Professor Gunther E. Rothenberg
(1923–2004)
Editors’ Note: Professor Gunther E. Rothenberg, a distinguished international scholar of war, was a foundation member of the Australian Army Journal (AAJ) Editorial Advisory Board from February 2003 until his death in April 2004. As a tribute to Professor Rothenberg’s services to the journal, the AAJ is publishing the eulogy delivered at his funeral in Canberra on 29 April 2004 by Professor Peter Dennis.
Eleanor has asked me to speak about Gunther’s life. How to sum up that remarkable life in a few minutes is more difficult than I could have imagined, for there are so many lives to consider: the private life and the public lives. This is not the time to speak at length of Gunther’s private life, except to say that, as a husband, father and grandfather, it was guided by love, especially for Ruth and, for the past ten years, for his beloved Eleanor.
Rather it is his public lives that I want to speak about. Few men can have had as many rich, varied and ultimately satisfying lives as Gunther. Soldier, scholar, teacher, mentor—Gunther excelled in all these spheres. He was born in Berlin in 1923, and from an early age expressed the ambition to become one day a professor of military history. What a gift of prophecy, but what twists and turns stood between him and the fulfilment of that boyhood dream. As the situation in Germany deteriorated and the position of Jews became more and more precarious, Gunther emigrated with his family to the Netherlands and thence to Palestine, where in 1940–41 he was a member of several youth groups and of the Haganah. In 1941 he joined the British Army, and served throughout the war in Egypt, Italy and Austria in the Service and Intelligence Corps, and undertook a number of missions to connect with partisan groups. His decorations by war’s end included the Distinguished Conduct Medal and the Medal of Merit. He was then employed by US Intelligence as a civilian in Austria in 1948, before returning to Palestine–Israel as a Captain in the Haganah and fighting in the Israeli Defence Force in the War of Independence.
In 1949 he migrated to the United States, and for the next six years served in the US Air Force Intelligence Branch, which included service in the Korean War. At the same time he began his academic studies. These studies led in 1958 to his PhD from the University of Illinois, and the start of what was to become an illustrious career. He was a member of the faculty of the University of New Mexico for ten years before joining Purdue in 1973, where he spent the rest of his American academic career—not bad for a boy who did not complete high school.
I say his ‘American’ career, because by the mid-1980s Gunther’s horizons were widening to include Australia. Eleanor and I and others here today were privileged to have Gunther as a colleague in 1985, when he was a Visiting Fulbright Fellow in the Department of History in the Faculty of Military Studies at the Royal Military College of Australia, Duntroon. The Royal Military College was Gunther’s introduction to Australia, and he revelled in it, even if he found some aspects of Australian military behaviour puzzling. He never did come to terms with the sight of young officer cadets marching offto class in the rain carrying umbrellas. It sat uneasily with his notion of soldiers as men of action.
When he returned to Australia, now married to Eleanor, some time after Ruth’s tragic death, he found a new academic home at Monash University. Gunther made many friends at Monash and spoke warmly of them, but I think it true to say that he never felt completely at home there. The same was true when he and Eleanor moved to Canberra. ‘Peter,’ he often told me, ‘the worst mistake I ever made was to retire.’ He missed the sense of being in the thick of things, but given that he also told me at great length of his frustration with the ‘business’ of universities. I used to remind him that now he was free to pursue his scholarly interests without the burden of having to pay too much, indeed any, attention to what administrators said or thought.
Which brings me to Gunther’s achievements as a scholar of military history. Over the course of his academic career, which went well past his official retirement date, Gunther established himself as one of the world’s leading authorities on Austrian and Napoleonic military history. His books, especially The Art of Warfare in the Age of Napoleon, are the authoritative works in the field, and regularly appear on course reading lists around the world. He was widely consulted on a range of military matters, and continues to be cited frequently in new works. Even the French approved of his study of the Napoleonic Wars. What higher praise could there be for an historian of the Napoleonic era? At the time of his death he was putting the finishing touches to a study of the Battle of Wagram, and bemoaning the fact that he had not yet worked out what project to tackle next. By any measure, it is a sterling record.
As a teacher and mentor Gunther excelled. In lectures—whether to undergraduates, graduates, or at the many staff colleges around the world where he taught— Gunther was the consummate showman. He loved to talk, with the result that his classes were animated theatrical performances—entertaining yes, but suffused with a deep understanding of, and love for, history. He also loved his students, and for those whom he supervised as graduate students he had a special and enduring regard. They were ‘his boys’: a stern taskmaster, he guided and nurtured them in their studies and subsequent careers, and in return they held him in a mixture of awe and deep affection. This was surely demonstrated in February 2004, when Gunther was Guest of Honour at a meeting of the Consortium on Revolutionary Europe held in High Point, North Carolina in the United States. Gunther affected to be largely indifferent to the fuss, but on his return told me, somewhat shyly, that he had loved every minute of it. For their part, it was a very public way for many of his former graduate students to show the great esteem in which they held him. One of them wrote to me on hearing of Gunther’s death: ‘He was tough on the outside, and yet we, “his boys”, knew the gentleness and kindness within. Our standard joke was, to paraphrase Kipling, “We’d rather be kicked by him than knighted by the Queen of England”.’
For all of his outward gusto, Gunther was in many ways a very private man. He was guided by a deep sense of duty, which Eleanor suggests sprang from his German, indeed Prussian, background. Then there was his strong sense of American patriotism, fuelled in part by his gratitude to the United States for having provided him with a home and unlimited opportunity. He was also guided by a quiet devotion to his Jewish faith. We do not choose the time of our death, but there is surely something symbolic in the fact that Gunther died on Israel’s Day of Independence—a day for which he had fought as a soldier. How then to sum up the extraordinary public life of this soldier, scholar, teacher, mentor and friend? I can only say: ‘He was a good man’, and conclude: ‘His duty nobly done’. May he rest in peace.
Peter Dennis
Professor of History
School of Humanities and Social Sciences
The University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force
