Wolfgang Nehring

Wolfgang Nehring was a scholar and a gentleman, a stoic and a romantic, a handsome devil who kidnapped the woman he loved out of the home of her boyfriend in 1963 and married her soon after. He was an impassioned lover of German literature and culture, a powerful hiker, swimmer and prose stylist, a tender brother, a loyal son, an idealistic and demanding teacher, an ever more generous and devoted husband and --- surely to his own shock --- a doting and fabulous grandfather to his exceptional little granddaughter, Eurydice.

When Eurydice contracted acute leukemia at only one year of age, Wolfgang searched high and low for medical advice and visited her in the hospital every day for seven months until she was cured. His own hospital experience was less successful: After being escorted to Emergency by his doctor on January 2 in response to sudden excruciating back pain, fever, and loss of balance, he was discharged without treatment and died before the sun could rise on January 3.

Had this swiftest of exits occurred twenty years later, it might have been graceful; but it cut short a vivid life that was every day widening and deepening. Though continuing to teach and serve as director of graduate studies in the UCLA German department where he'd arrived via Boston College from Germany in 1967, Wolfgang was envisioning a new life between Berlin (which he loved) and Paris (where his daughter lives with her daughter); he was envisioning Greek and Italian island exploration and peripatetic writing. His complicity with his wife was tightening and his love for his grandchild flowering more every day. He was on a beautiful springboard. But now it is we who must jump in his place.

Text by Cristina Nehring

Wolfgang is survived by his wife, Christa, his daughter Cristina and his grand-daughter, Eurydice Rafaella Tess. He is also survived by his sisters Gerda Nehring-Meschig and Gisela Gebauer-Nehring and his brothers Karl-Dietrich and Eckart.