My father, Ian Wallace, who has died aged 78, was a lecturer in German and European studies. He was drawn to exile studies, which follows the Jewish writers who had to leave Germany under Hitler, but was also concerned that, prior to unification, the world heard mainly about the West German perspective, and so he took the initiative to create the academic journal GDR Monitor (now German Monitor), a neutral forum for discussions on the East. Our home was often filled with German thinkers and writers, such as Volker Braun and Erich Loest.
Born in Carlisle, Ian was the son of Edith Reay and Frank Wallace. Frank, a munitions factory worker, left the family when Ian was a toddler, and Edith brought him up with the help of her mother, while working on the production line at the Carr’s biscuit factory, then as a waitress at the Silver Grill bakery and restaurant in Carlisle. Ian’s grandmother died when he was eight.
Ian attended Carlisle grammar school, where he decided to pursue an academic career despite having a left foot that caught the attention of major football clubs. He won a scholarship to Oxford and studied modern languages at St Peter’s College (1961-67). It was in Oxford that he met Trudy Breitenmoser, a young Swiss woman working at the Randolph hotel, whom he would marry in 1967.
They moved first to the US, where he undertook his first teaching position at the University of Maine in 1967, returning to Britain five years later to teach German at the University of Dundee, the city in which I was born. It was at Dundee that he won a grant to create GDR Monitor.
In 1984 he was appointed chair of modern languages at Loughborough University. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Dad bought a campervan and we drove for days to Berlin so that he could watch the changes firsthand, and also to undertake a sabbatical at the Freie Universität Berlin.
In 1991 he became professor of German at Bath University. During this time he edited a series of books on German unification. He also became chairman of trustees of the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution and co-founded and was president of the International Feuchtwanger Society, to increase awareness of the life and works of Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger and other German émigrés.
A man known to all as kind, patient, fair and funny, my father worked as a visiting professor at universities across the world. His colleague and friend Pol O’Dochartaigh of the National University of Ireland Galway described him as “a towering figure in German studies and exile studies. He was always collegial, a genial, gentle, immensely supportive character who inspired all those with whom he came into contact.”
Ian retired in 2002, but never stopped working. He and Trudy settled in Felixstowe, Suffolk, to be near the seafront, which delighted him on his walks every day.
Trudy and I survive him, as do his three grandchildren, Elliot, Clover and Kit, and his sister, Freda.
