Heiko Oberman as mentor
The graduate student between Doktor and Vater

by Robert J. Bast, Associate Professor of History, University of Tennessee

Introduction to Continuity and Change: The Harvest of Late Medieval and Reformation History: Essays Presented to Heiko A. Oberman on His 70th Birthday, ed. Robert J. Bast and Andrew C. Gow (Leiden, Boston, and Köln: Brill, 2000), xiii-xv.

   In 1985, the first full year of Heiko Oberman's tenure at the University of Arizona, the Division he would raise to such distinction was still young enoughto accommodate students such as I was — raw, naïve, and undertrained.  One of the many lacunae in my education was filled in my very first formal interview with Heiko (he the only man in Tucson wearing coat and tie in the summer heat), as my new mentor gravely defined and parsed the word Doktorvater .  Though time has clouded the exact words spoken on that occasion, their effect remains vivid: this American didn't know whether to be relieved or alarmed by the layers of meaning evident in that slippery term, etymologically familiar, culturally so foreign.
   In retrospect, both relief and alarm were entirely appropriate.  As any of his students past or present can attest, Heiko expects much and pushes hard, and in those early years there was a great deal of ground to make up.  Yet the demands of the Herr Professor Doktor were more than matched by the generosity and dedication of the Vater.  Despite the extraordinary pressures of his own schedule of teaching, research, and writing; of correspondence, editing, fundraising and service to the academic community, to say nothing of his own private life, Heiko somehow managed to make time for each of his growing cadre of students in a way that those of us who now have our own can scarcely imagine.  There were weekly sessions for each of us individually, time spent discussing our research or, more precious in hindsight, working line by line through a common primary source.  It is one of Heiko's unique gifts that at such times, the pressures of schedule are firmly banished to the other side of the office door, and the text itself takes on such life and immediacy that the hour becomes a lively conversation between mentor, student, and author.  Nor is any meeting complete until Heiko has inquired after morale, health, family, and genuinely taken the measure of the human being whose present and future he has undertaken to shape.  Such moments define what it means to be one of his students.
   This personal dimension is carried over to the graduate seminar, in some respects the place where the heart and soul of the Oberman program are quintessentially manifest.  The group assembles each week at Heiko's home in the foothills of the Catalina mountains (in our day, promptly at 7:00 p.m.), with the desert city spreading out below.  Students take their places around the living room, and Oberman presides from his ornate, hand-carved chair (a family heirloom that the wags among us always suspected he favored not for its comfort but for its regal lines).  Against the cool of the desert evening there is always a fire, and the dogs wander in and out freely, blithely ignoring the occasional Dutch rebuke.  The evening begins with a brief survey of recent secondary literature, then progresses to a feast of scholarly discussion and analysis around a common primary source.  Heiko aims high in his sodalitas:  Augustine's De Civitate Dei , Luther's 1535 commentary on Galatians;  the first edition of Calvin's Institutes, for example.  Students take their turns each week leading the study of a prescribed chapter or segment, presenting summary and analysis, identifying problems of translation and interpretation, and proposing an agenda for the subsequent discussion.  What follows is as good as graduate training gets:  an inspired group debate on the nature and meaning of the text, the passions and personalities that crafted it, and its place in historical and historiographical context.  Heiko presides over all of this with a light but expert hand, guiding but never dominating the discussion, willing to mix it up when his own interpretation is challenged, but doing so with unfeigned respect in which condescension has no part.  There are a few rules, expressed in the aphorisms that have become so familiar to Heiko's students:  "The phrase 'of course' has no place in the historian's vocabulary";  "the past is a foreign country".  This is no arbitrary code:  it is intended to combat presentism; to guard against that occupational hazard of our profession, the unconscious arrogance that comes with perfect hindsight;  to drive home the Prime Directive of Heiko's program:  listen to the sources.
   Such evenings unfold in stages, punctuated by fortification from the largesse of the Oberman pantry that gives the lie to that malicious stereotype, the parsimonious Netherlander, and graced more often than not by the presence and insightful participation of Toetie Oberman.  In a second round, students present their own work:  drafts of dissertation chapters, conference papers, grant proposals and the like.  Group critique is frank and unsparing, yet offered up with collegial good will and to excellent effect.  The hours pass — midnight often comes and goes without notice — yet Heiko seems to get livelier as they do, drawing energy from the proceedings themselves.  This is all to the good, for it means that once the session is at a close, those with the stamina will join him on the veranda, drink copious amounts of his Heineken, and idle away another hour or so under the stars in unhurried and increasingly irreverent conversation.
   Here too Heiko's unique gifts are at work, for the atmosphere he encourages fashions more than the artificial civility made necessary by the forced proximity and common purpose of graduate student life.  Genuine friendships are built in that circle, and Heiko and Toetie contribute significantly to their construction.  In the near decade of my own tenure in Tucson, we dozen or so students became something of a family — however dysfunctional, at times.  We celebrated marriages, mourned their dissolution, rejoiced at births, wept at death.  The Obermans unselfconsciously offered their home as a meeting place for this extended, ersatz clan, adjusting to the new customs and rituals of thier adopted land with a bemused good will.  In one of my fondest memories, Heiko trots around the bases of a hastily-constructed baseball diamond in his own backyard on a balmy Thanksgiving afternoon, still clutching a plastic bat, as half a dozen young children, their stomachs full to bursting with turkey, dressing, and (a modest concession to our hosts) the odd herring, run screaming wildly in hot pursuit.
   Such moments have nothing to do with books, research, textual analysis, graduate training;  nothing to do with the Harvest of Late Medieval Theology or Luther between God and the Devil or the Mystery of Calvin's Impact.  They have everything to do with life, humanity, and the crafting of personal relationships.  The celebration of Oberman's scholarly accomplishments, through this Festschrift, is justly deserved, the unparalleled merit of his works widely acknowledged, their author universally respected.  Yet posterity should know, too, that Heiko Oberman was as good as his word:  not Doktor only, but Vater to a generation of students who have gratefully contributed to the creation of this volume as a small token of their deep and enduring affection.

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