My dear friend and colleague Peter Meusburger died early on Monday morning.

It was Peter who invited me to give the first Hettner Lecture in Heidelberg in 1997.  He met me at the airport in Frankfurt – a typically kind and thoughtful gesture – and we talked non-stop all the way down to Heidelberg, including a 90-minute wait while a crash on the Autobahn was cleared: we barely noticed the delay.  He had arranged a whirlwind programme, including a two-day seminar with graduate students from all over Germany, but with lots of time for informal walks and talks in the exquisite grounds of the Villa Bosch and elsewhere in the Neckar Valley.  At the end of my visit we were sitting with colleagues in the garden of one of Peter’s favourite inns in Handschuhsheim, when he asked me for my impressions.  He knew I’d never been to Germany before – I’d studied German in grammar school in the 1960s for three years, but my teacher had been a captain in the Tank Regiment during the war and when he shared photographs of German cities with us all you could see were piles of rubble (really)…  So I said I had been surprised by the lively informality of the whole event; I was still feeding on a diet of Jürgen Habermas, and it was this as much as anything that had prompted me to expect a much more abstract and, above all, I suppose hierarchical discussion.  Instead of which the whole week had been a series of wonderfully engaging conversations and debates.  As Peter pressed me for more, I recalled a remark of Heine – to the effect that when the world is falling apart, one should never worry because there would always be a German professor to put it back together again – another reference to Habermas’s architectonic schemes.  The more I elaborated my idiotically stereotypical view of German intellectual culture, the more Peter and his colleagues roared with laughter, until eventually even I realised I was missing something; wiping away his tears, Peter managed to say “We’re all Austrian…”

During the week I had come to know the old city of Heidelberg well, and every day I had passed an antiquarian bookshop.  At the very back of the shop I had found an English guidebook to Egypt, and every day I had debated with myself about buying it – at that time I was working on cultures of European and American travel to Egypt in the long nineteenth century from 1798 to 1914, a supplement to Edward Said‘s commentaries in Orientalism – and the issue was not so much getting the volume through Canada Customs as getting it past Angela’s scrutiny when I got home.  Eventually I had persuaded myself that I could afford both the price and the risk, but when I returned the book had gone.  I hadn’t mentioned it to anyone, but that evening in Handschuhsheim Peter handed me a gift to thank me for my visit.  When I unwrapped it, I found that Egyptian guidebook.

That story is typical of not only of Peter’s kindness but also his attentiveness to people.  I have no idea how long he had searched for the perfect gift, but – as always – he found it.  He was one of the most generous, humane and modest scholars I’ve ever known – always keenly interested in ideas and their implications, and ever concerned to promote the work of everyone but himself.

He invited me back to Heidelberg on multiple occasions – one of them to receive an honorary degree, which I treasure – and these subsequent visits were directly responsible for  provoking two of the biggest changes to my research in recent years: the work on bombing and more recently the work on the wounded body.

When Peter first invited me to take part in one of his “Knowledge and Space” symposia, I knew I had to do something new, and something special, for Peter: he was that kind of man.  The subject of the meeting was “Cultural Memories”, about which I protested I knew next to nothing.  But then, remembering those German cities reduced to piles of rubble, I recalled Heinrich Böll saying that when, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, he saw his ‘first undestroyed city’ he broke out into a cold sweat: it was Heidelberg.  This prompted me to turn to W.G. Sebald, to A Natural History of Destruction, and to produce what eventually became “Doors into nowhere: Dead cities and the natural history of destruction” as a first attempt to understand the genealogy and geography of aerial violence.

That little word ‘eventually’ in that last sentence is a leitmotif of my work, as Peter knew very well. Two years later he invited me to another symposium in the series, on “Knowledge and Power”.  This time my presentation returned to the Middle East, but to one peopled not with tourists and travellers but with soldiers and canons (as Said once put it).  By the time it came to produce an essay for the edited volume, though, I wanted to do something completely different.  Would that be OK? I asked Peter.  His reply was immediate and encouraging, even though he knew it would take me even longer than usual to submit the essay.  Again, the inspiration was literary: a quotation from William Boyd‘s An Ice-Cream War:

I’m certain that neither of these essays, let alone the projects they launched, would have happened had it not been for Peter.  He was always immensely supportive (not only in my research but in my responses to the serial inquisitions from his technical editor; that was no small thing – they prompted a besieged Steve Legg to flee to India on one occasion; I never had to do that, but it was a close call: in “Doors into nowhere” I had referred to urbicide, and noted its origins in the Bosnian conflict, only to be asked for a reference in the original Bosnian….).

For all of those seminars and symposia Peter gathered together an eclectic mix of scholars from all fields, most of them geographers but always with some inspired and inspiring additions from left field who often made the most creative contributions of all (my favourite, and I suspect Peter’s too, was Stefan Paul‘s ‘Telling the future: reflections on the status of divination in Ancient Near Easterm politics’, by turns achingly funny and stunningly serious, a tour de force of sustained scholarship and perfect performance).    Peter understood better than anyone that creative scholarship is also always irredeemably social: that it thrives on the trust that makes risk-taking possible, and on the good humour that enables genuine debate.  That too was one of his most precious gifts.

Peter’s love for Heidelberg, the University, his colleagues – and above all his family – shone through everything he did.  One of our last conversations was about his plans for “retirement” (which would always be in scare-quotes where Peter was concerned; not because he was scared of it at all, but because it obviously was never going to happen) and his plans for remodelling the family home in his beloved Austria.

One of the very good things about the academic life, even in these increasingly neo-liberal corporations in which we labour, is the capacity to make lasting friendships around the world.  Whenever I met Peter we resumed our last conversation; I can still hear his voice, see that twinkle in his eye, find myself grinning at that smile on his face.  I shall miss his generosity of spirit, his restless intellect – but above all his friendship.

Joris Schapendonk is organizing the second Transmobilities Conference at Radboud University, Nijmegen in the Netherlands on 8-9 June 2017.  The theme is Friction in a mobile world: Transmigrants, contested citizenship and human in/security:

As you can see, one of the panels is devoted to ‘the politics of escape’, in which I have a keen interest (think refugees; think casualty evacuation); I’ll be taking part during my tenure as Radboud Excellence Professor.

So here is the Call for Papers for that session (organised by Joris and Craig Jones):

I’ve been pleased to see how often old posts are consulted by readers: I never intended this to be a fleet of ships passing in the digital night.

But as the blog has grown, I realise it’s become increasingly difficult to navigate through the different themes and so I’ve added a GUIDE to the tabs at the head of the page.

This lists some of the key posts which will, I hope, supplement a judicious use of the search box (and the word clouds to the right) plus the publications available under the DOWNLOADS tabs.

It’s still under construction, but let me know if you think I’ve missed anything important.

Virtually a month since my last post, the longest silence since I started: my dad died last month, and I’m only just back from the UK and still stumbling around trying to find words.  He left school at 14, like my mum; they met while she was working in a baker’s shop in Sidcup High Street and he parked his milk cart outside to buy some buns.  They married soon after the war ended and he had completed his national service with the Royal Artillery in India.  The post-war Britain in which I grew up was still indelibly marked by the war – from bomb-sites to prefabs, popular culture to kids’ comics. When I was a kid my dad worked as a van driver for the Ministry of Works, and one day he took me to one of the vast warehouses where the Imperial War Museum kept stuff for which it either didn’t have room or didn’t know what to do with; much of it still very recent.  It was a wonderland for a young boy to race around – and climb over – but back then I was oblivious to the possibility that these mute objects could be made to speak.

Dad never talked about his war, and it would be years before my thoughts turned back to war again. I heard that he had taken a turn for the worse while I was working in the research room at the IWM, reading diaries and letters from men and women who had been involved, in one capacity or another, in casualty evacuation during the First and Second World Wars.  In amongst the horror – of which there was no shortage – there was also extraordinary courage and bravery, black humour and beautiful images, and for some consolation and even redemption.

But this isn’t a prelude to talking about my dad ‘fighting a battle’ in his last months; those martial metaphors are utterly misplaced, particularly for such a gentle man.  To be sure, there was bravery and defiance – Dad insisted that all he wanted to do was leave hospital and go home to look after Mum – and there was beauty too: him and Mum holding hands across his bed, telling one another over and over again how much they loved one another.  And yet the experience – death, I insist, not a ‘passing’ –  is like war in at least one sense:  you think you’re prepared for it, but you never are and so you muddle through as best you can, helped immeasurably by the company of others.  All sorts of things suddenly leave you bereft; some you anticipate, others you don’t. When we arrived at the crematorium, my mum sitting between my brother and me, the hearse was at the foot of the long drive, idling by the side of the road – and I can’t get the sense of Dad quietly waiting for us out of my mind.

He died just two days before his ninetieth birthday, and I’ve been re-reading Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s To my father on his birthday, which was written in 1826, exactly one hundred years before Dad was born:

‘There glides no day of gentle bliss

More soothing to the heart than this!

…

Repeating to the listening ear

The names that made our childhood dear

For parting Joy, like Echo kind,

Will leave her dulcet voice behind

To tell, amidst the magic air

How oft she smiled and lingered there.’

He was always there for all of us, quietly, unobtrusively there; he was a lovely, loving and much loved man, and I can’t imagine him not being there still.

LANCASTER UNIVERSITY

I’ve just heard that John Urry died unexpectedly last Friday: I’m so desperately sad.  We first met when we edited Social relations and spatial structures together as part of Macmillan’s Critical Human Geography series; an invitation to extend the conversation between sociology and human geography, it appeared in 1985, but we kept in touch ever since.  He was a joy to work with.  I remember rattling up to Lancaster on a succession of small trains from Cambridge and receiving the warmest of welcomes: good beer, creative conversation and lots of laughter.  I last saw him two summers ago when I was in Lancaster for a conference on drones; one evening we sat in his gorgeous house sipping wine and having the loveliest and liveliest of times.

In between those book-ends (in fact before them and after them too) John produced some of the most imaginative work in the social sciences: books that were brimful of ideas – I never thought of it as Theory-with-a-capital-T and I doubt that he did either, though his grasp of classical and contemporary social theory was truly remarkable – that were drawn from an ever-expanding intellectual imagination fed by the widest of reading and reflection, but which never lost sight of the pressing substance of what he was thinking about.  These were wonderfully accessible, provocative, insightful books – his work with Scott Lash on disorganized capitalism and his own studies of tourist culture and the tourist gaze, mobilities, climate change, and most recently on off-shoring.   There was a tremendous clarity to John’s writing but also a humbling modesty; he was never strident, but it was impossible to put down one of his books – or reluctantly end a conversation with him – without thinking you had never seen it like that before and that you now had a lot more thinking of your own to do.

If you’ve never heard him, here he is in 2014:

John had an extraordinary gift for enlarging people’s political and intellectual horizons without lecturing or hectoring; his writing was splattered with references, but never in that showy, superficial ‘look how up-to-date I am’ way – instead they were generous acknowledgements of his debt to others and bibliographic gifts to his readers.

In (too) brief, he was a gorgeous man, the very model of a critical scholar and a generous human being.  We still have his words but the realisation that there will be no more of them fills me with a sense of rootless desolation.

I’m sorry for the inordinately long silence – and grateful to all those who have written to ask if I’m OK. The short answer is yes – now.

At the end of February I had a routine biopsy and, having asked, was told that it was perfectly safe to travel: there was only a 1 per cent risk of infection.  So the next day I flew off to the UK for a series of lectures at Durham, Newcastle, Exeter and Queen Mary London.  Somewhere over Greenland I realised that all was not well – a combination of high temperature and chills (which I’m relieved I didn’t know at the time doctors call ‘rigors’) – and I recognised, through my confusion, the symptoms of sepsis.  I managed to explain to the Cabin Service Director what was happening, and she found two doctors on board who looked after me: by this stage I was very ill and going in to shock.  At one stage plans were laid to divert to Rekjavik, but the doctors – magnificent men in that flying machine – gave me antibiotics and brought my temperature down.  I was moved to a flat bed (ah!) and by the time we landed in London (straight in: the flight crew declared a medical emergency) I felt much better.  Before I was allowed to disembark, I was checked over by two cheery paramedics, and then wheeled through the terminal by the captain and the Cabin Service Director.  So a huge thank you to all those on BA 84 who came to my aid: I cannot praise their professionalism, care and competence too highly.

Sepsis on the ground is terrifying – my wife has had it multiple times – but at 38,000 feet it’s almost overwhelming.  It was, I thought, a sharp lesson for someone who now works on casualty evacuation…

So I headed off to London and checked in at the Great Northern Hotel, ready for the train to Durham the next day.  Twenty minutes after I’d phoned Angela (‘Have I got a story for you?!’) the symptoms returned, so I went down to reception to ask them to call an ambulance.  Their first thought was that a cab would be quicker – but this was King’s Cross and the queues were enormous – so they called a paramedic who cycled over from St Pancras.  I can remember muttering something about ‘not going on your crossbar’, and when I stumbled through my explanation he called a car which took me to University College London Hospital just down the road.

I thought I’d be there for a few hours while they pumped IV antibiotics in to me, and even though they kept me overnight, the next morning I was still counting on making my train to Durham at mid-day. Then a consultant explained that I would be going nowhere until I’d had no temperature spike for 48 hours, and ordered all sorts of lab work to find out what was going on.

Eventually I was there for five days on IV, receiving absolutely wonderful care (so hands off the NHS!).  By then I’d cancelled Newcastle and Durham, and was discharged into the care of my brother and his family with a course of heavy-duty oral antibiotics.  Never having been in hospital before, I wasn’t prepared for how weak I was — it turns out that life-saving antibiotics are also life-draining ones — nor for how vulnerable I would feel.  Over the weekend it became clear that I’d have to cancel Exeter, and by mid-week QML had to go too.

I flew home at the end of the week, just when the course of antibiotics had expired: you can perhaps imagine how apprehensive I was during the flight.  But to distract me I managed to watch “Testament of Youth“, loosely (but brilliantly) based on Vera Brittain‘s autobiographical memoir of being a nurse in the First World War — when sepsis was a major killer.  Smart choice.

I’ve been slowly recovering since then, having battled a series of secondary infections, and I’m now just about OK.  I’m really sorry to have had to let so many people down, since I know that everyone who arranged my lectures and seminars had gone to a huge amount of trouble on my behalf: I was really looking forward to those exchanges.  I’m now staring at a backlog on my screen and on my desk, so I also have to apologise to all those whose messages and requests have gone unanswered: I’ll do my best to get back on track.

It may take a while: I’m off to deliver the two presentations I’d planned for the UK – “Angry Eyes” (about air strikes in Afghanistan) and “Dirty Dancing” (about drones and military violence in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas) – at the Balsillie School of International Affairs and the Centre for International Governance Innovation at Waterloo.  And then it’s the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Chicago…  So bear with me, and thanks again to all those who have written.  I really appreciate it.