In Memoriam: Jens Rieckmann

Jens Rieckmann died on December 8, 2013. He was only sixty-nine years old—too young to pass away and to leave behind his beloved partner of forty-three years, David Perkins; his many friends; his books; and his home with its well-stocked kitchen and its beautifully tended garden in Amherst, New Hampshire. But congestive heart failure cut short the life of one who touched many of us—with his intellect as much as with his open and warm personality.

With Jens Rieckmann, the field of Austrian Studies has lost one of its most learned and prolific scholars. But Jens’ legacy does not consist merely of his books and countless articles. Rather, he also leaves behind several generations of students—undergraduates, graduate students, and “Doktorkinder.” Those of us who were fortunate enough to sit in his classroom and to work with him perceived in him the rare and brilliant teacher who was a strong academic influence but who nevertheless taught us to look for our own voices so that we might become scholars not in his image, but rather in our own right, able to use as a model for ourselves his professional ethics and intellectual integrity while setting out on our own path to be the best scholars and teachers we know how to be. I had the great privilege of being one of Jens’ students—he was my doctoral adviser when he taught in the Department of Germanics at the University of Washington in Seattle, and after he left Seattle to teach at the University of California, Irvine, he flew back to the Pacific Northwest to be present at my dissertation defense. Really, though I have been in the profession for over two decades now, Jens never stopped being my adviser—and just as he remained my adviser, he also remained an adviser and trusted friend to many of his former students. A few short days before his death, his voice straining but his mind crystal-clear, he told me on the phone about a Kafka paper another one of his “Doktorkinder” had sent to him to ask for his feedback on this piece of scholarship.

This kind of generosity—in deed and of spirit—was a hallmark of who Jens was, as a scholar, as a teacher, and as a friend. Jens’ writing is marked by a careful choice of words—his sentences are beautifully crafted, his arguments are intricately wrought, and his research is exhaustive. In his thinking, Jens was exact, nuanced, and subtle, and yet he was never nitpicky. An openness characterized his thought and his outlook on the world that found both expression and one of its complements in his sense of humor. Jens’ humor had many registers—at turns, it became manifest as a sly and quick and marvelously funny wit; as a laugh and big smile about a cosmic irony or about a well-crafted joke; or as a conciliatory and gentle chuckle.

This openness and sense of humor also were a hallmark of Jens’ seminars. His expositions of texts, of their history, of their scholarly reception, while bearing the imprint of his gravitas as a scholar, nevertheless were characterized by a lightness that was owed to their clarity and accessibility. As importantly, Jens was an exceptionally good listener. Just as he was able to listen to a narrative voice in a text, he also was able to listen to his interlocutors. And his open gaze could apprehend texts as well as social and interpersonal situations, both in the classroom and in the world. Jens had about him an alertness, a clear-eyed way of being in the world, that allowed him truly to be present when he spoke with his students, with his colleagues, and with his friends.

Jens Rieckmann studied at the Universität Göttingen and then took his PhD at Harvard in 1975. He first built a research profile through his scholarly engagement with Thomas Mann. His landmark study on Thomas Mann’s Zauberberg appeared in 1977. And while Jens continued to make important contributions to the literature on Thomas Mann for the duration of his career, he...