Philosopher
Herbert Marcuse was one of UCSD’s most controversial professors,
an icon of the New Left during the University’s early turbulent
years. Last summer, 24 years after his death, his ashes were finally
interred in the
Dorotheenstadischer Cemetery, Berlin, Germany. Marcuse died of a
stroke in 1979 while he was lecturing in Starnberg, Germany. Because
his ashes could not be shipped legally to a private residence, a
lawyer arranged for them to be sent to a funeral home in New Haven,
Connecticut, where his third wife lived. She had not yet decided
on their disposition before her own death years later.
Then in December
2001, a young Dutch student asked his philosophy professor where
Marcuse was buried. When it was discovered that the ashes
had still not been interred, the city government of Berlin stepped
forward and offered a final resting place.
About 80 people attended
the ceremony on July 18th, 2003. They included Berlin’s Senator
for Culture Thomas Flierl and Marcuse’s best-known student,
the civil rights activist Angela Davis, M.A. ’69. The 300-year
old cemetery, which lies at one end of Berlin’s splendid
Friedrichstrasse, is the resting place for German intellectual
luminaries, ranging from the playwright
Bertolt Brecht, to the philosopher G.W. F. Hegel. A symposium was
held earlier in Marcuse’s honor at the Free University of Berlin.
Davis was one of the many speakers. “He was charismatic, current
and had integrity,” she said.
Marcuse came to UCSD in 1965 and
was a professor emeritus until 1979. In an era marked by controversy
and student unrest, he was one of
the University’s most contentious appointments. His book
One Dimensional Man, a Marxist critique of America, with its “comfortable,
smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom,” inspired a generation
of student revolutionaries and catapulted him to international
celebrity. On campus, his course “Theories of Society” was
enormously popular even as he made bitter enemies amongst Southern
California
conservatives.
In 1968, the Reagan-led board of Regents tried to
force UCSD not to renew his appointment. William McGill, chancellor
from 1968
to 1970, refused to bow to the pressure. Even though he later wrote
in his book The Year of the Monkey that “Marcuse was usually
ready to urge students to strike, but seldom visible in the resulting
crowd scenes,” McGill stated publicly at the time that it
was “wholly
inappropriate that . . . a senior academic appointment should be
the subject of undue pressure on the chancellor from local newspapers
and the American Legion.”
Not all of the family was happy with this burial in Germany. The
Los Angeles Times noted granddaughter Irene Marcuse’s objections. “There
are more than enough Jewish ashes mingled with German soil already,” she
said. Her preference would have been to scatter his ashes “in
a place where he loved to walk, such as Torrey Pines.”
The
family has still not decided what the monument on the grave will
look like or what it will say. In an email to @UCSD, Harold Marcuse,
his grandson, invited suggestions from alumni readers. “UCSD
alumni would be as good an audience as any to poll for ideas!” |
