Gerhart Niemeyer, RIP

National Review, July 28, 1997 by Wfb

When the Nazis took over in Germany, Gerhart Niemeyer, age 26, left his native country. He taught and studied abroad and in 1937 came with his wife, Lucie, to America. He taught at Princeton, worked for the State Department as a foreign-affairs specialist, lectured at the National War College, and, in 1955, settled at Notre Dame as a professor of political philosophy. He had been a non-Jewish self-exile from Germany and was now another Protestant presence at Notre Dame. "I stopped teaching only when the exact words I searched for didn't materialize in my mind," he explained. "When it's thoughts or nomenclature, you can angle in on them with a little help sometimes from the students." The time had come for the middleweight, middle-sized professor with the blond curly hair to quit, which he did at age 85, departing South Bend to live alongside his daughter and grandchildren in Greenwich. He had taught for more than fifty years and written ten books. He had lost his cherished wife in 1987. In 1980 he was ordained an Episcopal priest, later converting to Roman Catholicism. When Frank Meyer died in 1972, Gerhart Niemeyer took over the monthly philosophical column in NATIONAL REVIEW that Meyer had begun under the logo "Principles and Heresies."

On Sunday, June 22, Lisa Niemeyer Silver, Gerhart's only daughter (he had four sons), called. She said her father was on his deathbed but would like to hear my voice. "It's possible he will reply in German. But I know he will hear you." I spoke into the telephone and said what I said, and heard him reply faintly in acknowledgment. The next day I left for Turkey, where the news reached me in mid-week that Gerhart had died.

I THOUGHT back on the sunny afternoon in Washington, D.C. It was 1951. I was spending the summer there pretending to use the Library of Congress to do research on the tradition of academic freedom. Actually, I spent my days in safe houses being instructed in the arts of covert intelligence for the CIA. My friend and tutor Willmoore Kendall took me to meet his old friend Gerhart Niemeyer, and we spoke in the garden about academic freedom, and he instructed me in distinctions common in German and indeed European culture.

He was emphatic in his pedagogical style. Gerhart was humble and inquisitive intellectually but never a mincer. That's the way it is done in Germany, take it or leave it. He would enrage our disputatious friend Willmoore from time to time by simply declining to pursue a point when he believed Willmoore was arguing only for the sake of doing so. But he would take infinite pains to communicate his point when the apprehension of it rested on elusive subtleties. In his teaching he exercised his special mission, helping his students--and his readers--to cope with the greater mysteries of political philosophy. He did this by exhibiting his successful resistance to what T. S. Eliot called the "dissociation of sensibilities," the cleavage between the life of the mind and the life of the heart. He showed us--or tried to do so--how to draw strength from confusion, and pleasure from the working of the mind. Readers of his books and essays felt the special vibrations Gerhart Niemeyer could generate toward the understanding of the good life, the special vindication of learning as an instrument of virtue.

Though Teutonic in style, Gerhart was unstinting in his expressions of friendship. "We do not see each other often but I never feel that the interstices have meant a loss. Thus I was not too sad not to be able to talk to you that night [of his ordination]. It was not an occasion for conversing. I saw you, I felt your hand, and got the glance from your eye. No more was needed." While unambiguous in criticism, he was also abundant in approval. "Whenever I read something of yours like this [he wrote of an obituary in NATIONAL REVIEW on David Niven] I feel as if there were no distance, or time of absence, at all between us. There is an immediacy of presence which, again, is possible only through the realm of spiritual mediation." He wrote after reading a book I sent him, "The music is about friendship rather than friends as such. `This love one can imagine between angels'--remember those words of C. S. Lewis's The Four Loves? Curiously enough, there are few books in literature that can be called `a celebration' of friendship. [This] is one of them. Throughout it one has the stimulation of well-being, not because of the wine and the cooking, but because of congenial companionship. At some points it rises to great heights, as when Danny, in the solitude of his night watch, worries about the captain's besetting concerns and composes and says a prayer for him. But mostly it moves on in the undulations of sheer harmony, like the Pastoral Symphony, without high summits or deep canyons."

Gerhart Niemeyer spent many years communicating to the readers of this journal his special blend of political philosophy, which rejected all that was barren in modernism, groping for the central truths of human experience, and fondling the fruits of their discovery. The editors of NATIONAL REVIEW join me in extending condolences to his family.