My friend and colleague Arnold (originally Arno) Paucker, who has died aged 95, was a distinguished scholar of German-Jewish history and literature, having arrived in Britain as a refugee from Nazi-occupied Europe.
He was born into a middle-class family in Berlin, to Wilhelm, a manufacturer of leather goods and Minna, who had inherited a tobacco business. Arnold became politically active at an early age. As a schoolboy at the end of the Weimar Republic he joined the Social Democratic Republican defence league, the Iron Front, and, once this was banned after the Nazi takeover, the leftwing Zionist Werkleute (Labouring People) and later the underground Communist Youth League. When life became too dangerous, his parents sent him to Palestine, where he boarded at the progressive Ben Shemen school.
In 1941 he volunteered for the British army, in which he served for five years. As a member of the Eighth Army he took part in the liberation of Italy. A formative experience for him was the celebration of VE Day in Bologna with Italian partisans. A further step in his life was the encounter in Florence with an English art student, Pauline Pond, whom he married in 1949.
Though never losing his love of Italy, he was happy to move to England with Pauline and to embrace his new home. He never regarded himself as an exile: “When I return to Germany,” he wrote, “I feel that I am visiting a foreign country where it so happens that I speak the language rather well.” It was in England that he realised his academic yearnings, studying at Birmingham University, achieving a first in German, and then an MA at Nottingham University, his research subject being Yiddish versions of German popular literature.
His chance to become a historian came with the surprise invitation to become director of the Leo Baeck Institute London, dedicated to rescuing and recording the history and culture of German Jewry. On the retirement of the first chairman, Robert Weltsch, he took over the institute’s Year Book, turning it from a compendium of memoirs into a scholarly journal and the leading international medium on its topic. He was awarded a PhD from Heidelberg University on the basis of his publications.
I became involved in the institute in the 1970s, becoming its chairman in 1997. We had a harmonious partnership, cemented by Arnold’s belief that colleagues should be friends and strengthened by his expert editorship.
His work was recognised by being appointed OBE in 2011, by the award of the German Federal Cross of Merit and by an honorary doctorate from the University of Potsdam.
He is survived by Pauline and by his niece, Alice.
