stein (p. 9), myself (p. 151), and Paul Elovitz (p. 79) as “fellow psychohistorians,” and defines himself as “a historian who uses psychology as part of his research tool kit” (p. 164).

Peter came to psychohistory by what he calls “a circuitous route” (Petschauer, 2021, p. 62). He credits me with encouraging him to engage with psychohistory in the first place. He cites an essay I wrote in 1982 on early German nationalism. When he read it, he says, “I felt compelled to make him aware of my different opinion” (Petschauer, 2021, p. 62). I invited Peter to join Boyd Shafer, Louis Snyder, and several other prominent scholars in a symposium critiquing my work. It was published in The Journal of Psychohistory. Peter says without that invitation, “psychohistory would never have entered my perspective on history” (Petschauer, 2021, p. 62). (But Peter was the one who read the article in the first place!)

Peter says he did not enter psychohistory “fully” until he read Lloyd deMause’s essay, “The Evolution of Childhood.” Let me talk to Peter directly here: I have to take issue with you here, my dear friend. I believe you were doing psychohistory long be-

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fore you read my article or Lloyd deMause’s on the history of childhood. You tell us you read Erich Fromm, Erik Erikson, Viktor Frankl, and Freud as an undergraduate. You confess that in your doctoral dissertation, you wanted “to create a first-rate psychological study” of Catherine the Great but tell us “[my] youthful arrogance overestimated my knowledge of psychology,” considering your dissertation “a mediocre work” (Petschauer, 2020, p. 143). Yet in the late 1960s, few historians were engaged in such studies. You were doing psychohistory.

Peter once told me that he thought retirement from teaching would mean his writing days were over. Yet in retirement, Peter discovered a poet hiding within the historian. He has since written scores of poems, published two books of poetry, and credits several colleagues—especially Howard Stein—for encouraging him to write free verse. An Immigrant in the 1960s introduces seven of his poems at relevant points in its historical narrative, along with the photos of places and family interspersed throughout the whole, recalling for me the works of W. G. Sebald.

Near the end of his Immigrant book, Peter recounts an episode that reveals his honesty. One of academia’s darker sides is the well-known yet rarely mentioned reality that behind the positive curtain of idealized academic collegiality lies a few backstabbing betrayers who have lost their moral compass. Historians seem to inhabit a particularly nasty place here. Many have spent far too many hours in bitter arguments attacking each other’s pet explanations in petty disputes over minuscule historical events in decades-long intellectual battles to the death. Peter lays bare one of these personal stab-in-the-back encounters in an event he experienced near the end of his graduate school days, which, he says, “left a bad taste in my mouth” (Petschauer, 2020, p. 152).

A book of readings on Russian history, Peter thought, would be a helpful classroom text. The manuscript he prepared and submitted for publication was rejected because the publisher had already accepted a similar manuscript from one of Peter’s professors with whom he had earlier shared his idea for the project. The “competition being fierce,” Peter says, “he was faster than I to submit it for publication” (Petschauer, 2020, p. 152).

From episodes such as colleagues stealing ideas from us, we learned collegiality was offset by a contradictory dictum. We should be supportive and collegial yet somehow remain evasive and

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keep our own research findings close to the vest. It is a tribute to Peter Petschauer’s personal and scholarly character that such experiences have never dimmed his respect for the historical profession, that he has always maintained his integrity and preserved his role as a generous mentor and helpful colleague, qualities that contribute to his stature as an excellent historian and one of the most judicious of psychohistorians.

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