David Abraham
Professor Emeritus, School of Law
University of Miami
“Sandy and I have known Andy –it’s very hard to use the past tense for a contemporary and compatriot – for nearly half a century through thick and thin, success and failure. When Andy was at Hampshire and New Paltz as well as his many years at Princeton, first as an insecure Lecturer and later as a Distinguished Professor, there was plenty of both, in life and at work. Whether on the UWS or in small town Princeton or as a guest in Miami, Andy was always there. An intellectual comrade and true friend through the best of times and the worst, at bar mitzvahs (his son and mine) and shiva calls (for my mom) alike, Andy was there. It isn’t often that one can say we attended each other’s early job talks and retirement events– and spoke at both. Andy was always game for serious intellectual-political conversation, whether over Vienna, Weimar, or Jerusalem, the 1920s or 2020s. These last years with Andy’s reduced mobility, we visited often and emailed constantly. In fact, until the days before he left for Rome, we shared a constant stream of hope and worries– as well as happiness with our children’s and grandchildren’s success.
It must be said, Andy was not only about the political or the life of the mind or Europe. I well remember his introducing me to summer softball on Cape Cod and my klutzy canoeing outing there with Sandy and Jessica and far more successful boogie boarding with Jake and our Nate in Wellfleet ponds. Andy’s intensity was accompanied by a deep warmth and spirit of solidarity and shared struggle–and fun–which we all need and will much miss. I think we all also enjoyed Andy’s sardonic, slightly old Europe sense of humor, which was still always voiced with a sense of optimism. Andy’s memory will surely be for a blessing.”
Steven Aschheim
Emeritus Professor of European Cultural and Intellectual History
Hebrew University, Jerusalem
“Andy: A Very Personal Memoir
I’m not completely sure when I first met Andy, but I do more or less remember–I think it was in 1976–when I first saw him. I was standing on the upper floor of the Madison Student Union when, somewhat awestruck, I saw members of the editorial board of the recently founded (1974), but already very much admired New German Critique, walking through the lobby. I already knew who (the late) David Bathrick was and that he was a member of the board so–knowing too the names of the other editors–I surmised that one of them was Anson Rabinbach. The importance of this needs some explanation. I had arrived at the University of Wisconsin from Jerusalem in 1975 to study for my PhD with George L. Mosse (my relation to Andy, although it assumed its own independent existence, was inextricably linked to the Mossean world). As a very late doctoral beginner–I was 33 when I arrived in Madison (three years older than Andy who already had his doctorate and was no longer a student there)–I looked with wonder and great envy at these (fairly) young intellectual trailblazers and, from what appeared to me a vast distance, passionately wanted to be one of them!
Though my memory is foggy, it must have been George who introduced us during that Andy visit. It began a friendship that lasted until his sad death. It was a friendship characterized by great warmth (Andy had that in abundance), an infectious sense of hilarity (I’ll never forget his hearty laugh when in one of Madison’s Siberian winters, he beheld George donning a hat with huge doggy ears), a sense of mutual unspoken trust and common intense intellectual interest, characterized almost always by agreement. I can’t remember a single instance when we were at uncomprehending ideational loggerheads. Despite my alien South African accent and his broad unmistakably New York twang, despite our differences in background, national as well as socio-economic, there was a certain common existential sensibility, and a suspicion of ideological orthodoxies. The attraction, I think, was made even greater by our interest in the problems and connections between German and Jewish politics, thought and culture. Of course, he was way ahead of me in articulating these issues.
I remember how thrilled I was to see the Special Issue I, Winter 1980 of New German Critique, around the themes of “Germans and Jews”. I have just reread Andy’s (and Jack Zipes) opening article on “Lessons of the Holocaust”. It assumes a jolting, peculiar reverence in our own explosive time. While taking a position on issues that today remain deeply controversial, they insist on maintaining a certain non-ideological openness and recognition of unresolvable complexities. Here is a highly selective quote of what so excited me at the time and which addressed issues in ways that I found–and still do–so compelling: “As a flight from the betrayal of European universality and from the realities of Jewish victimization, Zionism is not historically linked to imperialism, however wrong current Israeli policies may be. There is something equally perverse in both the self-satisfying identification of many American Jews with the recently acquired and extremely fragile power of the state of Israel, and the simplistic characterization of Israel as a world power and conqueror, which since the 1967 War has become so voguish on the Left…….If neither Auschwitz nor Israel can provide a secure basis for Jewish ‘identity’, it is because in the long run territoriality and cultural extra territoriality have proven unreliable…To discuss the problem of Jewish self-consciousness in the post-Holocaust era is to unravel the contradictions and vicissitudes of Jewish existence without arriving at a synthesized destination.”
There was never anything self-promoting or boastful about Andy. Yet, underneath what appeared to be a certain fragility, there was a deep inner strength and iron discipline that only became apparent to me as his cruel illness set in. He had an uncomplaining insistence on carrying on as usual, still meeting colleagues and friends, going for walks in the park with his walk, amongst others with co-editor and decades-long friend, Andreas Huyssen, and conducting a flurry of emails with people who sought his advice. What amazed me during this time is that the same intellectual curiosity, acuity of thought and critical eye remained as sharp as ever. Given his frail condition, almost unbelievably, he wrote a much longer review than normally permitted in the Times Literary Supplement, as late as 21 July 2023! Entitled Moral Catastrophe it critically discussed a considerable number of hefty books on the great inflation and the Hitler Putsch. It is a mystery to me where he found the moral and cognitive energy to undertake and complete this.
The last time I saw Andy, was in June 2019 in Berlin and in New York April 2023, both occasions fittingly around Mosse conferences. We gossiped, laughed and talked shop as usual. After that, we sometimes spoke on the phone but as his illness progressed our email connection (from November 2021 almost to the end) was our main link. (For the sake of good taste, I will omit our shared, private, pessimistic, almost apocalyptic discussions about contemporary Israeli and American politics, except his tongue-in-cheek suggestion of August 8, 2023, that the subtitle of his TLS piece should have read: “Putsch Trump ties to outputsch Hitler and get away with it, as did the Fuehrer.”) That email correspondence, regular, vivid, is surprisingly revelatory of the qualities of the man. His critical eye never deserted him. “Roger Berkowitz’s Arendtian take on Trump”, he characteristically wrote on August 27, 2023, “is a good example of what happens when a thinker is enshrined in an institution with a leader and an ‘authoritative’ interpretation.” Perhaps what stands out most in this correspondence was his broadness of spirit and great generosity. Unfailingly, he would praise my essays or reviews that I had sent him (and I think he almost really meant it!). “Terrific”, “Great”, “Marvelous”, “Brilliant”, he would inevitably write. This generosity even extended to my son who had written a book on Bruno Kreisky. Despite his condition, and in terrible weather conditions, Andy took the trouble to hear him lecture. On January 26, 2023, he wrote: “I had the pleasure of seeing your son at the Austrian Cultural Institute last night. Despite the torrential rain, the room was full. His presentation was extraordinary, totally without notes and with a bit of a dance on the stage. He managed to convey the paradoxical character of Bundeskanzler Kreisky. He was engaging, witty, and nuanced. I can only wonder where he acquired these skills.”
Together with that generosity went a marvelously refreshing sense of humor. Deadly serious about intellectual and cultural matters, he would almost always add spicy, incisive and very funny comments. Thus, he regarded Jerry Muller’s book on Jacob Taubes (July 29, 2022) “as a kind of mystery story of a golemesque figure capable of infinite transfigurations. He was the Harvey Weinstein of philosophy.” “When are you not reading hefty tomes about academic Meshugenahs”, he asked me, “what are you up to?” He described one fashionable Jewish intellectual advocating Exile as “an uber Jewish pseudo prophet dressed up in Buberesque costume.” (July 24, 2024). Commenting on a book insisting that only fidelity to the Talmud made one Jewish, he self-mockingly wrote: “I know that this is true since I was kicked out of Hebrew school for reading a comic book and had to attend the Shalom Aleichem Yiddish school instead.” (February 27, 2023)
More than ever, Andy’s sad ending revealed the nobility of his being. He was quite candid about his personal and physical condition. On July 29, 2022 he wrote: “I’m okay, but just barely. I need a walker and an aide though I do get to walk in the park with friends. Gwen and I divorced last year. Writing is virtually impossible, but I can still read.” As late as July 24, 2024, he wrote that he found “old age with PD extremely debilitating.” Ironically in retrospect, he even added that after a trip to California, “I thought I better not take the risk of going to Rome for the Mosse conference.” But his passion for that event made him immediately qualify that rational statement: “But we’ll see what condition I am in after the Winter.” For all his debilitation, the Rome conference assumed enormous intellectual and emotional importance in Andy’s mind. Regarding that event, he wrote in his email of November 17, 2024, that “my anger is directed at…Emilio Gentile who wrote a very bad book about George, classifying him as a cold war liberal who used the term totalitarianism. He devotes an entire chapter to George as if he had the same politics.” I have watched the video of Andy’s lecture at the conference insistently refuting Gentile’s position. His voice may have been weak but not his logic nor his impassioned argument. His tragic death may perhaps be slightly ameliorated by the almost redemptive nature the event assumed for Andy. He told Atina Grossmann and Frank Mecklenburg that he “wouldn’t have missed it for the world.” In all of this, there was, for me, a personally stunning and poignant moment. At the time of his most frail and fraught condition, he commented to Atina that my lymphoma (exceedingly mild compared to Andy’s suffering) worried him greatly! Those selfless words continue to move me to the core. It’s going to be very difficult to live in a world without him.”
Rabbi Andy Bachman
“I knew Andy through our shared teacher, George L. Mosse and my dear friend Michael Berkowitz. At George’s urging, I became a rabbi and so did not share the commitment to the life of the mind, the intellect and the study of history as Andy did. However, as a perpetual student of the Jewish condition, I was so greatly enriched by his capacity for learning, teaching, explaining, and shedding light on the questions and responses to the historical reality of our lives generally and the Jewish people in particular. During the few times that I was lucky enough to be in his company, I felt the warmth of his soul, laughed at his wit, was moved by his kindness and could see easily the obvious love he had for his family and friends. Andy had a tenacity for the intellectual pursuits he lived by that was uniquely shared by all of George’s students; and his light will always burn bright, as the most enduring truths do. May his memory be a blessing.”
Humberto Beck
El Colegio de México, Centro de Estudios Internacionales
“I deeply regret the passing of Anson Rabinbach, my dissertation advisor in the History Department at Princeton University. Andy broke new ground in so many areas in intellectual history. He was an irreplaceable mentor, whose friendship, wisdom and knowledge were indispensable to the intellectual work of historians of several generations. I will always be grateful for his clarity and generosity.”
Michael Berkowitz
Professor of Modern Jewish History
University College London
“Andy was a beloved and most treasured colleague and friend. His work will remain utterly unmatched and brilliant. I have in front of me The Third Reich Sourcebook he created with Sander Gilman. Before hearing the terrible news (some hours ago) it was my ‘lesson plan’ for the day. I tell my students that the many introductory essays comprise the best writing, ever, on the history of Nazism and the Holocaust.
Along with being an incredible scholar he was a great and trusted friend.
His love for and pride in his kids was beyond immense.
I so wish I had had the chance to spend more time with him.”
Ararat Gocmen
Research Officer, Centre for Research & Analysis of Migration, UCL (University College London)
“Andy’s intellectual history course convinced me to want to be a history major, his book The Human Motor made me want to be a historian, and his course on the history of Nazism made me want to be a historian of interwar Europe. This all culminated in me asking him to be my undergraduate thesis advisor, and him eventually agreeing—albeit only after I read all of Stanley Payne’s A History of Fascism, 1914-1945, discussed my interpretation of it with him, and convinced him that I was ready to take on the challenge of studying the far right. Despite my thesis’s focus on a context relatively unfamiliar to Andy (interwar colonial Algeria), he pushed me to become an expert of that context while helping me draw the comparisons that I wanted to draw between it and continental Europe during the same period. He was an incredible thesis advisor and, more generally, the most supportive intellectual mentor that I could have asked for. The encouragement that he gave me in private kept me motivated to pursue a PhD in history one day, while his much-too-generous description of me in his recommendation letter helped me win a Marshall Scholarship in 2019. When I last spoke to him in 2020, he helped me move forward with the difficult decision to switch my career aspirations from one in academic history to one in academic economics, with his approval crucially reassuring me that I wasn’t betraying him and my other backers in the history department by making that decision. I deeply regret not reaching out to Andy much more since that last conversation, being caught up in the thick of my PhD since then. When I heard the sad news of his passing, I got emotional, not only because thinking of Andy reminded me of my love for history, but also because I missed the kind of intellectual mentor Andy was: a giant in his field that nevertheless spoke to his students with absolute kindness, which, as I have discovered over my one too many years in graduate school by this point, is exceedingly rare. Rest in peace, Andy. I owe you a lot, and I will miss you dearly.
P.S. When I asked Andy which bottle of wine that I could buy him to thank him for being a wonderful thesis advisor, he specifically requested an Austrian Riesling. To this day, it remains my favorite type of white wine. So thanks for also training my palate, Andy!”
Brian J. Griffith
Assistant Professor of Modern European History
California State University, Fresno
“Andy Rabinbach will be remembered for so many reasons. But for me, Andy’s work on The Third Reich Sourcebook is the most important. When I started teaching courses on modern European history, I decided that I wanted to teach with primary sources so that my students could flesh out the bones of my lectures and our in-class discussions. Making this commitment, however, came with the responsibility of finding primary sources and teaching materials to complement them. Here was when I came to Nazi Germany, I quickly found Andy’s co-edited volume, which is exhaustive in its representation of the rise and fall of the Third Reich. The volume includes speeches, manifestos, journal articles, election pamphlets and posters among many other remarkable materials documenting Nazism and the horrors that followed it. When I met Andy in Rome three weeks ago, I told him how much I admire him and his edited volume. I’m glad I got that opportunity: Andy will be missed.”
Jeffrey Herf
Distinguished University Professor, Department of History, Emeritus
University of Maryland, College Park
January 31, 2025
“Dear Andy,
There’s a lot to say about 57 years of friendship, but I’ll start by saying, yes, I love you, and I’ve felt your love as well.
I’ll spare you a careful rendition of your greatest hits, from the 1973 “Toward a Marxist Theory of Fascism and National Socialism,” to the introduction to the NGC issue of winter 1981 on “Lessons of the Holocaust” to the essays in In the Shadow of Catastrophe, on to The Human Motor and then The Third Reich Sourcebook and the essay collection of your essays on Nazism and on antifascism. I’m sure they will endure and be read for many years.
In Madison, I think we met in spring 1968, perhaps after I gave a stemwinder at a demo. The theme was the connection between American imperialism, the war in Vietnam, American advertising, the need to change consciousness and reject false needs, or something along those lines. At my retirement party two years ago, I recall you said after hearing the speech “I’ve got to meet that guy.” We must have had lunch with George on the terrace behind the Student Union in Madison, and soon bonded over Walter Benjamin, Adorno and Horkheimer and what we understood of them at that point.
We both loved books and ideas, but the activist bug caught me more than you. The fact that you are two years older than me, that small difference made a big difference as you were beginning grad school, and I was still a junior. We had a fine time as I recall on election night in November 1968 when we formed an affinity group in a demo to protest the war. We were far more sophisticated than the rest of the crowd. They were chanting familiar antiwar slogans. We sang Dylan’s “I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s Farm no more,” though I doubt we remembered all the words. But in the midst of the march, singing Dylan was our way of expressing independence, not only from the war and one-dimensional society but from the Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, and suspicion of intellectuals, that we both saw creeping into the New Left.
I don’t recall seeing much of each other from 1969 to 1971, probably because I went deeper into the SDS faction fight, and you were on the path to passing grad exams and preparing to spend a few years in Vienna to work on your dissertation. The cultural left in Madison of which we were a part was an antidote to the lunacy of Weatherman, RYM II and the Maoists, which is rather peculiar when you think about the connection between the cultural left and political orthodoxy today. In those intense years, the activists had little difficulty in defeating the intellectuals and driving them back to their studies.
I’m not sure when we reconnected on a regular basis. I think it was when you taught at Hampshire and were getting NGC off the ground, and I was living in Somerville, just going back to grad school at Brandeis, and teaching part time in community colleges. I was astonished at your ability to combine leftist political passions with beginning a scholarly career. Compared to me you were the epitome of professional success and stability. I was not yet back at grad school and feeling very alone. Dylan’s Wallflower captured my mood in those years. I was really glad to be sane and alive after a gun in my ribs hold-up while taxi driving, after the SDS freak-out, after the December 4th Movement, and the arrest in Times Sq. subway station after a Black Panther demo in New York in 1970s. The cops did not mess around. I was so eager to get back to scholarship. You inspired me that there was scholarship after the maelstrom.
In retrospect, I think the two of us made fundamental decisions in those years that we followed pretty consistently over the succeeding five decades. First, we decided to become scholars, not activists. Second, we wanted to stir things up in German studies, really in German history, and most of all we wanted to do so regarding Jewish questions. Perhaps because I had seen the hard left up-close, or because my family was liberal but not left-wing, I was emerging from the sixties as a liberal, not a leftist. With NGC, you combined a continuity of Social Democratic Marxism with a pressing concern about the then-unfashionable interest in antisemitism and the causes of the Holocaust.
You know, from Dutschke’s famous phrase to the MAGA-world denunciation of “the long march through the institutions,” there is a focus on the “tenured left” as a power- seeking generation. And that’s on the mark. It did seek and it did generate a lot of power and positions at fancy universities. But what that leaves out is that starting NGC and becoming a scholar was, compared to “the revolution” of 1968 to 1971, a comparatively conservative thing to do. Rather than burning the place down, it was about building something up. All your adult life, you’ve been about building things up, not tearing them down. The alternative in our circles to NGC and university careers was activist anti-intellectualism and hatred of the life of the mind, and both of us wanted nothing to do with that.
In those years, “anti-racist” ideologues had not yet denounced the whole enterprise of European history, including efforts such as New German Critique, as expressions of “white privilege.” In the history profession, it was the age of social history, of the celebration of E.P. Thompson and the common people, certainly not George L. Mosse and his fears of mass movements. You probably recall his channeling of a mixture of Freud and Gustav Le Bon about the danger of large gatherings of the like-minded. Everything we did, and Jessica’s (and our) interest in psychoanalysis, reeked of distance from the common people, of memories of the chanting crowds in Germany, and, yes, of the opposition to the Civil Rights movement. Our intellectual concerns were not hostile to the concerns of American workers. You and I, two sons of the lower middle class, raised with more cultural than financial capital, were never into that. However, as young historians who took George’s work seriously, we were always aware of Hitler’s popularity and tried to explain how that came about. Hence, neither of us emerged from the sixties as a romantic about anything—not the “the Vietnamese,” the “Palestinians” and not China, Cuba, Algeria, the third world, not hippies or the counterculture, etc.
It is no accident, as they say, that you agreed to my suggestion of publishing a translation of Rudi Dutschke’s important–but belated–rejection of terror in a 1977 issue of NGC. I translated it with the clunky English title that captured the clunky, pretentious German original: “Toward a Clarifying Criticism of Terrorism.” It was an overtheorized statement of the obvious: political violence should have no role in politics. Yet it seemed like a bold thing to say and to publish when a lot of people we knew or had known still had romantic visions of “armed struggle” and third world liberation movements. You had less “de-radicalization” to process than I did but we were meeting then again on the terrain of shared liberal principles.
You’ll recall how angry George was with me in 1969 because I paraphrased James Joyce’s Ulysses and told the UW History Department that by not supporting the black students strike, they were viewing “history as a nightmare from which they were trying to escape.” (Joyce’s term was “awaken.”) Today, I find it astonishing that I said something so stupid to that very impressive history department, but, hey, I was twenty-two. George was furious at what he viewed as an attack on the faculty from the nutty left. He walked out and wouldn’t speak to me for several years. I can’t recall exactly when you arranged a brunch meeting with George at a hotel near Harvard Square, but reconciliation with wayward me was accomplished-–yet another example of the constructive bent of your character. It was the beginning of the restoration of my connection to George, which grew over the years. Thanks so much for helping to restore it.
We both had ups and downs in our careers. I was having more downs than ups for quite a while as I migrated from sociology to political science to history (a saga for another time), but I recall one story of your own hassles. One of your favorite stories—was it real or imagined?—was about an interview you had for a job at Rutgers. When the chair of the History Department made the case for hiring you, you were told that the Dean said that he was not going to hire yet another Marxist to the Rutgers Dept of History. The chair responded that you were not a Marxist; rather, you were an anti-Marxist. I can still see you delivering the punch line with fine timing. The Dean replied, “I don’t care what kind of Marxist he is.” We had good laughs about it.
Fortunately, after Hampshire, and a few years of uncertainty, Cooper Union hired you, and you met Jessica. The two of you were so happy in those years, really head-over-heels with one another, full of love and mutual admiration. One of my fondest memories is of your wedding, one of the finest I have ever attended. There were about 20, maybe 25, of us in your apartment on 91st and Amsterdam or around there. No destination wedding. No fancy, expensive, event with huge numbers but very moving and intimate. Soon after we—Sonya and I—spent a fine month with you and Jessica in Wellfleet.
You and I bonded over so much in the late 1970s, and in the early 1980s as I completed Reactionary Modernism and had the good years at Harvard’s Social Studies. We enjoyed talking with one another a lot—about modernism, technology, Albert Speer, the Nazis, and getting the Marxists to stop focusing only on capitalism but state the obvious about the Nazis’ hatred of the Jews. We shared the understanding—from having been there—that “1968” and the New Left was most definitely not—either in the FRG or the U.S.—about “coming to terms with the Nazi past” and the Holocaust. We understood that was a retrospective myth. It was about imperialism and anti-imperialism, fascism and anti-fascism, and soon it also became about bashing Israel, especially after it won the Six-Day War. Getting our leftist contemporaries to really face the ideological sources of Nazism and the specificities of the murder of the Jews was an uphill battle. You waged it from within the world of left-wing intellectuals. I departed, not “to the right” but to liberalism, even during the tense days of the Euromissiles. Those were hard years for me, and they were the low point of our friendship.
I forget how things got back on track. Perhaps it was when I began to work on Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit, and the Jewish question in West and East Germany. Then again, we could talk about things we both cared a lot about, and which again put us at odds with those who did not want to discuss the antisemitism in its leftist as well as conservative forms. I was so pleased when you got the richly deserved job at Princeton, and that you had such wonderful colleagues and students. I remember so fondly when you stayed with Sonya and me when I was at the Institute and Sonya was a Visiting Prof in the Princeton History Dept. I especially recall one Passover Seder. Jessica must have been there as well. It was a hilarious evening. George was there and the reading of the Ten Plagues elicited a groan from the atheists around the table. We, you and me, again, were very close.
I’ve gone on far too long and I’m only up to 1994. For our friendship, the past thirty-one years have been a continuing conversation, one in which the disagreements were mild and interesting, and the agreements more frequent. For example, we just agreed to disagree about whether Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem was right or woefully wrong about who Eichmann was. We both found professional success, or rather you found even more of it at Princeton, and my ship finally came in at Ohio University in 1996, and at the U of Maryland in 2000. And on top of that we had kids, and then grandchildren. And we were and have remained brothers in intellectual arms as historians about the key issues of German and European history.
It’s been obvious since we met in Madison that we recognized a seriousness and strength of character in one another, but also the ability to enjoy the good things in life. Yet life has thrown you some bad blows. In response, in the face of those difficulties, you’ve shown to me and others a strength of character and courage that reminds me of FDR and Churchill (I know you may wince at the latter comparison, but Churchill was right—without courage nothing else is possible). Your courage and will have been remarkable, but knowing you as well as I do, I have not been at all surprised.
Since we marched together down State Street singing “Maggie’s Farm” up until today, I always felt that you and I shared at our core a love of freedom and independence of mind, that we are both were fully devoted to being scholars and historians to the core of our being. I treasure those commitments that you and I share. The 57 years of our friendship and our conversations have been a wonderful, splendid, great, and always interesting aspect of my life. You’ve given me so much.
In the face of this awful disaster that has landed you in the hospital, I’ve written this long letter to say simply that I love you, I miss you, miss talking with you about so much, and I want you to recover. I write in the hope that love and memory of our long friendship, along with your friendships with so many others, can combine with modern medical science to foster your recovery. We’ve got an awful lot more to discuss. I’m looking forward to doing so.
Much love,
Jeff”
Eva Horn
Professor of Modern German Literature and Cultural History
University of Vienna
“We met sometime in 2003 in New York at a party. A few years earlier in Germany I had organized a conference on the concepts and theories of work in the early 20th century. Obviously, Andy’s book The Human Motor was our cult book, but somehow we didn’t manage to lure him in as a participant of this conference. So I was all the more excited to eventually meet the elusive mastermind in the flesh! At the party, we immediately engaged in a very nerdy discussion on “Arbeitswissenschaft” of the 1920s, Helmholtz, Taylorism, etc. From then on, as long as I was based in New York or visiting, we met on a regular basis, and discussed the many many fields of shared interests, from Nazi philosophers to Cold War strategists, from Fritz Lang movies to the McCarthy era. At the time, I was writing my book The Secret War (it was he who suggested the title!) and trying to grasp the anti-communist paranoia of the 1950s. After one of our conversations, he wrote me a long email about the effect of the Rosenberg case on American Jews, which was so succinct that I reprinted it in my book. Every meeting with him was always so intellectually stimulating, he was so quick-witted and sharp, he always saw things from an unexpected angle. And I must admit we shared a guilty pleasure: academic gossip. I always returned from our encounters somewhat elated, intoxicated, with tons of new ideas and plans. We later collaborated on a New German Critique issue on Dark Powers, a collection of essays on conspiracy theories and fiction. But we also liked to make fun of our friendship as a form of ongoing conspiracy, a discreet way of helping each other out with contacts to publishers, reviews, or in supporting younger colleagues. This was his way of helping others: he would make great efforts to support people but would not talk about it. I think we last met in Vienna, his old turf, maybe 10 years ago (or more?). He started to show the first signs of Parkinson’s, but didn’t want to discuss it. At the time, he was upbeat, energetic, full of plans and projects, so I couldn’t have imagined that this would be the last time we met in person.”
Nitzan Leboivic
Apter Chair of Holocaust Studies and Ethical Values
Director of Graduate Studies
Lehigh University
“I met Andy, the first time, in October 2001. He approached me after a talk I gave at the GSA (German Studies Association, in D.C.), and introduced himself to me, a young scholar with some equivocal ideas about German life-philosophy and a “loser”—this was Andy mocking the philosopher I was writing about —”who didn’t even succeed becoming a real Nazi.” Obviously, I read his books and admired them, and was smitten by the idea that one of my intellectual heroes was showing an active interest. The following year I asked him to join a panel I was organizing and he immediately agreed (I couldn’t believe my luck). In that conference he kept introducing me to people, other famous professors who already heard about me, from him. All this was new to me. I never came across someone who was equally that wise and that generous; it was usually the one or the other (those knowing the academic world will nod agreeably, I’m sure). With Andy this came with unaccustomed mounds of knowledge about every aspect of the period, including completely esoteric marginalia, and a crackling sense of humor he usually delivered with a straight face but a twinkle in his eyes. I’ll share one story he told me at the time about his past as a young communist in the Viennese Commune, which according to Andy fell apart not when people slept with each other’s partners, or when they shared private property, but when the commune decided it was time to get all the books in the commune to a shared library. Since then I spent many, many hours with Andy, and was always looking forward to seeing him as the highlight of a conference, a talk, or simply—as I’ve done in the past few years—over coffee and croissant I’d bring him from a nearby café. I never met a person who was less self-involved; he’d refuse discussing his own writing, and at his 70 birthday– a few of us, his admirers, organized in 2015– said he just came to enjoy our company and declined to hear any “eulogies.” So I’m writing this one knowing how reluctantly amused he’d been reading or hearing any of it, imagining also this twinkle in his eye we all knew so well. A world without it is so much emptier.”
Andrei “Andy” Markovits
Arthur F. Thurnau Professor
Karl W. Deutsch Collegiate Professor of Comparative Politics and German Studies, Political Science
University of Michigan
“I have had many colleagues and co-authors in my fifty-year university career but none have been more brilliant intellectuals, inspiring colleagues but also dear friends than Andy Rabinbach! Our mutual interest in Austrian politics, the German and European lefts, Habsburg history and Central-European culture led to a forty-year friendship in which we saw each other in many places in Europe and the United States, always delighting in each others’ company! I got to meet and know Andy’s family, most closely his elder son Jake with whom I played guitar and sang many a Grateful Dead and Bob Dylan tune – always to Andy’s great pleasure, even enthusiasm! Most important, Andy and I supported each other both professionally and personally, sadly a rarity in the academic world. Our last exchanges pertained to Andy’s genuine enthusiasm for my memoir that he read both in its English original and German translation. He shared some amazing insights about my depictions of Timisoara (Temesvar), my birthplace in Habsburg Romania as well as Vienna and New York. No other reader of this work shared such precious insights both on an intellectual as well as emotional level. Andy was a stellar human being! He was my dear friend! I will miss him beyond words!”
Dirk Moses
Anne & Bernard Spitzer Chair in International Relations
City College of New York, CUNY
“Andy was unfailingly generous if exacting in his discussions of issues that concerned us both. I appreciated that. Here we are at his beloved French Roast in the fall of 2022.”
Timothy Nunan
Professor for Transregional Cultures of Knowledge
University of Regensburg
“I had the pleasure of having Andy as an undergraduate advisor during my years at Princeton from 2004-2008. After taking Andy’s undergraduate lecture class during the 2005 fall semester, I began to work more closely with him on projects like The Third Reich Sourcebook and, ultimately, my senior thesis on German antifascist journalists. What stands out for me in retrospect is, on the one hand, how Andy took intellectually naive undergraduates seriously and was keen to discuss difficult texts by Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, and others with us. When taking a seminar with him, Jan Gross, and Adam Michnik on twentieth century intellectuals and totalitarian movements, Andy was always genuinely interested in students’ opinions on the texts and keen to understand how these twentieth century texts “landed” with millennials processing the ongoing disaster of the Iraq War and the second term of the Bush administration. In short, Andy’s style in the classroom and as an advisor gave me tremendous intellectual confidence to believe in myself and never feel intimidated in debates about big ideas.
Above and beyond his responsibilities in the classroom, Andy always encouraged students to look beyond the horizons of the Princeton campus. It was in part through time spent in Andy’s office that I became aware of historians like Tony Judt and magazines like The New York Review of Books. While it was not exactly fashionable to study German and Austrian intellectual history in the mid-2000s, when Europe still seemed to be enjoying a “holiday from history,” I feel like my conversations with Andy about the history of fascist movements prepared me well to make sense of the current moment. Certainly, without his mentorship, I never would have had the confidence or wherewithal to study the German language seriously and eventually become (improbably) a professor at a German university. In fact, one of the first things I did when I received my current job was to write to Andy to thank him for making this journey possible.
Last but not least, I would only like to note that beyond his role as a teacher and advisor, Andy was extraordinarily kind to me on a personal level. Shortly after I graduated from Princeton, I had to remain around campus for a few days for a medical procedure that required me to rest afterwards. While I had been staying in a very spartan dorm room in Rockefeller College, Andy generously opened up his apartment just off of campus for me to stay in, making for a much more comfortable and speedier recovery. I would not be where I am now without Andy’s support and encouragement, and I will always miss him.”
Frances Tanzer
Rose Professor of Holocaust Studies and Modern Jewish History and Culture
Associate Professor of History
Clark University
“I met Andy last winter when I was a fellow at the Remarque Institute at NYU. I instantly liked him and I would venture to say, I hope it isn’t too presumptuous, that we became friends over the past year. He was, in fact, my favorite person I met during that time in New York. Not a week seemed to go by that we didn’t communicate about something, and I enjoyed long afternoon conversations with him over coffee at French Roast and a walk in Riverside Park. We gossiped about academia and talked, among many other topics, about German memory politics, interesting new exhibitions and publications (he read everything), his Yiddish childhood, his father and the “commie coops,” his political awakening, and Bob Dylan (both huge fans—last I saw him he anticipated seeing the new Dylan biopic but could only give Chalamet a B+ for his impersonation—an opinion, I understand, he subsequently revised). I loved hearing tales about the Village—in addition to the interesting characters he encountered, a professor who said he would have been a better student if he spent less time there. We talked a great deal, too, about Vienna—his and mine. We ruminated about the absence of a meaningful culture of critique in the 1950s and the totally marginal status of the left. It became clear to me that his early, pathbreaking scholarship about Red Vienna was in some way motivated by a desire to think through the municipal socialism of his father’s world and his own upbringing in the Bronx. When my first book about Vienna came out, I brought Andy a copy. He read it in, I think, a day and responded with characteristic generosity. He proposed we go to dinner to celebrate the accomplishment over Grüner Veltlinger, which we did–a long and memorable evening filled with tales and gossip (he really could spin a tale).
I came to know Andy not only as a brilliant scholar, but also for his generosity, kindness, and humor—he was really, really funny. A twinkle in his eye, a sly look, and a gentle but sharp humor that, like his scholarly work, reorganized the world to expose its contradictions. I don’t think these qualities—generosity, kindness, and humor—were separate from his brilliance. Rather, they were part of its foundation. It is that unforgettable lesson, which he embodied to the very end of his life, that he left me with and for which I am eternally grateful. The world is less sparkling and fun without him—certainly it is lacking in one of its most engaging and thoughtful minds. What a huge loss.”
Enzo Traverso
Susan and Barton Winokur Professor in the Humanities
Cornell University
“I met Andy in Paris at the end of the 1990s, just after reading In the Shadow of Catastrophe. I had been very impressed by his works on critical theory, fascism, national socialism, and the Holocaust memory in Germany, which deeply shaped my views and approach to intellectual history. We had a rich and pleasant conversation, recognized many affinities and decided to stay in touch. So, we met quite regularly in New York, but occasionally also in Paris and Berlin. He participated in a Storia della Shoah, which I edited with other Italian scholars twenty years ago and which included a remarkable essay on Nazi culture written by him. Then we had a more intense exchange when I prepared the French edition of The Human Motor, for which he wrote a new introduction and several updates. When I moved to Ithaca, NY, to work at Cornell, he invited me to Princeton to present my book on the European Civil War. He always was very generous with his colleagues and disciples. Any meeting with Andy was a source of enrichment and a moment of friendship. In Rome, we all admired his tenacity and intellectual lucidity when his strength was failing him. I am sure that the relevance of his work will grow in the coming years. We miss him.”
Marc Volovici
Alfred Landecker Lecturer, Department of Jewish History
University of Haifa
“Andy was my teacher and PhD advisor. I greatly valued his sensitivity, wisdom, and sense of humor. He was an incredible historian and a truly wonderful person. His loss is deeply felt.”