The Cunz Administration (1957-1969) History of Our Department

This office was destined to lose its master again. In 1956 Bernhard Blume was offered and accepted the Kuno Francke Professorship of German Art and Culture at Harvard University, the most distinguished academic chair in the field of Germanics in the United States. It was obvious that a successor to Blume would not be easy to find. So the department was administered for one year by an acting chairman (Wayne Wonderley), until the selection committee and the members of the department decided in favor of Dieter Cunz, then Professor of German at the University of Maryland.

Dieter Cunz was born in 1910 in a village in the Westerwald and grew up in Schierstein, a suburb of Wiesbaden. At various German universities he studied History, German Literature, and the History of Religion. He was awarded his Ph.D. in 1934 by the University of Frankfurt with a dissertation on Duke Johann Casimir of the Palatinate, one of the leaders of the German Protestant League in the 16th century. But the granting of the Ph.D. meant to Cunz not the "commencement" of his academic life, but its end--at least in Germany. A dedicated and outspoken opponent of Hitler, he left his homeland immediately after having finished his university studies and went to Switzerland. Here he lived--meagerly enough--from his writings for various newspapers. In addition, during his four years in Switzerland he produced no less than three books: a short monograph on the great Swiss reformer Ulrich Zwingli, a collection of "Fairy Tales for Adults," Um uns herum, and a Constitutional History of Europe Since the Early 16th Century. The last work was published as a concise handbook for the layman in one of the most distinguished and popular scholarly book series.

In 1938 he emigrated to the United States. After a year spent doing some of the oddest jobs in New York, he received a stipend of $900 from the Carl Schurz Memorial Foundation for the purpose of cataloguing and organizing the library of the Society for the History of the Germans in Maryland. Located in Baltimore, Md., this was the last surviving society in the United States dedicated to the study and preservation of the history of German immigration to America. Cunz did much more than simply discharge the duties of this appointment of one year, after which he started his teaching career at the University of Maryland, where he remained for eighteen years. As secretary of the Society in the following years, he breathed new life into the almost moribund organization. Above all, after a lapse of many years, he revived the publication of the Report of the Society for the History of the Germans in Maryland. Under his editorship this became one of the main media of publication in the field of immigration history. It is not surprising that upon his departure from Maryland he was made an honorary member of the Society and the editorial supervisor of its future Reports.

His activities with the Society had the most fruitful consequences in Dieter Cunz's life. They had aroused his interest in the history of the German immigration to America and it was in this field that Cunz attained his most outstanding scholarly achievements. He became one of the most distinguished and productive American writers on immigration history. In countless articles he told the stories of German immigrants--from John Lederer, who made his exploratory trips into the unknown Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and south into the Carolinas in the late sixties of the 17th century, to Wernher von Braun, who helped to lay the groundwork for the exploratory trips into unknown space and to the moon. Cunz's most massive achievement in this field was his The Maryland Germans: A History (1948), a book which today is considered one of the high points of immigration historiography. He remained true to this interest to his very end. His last book, They Came From Germany (1966), is a gallery of portraits of Germans who became useful, famous, and influential citizens in their new homeland.

In the field of German literature proper it was the eighteenth century that attracted him most. One of his regular courses at the Ohio State University was dedicated to this period. And shortly before his untimely death the new edition of the autobiographical writings of Heinrich Jung-Stilling, friend of young Goethe and one of the leading 18th century pietists, was released, which Cunz had prepared for the famous German Reclam Publishing House. To this edition he contributed a long and penetrating introduction, which gives ready proof of his profound knowledge of the intellectual movements of the 18th century.

No less intense was Cunz's interest in the methods of teaching German, particularly the teaching of elementary and intermediate German. It is surely more than a random coincidence that his last publication, which appeared in print shortly after his death, deals with a pedagogical problem: the coordination of the teaching of German in the high schools and colleges. This vital interest led him to the writing of his college text, German for Beginners (1958) a grammar book widely used throughout the country and revised in a new edition (1965) with the cooperation of Ulrich Groenke. Groenke had been brought over from Germany by Cunz in 1959, because he seemed eminently qualified to train the department's young instructors and teaching assistants and to supervise their teaching. --Due to the rapid growth of the number of students of the German Department under Cunz's administration, both on the undergraduate and graduate levels, this concern for effective guidance became even more important and pressing than it had been under Cunz's predecessor.

In due course we shall demonstrate statistically this growth of the student population, which required as strict a supervisor as Groenke. The actual field of his scholarly interest was the Nordic languages, especially Islandic, old and new; and he had the opportunity to introduce some of our graduate students to this field, e.g. in a seminar in Norwegian. But his main duty at the Ohio State University was the supervision of the "greenhorns." For this task he had gained vast experience as a member of the Maryland Overseas Program, the "soldiers' universities" which the University of Maryland had established wherever American GIs were stationed abroad. In 1967 after eight years of supervisory work at the Ohio State University Groenke returned to Germany to accept the chair of Nordic Languages at the University of Cologne. His place was taken by Professor Werner Haas, who came to us from the University of Massachusetts and who has further tightened and systematized the supervision of the teaching assistants. The same unusual gift for organization which makes him so effective at this was recognized by the present Director of the German Summer School of Middlebury College when he made Werner Haas his administrative assistant.

The method of elementary instruction practiced by Cunz, Groenke and Haas, has remained mildly conservative. Use has long been made of the language laboratory and emphasis is placed on exposing the student at the earliest stage to as much spoken German as possible. But the explanation and practice of grammatical and syntactical principles were never abandoned, as has been the case at many institutions which consider the laboratory and the machine the panacea of language instruction. The integration of grammar assignment and laboratory use has been in the hands of Professor Gottwald, who worked out a meticulous system which helped support the classroom instruction by a carefully coordinated use of the laboratory.

To achieve such a coordination was no mean task considering the number of students who had to be taught. It is common knowledge that the student population in the sixties grew rapidly all over the United States, and the Ohio State University was no exception. The following statistical data will show how the enrollment in German courses grew, and a comparison with the total number of students will demonstrate that the German Department under Cunz's administration often grew proportionally considerably faster than did the University population as a whole. The figures given here are for the fall quarter only; the reader will have to more than triple them to arrive at the total enrollment in German during a full academic year.

Year	Total Enrollment	German Department Enrollment
1951	16,583	423
1952	16,410	436
1953	17,397	447
1954	18,081	464
1955	19,590	447
1956	20,324	524
1957	20,100	533
1958	22,291	665
1959	22,296	650
1960	23,813	621
1961	25,722	755
1962	28,160	1077
1963	30,508	1196
1964	33,384	1288
1965	35,120	1452
1966	36,640	1724
1967	38,834	1969
1968	40,392	1696

The growth of graduate student enrollment follows a similar pattern. During Blume's administration the department had between 8 and 10 graduate students, and this figure changed only very slightly in the period 1945-1957. But after this the rise in the number of graduate students was conspicuous. In 1958 there were 18, 21 in 1959, 17 in 1960, 17 in 1961, 22 in 1962, 23 in 1963, 21 in 1964, 23 in 1965, 38 in 1966, 35 in 1967, and 42 in 1968.

This is the place to point generally to the enormous growth of the Graduate School of the Ohio State University, and how it is reflected in the German Department. As we mentioned previously, the Graduate School was instituted in 1911, the year in which Evans became chairman of the German Department. During the 34 years of Evan's administration the Graduate School awarded the Ph.D. degree to 22 candidates in the field of German. Under the Blume administration, which lasted a little less than one third as long (11 years), 14 candidates received their Ph.D. in German. And during the following 12 years of Dieter Cunz's chairmanship this figure was exactly doubled. From 1957 to 1969 28 students earned their doctorates. During the same 12 year period the Graduate School awarded 71 MA degrees to students of German literature or philology. The corresponding figure in the ten preceding years had been 16.

But we thoroughly dislike getting drowned in statistics. The individual students and their achievements are as essential a part if the history of a department as are the department's professors and their achievements. Yet, when mentioning some outstanding "products" of our department since the opening of the graduate school in 1911, we have to limit ourselves to a few names and to the shortest possible indication of their accomplishments (the year in parenthesis is the one in which the Ph.D. degree was received): Jacques R. Breitenbucher (1934), chairman of the German Department, Miami University; Harold A. Basilius (1935), chairman of the German Department and later Dean of the Arts and Science College, Wayne University; Frederic J. Kramer (1935), chairman of the German Department and later Dean of the Arts and Science College, University of Syracuse; Reinhold Nordsieck (1935), chairman of the German Department, University of Tennessee; Gilbert Jordan (1936), chairman of the German Department, Southern Methodist University; Paul K. Whitaker (1942), Professor at the University of Kentucky, and frequent organizer of the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference; Humphrey Milnes (1949), Professor at the University of Toronto and active in research; Adolf E. Schroeder (1950), for many years chairman at Kent State University , as of 1969 chairman of the German Department at the University of Missouri, well known for a number of scholarly publications and his work in the American Association of Teachers of German; Arne O. Lindberg (1951), chairman of the German Department and later Dean of the Arts and Science College, Washington State University; Egon Schwarz (MA 1951), one of the most productive and respected younger germanists and chairman of the German Department of Washington University in St. Louis; Elisabeth O-Bear (1953), chairman of the German Department, Otterbein College; Paul Gottwald (1955), whose dedicated services to our department have already been described; Sigurd Burckhardt (1956), who will be mentioned later on in this report; Kurt Guddat (1959), chairman of the German Department, Ohio Wesleyan University; Truman Webster (1959), chairman of the German Department, University of Vermont; Ilsedore Edse (1960), who has been mentioned before in connection with her work for WOSU and WOSU-TV; Gerald Gillespie (1961), now at the University of Pennsylvania, author of a book on the Baroque playwright Lohenstein and of many remarkable publications both here and in Germany; Alan P. Cottrell (1963), teaching at the University of Michigan, and author of some fine scholarly papers; Peter S. Seadle (1964), chairman of the German Department, Franklin and Marshall College; LaVern Rippley (1965), chairman of the German Department, St. Olaf College in Minnesota and active in published research; Marvin Schindler (1965), whose book on Gryphius will soon be released, teaching at the University of Virginia and Assistant Dean of the Arts and Science College; Johanna Belkin (1966), now an associate professor in our own department; Marion S. Wenger (1969), chairman of the German Department, Goshen College in Indiana. And then there are the many who are teaching literally all over the country, from Maine to Washington, from Louisiana to Canada. One of our graduates, Helmut Tribus (1966) is even a professor of German at Milano, Italy.

After this quick but far-flung excursion into time and space, we now return to the Columbus campus and to the years of the Cunz administration. And having offered a partial list of alumni of the German Department, we now present a list of faculty members under whose guidance some of these students turned into alumni. Dieter Cunz had a remarkably lucky hand in finding new faculty and in warding off, at least for many years, the attempts of other institutions to raid the German Department of the Ohio State University. There were but few of its members who did not at one time or the other receive tempting offers from other universities. Some turned down a whole array of offers, not only from American institutions but from German universities as well--e.g., within three years the universities of Mainz and Munich offered Oskar Seidlin distinguished chairs in German or Comparative Literature.

One of those whom Cunz could keep for a number of years in spite of the most attractive temptations was Sigurd Burckhardt. He had left Germany after finishing his secondary education and earned his BA and MA (in English) at the University of California in Berkeley. For a number of years he taught English at St. Mary's College in Berkeley, but in 1953 he decided to come to the Ohio State University to work under Seidlin. In the summer of 1956 he received his doctor's degree with a dissertation on Goethe's Classical plays. Four years later, in 1960, he was promoted to a full professorship--surely one of the fastest rises anyone has made in the academic world. And it was certainly one of the most deserved advancements. Burckhardt was equally well versed in English and German literature, and his critical contributions to both have been the marvel of literary scholars and writers here and abroad. His readings and interpretations of Shakespeare, Goethe and Kleist are as daring as they are brilliant; and even when they are provocative and bordering on the eccentric, they are of razor-sharp ingenuity and a lucidity which is rare in literary criticism. He left our department in 1963 to build up the German branch of the Division of Literature at the newly-founded University of California at San Diego (La Jolla). Three years later he committed suicide, and only those who know his work can fully appreciate what American literary criticism has lost with this premature death at the age of 50. His essays are of such quality that a posthumous volume of his Shakespeare papers was just published by the Princeton Press (Shakespearean Meanings, 1968); and a collection of his essays on German literature (Goethe, Kleist, Mörike) is being prepared by the Johns Hopkins Press.

Cunz was most anxious to build bridges between the German Department and other literature departments. Thebridge to English was Sigurd Burckhardt. The bridge to the Romance Department was Walter Neumann, Cunz's first appointment after he had taken over the chairmanship. Naumann had studied French literature with the world famous Romance scholar Ernst Robert Curtius, under whose guidance he earned his Ph.D. at the University of Bonn with a dissertation on Mallarmé. After immigrating to this country, he taught at Oberlin, the University of Wisconsin, and Ohio University in Athens. From there Cunz called him to the Ohio State University in 1957. He was to be our 19th-century man. As such he had proven his mettle with his book on the Austrian playwright Grillparzer (1956). Remaining faithful to Austrian letters, he later published a number of papers on Hugo von Hoffmannsthal, especially on Hoffmannsthal's indebtedness to the Austrian tradition. In 1963 we lost him to the Technical University of Darmstadt which had offered him a chair in European literatures, Cunz had known all along that he would not be able to keep him if and when a suitable invitation came from Germany, since Naumann's family had returned to Germany for good in 1954. But Naumann left the department with a heavy heart, and he has remained close to us over a distance of 4000 miles. In the summer of 1969 he returned as a visiting professor; and his last book, a collection of essays on Hoffmannsthal (1968), he dedicated to his friends in the German Department at the Ohio State University.

So it happened that in 1963 two of our four key men had to be replaced. And again Cunz's hand was lucky. From Germany he brought over Wolfgang Wittowski (1963), who was teaching in a Gymnasium and whose article on Schiller and Hebbel had caught Cunz's attention. Out of the preoccupation with the latter author grew his recent book Der junge Hebbel (1969). He also continued his studies of Schiller and later added a penetrating concern with the works of Kleist and Stifter. His publications and the many lectures which he presented at American and German universities made him well and widely known among his colleagues within the short period of six years. Too well known for our own good, because he recently accepted a very tempting offer from the University of Massachusetts, which he will join in the spring of 1970.

The replacement for Burckhardt was Charles W. Hoffmann. He had received his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois (1956), after having spent two years as a Fulbright scholar in Germany. His graduate studies completed, he went to the University of California at Los Angeles, from where Dieter Cunz called him to the Ohio State University in 1964. What originally recommended him to Cunz and to the other members of the department was his book Opposition Poetry in Nazi Germany (1962), which is as rich in interesting material as it is intelligent in its presentation. But there was another point that counted at least as heavily in Cunz's eyes: in 1962 Hoffmann had received the Distinguished Teaching Award at UCLA, and good teaching was to Cunz at least as important as the publication of research. In this case Cunz's expectations were richly fulfilled. Hoffmann turned out to be one of the most effective teachers in the department. At the same time he continued his research and was asked to deliver a paper on the Swiss author Max Frisch at the symposium on Present Day German Literature, held at the University of Texas (1965). The essay was later published by the University of Texas Press; and his lecture was so impressive that in 1969 the University of Texas invited him again this time to deliver two talks on Bert Brecht.

With this team the German Department of the Ohio State University had an expert in every major era of German literature with one exception: the Baroque period of the middle of the 17th century. Ever since Cunz arrived on the Columbus campus, he was determined to find a specialist on the Baroque, an era which had not been adequately represented at the Ohio State University for decades. He finally found him in Hugo Bekker, an alumnus of the University of Michigan, who had been teaching at the University of Oregon since 1958. Three years later he came to the Ohio State University, fully certified as a Baroque scholar by his publications. But he proved to be anything but a one-track man. He managed to jump 300 hundred years forward in dealing with a contemporary writer, Werner Bergengruen, and to jump more than 300 years back with provocative articles on the Nibelungenlied, on which he has prepared a full-length study. With Fleischhauer, Bekker, and Johanna Belkin, who already boasts interesting publications in so distinguished a journal as the Zeitschrift für deutsche Sprache, the field of medieval philology and literature is indeed very well represented.

After having assembled his faculty, Cunz started to revise the program of the German Department somewhat. He himself offered a two-quarter course in German Civilization, taught in English so that students of other departments could attend. This they did in such numbers that the course had to be "closed" with registration of 50. Finding that the mixture of graduate and undergraduate students in the six general survey courses made for non-homogenous and hard-to-teach classes, he excluded the undergraduates from this sequence and offered for them a series of courses in literary genres instead--i.e., poetry, drama, and the short story. The program of the graduate students was enriched by the introduction of colloquia, somewhat misleadingly called "Individual Studies Groups" and actually similar to the graduate seminars but somewhat free-wheeling and less structured. In this respect they were similar to the newly introduced special courses for undergraduate honors students. Always anxious to improve the elementary and intermediate instruction, he added two courses in conversation to aid the students' development of a respectable proficiency in spoken German. And, as has been mentioned before, Cunz divided the course on German Literature and English Translation where the enrollment had become unmanageable: the first section, taught by Seidlin, dealing with literature from Goethe to the end of the 19th century, the second, taught by Hoffmann, dealing with the 20th century exclusively. Each course now draws close to 150 students.

With this program the department was able to "produce" Danforth and Woodrow Wilson fellows, and it was in turn successful in attracting Woodrow Wilson fellows as graduate students to the Ohio State University. And almost every year at least one of our students was selected to study as a Fulbright fellow in Germany. To carry out the program the department needed 46 instructors in the academic year 1968/69: 24 teaching assistants and 22 members of the regular staff. The latter consisted of 1 Regents professor, 5 professors, 2 associate professors, 6 assistant professors (among them promising young people not yet mentioned: Gisela M. Vitt, Joseph Gray III, and Donald Nelson), and 8 instructors. Or rather, the department needed 47 members, the 47th being our secretary and administrative assistant Maria McCutchen (since 1964) without whose efficiency, helpfulness and composure the other 46--plus countless students--would be utterly lost.

As in earlier years, the regular menu of courses outlined above was enriched by side dishes. The department invited visiting professors from abroad, e.g. Professor Eduard Neumann of the Free University of Berlin (1956) and Professor Albrecht Schöne of Göttingen (1963), whose seminar on German Political Poetry is still unforgotten. Almost every quarter we had a special lecturer, among them some of the most notable scholars in America (Victor Lange, Princeton; William T. Jackson, Columbia; Erich Heller, Northwestern; Berhard Blume, Harvard; Egon Schwarz, Washington University) and in Germany (Walter Killy, Göttingen; Hans Egon Holthusen, Munich; Wilhelm Emrich, Berlin; Fritz Martini, Stuttgart). Whenever possible, these lectures were given in English so that the University as a whole would profit from them. This was in keeping with the German Department's general attempt to give its whole-hearted support to university-wide efforts. Some of our instructors (Bekker, Burckhardt, Naumann) were loaned out to the program of the new Division of Comparative Literature. For the Schiller celebration in 1959, commemorating the two hundredth anniversary of the great playwright, we collaborated with the Theatre Department. It produced Schller's Maria Stuart for this occasion, while the English poet Stephen Spender and Oskar Seidlin presented lectures on Germany's greatest theatrical genius. To reach an audience beyond the campus, Ilsedore Edse continued her programs over WOSU and WOSU-TV, and now her fans are legion. Once a year in spring, any of them converge on Columbus from all parts of Ohio to have luncheon or a Kaffeeklatsch with the woman who instructs them by entertaining them.

All these efforts have been richly rewarded. If on the following pages we list some of the many and high recognitions which the members of the department have reaped, we do so not to pat ourselves on the back or simply to boast our achievements. The history of this department must not only report the department's actions, but the re-actions to its activities as well, its standing in the academic world at large. First there are the honors gathered on the home grounds, on the campus itself. A member of the German Department was among the first group of five faculty people who in 1960 received the $1000 Prize for Distinguished Teaching awarded by the Ohio State Alumni Association. Three times members of the German Department (Seidlin, Cunz, Fleischhauer) were initiated as honorary members into Phi Beta Kappa. Four times the Alfred J. Wright Award "for significant service to organized student activities and for the development of effective student leadership" went to the German Department (Cunz, Seidlin, Edse, Fleischhaur). And four times the Arts College Council also chose a member of the Department of German for the annual Good Teaching Award, given to a member of the College faculty who is worthy of special recognition "by virtue of the excellence of his undergraduate teaching" (Mahr, Cunz, Edse, Seidlin). There is no other department in the Colleges of Arts and Science, which has received this "Teacher of the Year" award more often than has our relatively small German Department. In 1966 the highest distinction came to the German Department when one of its members was designated Regents Professor by the Ohio Board of Regents, the first such appointment in the humanities at the Ohio State University.

Honors from outside the campus were equally impressive. Blume, Burckhardt, Naumann and Seidlin were recipients of Guggenheim Fellowships. Cunz was elected a member of the Advisory Council of the Carl Schurz Memorial Foundation in 1961. At about the same time Seidlin was appointed to the Advisory Council of Princeton University, on which he is now serving a third term. Several members of the department were involved in the activities of the country's leading professional organization representing English and the foreign languages, the Modern Language Association of America. Blume, Hoffmann and Seidlin (3 times) were at one time or the other elected chairmen of MLA sections. Again and aging members of the department were invited to read papers at the annual convention of the Association: Blume, Sperber, Burckhardt, Bekker, Wittowski, Johanna Belkin and Seidlin (5 times). The highest recognition came in 1965, when a member of our department was made First Vice-President of the Modern Language Association, the first time in more than 50 years that an Ohio State University man was elected to a presidential office of the organization. Honors came too from other universities, not the least of them last May, when a member of our department received an honorary degree (Doctor of Humane Letters) from the University of Michigan. And in 1965 the department as a whole was honored when the American Council on Education, after a survey conducted among the faculties of the 106 largest universities and colleges, included the German Department of the Ohio State University among the ten best graduate departments of the country.

Yet the reputation of the department reaches beyond the boundaries of our country. Some of the highest honors were bestowed upon its members by German agencies and organizations. In the summer of 1959 Seidlin was chosen Ford Professor-in-Residence by the Free University of Berlin. Three years later the President of the federal Republic of Germany awarded the Officers' Cross of the Order of Merit to Dieter Cunz, citing specifically "his efforts on behalf of the German language instruction in the United States and his scholarly contributions in the field of German-American immigration history." In 1963 Oskar Seidlin received the Goethe Medal in Gold, awarded by the German Goethe Institute for meritorious work in the service of German culture in a foreign country. And in 1968 the German Academy of Language and Literature bestowed upon him the $1500 Prize for Germanic Studies Abroad, making him the second American ever to receive this honor.

So recognized, the German Department of the Ohio State University would indeed be in a position to celebrate cheerfully the hundredth anniversary of its university, if on the eve of the centennial year a heavy shadow had not fallen upon it. In February 1969 Dieter Cunz suddenly died at the age of 58. Only those who knew him well are fully aware of what a loss we have suffered, yet others have realized it too. Expressions of sorrow and sympathy came from all over the country, literally from hundreds of people whose lives he had touched. A young German writer who had been helped by Dieter Cunz when he arrived in this country, dedicated to Cunz's memory a book he had just published on the History of the Germans in Virginia. The next Report of the Society for the History of the Germans in Maryland will be a memorial volume to Dieter Cunz, containing a complete bibliography of his writings; testimonials of the first student who took his Ph.D. degree under him (Dr. Myron Vent, Washington, D.C.) and of the last (Prof. Walter Knoche, University of Maryland); and as an homage from our university an article by Wolfgang Fleischhauer on "German Communities in Northwestern Ohio." The State of Maryland has done even more. The governor of the State and the Lord Mayor of Baltimore declared the 17th of August, 1969 "German-American Day." It happened to be exactly 6 months after Dieter Cunz's death, and the societies and associations which organized this German-American Day dedicated to the memory of Dieter Cunz, whose life is, as the main speaker expressed it, "a model and a challenge to all of us."

Proud as we are of these tributes to our late chairman, we were even more deeply touched by the dozens of letters from students. Some of them he had never had in class; but he had helped them when they were in trouble, had given them needed advice, or had simply perked them up, by a kindly word when they felt in the dumps. Almost like a refrain there runs through all these letters the writer's assertion that Dieter Cunz's name is indelibly inscribed in his heart.

But his name will outlast the present generation. Upon petition of students and with the strong support of Dr. Charles Babcock, Dean of the College of the Humanities, and the Board of Trustees decided to name the new building, into which all the modern foreign languages will move during the centennial year, the Dieter Cunz Hall of Languages. It will replace Derby Hall, which has housed most of the languages since 1928. At the time of this move the street on which the new Dieter Cunz Hall is located, will be renamed Millikin Road. Thus in the centennial year the name of the man who first taught German at this university will be united with the name of the man who was the German Department's chairman on the eve of the second century of our university, The German Department is aware of and very moved by this symbolic constellation. It accepts it as a pledge and a challenge which it trusts it will be able to meet under the guidance of its chairman, Charles W. Hoffmann.
(Chair 1969-1977)

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Content Owner: Professor Bernd Fischer.