It is my sad duty to inform you that, after undergoing a difficult operation recently, our friend Martin Peterson has passed away. Martin was supportive both to our journal and the ICCR from its early beginning. I personally have lost a good friend, and we at the journal and at the institute will miss him.
When Martin retired from his Chair in History at Gothenburg University, his friends and colleagues produced a Festschrift in his honour. The editors, K.G. Hammarlund and Tomas Nilson (2006), gave it the title ‘A Case of Identity’. This title was well chosen: in all of his work one can see that the issue of identity and its impact on individuals and societies was at the core of Martin’s interest. This is also reflected in the Festschrift: “All contributors were given their freedom to choose a topic themselves. We soon discovered that everyone had chosen to deal with the question of identity in one way or another.” The logical question which follows, is:
What about Martin's own identity? Well, even if he does love his country, it is also true that an academic colleague from a neighbouring Scandinavian country once (and maybe not without a bit of reproach) said: ‘But Martin, you’re not Swedish at all!’ The scholar Martin Peterson could thus be described as European rather than Swedish. (Hammarlund Citation2006, 10)
I remember Martin from the early 1980s onwards, when he was participating annually at the so-called ‘Koninki Seminars’, organized by Professor Jan Jerschina, Chair of Sociology of Education at Cracow University. As at this time Communism and political control was still prevailing, he organized the annual seminar outside Cracow and we had lots of good political discussions. The most important papers of the seminar were published in special issues of the early volumes of our journal. The seminars were supported by the UNESCO Commissions of the Nordic countries, and we used to call Martin and his friend Ingvar Løchen our ‘Private Nordic Council’. Both supported not only the Koninki Seminars, but our journal and our young institute as well, from their early beginnings as Members of the International Advisory Board. Ingvar passed away some years ago.
Martin was a mentor to several people, and one of these, K.G. Hammerlund, was kind enough to offer a longer post-mortem to our journal, which we will publish in the next issue of this journal.
With my colleague Liana Giorgi I contributed an article to the Festschrift as well. In this article we summarized our impression of Martin that, I think, all those who had the pleasure to know him and to collaborate with him will share:
Martin Peterson is beyond any doubts one of the last universalistic scholars. A historian by formation he has published contributions in mostly all fields of the social sciences and contributed to them based on a profound knowledge in history, philosophy, social sciences and the arts. In this respect, Peterson has shown that the independence of social sciences and scientific methods cannot be understood without basic values: the values of democratic principles and social fairness. (Pohoryles and Giorgi Citation2006, 74)
Ronald J. Pohoryles
References
- Hammarlund, K. G. 2006. Identities and History Professors – Some Introductory Notes edited by K. G. Hammarlund and T. Nilson, 9–15.
- Hammarlund, K. G., and T. Nilson, eds. 2006. A Case of Identity – Festschrift for Martin Peterson. Gothenborg: Gothenburg Studies in Modern History, University Press.
- Pohoryles, Ronald J., and Liana Giorgi. 2006. Knowledge Society and Knowledge Economy: What's New in the New Economy? edited by K. G. Hammarlund and T. Nilson, 73–95.