R O B E R T P I C K

ROBERT PICK

BY L. A. WILLOUGHBY

TO his many friends, colleagues and pu ils in this country the name ‘Dr

little town of Neustadt in the north-west corner of Bohemia. Likc Thomas Masaryk before hm, he attended the ‘Erstes Deutsches Gymnasium’ in Briinn, a seventeenth-ccntury Jesuit foundation with a strong classical bias; like him he subsequently went to Vienna;‘and like that first President of an independent Bohemia, he too was in adversity to find refuge as a lecturer at King’s College, London. For the Picks, as for so many Jewish Liberals from outlying parts of the Austrian Empire, Vienna - its language, its litera- ture, its civilized cosmopolitanism, its urbane and gracious way of life, above all its music - represented a cultural ideal which they made entirely their own and of which they became an integral part.

It was in a Vienna which was still the splendid capital of a great Empire of forty-five million people, still for the Balkan countries the ‘frontier town’, a gateway to the West, still sustained by the ccntury-old traditions of a universal Holy Roman Empire, that Pick and I first met in 1907. Both studying German and English as Haup@cdcher, both &ere Semester, we submitted ourselvcs to the strict, but straightforward, discipline of positivis- tic Wissenschaft in the seminars of Hofrat Minor and Hofrat Schipper, discussed the political situation - Trieste was demanding cultural autonomy, an Italian university of its own, and there were numerous student Krawalle both for and against; and that dangerous demagogue, Biirgermeister Karl Lueger, was already kindling those flames of anti-Semitism which a frustrated house-painter would later fan into a holocaust. Best of all, we savoured - and at student prices! - the delights of Austrian cooking at the KochschuIe in the Mariannengasse to which Pick had introduced me. It was not his only Verdienst to the solitary Englishman then matriculated in the ‘Phllosophische Fakuldt’. Then, as now, he was ever ready to help, and even inflicted upon himself the drudgery of reading my doctoral dissertation bcfore it was finally handed in.

From the first, Pick was bent on teachmg. And after a brief spell in a Gyrrrnasitrm he became Professor at the ‘Wiener Handelsakademie’, one of thosc many institutions for higher learning in German lands which do not assume - as we too often tend to assume in this country - that vocational training is incompatible with a liberal education. His twenty-six years’ tenure of that office was only interrupted by three years’ activc service as an officer on the Italian front in the first World War. Anglophile that he was

Pick‘ spells Vienna. But he was actually E om, on August 31st, 1885, at the

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2 ROBERT PICK

even then, he has always felt grateful that his battalion should have been transferred to Russia before the English arrived to reinforce the Italians. Soon after the end of the War he started an annual Holiday Course for English students at Gmunden, and he and Mrs Pick kept open house for those numerous undergraduates we German teachers in England sent in ever-increasing numbers to Vienna. This connection with English univer- sities was - as he himself once put it with his habitual philological nicety - ‘to prove of vital importance, “vital” in ureigenster Bedeutung’, a matter, indeed, of life and death. For on that infamous Tenth of November in 1938, when the Gestapo swooped down on German Jewry, Robert Pick was arrested and sent to Dachau. That he was released after three months was due to the energy and generosity of two old &ends - and our close col- leagues - Professors Purdie and Penson who provided permit and visa and a home for the family to come to.

And here they have remained, Dr Pick himself teaching, first at Hillcrofi College in Surbiton and then, for ten years and more, at various Colleges of London University; his daughter Marianne, who graduated at Bedford College, carrying on the ‘Pick tradition’ by becoming a teacher too. On his retirement in 1950, which coincided with my own, we found ourselves - almost fifty ears after we had sat side by side in Minor’s Kolleg, behind all

the best seats and crowded out hs regular Horer - we found ourselves, in our Patriarchenalter, together again. And, in a sense, at the beginning again. For with a newly founded Institute of Germanic Languages and Literatures on our hands, its first Honorary Director and its first Secretary-Librarian had everything to learn about how to run it. Indeed, about how to make it! For as yet it consisted of nothing but an empty Regency house in Russell Square. And Dr Pick proved as resourceful in buyin furniture or washing

the great success it now is, if it has grown into a centre towards which Germanists - not only from Great Britain and the Commonwealth, but fiom Europe and America as well - tend to gravitate when in London, this is almost entirely due, as three successive Directors will gratefully testdy, to his selfless devotion, infinite patience and un&g tact, to that Austrian Kulanz in the face of which even the most intractable problems dissolve or are resolved. And despite his multifarious duties he has s t i l l found time to continue, unobtrusively and with characteristic modesty, his scholarly pursuits: writing articles, urbane and gently humorous, on Anglo-German relations, editing, translating, reviewing, preparing bibliographies, in other words, putting his learning and talents at the service of others. In this sphere alone he wdl certainly be remembered as the chief compiler and editor of the exhaustive Bibliography of ‘Schiller in England’ which constitutes vol. XXX

the fashiona B le ladies in their wide flower-laden hats, who monopolized

crockery as in buying books or arranging lectures. If tf e Institute has become

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R O B E R T P I C K 3

of the Publications of the English Goethe Society, and of ‘Hofmannsthal in England’, a forthcoming publication of the Germanic Institute. One of his articles in t h s journal contained ‘Some Thoughts on Festschriften’ (GLL, vol. XII, 1959, 204-IO), and it is fitting that he should be the recipient of a Festschrift in the form which he there recognized to be the most suitable - a special number of a periohcal. He is a connoisseur of Festschriftcn, and all thc contributors to this one hope he will be pleased with his.

Dr Pick has assented in a manner that Goethe would havc called beispielhaft to a fate whch has become all too common in our century. Unlike many refugees, he has never repudiated the culture which nourished his spirit and moulded his mind, however grievous the injury its self-appointed and spurious heirs may have done to him and his. If he has made his home here, and fclt at home among us, it has not been by trying to bccome, at superficial levels or to surface appearance, more English than thc English, but by enlarging his heart and mind to embrace a second language, a second culture, and a second people. In this way he has become not only a f a d a r and well- loved figure on the Germanistic scene, but an important mediator between Austria and England. We are grateful to him, and wish him many happy years of continuing activity in the land of lus adoption.