When Dr. Guido Goldman’s family fled to the United States in fear of the Nazi regime in 1940, no one knew what the family’s new life was going to be like. Goldman would come to be immensely influential in American society – not only in terms of transatlantic cooperation and understanding, but also as a highly successful academic figure and mentor for generations to come. Goldman passed away after a long fight with prostate cancer on November 30, at the age of 83, but his impact remains indelible.
Goldman was born on November 4, 1937, in Switzerland. His mother Alice Gottschalk was German and his father Nahum Goldmann, who was born in what is now Belarus, was the co-founder of the World Jewish Congress and the president of the World Zionist Organization. In the U.S., Goldman attended Harvard University going on to earn his doctorate in government in 1969. He wrote his dissertation on the Weimar Republic, which was supervised by Henry Kissinger, with whom he maintained a lifelong, close friendship. Growing up in New York, prominent personalities such as Bernard Baruch and Konrad Adenauer were frequent guests at his home. These visits showed Goldman how important it was to form personal ties and nourish relationships with people he encountered during the course of his career, which would remain one of Goldman’s central objectives.
One of the accomplishments he is most known for is the establishment of what later became the Minda de Gunzberg Center for European Studies at Harvard University – a process he undertook with Henry Kissinger and Stanley Hoffman. Goldman went on to teach as a senior lecturer in government at the European Center and later became the center’s director of the program for the study of Germany.
Academics and former students say Goldman had a ceaseless commitment to higher purposes and a deep-rooted humility that drew people closer and inspired introspection. His former student, Larry Wolff, who took his German politics class at Harvard back in the late 1970s and went on to become New York Universitys’ director for the Center for European and Meditteranean Studies (CEMS), remembers Goldman as one of a very small number of professors who made him think in a practical way about how politics works. Goldman inspired Wolff to combine his academic interests with administrative roles later on in his career.
“I can remember him as one of the directors at the European Center at Harvard, and being aware that that was both, something interesting to do, and something that you could mesh with your academic interests and your teaching interests in ways that were productive – that is something that I appreciated looking back on it later,” Wolff said.
The primary force behind establishing the German Marshall Fund (GMF), an organization dedicated to the improvement of transatlantic understanding, Goldman convinced German Chancellor Willy Brandt to announce a generous gift to the GMF and a large endowment to Harvard’s European Studies Center in 1972.
While serving as a founding chair of the GMF board for 40 years, Goldman was also a board member of the American Council on Germany, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Atlantic Council of the U.S. Even though he retired from the GMF board in 2012, he continued to attend meetings frequently and monitored the development of new transatlantic leaders.
When Wolff moved back to Harvard in the late 1980s after finishing his PhD, he touched base with Goldman and was surprised to find that his rather reserved but brilliant undergraduate professor had a completely different side to him – Goldman was also a major supporter of the arts. He was the founder of the American Foundation for Textile Art, sponsoring textile exhibitions in 12 American and European museums. In 2005, he donated the majority of his collection to the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C. Moreover, Goldman served on the board and as vice chair of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and helped organize the Dance2Bfit program to fight obesity in primary schools.
Jackson Janes, the president emeritus of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies writes of his mentor that he was a model, a mentor and a motivator for hundreds of people during his lifetime.
“Guido’s legacy is a record of accomplishments few might be able to match,” Janes writes, “But he left us with the inspiration of his generosity, his passion for connecting people and ideas, and his lifelong devotion to the bonds of the transatlantic community. So many of us are indebted to Guido for so much – and we can best remember him by walking in his footsteps.”
(Photo Credit: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/11/guido-goldman-83-established-future-minda-de-gunzberg-center/)
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