Loewenberg Early History

Many know my father as both an intrepid traveler and a committed fighter for what he believes in. That has a history, and it began early. I am a journalist, and here is the story I’ve found:

Peter Jacob Loewenberg was born into turbulence. Just a few weeks after his birth in the summer of 1933 in Hamburg, my father was on a boat to Shanghai. My grandparents, Richard and Sophie, had decided to flee Germany at a relatively early date, after my grandfather was forced to resign his position as an academic in the psychiatric department of the University of Hamburg due to Nazi legislation—from April 1933—that forced Jews out of government service. The director of the University Neurological Clinic, Dr. George Schaltenbrand, wrote a letter praising my grandfather’s work, saying, “He is obliged to quit his position here only due to the new legislation.”

The Nazi period had only recently begun, and my grandpar-

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A recent picture of Peter Loewenberg

ents, while clearly feeling the situation was urgent enough to risk traveling with their newborn son, were also looking for a place they could work and call home. My grandfather, 35 at the time, wanted to continue his burgeoning psychiatric career, and had to find a country that would accept a German doctor without requiring additional exams (this would later be an issue in the U.S.). He had researched many possibilities for emigration—including Egypt, Aden, Tangiers, Persia, and Ethiopia—before settling on China to make his new life.

A letter of introduction for my grandfather from the head of the German-Jewish community in Hamburg to his counterpart in Shanghai, dated October 8, 1933, provides insight into the situation he faced: “Dr. Loewenberg intends to leave Germany on account of the political circumstances and he must try to found a new existence abroad to make a living for himself, his wife, and his little baby. He is a noted physician although he is still of young years, being a highly educated and very esteemed man. We would therefore be very much obliged to you if you would do everything in your power to assist him, considering his terrible plight and the absolute necessity of making his livelihood.”

By September 1933, having been in the world just a few days over a month, my father and his parents set out for China. Not knowing what the future would hold, my grandparents settled in to what they expected to be their permanent home. My grandfather began learning Chinese and found work as a doctor in a cosmopolitan private practice and a Shanghai mental hospital. There was already an old established Jewish community in Shanghai. Photographs show my father, then a toddler, frolicking with his Chinese nanny and my grandparents wielding chopsticks at a dinner party.

When the Japanese invaded in 1937, my father and his fam-

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ily again fled, this time to the United States, thanks to the sponsorship of a distant cousin in El Paso, Texas. They initially settled in San Francisco. Times were hard during the Great Depression in America. In a letter to the relative, Edwin Wisbrun, my grandfather declined an offer of help, saying that relatives still in Germany needed assistance much more. The letter also described the difficult circumstances my father’s family faced. My grandmother worked as a night nurse, which required a long commute on public transportation, while my grandfather, required to be recertified in California by the state medical board, had to work as an intern in St. Joseph’s Hospital in San Francisco. Now 39, he worked 120 hours a week—for a salary of $25 a month. Their work schedule meant my grandparents could not take care of my father, who was four years old. He went to live with a family in Berkeley.

“That was the hardest time in my childhood. I was a foster child for a year,” said my father. “It was a pediatrician’s family, they had two older kids, but they weren’t my family. And I never went back to see them. A lot of pain there.”

From 1942 to 1944, my grandfather Richard did his war service at a hospital in the High Sierras. My Dad has fond memories of that time. “For me it was real nice. There were mountains and forests and a lot of hiking. What struck me was the contrast between the urban concrete play yard of the school I went to in the Haight-Ashbury of San Francisco and the school in the wilderness of the High Sierras in California, with acres of pine forests and nice tables to eat lunch under the trees.”

In 1944, the family moved to Bakersfield, where my grandfather became the only psychiatrist in the county. Sophie, my grandmother, a registered nurse, was active in the Jewish community and in liberal social justice causes. A matter of pride in our family was her assistance to farm-worker leader Cesar Chavez; she helped him recover from a hunger strike. My father, who was in college at the time, came home to see Chavez convalescing in his house. It fit his mother’s character, says my father, who related that Sophie had been a devoted anti-fascist and leftist in Germany. She had met my grandfather while working in the Jewish hospital in Hamburg, where she was a nurse and he was doing his residency. “I remember coming home and meeting him there. It was a per-

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fectly natural thing for her to bring Cesar Chavez to our home.”

My father first attended Bakersfield College, and then transferred to the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he majored in history and political science. During that time his father, who was only 56, died from a stroke in 1954 while giving a lecture at the USC Department of Psychiatry. The memory is still painful to my Dad, who was 20 at the time. “I should have driven him to the lecture,” he regrets.

After college, my father enrolled in graduate school in diplomatic history at U.C. Berkeley. But the study of Foreign Office telegrams and military strategy did not satisfy him. “I felt that the explanations historians were putting out for human behavior, for wars, aggression, hatred and genocide, were not adequate,” explained my Dad.

Still searching for his identity and depressed over his father’s death, he entered psychotherapy. Depth psychology was a revelation. It opened up a whole, rich world of complex motivation, ambivalence, unconscious conflict, and multiple levels of causation. “This is really what I wanted to apply to history.”

At Berkeley, he went on to study European intellectual and cultural history with Professor Carl E. Schorske. He had finally found his home.

And so the story begins…

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