Voegelin Recollected

“Kommen Sie doch herein . . .”

It was July of 1999 when I left Munich the first time. One afternoon two weeks before leaving, I stood at the doorstep of a Jungendstil apartment in Schwabing, ringing the doorbell of a man I’d never met. There was no answer. I rang again. A frail female voice finally responded, “Ja?” I had an appointment with her husband, I explained in a German that was passably fluent by this time. He knew I would be coming; I wished to speak to him about Eric Voegelin.

After a long pause, the buzzer bid me up. I mounted two flights of creaking stairs to be greeted by a shuffling woman in a day coat and house slippers. She admitted me into the adjacent apartment, which she described as the “atelier.” This room was unlike most I’d seen at such meetings, with heavy green velvet curtains drawn, strewn with curios: a marble bust in one corner, a stuffed duck on the mantelpiece, an immense glass coffee table cluttered with mannequin body-parts, an Oriental lounge, a large, well-stocked bar, some Persian vases, assorted photographic paraphernalia. The room was filled with what Germans would call Ramtsch, but it was quality Ramtsch. This junk had the aura of a déclassé aristocrat.

As I adjusted to the dark, it took me some time to note the bulk in one corner of the room. I soon saw it was a man, mid-sixties, corpulent, twin spots of color in his cheeks, hair wild like a cliché of Beethoven’s. He swiveled a cocktail in one hand, appraising me slowly through owl glasses.  Raising his eyebrows, he squinted at me: “Warum glotzen Sie einfach? Ich werde Sie nicht beissen. Kommen Sie doch herein; setzen Sie sich hin.” (Why are you just staring? I won’t bite you. Come on in. Sit down.)

* * *

By the time of that interview, my ten-month stipend from the German Academic Exchange Service had almost expired.  The stipend had funded both dissertation research and an interview program with former students, colleagues and acquaintances of Eric Voegelin.

The interviews were to provide the stuff of the European chapters of Voegelin Recollected, the anecdotal biography I was co-editing with Barry Cooper. Barry had already spoken with former students, colleagues and acquaintances of Voegelin in the United States. My task was to comb Germany and Austria for potential further “informants” and capture their memories on tape.

By the time of that second to last interview, I’d met with over a dozen of Voegelin’s German students and colleagues, as well as some in Austria. I had crisscrossed Germany from my home base in Munich: to Siegen, Erlangen, Saarbrücken, Berlin, Hamburg.

Encounters in Berlin, Vienna, and Elsewhere

I also went to Vienna, where I spoke with the son of a former friend as well as an eighty-five year old lawyer who had been Voegelin’s student in the late thirties. He may have been the most articulate of all of them, delivering reminiscences as fully-formed paragraphs.

My farthest trip for the project was to Amsterdam, where I had scheduled a meeting with an expatriot American professor at the Amsterdamse Academische Club only to be dismissed after a half hour or so when my host couldn’t shake the sense that I had come to steal his ideas and pass them off as my own. Besides that, as I learned too late, he detested my co-author.

That summer was one of a palpable metamorphosis for Berlin. The Bonn regime had not yet fully arrived. Potsdamer Platz was a mass of cranes; East Berlin still gloriously dingy and unexplored. The first time I went to Berlin, it was to speak with a former student of Voegelin, by that time a respected expert on the contemporary Near East at the Free University.

After four or so hours of intense conversation, he took me to a local restaurant for a meal. There, I insisted on having a Berlinerweiss. I had expected something like a Bavarian Weissbier, but what I received was a sundae dish filled with a neon-green beer topped by green-tinged foam and a straw.

On my second trip to Berlin, I visited the special advisor on culture to the then-chancellor Gerhardt Schroeder. That man had also been a former student of Voegelin, but had made a highly successful career in publishing. His makeshift Berlin office was located in one corner of the abandoned Staatsratsgebäude in East Berlin.

When I arrived, he was enmeshed in the “Austrian bookseller crisis” percolating in the media. Rather than send me back to Munich, though, he alternated at fifteen-minute intervals between recalling this formative period of his youth and dealing with the immediate political issue, chain-smoking the whole time. What he unwittingly afforded was something that proved formative for me: a glimpse, rare at that time, into the working world of the vita activa.

After some of interviews, my host would take me on a tour. I have many memories here, including of losing my wallet on the bus in Hamburg then vainly retracing my route. A transvestite hotelier held my luggage hostage until my good host lent me 400 DM so I could pay my bill and return home.

But the highlight in hospitality may have been Vienna: here I was treated not only to Kaffee und Kuchen in a café Mozart had frequented, but shown an old convent in the Wienerwald and finally an authentic Viennese Heurigen. As we dined late on spring wine and fresh food , I became privy to some very Austrian musings on the impossibility of multi-cultural accommodation after the demise of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.

The Constant Topic: Eric Voegelin

The backdrop was as diverse as central Europe itself.  But the constant was always Eric Voegelin. How had he or she known him?  What had his lectures been like?  How did they compare to those of other German professors?  Did Voegelin go out, socialize?  How did he relate to students? To other scholars? What was his workday like? Some of the interviews pursued these questions for an hour; others lasted the better part of a day and in some cases continued on into an enduring, if sporadic, correspondence.

Among those for whom Voegelin had been a formative figure in their youth, our conversations returned them to a time when they had experienced not only this person but the unfolding potential of their younger selves. Answers to my questions varied, but by and large, Voegelin’s German and Austrian students were able to locate Voegelin very precisely in their intellectual milieu: they stressed his significance as an intellectual presence both anti-Nazi and anti-Marxist and his representative internationalism at a time when German universities were mired in parochialism. Consistently too, the Europeans were more forthcoming about Voegelin’s faults than American students and colleagues: his pedagogical shortcomings, his awkwardness in social situations, or his inability to work diplomatically with colleagues.

The Interviewer is Examined

One fascinating element of the interviews was the unspoken exchange between the participants, a kind of mutual stock taking. I sought to gauge the credibility of the interviewee as an observer of Voegelin’s work and character. This didn’t depend simply – or often even primarily – on how close the person was to him or how intelligent a scholar. The interviewee had to be sharp, certainly, but at a more intuitive level, as well as willing to share his or her observations.

The assessment worked both ways, however.  Those I questioned also questioned me: my knowledge of Voegelin’s work; my ability to grasp it; or again, more intuitively, the ability of me and my co-editor  to render their statements into a fitting portrait of this man who, intellectually, towered above all of us.

My ignorance within the discipline clearly dismayed some. They had all been trained as German graduate students – even more, as Eric Voegelin’s graduate students. A scholar of political philosophy needed a thorough knowledge of English and French, a basic command of Latin and Greek, as well as any other languages their specific subject required.

Like the master, some I interviewed expected me to know all the authors they knew – or perhaps at least to minimize the extent of my unknowing.  Had I read Karl Mannheim? No, unfortunately not. Did I know Karl Kraus? Yes, but hadn’t read much of him. I’d surely read Tonnes, Taubes, Max Scheler?  Had I read this book by Max Weber, that one by Rosenzweig? Not Rosenzweig?  Rosenstuck-Huessy, then?  To many of them I’m afraid I resembled one of those ignoramuses on whom Voegelin himself heaped scorn in his tense seminars.  But most of them, graciously, held back.

Therapy in a Period of Stress

I should add that I was not disposed to faking my knowledge at that time, having begun to entertain doubts about my suitability for the scholar’s life. When I reached Munich, I had finally made it through course work and comprehensive exams and could spend endless hours reading and theorizing. For months, though, I was mired in the first chapter of an intensely theoretical dissertation, blocked by a wall of a topic that seemed theoretically impenetrable and the masses of literature I realized I would have to master.

In February 1999, my body began to revolt.  After weeks of limping home from the philosophy library night after night, my joints seized up and I was admitted to a Bogenhausen hospital. On my release two weeks later, I was at least walking again, but was shot full of cortisone. The diagnosis of systemic lupus eventually proved false – but I had been warned.

In this sense, the Voegelin book project became a kind of unintended therapy. With only a few months left in Germany, the book project forced me again to be interested, to seek people out, to talk to them, to listen.  The project required intelligence, but, more importantly, it required an intuitive grasp of people and characters. That in itself was emancipating.

A second value of that period was my nearness to Voegelin’s work and memory. Partly because of my own recent illness, I repeatedly asked, at what cost?  What price did Voegelin pay?  He had channeled his wealth of empirical knowledge and analytical rigor as well as his entire lived experience, his very humanity, into his work.

We know that there was a price.  Tact suffered, good manners at parties suffered, Lissy lacked company; they had no children. Yet one also had the sense that Voegelin hardly noticed. It was an attitude I also saw reflected in his serious students.

The Connoisseur Was Wrong

A few weeks before I left Munich, one of Voegelin’s closer students gave me the name of the photographer in the Schwabing apartment. His connection to Voegelin had been fleeting; he had not been a student so much as a part of the larger circle.

He had been a creature well adapted to the emerging milieu of Schwabing in the ‘60s and his girlfriend had been another native butterfly. Voegelin himself had been known to admire her ingénue looks. The photographer, I’d been told, was a Geniesser, a connoisseur of the type who would drive for four hours in a Fiat convertible to a remote Italian village to pick up the perfect olive oil for a dinner party.

His parties lasted for days; and he had invited Voegelin to at least one of them. He may even have attended a lecture or two. It was important, I’d been told, to speak to types in the broader orbit of Voegelin and his students too. And so I arranged to see him.

That interview in the darkened atelier lasted a painful forty-five minutes. What was I doing writing a book about this insufferable German professor and his even less sufferable students?What kind of life could such a man have had?And what kind of a life could I have trying to research it?Was I not still a young woman?

Nothing of that interview was worth using for the book. It still stands in my mind, though, above all for that taunt that the biography was no more than a tedious derivative project talking to tedious people about a tedious German professor.

More than ten years later – returning to this vivid portrait of a human being and philosopher, with all his contradictions, achieved solely through a montage of conversations with his former students and colleagues – I realize how wrong he’d been.