Personal Friend and Professional Colleague

There is a personal and a professional side to my relationship with Peter Loewenberg. On the personal, we were both young, aspiring historians of modern Germany, he with a doctorate from Berkeley, me with one from Heidelberg. Early on, it impressed me enormously that Loewenberg, just a few years older than myself, had managed to publish two articles in the same annual volume of the American Historical Review (1971), the flagship journal of our profession. (Over my entire career, I have managed only one.) They were in a field that interested me greatly at the time (more of this below), and eventually we met. The similarities between us struck me. We had both been born in Germany and settled in North America, and we had both studied modern German history to figure out where we came from and why we were where we were. Moreover, we had both taken up a sideline next to history, he in Freudian analysis, I the performance of modern jazz. Either of these enabled us to function in different professions, if we had to (Peter then actually practiced this more than me, but I was a member of the American Musicians’ Union and took on gigs). We both still spoke our mother tongue and traveled to Europe (and elsewhere) at every opportunity, mostly for research and conferences, at some of which we also met. As I live in the greater Toronto area and he in Los Angeles, it was difficult for us to meet as often as we should have, though certainly I wanted to (for we never ran out of topics). Unfortunately, as far as that was concerned, a possibility for me to assume a position at UCLA did not materialize; a large part of the reason why the university had been attractive to me was Peter Loewenberg.

The similarities in our characters and upbringings were paralleled by significant differences, which nonetheless drew us together as well. Whereas I came from a Lutheran background and had discarded my faith, Peter practiced Judaism—as far as I could tell, in a reformist and enlightened vein. One of the most important experiences in my life was when he invited me to his house in

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Brentwood to celebrate a Seder with his family. The details of Peter’s complex life brought home to me differences in personal fortunes one can experience: his father, a renowned psychiatrist, had had to flee Hamburg with his family and eventually make a new home on Californian soil. My father had been a Nazi Party member, as had his father even before 1933. My father had fought in France and Russia as a member of the Wehrmacht, and my communication with him after 1945 was always broken. When he retired in Spain under Franco, it was a blow to somebody like me, who tried to come to grips with his childhood in the era of fascism through professional research in the 1970s. In contrast, I imagined Peter to have had a very good relationship with his father, as the son too had become a Freudian psychoanalyst.

As for the professional aspects of our relationship, I had studied those two early articles by Peter because of my then interest in the social history of youth, particularly under Nazi rule. He had written on the young Heinrich Himmler, as well as on psychosocial-economic problems young Germans were experiencing in the inter-war period. Peter explained these in a Freudian vein, in terms of these youths’ disturbed or non-existing relationships with their parents. Peter’s follow-up work on generational conflict in German society influenced my own studies decisively, especially when I wrote a book on the Nazi party and its male and female cohorts of all ages, and, years after that, a collective biography of the Hitler Youth. In the 1980s, I had turned to German medicine and the medical profession of the 1920s to ‘40s and again found several of Peter’s insights fascinating. After medicine and physicians, I occupied myself with music, starting with a monograph on jazz under the Nazis (Oxford UP, 1992). As I came to interpret jazz both as a quintessential expression of American culture, modernism, and revolt against fascism, on which, in Germany, a generational revolt had been superimposed, much of what I had been discussing with Peter over the years was turned into thoughts and words on a page. His life on the California coast, where the “cool” form of modern American jazz had been developed, inspired me. In a later book, I had included a chapter on Arnold Schoenberg (whose music I treasure), and again it gave me a boost when I found out not only how Peter could correspond to that form of modernism, but that he per-

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sonally knew members of the Schoenberg family. By this time, of course, I had become aware of Peter’s own interest in Vienna (and Switzerland) and knew his second, originally Austrian, wife, Josefine. My last book on music so far was published in 2008; it was a biography of the German opera singer Lotte Lehmann, who, born a year before Hitler, made her home in Santa Barbara after 1940. As my wife and I kept returning to the American Riviera north of Los Angeles for many years, primarily for research, it was as if my work there had somehow been divined and blessed by Peter.

Peter Loewenberg in 2005 published a seminal article on “creative play space” in the Bauhaus, which was generated and developed in Weimar from 1919 to 1925. He sent me a copy not knowing that I was about to work on a history of Weimar from the Enlightenment to the present. Another instance of creative serendipity! Needless to say, there are now quotes from this essay in my book manuscript, which is nearing completion. Since I know he has read my writings as I have read his over the years, I believe one can talk about a particularly good example of cross-fertilization in our case. This is what international, universal scholarship should be all about. Peter has been the one man in my life, in my career, who has impressed and influenced me, as much through personal friendship as through professional example. May he be productive for many years to come!

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