George Kren’s Retirement (article)

Colleagues will be interested to know that a founding member of Clio’s Psyche’s Editorial Board, one of our very first Featured Psychohistorians (March, 1995, Vol. 1 No. 4: pp. 7-12), “and a distinguished scholar of the Holocaust,” is retiring from teaching after 35 years at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas. We hope George Kren will not be retiring from his contributions to Clio and we know he will never retire from the life of the mind. Below we will quote liberally from comments of colleagues and students of Professor Kren and conclude with his own words at his retirement ceremony. The reader should note that not every thought at this sad and joyful ceremony was meant to be literally true.

One Kansas colleague lovingly said she “found George Kren to be the most exotic creature I had ever met.” She thought this “strict Freudian” (according to her) “looked just like Fritz Perls, the guru of gestalt psychology.” (This puzzled me since when I last saw him, I thought he was a Trotsky look-alike.) He was the first person she met “who had apparently read everything … could quote from everything, and … footnote it at the same time.” She recollected comments consisting of 28 points each introduced by the words, “That is to say….”

The professor recollected a Thanksgiving dinner in 1975 where six or seven colleagues (George and his wife Margo included) “drank four or five gallons of wine” and “smoked approximately 3,000 cigarettes” amidst exhilarating intellectual discussions and George’s “highly individual sense of humor.” She wondered if that wonderful dinner really happened in Kansas or if it might have been in some other location, such as the “other Manhattan” — the one on the Hudson River.

Students from Kansas were fascinated by Kren, as were many of his colleagues. To them, knowing George was an altogether unprecedented event, and “an experience not to be missed.” Kren’s “very being,” his “respect for the life of the mind, make the world large in a way” they “would not have known without” him. To these students, it was a “privilege of knowing an authentic European intellectual.” (George was born in Austria.) That this European intellectual is such a sweet man and gifted artist with a motorcycle was all to the better. What is most appreciated by colleagues and students alike, is exposure to George’s “version of the life of the mind.” This vision includes a “ferocious comprehension of the starkness and the absurdity as well as the dignity and even the glory of the human condition.” This “has always been at the center of what” Kren does, will “continue to do, and will always continue to do.” All felt privileged to be one of his friends.

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