On February 25th of this year, a few months after his 90th birthday, the Nestor and for three decades the guardian spirit of the Graduate Faculty of the New School succumbed to a long illness. It is never easy to present an eminent personality and his achievements in the limited space and the pale words of an obituary. In the case of Hans Staudinger it is outright impossible.

Should one speak of the scholar who as a young man startled social scientists and politicians alike with his novel views of the structure and spirit of the labor movement, as he did in Individuum und Gemeinschaft, his doctoral dissertation? Or who worked almost to his dying day on his memoirs, a book that in fact is a political and economic history of the Weimar Republic as seen by one of its protagonists?

In thus calling attention to his political life I also point to quite another field of activity in which this uniquely versatile mind distinguished himself. From 1917 to 1932 he was a civil servant in the Weimar government, rising from a modest position in the Ministry of Food to the rank of Secretary of State in the Prussian Ministry of Commerce. It was there that his organizational talents came to full fruition in the restructuring of large sections of the German economy. Of lasting importance was the establishment of a comprehensive network of electrical power that has survived the Nazi regime and the Second World War. What Staudinger demonstrated in this undertaking was the fact that public enterprises, far from deadening initiative, can be pioneers in technical and social progress and yet yield good dividends--a thesis he himself elaborated in his widely known book Der Staat als Unternehmer.

Or, to turn another leaf, should one speak of the academic administrator as which he is perhaps best known in this country? During a decade of permanent deanship in the Graduate Faculty he not only guided its transformation from a University in Exile to a genuinely American institution, but more than once preserved its existence by his exceptional gift for rallying financial supporters.

But no image would be accurate that did not bear the features of a passionate teacher, equally devoted to his topics and to his students. Perhaps the enthusiastic response to his teaching was due to the fact that, contrary to a tradition of academic inbreeding where the professorial son succeeds to the professorial father or even grandfather, here was a man whose political and economic ideas were pervaded with practical experience.

And yet how misleading it would be to cram Hans Staudinger into the confines of professional activity, scholarly, pedagogical or administrative. From a feeling of deep responsibility to his fellow victims of Nazi persecution he and his late wife Else founded, first, Selfhelp for Emigres from Central Europe and, later, the American Council for Emigres in the Professions, both of them flourishing to this day. Equally characteristic of Staudinger was that he never forgot that there was also another Germany. He made it his business to initiate political, economic, and cultural relations with the new Federal Republic, an endeavor to the success of which the Heuss Chair in the Graduate Faculty and the New York German Theater testify. His so-far-unfulfilled wish was to found at the New School an American-German Research Institute for the study of intercontinental relations.

I may confine myself to these incidental remarks because there is hope that the full story will soon be generally available when his memoirs will be published. But what I, blessed with his friendship for more than sixty years, cannot omit is a word about Hans the person. Mindful of the immense variety of his activities, his engagement in more than one civilization, his absorption not only in politics and economics but also in nature and art, one may well wonder what was the underlying impulse that unified those diverse strands.

To find an answer we must go back to his early years and to the influences that molded his character. He was born into an exceptional family, with a father who was a noted social philosopher and an early champion of the rising cooperative movement--with an elder brother who won a Nobel Prize--with a sister who was a renowned sculptress. Listening to him speaking about those days one sensed a spiritual atmosphere in which devotion to the good and the beautiful was more than a pious pretense. However, what ultimately placed its stamp on Staudinger's personality was the German youth movement, of which he became one of the most popular leaders.

It is significant that this youth rebellion that preceded the First World War, though opposing the philistine spirit of middle-class society, by no means repudiated the values of traditional ethics. It protested against the cant that made people forget during the week the lesson of the Sunday sermon.

Even those who knew Hans only superficially detected this idealistic heritage. It made him an active socialist though never a Marxist revolutionary. It made him the model civil servant totally devoted to the public interest. It made him laugh at Goering's invitation to join the Hitler regime, but it also kept him calm under the beatings of his jailers. Above all, it inspired his unbreakable optimism in the search for solutions, when others had long resigned themselves to letting the problems take care of themselves.

On the occasion of his 80th birthday I quoted a passage from Schiller's Don Carlos in which the Queen sends her final message to the departing Prince: "Tell him that he should cherish the dreams of his youth when he will be a man." That Hans did cherish those dreams gave him the courage to persevere in adversity. That he could make so many of them come true was the ultimate reward of a long and happy life.

Adolph Lowe

Issues in Development Economics: An Introduction