Abstract

After the recent deaths of Hans Speier and Felix Gilbert at age eighty-five, the number of persons is ever growing smaller who witnessed Hitler's seizure of power in 1933 and escaped to lead productive lives, giving and taking, in an adoptive country. On February 28 Reinhard Bendix died in Berkeley, three days after celebrating his seventy-fifth birthday with friends and colleagues. He was done neither with writing nor with teaching. Stricken by a final heart attack, he collapsed into the arms of his seminar students — an ideal end for a scholar who took “science as a vocation” so seriously. Until the end he struggled how best to explain social reality and his own scholarly approach to students who seemed to remain forever young, while advancing age removed him more and more from their immediate life experience.