Into the Twenty-First Century: A Memoir, 1999 - 2012

By Roderick Stackelberg

This book is the fourth volume of Dr. Stackelbergs memoirs. It covers the years from 1999 to 2012, years of productive scholarship and declining health.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 14, 2012
• ISBN: 9781479762651

Roderick Stackelberg

Dr. Roderick Stackelberg is Professor Emeritus at Gonzaga University, where he taught in the History Department for twenty-six years until his retirement in 2004. He is the author of four books of scholarship: Idealism Debased: From Völkisch Idealism to National Socialism (1981); Hitler´s Germany: Origins, Interpretations, Legacies (1998; 2nd ed. 2009); (with Sally A. Winkle) The Nazi Germany Sourcebook: An Anthology of Texts (2002); and The Routledge Companion to Nazi Germany (2007). He has also published three earlier volumes of memoirs: Out of Hitler’s Shadow: Childhood and Youth in Germany and the United States, 1935-1967 (2010); Memory and History: Recollections of a Historian of Nazism, 1967-1982 (2011); and A Life Renewed: Memoirs, 1983-1998 (2012).

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Copyright © 2012 by Roderick Stackelberg.

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Contents

Preface

1 End of the century

2 A new century, a grandchild, and a new home, 2000-2001

3 Living with The War on Terror, 2001-2003

4 Towards retirement, 2003-2004

5 Celebrations and disappointments

6 The challenge of cancer, 2005-2006

7 Anniversaries and parties, 2007-2008

8 The calm before the storm, 2009-2010

9 Stroke, struck, stricken, 2011-2012

PREFACE

There is no present and no future. There is only the past, over and over again.

Eugene O’Neill

The curse of mankind, that which keeps our manhood so little and depraved, is its sense of selfhood, and the absurd opinionativeness it engenders.

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772)

EVIDENTLY I AM not a Swedenborgian, as I have many strong opinions and few inhibitions about expressing them. This fourth volume of memoirs offers another example of my opinionativeness (what a word!) and completes my life story from my interior vantage point up to my seventy-eighth year in 2012. It follows three earlier and equally opinionated volumes: Out of Hitler’s Shadow about my childhood and youth up to 1967; Memory and History on my experiences as a historian up to 1982; and A Life Renewed about my happy second marriage up to 1998. The present volume will be my last one unless I live another decade or two, a most unlikely prospect.

I have never quite gotten over my failure to pursue my childhood dream of becoming a writer. Instead, I became the living embodiment of Shaw’s harsh dictum, Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach. Pacé Shaw, teaching well does require a bit of an artistic temperament as well. Teaching was easy and enjoyable for me, but it did not fulfill my dreams. If I had to do it over again (and if I had been born a different person) I would have stuck to writing with much more tenacity than I was ever able to muster. It wasn’t only laziness (nor financial exigencies, which did play a part as well) that kept me from doing what I wanted to do. It was also a basic prejudice that I’ve come to regret: the unwarranted belief that fiction as a genre was inferior to expository writing because it wasn’t comprised of verifiable facts. What I lacked was imagination. I didn’t need much of that to record my own personal experiences and thoughts. However, I would have needed more imagination than I felt able to muster to describe the experiences of others. Of course, the history of Nazi Germany gave me plenty to write about, but it was not what I had set out to do in my youth. So after retirement from Gonzaga University in 2004, I retreated to autobiography. Into the Twenty-First Century is its concluding volume.

My target audience are my descendants, however many or few they may be. I would have liked to know more about the lives and thoughts of my ancestors, and so I assume that the same curiosity might be present in at least some of my descendants or close relatives as well. This is not the first autobiography in my immediate family. In 1907 my great-grandmother, Ellen McGowan Biddle (1841-1922) published Reminiscences of a Soldier’s Wife about her life on the frontier with her husband, Colonel James Biddle (1832-1922), who served in the U.S. Army from 1861 (at the start of the Civil War) until his retirement in 1896. Her later Recollections (Boston, 1920) were dedicated to my mother in the following words: To my granddaughter Ellen Biddle, a sunbeam that never casts a shadow.

On my father’s side of my family there is my cousin Traugott von Stackelberg (1891-1970), author of a delightful memoir of his internal exile in Imperial Russia for anti-monarchist activities as a young man from 1915 to the fall of the czar in 1917, entitled Geliebtes Sibirien (Beloved Siberia) and published in Germany in 1951. He followed that book up with an equally interesting memoir of his trip through the Soviet Union in 1967, Auf eigener Fährte (On My Own Trail), published in 1968. These family precedents gave me the courage to start on my own memoirs, even if my professional distinctions or literary eminence cannot rival theirs.

A book, when completed, has a life of its own. I would be very happy if it ignited a spark in any of its readers, but quite satisfied if it just gave them pleasure.

Spokane, WA

December 2012

1

End of the century

WE GATHERED IN Albany, VT, for Mama’s funeral service in January 1999. As Mama had foreseen, it was the first (though not the last) time that all of her children were together in the same place since Papa’s death in 1994. Olaf’s son Paul was the only family member who was with Mama the night she died. By the time the local undertaker came in the morning, rigor mortis had set in. They carried her body out as if it were a wooden plank. Shortly before her death, Mama had asked Betsy’s opinion why she had no appetite. Betsy’s response was, It could be anorexia. No wonder she and Mama could never get