J. A. S. Grenville (1928–2011)

John Grenville was born Hans Jurgen Guhrauer to a Jewish family in Berlin, Germany. His parents were Charlotte (Sandberg) and Abraham Adolf Guhrauer, a judge. As a child in 1939, together with his older brothers Julian and Walter, he escaped the Nazis on a Kindertransport to the UK to join his father, who had already fled there. His mother was unable to join them and died in a Nazi concentration camp. He attended a boarding school in Essex, followed by Cambridge Technical School. When he became a British citizen in 1949, he adopted the name John Ashley Soames Grenville. After leaving school at age 14, he took a gardening job at Peterhouse College of Cambridge University. He began to study on his own during the day and take classes at Birkbeck College, University of London, in the evening. Later he was awarded a London county council grant, which enabled him to attend the London School of Economics. He studied history under Sir Charles Kingsley Webster and Eric Hobsbawm and graduated with a First Class Honours degree in 1951. In 1953, Grenville received his PhD in history with a dissertation that won the Hutchinson Medal. It was published in book form in 1964 as Lord Salisbury and Foreign Policy: The Close of the 19th Century, and is considered a classic. He received a Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellowship to do postgraduate work at Yale University from 1960 to 1964. He began his academic career at the University of Nottingham as an assistant lecturer and reader in History. He then became professor of International History at the University of Leeds, where he promoted the use of film as a tool for understanding history. With director Nicholas Pronay, he made two films for classroom use, The Munich Crisis (1969) and The End of Illusions: From Munich to Dunkirk (1970). He was professor and head of the Department of Modern History at the University of Birmingham from 1969 to 1994. He also was a guest lecturer at many other universities, including the University of California. At a conference in Germany in 1976, Grenville met and became friends with Bernd Jürgen Wendt, a fellow historian, who eventually persuaded him to accept a visiting professorship at the University of Hamburg for one term in 1980. The experience of speaking his native language again helped rekindle his interest in his painful past. He produced three documentary series for German public television. Prof. Grenville was a member of the Executive Committee of the Leo Baeck Institute in London, and served as editor of its annual Yearbook from 1991. His numerous published works included The Major International Treaties, 1914-1973 (1974) and Europe Reshaped 1848-1878 (1976), which remains a widely-used textbook. A History of the World in the Twentieth Century was first published in 1980. Prof. Grenville's magnum opus, The Jews of Hamburg: The Death of a Civilization from 1790 to the Holocaust, appeared posthumously.