Waldemar Gurian: Witness of the Twentieth Century

Abstract

Personal and historical fate put Waldemar Gurian in his short but full and fulfilled life into the center of the vortex of the twentieth century. Born in Russia, educated in Germany, deeply familiar with France, he witnessed the intellectual, moral and social transformations produced by the First World War in the principal countries of continental Europe. While he was still in his twenties and early thirties, he wrote a number of outstanding books analyzing these transformations and probing their core with an understanding deepened by the ability and opportunity of comparing them, of seeing the wealth of their differences and yet the essential similarity of the mental and moral climate out of which they grew. He wrote penetrating studies about Russian Bolshevism and German nationalism, about the political and social ideas of French Catholicism and about the integral nationalism in France. The changing mental and moral climate in continental Europe which Gurian observed after the First World War was one of the principal causes of the Second World War. Its approach caused Gurian to leave continental Europe for the United States. Here began the second and in many ways more fruitful period of his life. Not many immigrants of the troubled thirties had so much to give to their new fatherland in the breadth and objectivity of their understanding of the Old World and in the humaneness and liberality of their personality; few, indeed, put their whole life and soul into untiring constructive activity as he did in Notre Dame, which afforded him the generous opportunity, an activity which helped to prepare American scholarship and public opinion to meet with a better understanding the new responsibilities in the wake of the Second World War.