In Memoriam Gustave E. Von Grunebaum, 1909–1972

Extract

The first President of the Middle East Studies Association and one of its principal founders, Gustave E. von Grunebaum, died of cancer in Los Angeles, California, on 27 February 1972, at the age of sixty-two. Born in Vienna on I September 1909, he belonged to a family well established in the economic and intellectual life of the old Austrian Empire, which was soon to pass into history but not without leaving to some among the younger generation the legacy of an open-minded cosmopolitanism, a wide participation in Europe's multilingual structure, and a keen enjoyment of style and elegance in the material and spiritual pleasures of life. Von Grunebaum was not given to speaking much about himself, and I do not recall that he ever mentioned to me why he chose Oriental studies as his subject at the University of Vienna, nor did I meet him when he, a Ph.D. recipient not yet 22 years old, came for a year of postgraduate study (1932-3) to Berlin where I had just begun my studies. Soon the second collapse of the world that had nurtured him came with the infamous Anschluss of 1938. Because of his clear perception of the new barbarism as completely antithetical to all the values he cherished, he left for the United States to join the Asia Institute in New York, where Arthur Upham Pope (1881-1969) was making an heroic, and greatly successful, effort to give displaced European Orientalists a new start. While his first five years in the United States were not easy, they brought such compensations as sharing in the intellectual atmosphere of a New York so different, yet in certain respects similar, to that of Europe,uninterrupted work in the quiet of the Oriental Reading Room of the New York Public Library, small and cramped but friendly in addition to containing what was then the best collection of Arabic books in America and, above all, getting married to his Austrian sweetheart Giselle Steuerman as soon as she was able to reach this country.