Thomas Gustav Rosenmeyer

3 APRIL 1920 * 6 FEBRUARY 2007 TOM ROSENMEYER, who died of cardiac arrest at his home in Oakland at the age of eighty-six, was an admired and distinctive presence in both classical and literary studies, uniting in his person and his scholarly enterprise the best of his German background and of the American identity he embraced. He was born and raised in Hamburg, Germany, where he received traditional training in Greek and Latin at the Johanneum Gymnasium. In 1939 the increasingly ominous Nazi persecution of the Jews forced him to flee to England. Within a year, he was interned by the British as a citizen of an enemy state and hence a putative danger to the Crown and was sent to an internment camp in Canada. Life at the camp did not prove to be as bleak as one might have imagined. Among those interned with him were the future classicist Martin Ostwald and the future theologian of post-Holocaust Judaism, Emil Fackenheim. With these and other young men of scholarly inclinations in the camp, Tom pursued further reading in Greek and Latin as well as the study of Arabic, Hebrew, and Sanskrit. In 1942 he was released from internment and went on to do a degree in Classics at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, followed by an M. A. in Classics at the University of Toronto, completed in 1945. From there he came to the United States for two years of doctoral studies at Harvard before going in 1947 to his first academic position at the University of Iowa, where he taught while working on his dissertation on Plato, a project he would complete in 1949. At the same time, he undertook a translation of Bruno Snell's groundbreaking study of Greek language and thought, The Discovery of the Mind. The translation appeared in 1953. From 1952 to 1955 he taught Classics at Smith College. Then he moved to the University of Washington, where he would remain for eleven years. In 1966 he was invited to join the Department of Classics and the newly formed Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley. He served as professor of Greek and comparative literature at Berkeley until his retirement in 1990. The weaving together of these two fields was entirely natural for Tom and suggests something of the ease with which he moved between different worlds, and not only these two. All of his life he would be a meticulous student of the Classics - scholarly, philologically rigorous, minutely attentive to the voluminous secondary literature on the subjects he dealt with - and he expected these same qualities from his colleagues and students. There was something of the Germanic professor in his professional conscientiousness, his impatience with intellectual shoddiness, the careful orderliness with which he conducted his work. He would write in his microscopic hand on an index card a concise abstract and evaluation of every scholarly book he read. He would respond in that same microscopic script (until the advent of email) within a day or two to any writing given him by students or colleagues, usually with encouraging words, but never disguising his objections. Yet his engagement with classical and later literature was by no means pedantic or merely technical. He was passionate about literature, and till his dying day he was an avid and restless reader of texts from many periods in several different languages, as eager to discuss a new novel by Ian McEwan as a recent study of Greek political thought. Precisely for this reason, he was the ideal classicist for a department of comparative literature, and he played a crucial role in setting the direction for the Berkeley department and influencing several generations of its students for almost a quarter of a century. The catholicity of his interests as a reader was linked to the urbanity of his character and cultural identity. He was keenly curious about all kinds of people and all kinds of cultural phenomena. Unlike so many who immigrated to this country from Germany as adults, he spoke American English virtually without a foreign accent and wrote graceful, at times witty, English prose. …

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