| 1 | Name: | Dr. Wolfgang F. Fruehwald | |
| Institution: | Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation; Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich; Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft | ||
| Year Elected: | 2010 | ||
| Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | ||
| Subdivision: | 503. Administrators, Bankers and Opinion Leaders from the Public or Private Sectors | ||
| Residency: | International | ||
| Living? : | Deceased | ||
| Birth Date: | 1935 | ||
| Death Date: | January 18, 2019 | ||
Wolfgang Fruehwald died on January 18, 2019 in Augsburg, Germany at the age of 83. Below is a biographical essay he wrote following his election to the American Philosophical Society in 2010. Augsburg, where I was born in August 1935, is a city in the Swabian part of Bavaria with about 250,000 residents. Thus, until today I speak with a Swabian accent. I grew up in a small family of four persons, father, mother and my brother who is four years my senior. We lived in a small green suburb, called "garden-town," that means we had a big garden with flowers, fruits and vegetables, and a huge forest was nearby. When I was four years old, the world turned into fire and war. The Nazis started the Second World War, and some years later my school was bombed. But as luck would have it our family survived. In April 1945, peace was a brand new experience for me. It was a godsend that the following decades, the decades of my life as a boy and a man, are the longest periods of peace which Europe ever experienced in modern history. In autumn 1945, the schools were reopened. I went to high school and studied Latin, Greek, English, a little bit of French and Hebrew. When I received my high school-diploma in 1954 I was 19 years old. My fiancée, Victoria Schwarzkopf, was my classmate in the last classes of high school. We married four years later and are lucky enough to have now been married for more than 50 years. We have five children, two daughters and three sons (also three daughters in law), and 11 grandchildren. In 1954, when I began to study at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, I was an outsider in my family. I studied German Language and Literature, History, Geography and Philosophy to become a high school-teacher in Bavaria. My grandfather and my father were railway employees in Germany. My brother chose the same career. In 1958, I received my first university degree (Staatsexamen) and was appointed assistant professor at the Institute of German Philology at Munich University. I received my Ph.D. in 1961, with a dissertation about medieval sermons from the 13th century, in 1969 I received the postdoctorate qualification (Habilitation) with a book about the German poet Clemens Brentano. My first appointment as full professor of History of German Literature was in 1970 at the University Trier-Kaiserslautern. In 1974, I accepted an offer for a chair at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. I declined offers from the University of Augsburg (1973) and the Free University of Berlin (1985). In 1985, I accepted an invitation as Distinguished Max Kade Visiting Professor at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. In 1984, when I was elected a member and four years later chairman of a reviewers committee (Fachausschuss) of the German Research Association (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft), a busy period began in my life. Working for nongovernmental organizations of science and scholarship in Germany, Austria, Israel and the European Union I met very experienced colleagues and learned something new every day. It is not possible to enumerate all the functions and appointments which I had in science policy, science management and science organizations during more than twenty years. But, in addition to my chair at an institute with more than 6,000 students, my work for the German Research Association and the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation were the main obligations which I held. I was elected a member of the senate and the grants committee of the German Research Association in 1986. In 1991, I was elected and 1994 reelected President of Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. After six years in office (two terms, 1991 - 1997) I returned to my chair in Munich. In 1999, I was elected President of the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation. The foundation has alumni-clubs in more than 50 countries of the world. During the eight years of my presidency (1999 - 2007) I visited 32 of them on different continents, in Europe, Asia, Australia and New Zealand, in the United States, in Canada and in some countries of South America. I travelled once or twice every year around the world and I met new and old members of the worldwide Humboldt-Family. Looking back at 45 years as a scholar and a science manager I am very grateful that in many difficult situations and in each country which I visited I found collaborators, members and friends of the big science community which gave me the confidence that we are together able to increase the quality of life. Since 2003, I have been Professor Emeritus, since 2008 Honorary President of the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation. | |||