A Tribute to John White
The Department of German would like to express its sadness at the death of Professor John White (Emeritus), our former Head of Department and renowned scholar of literary modernism, who passed away on Saturday 31 January 2015.
His longstanding colleague, Professor Jeremy Adler, also a King’s Emeritus Professor and former Head of German, read a tribute at Professor White’s funeral that expresses eloquently the loss felt in the Department at his passing. The full text is reproduced below.
John James White
A Tribute
Jeremy Adler
For the best part of his long and distinguished career, John White was the senior modernist among German scholars in the University of London. He was respected and loved in equal measure by students, colleagues and friends, but though he enjoyed an exceptional reputation, it is probably fair to say that no one really knew the extent of his learning, the depth of his commitment, and the sheer range of his responsibilities. At the height of his powers he was an editor of German Life and Letters, a prolific though anonymous reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement, a distinguished contributor to The Year’s Work in Modern Language Studies, and – a little later – an industrious editor of the Bithell Series of Dissertations. John never shied away from those duties that keep a subject going, but which earn no special points or credits. He was modesty itself, self-effacing, even shy, but that did not mean he did not know his own very considerable worth. In losing John White so very prematurely, British German Studies has lost one of its leading voices.
Everything John did was linked by a gentle law. I have touched on his capacity for self-sacrifice. I should also mention his intellectual honesty, his quiet dignity, and his sense of moral values. These were qualities that characterized him as a man, typified him as a teacher, marked him out as a colleague, and left their imprint on his scholarship. More than any other German specialist of his generation, John was a scholar, and for him, to be a scholar was a vocation not very far removed from sanctity. When he used the word “scholar”, he gave it a special flavour, an intonation, such as I have not heard before or since. On one occasion, I remember him consulting a colleague over an invitation to write a preface for the English edition of Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers – a book which more than any other addressed John’s sensibility. Could this request to write for a paperback audience, John wondered, be reconciled with his scholarly principles? Fortunately, the answer was “yes”. John aspired to Broch’s profession of truth. Truth was his guiding principle. This took him to work on the twentieth-century giants and on a host of other figures some of whom shared an equal place in the canon, and to familiarize himself with the whole of modern German literature in the old sense, especially from the Baroque – he loved Andreas Gryphius – right up to the Avant-Garde. Yet before I make John sound overly solemn, I should recall his impish sense of humour, with which he could deflate anything that sounded too serious. Yet if all these features make John sound like a quintessentially English scholar, one should recall his personal loyalty to Cornwall, an affiliation he always took pleasure in pointing out.
John was loyalty personified. He was loyal both to individuals and to the institutions which made him and which, increasingly, he made his own: the University of Leicester, where he did his BA, the University of Alberta, where he studied for his MA, University College, where he wrote his PhD, Westfield College, where he held his first appointment, and King’s College, first as a Reader and then as a Professor. In a world of Colleges, he was a university man, whether serving on committees at the Institute of Germanic Studies, or chairing the MA in Modern German Literature. He enjoyed the esteem of many older scholars, too, notably Mary Wilkinson, his PhD supervisor, and Siegbert Prawer, who gave him his first job. Innumerable colleagues also benefitted from his generosity. Countless students owe him a debt of affectionate memory, and maintained their loyalty to him for a lifetime. One aspect of university life, however, never won his loyalty or affection. Administration. He loathed it, and shied away from the corruption of office. None the less, he did well as Chairman of the Board of Studies and as Acting Head of Department at King’s.
Though he enjoyed a reputation as a German scholar, John was a comparatist, long before this became fashionable, and some of his best work is in comparative literature, in writings whose impact has been felt far beyond the discipline. A scholar’s life is in books: this is where the inner life takes outer form, and John’s books shower us with a wealth of learning, insight and compassion. Here, John certainly came up with a royal flush. His are necessary and illuminating works, magisterial studies that are rightly regarded as foundational. I will only single out the three major ones: Mythology and the Modern Novel (1971), Literary Futurism (1990), and Bertolt Brecht’s Dramatic Theory (2004). John planned two further titles: The Concept of Lebensraum; and National Socialist Literature. It was not to be.
John was a family man, and seemed to share everything he did with his wife, Ann – except perhaps for his hobby, which was philately. Increasingly, John and Ann came to collaborate as scholars, writing several articles together as well as a joint book, the excellent Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reichs (2010). They also planned to collaborate on John’s last two studies. But now, his legacy falls to his son, Jonathan, his pride and joy. Those of us who have followed Jonathan’s career, even at a distance, will understand why his success gave John such immense pleasure. Not least among these later joys, however, was Jonathan’s marriage to Lea, and the birth of their son, Arbien, John’s grandson. One of John’s last letters to me contained a photograph of himself, sitting on the floor with a very little Arbien, and playing some favourite game. Now John has been very suddenly wrenched away – in the words of the medieval hymn, mitten wir im Leben sind / Vom Tod umgeben, set to music by Bach, BWV 383. The literature John loved is replete with consolations for loss, yet in the end, we remain inconsolable for the loss of a man like John, like whom there is no other.