Peter Pulzer died: Being liberal means being able to listen

WThe British political scientist and historian Peter Pulzer counted Alfred Grosser and Fritz Stern among the group of Jewish emigrants who each felt a deep connection to their new homeland and yet were willing to accompany the post-war Germans in their search for liberal democracy as undeterred probation officers.

Thanks to his heritage, Pulzer was intimately acquainted with the German language and history, deeply alienated from the same culture after his family’s persecution and expulsion. To the end, Pulzer emphasized that neither the Germans nor the Austrians could get rid of the burden of history “because of good leadership”. In his work he dealt with the rise of modern hatred of Jews and the destruction of liberal democracy.

The failure of the liberal parties

His monograph “The emergence of political anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria, 1867 to 1914” was published in English in 1964 and in German in 1966. George L. Mosse praised it as a standard work. The success of populist anti-Semitism, according to Pulzer’s thesis, was only possible because the liberal parties of the time had failed. They had found no convincing answer either to the social upheavals or to the triumph of modern democracy. Criticizing the populism of modern anti-Semitism only makes sense if liberalism advocates a form of democratic coexistence that takes human needs seriously.

To this day, the book is the starting point for any serious study of the subject. As an author and editor, as chairman of the advisory board of the Leo Baeck Institute in London and above all as a mentor, Peter Pulzer repeatedly opened up new perspectives for research into anti-Semitism and German-Jewish history until his death.

Peter Pulzer was born on May 29, 1929 in Vienna. His mother was a handicrafts teacher, his father a civil engineer, both were close to the Social Democrats. Until the family emigrated to Great Britain in February 1939, they lived in Brigittenau, a working-class district. Pasettistrasse 24 was only a stone’s throw away from the men’s dormitory on Meldemannstrasse, where Adolf Hitler had painted his postcards a few years earlier, as Pulzer liked to say. He remained connected to the slander of his native city: Vienna was “wonderful”, he wrote to a younger colleague a few years before his death, “if you are not forced to live there”. He felt satisfied that the historian was allowed to give a lecture on Austrian anti-Semitism in Karl Lueger’s town hall in 1984.

Requirements of a tolerant society

Pulzer’s real passion as a scientist was the question of the prerequisites for liberal democracy and a tolerant society. The Gladstone Professor of Government and Public Administration at All Souls College in Oxford owed his high reputation in Great Britain to his political science work on the history of elections and representative democracy. As his essays in the London Review of Books show, Pulzer did not understand liberalism to mean a fixed canon of normative certainties, but rather the ability to endure differences of opinion.

When asked about basic texts on the theory of democracy, he named Helmut Schelsky’s idiosyncratic study “The others do the work” with obvious amusement. In the historians’ dispute and in the Goldhagen debate, Pulzer took a clear stance, but did not allow himself to be monopolized by any party. Instead, politely and firmly, he warned with John Stuart Mill against those who refuse to listen because they believe in their infallibility.

The resocialized Germans and Austrians knew how to thank their life-wise, witty and charming companion. The universities of Innsbruck and Vienna awarded him honorary doctorates in 2007 and 2012 respectively, in 2004 he received the German Federal Cross of Merit and in 2008 the Great Silver Decoration of Honor of Austria.

He was the light at the end of the tunnel, the historian announced quietly and with a Viennese accent in September 1995 before delivering his comments at the end of a three-day conference at Lincoln College in Oxford. On January 26, Peter Pulzer died in Oxford at the age of 93. What remains is the memory of a wonderful person, especially his smiling eyes, and the opportunity for liberalism research to rediscover the broad oeuvre of a brilliant scholar.