Columbia University praises the life and legacy of Friedrich Katz
Personalities such as Enrique Semo, Adolfo Gilly and Claudio Lomnitz recalled the passion of the author of Pancho Villa, who died on October 16, for whom ``Mexico meant freedom''
David Brooks
Correspondent
La Jornada
Sunday November 7, 2010, p. 2
New York, Nov. 6. The passion for history as essential to change the future for something better, the humor, political commitment, exile as a condition for seeing certain truths and personal history of Friedrich Katz were evoked Thursday night in a tribute held at Columbia University by his colleagues, students, friends and family.
The event was originally organized as a presentation of the book Revolution and exile in Mexico's history: the love of a historian to his adopted country, collection of essays by 45 historians and was published by Colegio de México, and Era Publishing house, where Katz intended to participate. But with the death of the author of Pancho Villa and The Secret War in Mexico, among other titles, Oct. 16, "instead it became a celebration of his life and work by a cast of colleagues that included Enrique Semo, John Coatsworth, Adolfo Gilly, Eugene Meyer, Claudio Lomnitz, Emilio Kouri, Javier Garciadiego and the widow and children of Katz.
Coatsworth, dean of the School of International Affairs at Columbia University and co-host, said ``he was going to be here, and somehow, he is here,'' when he remembered his friend and mentor, with whom he worked in the Faculty of History at the University of Chicago for more than two decades. Knowing him he said, was one of the highest points of my life. He praised Katz as a great teacher of new generations of historians.
Exile shared
Semo shared the personal story of his friend, whom he met in Mexico when they were teenagers, children of families in exile in Europe for being on the left (the Semo, socialist, Katz, communist) and for being Jewish. We were in the same generation of survivors, and our friendship was born from this tragic experience and the conviction of never losing hope for a better world. After noting that the Katz family was expelled from Austria, France and the United States, Semo said that his was expelled from Bulgaria. He told stories, like when Katz was young and played an accordion while singing the songs of the Spanish Civil War, The four generals, the Fifth Regiment and more.
Katz's father, Leo, a journalist and communist, began to carry weapons clandestinely to the Republican forces, and so the family had to flee France.
We both `leaned towards controversy,'' said Semo, which may be because we were survivors and came from socialists. ``For both Mexico meant life and liberty.''
Katz recalled, came from the Jewish freedom tradition in Austria, the same as Erich Fromm, Martin Buber, Lukács and Eric Hobsbawm. "My friend was a Marxist and I was an apprentice of Marxism.'' Katz he said, returned to Europe after the war, first to Vienna after the German Democratic Republic, years later, President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz brought us together again, after launching an attack on leftist intellectuals and forced Semo to leave the country with his family, rescued by a grant from East Germany, where Katz and his family received his friend.
There, ``Katz convinced me to study history.'' His experience in Germany led him to criticize the ``excesses'' and the need that ``in times of change a change of ideas is required .'' At the same time, they agreed that ``socialism without democracy is impossible.'' In 1968, both supported the students in Mexico and denounced the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and finally the two left Germany.
Katz in an interview with La Jornada in 2002 Photo Carlos Ramos Mamahua
Around the work of Katz on Villa, Semo considered that his friend released the figure of the manipulation of official historians, noting that before the work of Katz, ``Villa, as it appeared, was a tapestry of myths and legends.''
He said the historian does not look for an explanations of the person himself, but to understand the significance of economic and cultural conditions, the framework of a social historian, to provide a truthful light on Villa within the ``logic and illogic of the Revolution.''
For Gilly, our teacher was the one who opened new doors to investigating ``the great enigma of the Mexican Revolution, the failure of Pancho Villa.''
Katz, he said, repeated that ``his personal history was one survivor who managed to escape,'' and that vision of an exiled rebel gave just the lens to investigate the life of Villa and his rebel movement (Gilly will publish a version of their paper in La Jornada).
Meyer stressed that Katz fostered a ``permanent uprising against the official history'' in Mexico and was guided with the principle that ``without history, nothing is possible.''
This focus on the particular vision of an exile was repeated by other participants. Lomnitz, a historian now at Columbia University, said Katz explored the relationship between Mexico and the rest of the world in a way that ``only an exile can see.'' He said he saw Mexico's history as ``a history of / in motion'' and also a ``deep international history,'' both for the many worlds of the exiles in the country ( first the Europeans, then the Latin Americans) as well as the impact of Mexican events in the world. In fact, that breaks with the exiled intellectual exceptionalism prevailing in the country to open a more complex world in which Mexico is not necessarily unique, but part of a transnational story. ``This suggests that only from exile one can truly see the world,'' he concluded.
Passion, generosity and humor
In the end, Katz's two children offered some more intimate views of the work, passion, generosity and humor of the historian. Jacqueline said that one of the things she remembers as a child was how special she felt when his father invited her to walk. At the beginning, he told her she could choose any event of a peasant rebellion, an uprising or revolution, and that he would tell her everything he knew about it.
His son, Leo, told anecdotes of the family stories, from the great adventures of his rebel grandfather, like his father, and the presence of a personal history of political compromise and exile, as well as key friendships between the diaspora of leftist intellectuals. He recalled that his father mocked all the focus on ``identity'' as a major factor to explain events, and said that after the family spent nearly a year at the University of Texas, they moved permanently to Chicago. Shortly after arriving, when his father drove to his office at the University of Chicago, he went through a red light. A police officer intercepted him and asked for his driver's license. Katz only had the Texas license, which he gave the officer. The police reviewed, thought, and said that this time he'll let him go without penalty and said: ``We, Texans, have to take care of each other, right?
The event was a big hug to Katz and history of those of us ``who seek a better world.''
From La Jornada
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