Hans Rosenberg, who died in Freiburg on 26 June 1988, was not only a critical historian, he was above all a self-critical one. Looking back upon his life during his last years, he always saw first what he had set out to do but had not accomplished, or what, in his judgment, had turned out less well than he would have wished. At most he granted that he had exercised a certain influence upon many historians of the next generation. “Not everything has been futile”: that was the most positive statement he allowed himself to make about his work.

Before Hans Rosenberg reached his thirtieth year, the National Socialist seizure of power, abetted and applauded by disproportionate numbers of his contemporaries, drove him into exile. Many years later he wrote of the “curiosity and anxiety” he felt toward the catastrophe of German fascism, which had “disfigured and besmirched the wrinkled historic face of my native land beyond recognition,” giving it “the most sordid and brutal expression in its entire past.”

I shall teach this course as a stiff graduate course, and if you don't like it, get out now. The words came with a pronounced German accent, which somehow made them all the scarier to a college junior. Having taken two semesters of European economic histry with this professer, I had no illusions. He meant what he said. For those of us who had naively considered his “baby” courses in economic history draconian, his words were all the more frightening. What the devil were we in for on this round? Whether anyone “did not like it,” I have no idea, but no one dropped.

When I returned from a long summer in Israel, following the Six Days War of June 1967, Berkeley seemed to belong to an altogether different universe. Things that had been upper-most in my mind, indeed in everyone's mind, during those months in Jerusalem were of marginal interest to the bustling students and respectable faculty members on campus. In comparison with the hectic atmosphere in Israel at that time, even the most politically involved campus in the United States appeared like the proverbial ivory tower. After a brief hiatus during which everyone had breathlessly observed the events of the war in the Middle East, these events quickly receded into the background, and on the shores of the Pacific other issues seemed far more important. While activists were busily preparing an attack on United States government policy in Vietnam, everyone else, secluded in the innumerable Berkeley classrooms, seemed concerned with purely academic matters.

My first encounter with Hans Rosenberg was in the fall semester of 1952 when I switched from evening classers to day sessions full-time at Brooklyn College. His presence in the classroom was both fascinating and intimidating. He constantly took pains to engage each student in the room, and he still serves me as a model of teaching-effectiveness. Short and slightly pudgy but with ramrod posture, he had an expressive, unusually lively face and a profoundly serious but good-natured demeanor; he spoke with a slight impediment, with the heavy accent of his native Rhineland, and with an English vocabulary that was dazzling in scope. He was the epitome of the learned European professor, respected and esteemed by his colleagues. Some of his reputation as a teacher who demanded much of himself and of his students had preceded my entry into his class, and had conveyed a picture of a man who often literally got drunk on ideas in front of his students.