WALTER CURT BEHRENDT
College's Famous Lecturer on City Planning Dies
ON April s6 the College suffered a great loss in the death of a distinguished member of its faculty, Dr. Walter Curt Behrendt, world-famous authority on modern architecture, city planning and housing. Dr. Behrendt had been associated with Dartmouth since September 1934 when he accepted an appointment here as Visiting Lecturer in City Planning and Housing, bringing to the College an expert knowledge gained from his years of creative and administrative work in the great German housing program of the mid-twenties. As an official in positions of importance in the Prussian Ministries of Public Health and Finance, he was one of the vanguard in the movement toward a modern architectural style. His book on Modern Building, written while he was at Dartmouth, is considered one of the best books in English on modern architecture and city planning and housing.
When the Nazi regime put an end to Dr. Behrendt's work for his native country, he came to the United States where his vision and abilities were already known and admired. He was offered the post of Visiting Lecturer in City Planning and Housing at Dartmouth which he held until 1941. In that year he was called to Buffalo as Technical Director of the Buffalo City Planning Association, Professor of City Planning and Housing at the University of Buffalo, and Director of the Planning Research Station of the city. During the four years of his stay there, Dr. Behrendt helped develop the waterfront section of the city among other important projects. He came back to Dartmouth in 1941 as Lecturer in City Planning and Housing with rank of Professor.
Dr. Behrendt was born in Metz, Alsace, on December 16, 1884. He received his education in Germany, graduating from the Technical University at Dresden in 1911 with the degree of Doctor of Engineering. He was married in 1913 to Lydia Hoffmann, who as Lydia Hoffmann Behrendt is well known as a concert pianist and interpreter of modern composers. Dr. Behrendt died at his home in Norwich, Vt., and was buried in the country graveyard there following services at Rollins Chapel on April ag.
At the chapel services a tribute to Dr. Behrendt was read by Prof. Stearns Morse of the English Department. The MAGAZINE is pleased to present it here in full:
IN 1934 Walter Curt Behrendt came to America. He had an international reputation as an architect and writer upon architecture; he had been a distinguished civil servant in the Prussian ministry of public welfare. More than that he was what Nietzsche called "a good European": the inheritor of that civilization slowly and painfully built up through the centuries, of which in his own country Goethe and Schiller, Bach and Beethoven are shining examples. But he saw, like other seers of our time, that that western civilization was approaching catastrophe: a long dark night of horror was settling down upon Germany, Europe, the world. So he and his wife came to this country to the great good fortune of Dartmouth College—in search of freedom and hope. If he found freedom and hope in the new world it was as much because he brought them with him as because they were here. We, too, were bewildered, divided, confused, forgetful of our own great tradition. With his quick sensitivity he absorbed the essence of that tradition: the good European became a good American—better than many who had lived out their lives in America. He believed with Hamilton that intelligence and foresight were necessary if citizens were to create a good society; he saw that it was ultimately the responsibility of government to provide. for the general welfare, as the Founding Fathers had written in the Constitution. He shared with Jefferson, Lincoln, Willkie and Roosevelt the deep faith in the capacity of plain and simple people to establish and maintain such a government.
He was an artist and as an artist he believed passionately in freedom; but he also knew that if order was to be created out of chaos freedom must be disciplined freedom. In one of the earliest of many long talks I had with him he quoted the maxim of Nietzsche: not freedom from what but freedom for what. He knew that the good life for an individual or for a society must be informed with purpose: he was not only an artist but in this conviction a deeply religious man.
This conviction he imparted to his students: as his great windows in the house he designed let light into his living-room, so his spirit let light into the minds and hearts of his students. No student who sat under Curt Behrendt had the slightest doubt what he was fighting for as one by one they left this quiet countryside to join the armed forces of their country. Whenever they could, they came back to him to thank him without words for the assurance he had given them, as one I know returned just a short time ago from the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, the English Channel at D-Day, to talk quietly with his old teacher. They planned to return to him, as another whom I know planned to return from half way around the world, not to sit at his feet but to walk with him as a comrade and to learn again that life is forever triumphant over death and chaos.
This conviction was not mere theory; it was proved with him, as Keats said, upon his pulses. Shortly before he died I had my last talk with him. He said: "I have not seen you since we lost our friend, the President." Never, he said, in all his life had he felt so close to the head of a state as here in America, his new home. If he felt this friendship for his President, it was because he, too, possessed that capacity for friendliness and friendship which is the simple essence of democracy. His students, his colleagues, his friends, his neighbors at once discovered in him that great capacity. We felt it in his buoyant vitality, in the swing of his walk, in his smile, in his warm handclasp. So, although his stay with us was all too short, we felt that we had known him for a very long time.
In the last few years too many of our old men who dreamt dreams and our young men who saw visions have gone from us. But now that the long dark night is ending and the day which their faith bequeathed to us is at last dawning we cannot but be glad that they—and he have found their rest, their peace.
"Nor for you, for one alone, Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring, For, fresh as the morning, thus would I chant a song for you O sane and sacred death."
DR. WALTER CURT BEHRENDT, Lecturer in City Planning and Housing, and world-famous leader in developing modern techniques in that field.
