Gordon A. Craig

26 NOVEMBER 1913 * 30 OCTOBER 2005 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS BORN IN GLASGOW, Scotland, on 26 November 1913, Gordon Craig came to Canada with his parents in April 1914; he moved to the United States in 1925. He died on 30 October 2005, in Portola Valley, California, days before his ninety-second birthday. In long life, crowded with achievement and world-wide acclaim, he always remembered his Scottish roots. More than many, Gordon fashioned his own life and did so in harmony with an appallingly disharmonious world. As an undergraduate at Princeton, he traveled to Germany in the summer of 1935, crossing the Atlantic on the Dutch steamer S.S. Statendam. (I made the reverse journey on that boat three years later.) overt reason for the trip was to gather material for his senior thesis on The Rise and Fall of the Weimar Republic. That first trip inspired a deep and lasting impression of high German culture, no more so than the many examples that encountered of abuse of culture and, indeed, of inhumanity and barbarism. And to the end of his life, Craig probed the demonic puzzles of German antitheses. So that summer visit was formidable moment of Bildung, cultural and political, from which generations of Craig's students and readers were to benefit. Unlike so many foreign visitors at the time, the twenty-two-year-old Craig sensed the novelty and power of the Nazi regime, its malignant and enthralling militancy. As youth, he steeped himself in humanistic studies, and throughout his life he fell back on the ancient languages, on classical literature, on poetry. In 1936-38 he was Rhodes scholar at Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied under master historians, specialists in the thendominant field of political-diplomatic studies. It left him time for lighter pursuits, his guitar being the outward manifestation of gregarious spirit who in many roles was born entertainer. But he also had an inescapable ringside seat at the tempestuous changes in Europe's politics: Anglo-French dithering in the face of ever greater German aggressiveness, while Mussolini waged war in Ethiopia and an army revolt in Spain evolved into civil war with the Falangists in ascendancy. Craig returned to America just before Europe's war broke out. Right-wing appeasement, belatedly half-abandoned in March 1939, had encouraged Hitler's bid for European mastery. At Princeton, Raymond Sontag, who had just finished many-faceted study of Anglo-German relations, was his inspiring mentor, and Craig finished in short order dissertation on British relations with Europe in the years of Bismarck's wars of German unification. He began teaching at once, in 1939 at Yale, but in 1942 he was recruited to the Research and Analysis section of the OSS, group headed by W. L. Langer and Sherman Kent, where historians and social scientists, both native Americans and Central European emigres, analyzed world events under the intense pressure of wartime conditions; for Craig as for others, it was the time and place for forging lifelong friendships. Subsequently he served with the Marine Corps in the Pacific. After the war, Craig returned to Princeton and in 1951 began there his legendary career as teacher; in 1961, he accepted call to Stanford, where he continued to teach until his retirement in 1979.1 occasionally heard the early Craig-at Columbia, where he was visiting professor in the late 1940s: he spoke, as he later wrote, in perfectly formed sentences, with acerbic lucidity and amazing energy. His chief interests then fastened on war and diplomacy, subjects to which he was first introduced by Hans Delbriick's History of the Art of War-and which lent themselves to his knack for combining drama and analysis; he made the past come alive in all its complexity and human frailty. In preface to his textbook Europe since 1815, he acknowledged, I have been guided by my conviction that men are as important as ideas and have done my best to prevent the human beings in my story from being lost in welter of tendencies, developments, motive forces, and basic factors. …

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