Just over one year ago, on October 21, 2001, we lost our friend and colleague
Bodo Nischan. A man who evoked unusual fondness and respect from virtually
everyone who knew him, Bodo succumbed to a brain tumor after an intense struggle
lasting only six months. He was sixty-two years old.
The Society for Reformation Research, one of several scholarly organizations of
which he was a long-time and active member, dedicates this plenary session to
his memory. Our hope has been to design a session of just that sort to which
Bodo himself would have been drawn, and in which he would have actively
participated. Bodo would have objected strenuously, I think, to the idea of
being held up as a model scholar, or as a model person in any respect; he had a
healthy aversion to conceptions of sainthood, whether scholarly or of any other
sort. But surely we can help to celebrate his life and his contributions by
pursuing the sort of friendly and open intellectual exchange he loved, and by
discussing some of the historical matters he thought were important.
Most of us don’t need to be reminded of Bodo’s scholarly record. In addition to
his highly regarded, indeed landmark book of 1994, Prince, People and
Confession: The Second Reformation in Brandenburg, he produced an impressive
series of important articles over the years, each of which showed painstaking
and inspiring work in largely unknown historical territory. When much of this
work was collected and issued in a 1999 volume that Bodo titled Lutherans and
Calvinists in the Age on Confessionalism, I was personally taken aback to learn
that I had known about and read only about half of all the fine pieces that Bodo
had published in various scholarly journals. And he continued to be even more
productive than many of us realized.
We knew from his additional conference presentations since the mid-1990’s that
he was engaged in further pioneering studies on the subject of ritual and the
confessionalization process in Germany. In fact, at the time of his death he had
completed four chapters of his projected work on this topic, a study to which
everyone who followed the broadening discussion on early modern
confessionalization was looking forward eagerly. Fortunately, plans are in the
works for these chapters to be published in book form. Moreover, at least two
major papers that Bodo delivered in Europe will soon be available in conference
volumes. All this scholarship will have an ongoing influence. As a formal
memorial to the man and his work, a volume of essays on the broad theme of
confessionalization will be published by Ashgate, with support from East
Carolina University, under the editorship of two of Bodo’s long-time North
Carolina colleagues and friends, John Headley and Hans Hillerbrand.
Professor Bodo Nischan had a key role in helping East Carolina University grow
into the fine institution it is today. He was a truly beloved teacher and
thoroughly respected, honored colleague. Among countless students and
associates, sadness over this loss has recently been accompanied by warm nods of
approval, as Bodo has been named posthumously by the ECU College of Arts and
Sciences as the 2002 Distinguished Professor of History. In addition, and
equally appropriately, a new manuscript endowment has been named for him at the
Joyner Library of ECU. Meanwhile, his colleagues in The Society for Reformation
Research have, as you know, just bestowed the first Bodo Nischan Award for
Scholarship, Civility, and Service; this honor has fallen on Charles Nauert. The
name of the award reflects the deep gratitude of many colleagues who worked with
Bodo, learned from him, and came to value their association with him ever more
highly over the years.
Those of us who knew Bodo through his regular and lively participation in
programs like the one for which we gather this evening were familiar with his
great personal warmth, charm, and sensitivity. I suppose some who encountered
him for the first time might have been just a bit intimidated by this tall,
energetic figure, with his striking professorial visage, his deep voice, his
rapid-fire speech and residual German accent. But his ready smile quickly
revealed this man’s generous nature, and one needed to spend only a few minutes
with Bodo to discover his modesty, his sense of humor, his caring and supportive
character. And the longer one knew him, the more deeply one sensed his
thoroughgoing honesty, integrity, and loyalty.
At meetings like this one, who among his colleagues, friends, and acquaintances
didn’t smile inwardly to spot Bodo, striding hurriedly through the halls or
engaged in animated conversation, as often as possible accompanied by his
beautiful, elegant, and charming wife Gerda, his companion for life? It was
worth crossing a continent just to have dinner with that pair, so full of life
and love, such great and loyal friends. How often did Bodo send a knot of us
into fits of laughter with self-deprecating stories about his German relatives,
or about life in eastern North Carolina, or about some incredible misadventure
in their travels? During a conference in the old DDR, I had the memorable
privilege of seeing at least one such story unfold as it happened. Because of
Bodo’s many German connections, the regime had assigned some goons to trail him.
I watched as he playfully confused those sour, hapless characters, forcing them
into antics worthy of the Keystone Cops. He had me literally doubled over.
To my knowledge, Bodo never had a personal enemy. Like all of us he experienced
some scholarly and professional disagreements, but Bodo was the very last person
to let sores fester, or to allow his outlook to be soured. It’s no wonder at all
that he developed such close friendships—such as those that continued from his
youth and his days as a student at Yale, Lutheran Theological Seminary, and
Penn, and later wonderful networks in Greenville, throughout the U.S. and
Canada, at Wolfenbeuttel, Berlin, and elsewhere in Germany, not to mention in
other parts of Europe and scattered yet farther. Whether as fellow scholars, or
as friends, or both, people were quite simply proud to know him. And the love of
his family always glowed in him.
These thoughts, filled though they are with fondness and gratitude, would remain
incomplete if I failed to mention that Bodo Nischan was a man of abiding and
expansive faith. Alert during most of his final illness, he died in heartfelt
gratitude for the gift of life, and for the blessings he knew in his marriage to
Gerda, through his son Michael, through his larger family, and through his
friends, students, and colleagues. He would certainly be far less concerned
about the way we memorialize him than about our hearing, both here and now and
as we carry on henceforth with our lives, that infinitely larger message of
affirmation and hope by which his own days were graced.