Memories of Stephan Kuttner

Andreas Hetzenecker’s superb Stephan Kuttner in Amerika 1940 - 1964 does ample justice to my father’s life as a scholar and the financial and institutional challenges he overcame in those years at Catholic University. The book’s citations and sources are primarily from the Institute for Medieval Canon Law archive in Munich.¹

I will write about Stephan Georg Kuttner (SGK) as I knew him in those years at Catholic University of America. My hope is that you will get to know him better as the remarkable man he was, to supplement your expertise on his scholarly work and academic life. My memoir is based on verifiable events and mostly verifiable memories. I shall identify my opinions and conjectures.

1940-1948: The School Boy’s Memories

We came to the United States because my father had been warned that he and his family were on a list of people of Jewish ancestry who were slated for internment. With considerable assistance from Montini and others in the Vatican, we all escaped via Lisbon. Even before we left, my then 25-year-old mother Eva Kuttner read to me in German about America. She told me we were going to the capital city of America, where ‘Papa’ would be a professor. Already at 5, I knew that a professor was a very important person.

In late August 1940 we were settled at 1600 Otis St. NE, the family home until late 1956. This was a row house, with a living room, dining room, kitchen, and enclosed back porch on the first floor, three bedrooms (the smallest of which served as SGK’s study) a full bath and an enclosed back porch on the second floor, and the original basement, finished circa 1944. Until then, SGK was up early every morning to shovel coal into the furnace. He let me help.

My mother’s parents, Max and Kaethe (Kate) Illch lived with us briefly after they came to America via Spain in 1941. They were wonderful grandparents. SGK and Max Illch enjoyed each other’s company, exchanging puns, discussing the history of law, Napoleon, Bismarck and others. There was also a noticeably warm relationship between the two couples. They often played a German card game together, Skat. Sunday dinner with Opa and Oma and my parents and siblings was always festive and relaxed. We had wonderful neighbors. My father wasn’t used to the kind of helpfulness and support offered by our neighbors, especially those generous families, the Shields and Wilsons.

We had a thoroughly Catholic upbringing, including our education at the new and progressive Catholic University Campus School. SGK liked the school, especially the integration of music into the daily curriculum, the small class size of no more than 27 children, and the absence of corporal punishment. He enjoyed Andy’s and my stories of the school. We told my father nearly everything.

SGK did not approve of fighting. Yet he did not disagree when at dinner the night before I started kindergarten, my mother told me that people do not like the sight of their own blood. Go for the nose on the first punch without delay, she said. I did, and she was right. In the mid-1940’s, a new family moved into the neighborhood. Their only child Kirk, aged 15, would torment children he caught alone in the Otis alley where we often played. Finally with Andrew as bait, four of us trapped Kirk, dragged him into Fowler’s garage, whacked him until he cried uncle and for a minute or so after that for good measure. Proudly, Andrew and I told the story that night. My mother beamed. SGK said what we did may have been necessary, but that if we started to enjoy doing that sort of thing we would become just like Kirk.

My father encouraged me to practice the piano; he and my mother insisted I take weekly lessons. I practiced as little as I could. My parents attended the annual Campus School piano recital of 1942, featuring ten or so students. I could not remember more than the first...