Professor Emeritus John Rohl died at home in Kingston on 17 November 2023 after a long illness, looked after by his devoted carer, Jane. His wife, Rosemarie von Berg, predeceased him, and he is survived by their three children.
Born in London in May 1938 to a German father and an English mother, he was taken to Germany in August 1939, immediately before war broke out. Later he was told it was for a family visit, but John was recently greatly distressed to discover that his father had been a Nazi party member from the early 1930s, although he was to be briefly arrested by the SS in July 1944 after the failed Stauffenburg plot against Hitler.
During the war he, his mother and two younger sisters, lived mainly in Pecs in southern Hungary, although they evaded the Red Army by moving to West Germany. She and the girls were evacuated to England at the end of the war. John himself was taken to Switzerland to an international children’s home in the care of the Red Cross. He was finally repatriated to England in December 1946 to join his mother in Manchester, with, as he recalled, a label round his neck and no English, but fluent in German and Hungarian.
He was sometimes beaten up as a ‘Nazi’ in his primary school, and later wrote that learning Mancunian English was an urgent matter of survival. His parents’ marriage had ended, but John spent periods as a child in Frankfurt with his father who was now a headmaster. After Stretford Grammar School and Corpus Christi Cambridge, John started a PhD (later published) on ‘Germany without Bismarck’ – a field of study which was to become a life’s work, and followed this with editing the political correspondence of Philipp zu Eulenburg.
He was appointed to the School of European Studies at Sussex in 1964 as an Assistant Lecturer in History during what he described as Sussex’s ‘Golden Age’. He described it as ‘bursting with intellectual ferment in and outside the classrooms, and inventing courses to break down the barriers between disciplines’, and it enabled him to teach in small tutorials and to meet experts across a wide range of disciplines.
He later wrote that these early years at Sussex played a prominent role in his research. He was given a chair in 1979 and served as Head of History and as Dean of the School of European Studies, and was widely respected and admired by his colleagues. Best known for his three-volume life of Kaiser Wilhelm II, written, as were most of his books, in German and then translated by him into English, he published eleven books, almost all on German political history between 1890 and 1918. He established an unrivalled legacy among historians of this period, especially in Germany, as recent German obituaries have attested. His papers are now in Berlin.
He was a meticulous scholar, grounding his work on a wide selection of public and private archives from across Europe, and showed great determination in gaining access to many of these. He recently revived debates on the origins of the First World War in a series of debates with Christopher Clark, including in his last lecture at Sussex on this topic in the Martin Wight lecture series in 2014.
At Sussex he was active in the German-Jewish Centre and the Holocaust Memorial events. He spent periods lecturing in the Universities of Hamburg, Munich, and Freiberg and initiated a faculty exchange programme with the latter. He was awarded the Wolfson History Prize in 1994, and also taught in the US at the Universities of Washington and North Carolina. His retirement from Sussex in 1999 saw no let-up in his scholarly work and it is to be hoped that some of his recent, unfinished work can still be published. The University and the wider historical community has lost an eminent colleague and a much admired man and historian.
Authors: Beryl Williams (Emeritus Reader, History) and Malcolm Kitch (Emeritus Reader, History)