Peter Braunfeld

Dear Becky; Dear Gloria

First off, I want to apologize for my long silence. I've been dealing for some time with a long series of pesky medical problems. Luckily, none of them seem to be life-threatening. But, taken all together, they are very time consuming: doctor and dentist appts, lab tests, etc., etc. I've also given up my driver's license, which doesn't help expedite things. 

I'd like to begin my letter by telling you that tomorrow (Monday) I've been asked by the Philosophy Club (of which I'm a member) to lead a brief session in memory of Bruno. Bruno was briefly a member of the Phil Club, but later on switched to the Dial Club, which was more to his taste. It was actually Bruno who originally sponsored me for membership in the Phil Club for which I'm very grateful to him. I've now been a member for several years, and it has become an important part of my life. Most of the members of the Phil Club said that the knew of Bruno (Who in the U of I community didn't know of Bruno?), but none of them knew him well. So I agreed to talk about some of his scholarly achievements, but mostly about what he meant to me as a friend, and why I loved and admired him. I'll try to send you an up-date about this meeting. 

Ever since Bruno died, I've been preoccupied with thinking about him, and what he meant to me. At the beginning of these reflections and rememberings, it seemed to me that I had known Bruno for a very long time. But, I soon realized that that simply wasn't true. In fact, even now, I can't put my finger on exactly when and how we did meet, but it is clear that we spent decades on this campus without running into each other. My best guess is that we finally met at a party at the Kindermans. But meet we did, and at some point we started to be invited to the very special parties hosted by Wanda and Bruno. At these parties, I met a number of interesting people (e.g., the Kelmanns, the Temperlys, and many more.) I also remember being introduced to the Nettl's famous "Wiener Nusstorte 1 and 2." But mostly I remember the pleasure I derived from getting to know Bruno better and better. We both discovered to our delight that we both spent our early years in "Mittel-Europa"--he in Prague and I in nearby Vienna. We both came from German-speaking families, with ethnic Jewish backgrounds. Our families both emigrated from Nazi Germany at roughly the same time, and we discovered that we had even taken our first  sabbaticals at "smallish" universities in West Germany. As we discovered our common cultural heritages, we started to meet "a due" (as Bruno liked to say) almost weekly. At first our weekly meetings were for lunch at the Kamakura, a Japanese place on Neil Street. However, the service was slow and poor, so Bruno suggested we move to Panera's. But lunch at Panera's was noisy and loud, so we switched our meeting to 3 PM. Bruno noted that such afternoon gatherings in German were called Jause--so that's what we called it too. In our weekly Jause, our conversations ranged over every conceivable subject: central European child-rearing practices; life under the Nazi; adjusting to a new life in America; books we both encountered as children and teens; our diligent study of major league baseball statistics and lore; our experiences as undergraduates and graduate students; our early days as instructors and assistant professors; raising our children; university politics; national politics--all these and much more were grist for the mills of our Jause conversations. We discovered that we had similar, but not identical, tastes and interests in classical music. For example, I was delighted to learn that Bruno was knowledgeable about, and enjoyed, the music of Richard Wagner, without dwelling on the fact that Wagner was both a nasty man and a vicious anti-Semite.