Friends remember econ professor

Elmus Wicker was a new faculty member in the economics department -- he's now a professor emeritus -- when professor Arthur Schweitzer asked him, like he asked all new faculty members, if he played ping-pong.\n"I unwittingly said yes without inquiring at what level," Wicker said. "Before the game was over, I had been thoroughly defeated. I don't think I was ever invited over again."\nSchweitzer, 98, died March 9 at the Hospitality House nursing home in Bloomington. Despite his obvious ping-pong prowess, Schweitzer was best known by the IU community as a leading social economist and a faculty member in the economics department from 1947 until his retirement in 1976.\n"His field was what was then called comparative economic systems," Wicker said, where social and political variables are incorporated into economic theory. "And his specialty was the Nazi economic system. Both he and his wife fled from Nazi Germany very early after Hitler's rise to power. His wife's experience was especially harrowing."\nSchweitzer, born in Germany in 1905, first worked as a skilled laborer in a shoe factory. He later attended the Universities of Frankfurt and Berlin. \n"He originally wanted to be the mayor of a large German city," his son Eric Schweitzer said. \nBut when the Nazis came into power, Eric said he fled to Switzerland and attended the University of Basel, Switzerland in 1937. He became part of the university newspaper, but then the Gestapo came. They shut it down and arrested everyone.\n"He knew then that he couldn't go back to Germany because he thought that the Germans were probably looking for him, too," Eric said. \nSchweitzer's career goals then turned to finishing his Ph.D. and becoming a professor.\nIn 1938, his plan was to travel to the U.S. as a Rockefeller Fellow and return to a position as a professor in Basel. But right after his ship left France for the trip, Germany attacked Austria. Switzerland's politics at the time favored the Austrians, and because Schweitzer was German, he soon discovered his position had disappeared and he could not return to Switzerland. \nInstead, he and his wife needed to find a way to stay in the U.S. The solution was to emigrate from Cuba because the U.S. did not accept political prisoners at the time. In 1938, Cuba's emigration quota was 50 people. Schweitzer and his wife were numbers 48 and 49. \nThe U.S. was still in a depression in the late 1930s, and it was difficult to find jobs, Eric Schweitzer said. That is how his father came to join the faculty of the University of Wyoming in 1939 -- a far cry from Germany and Switzerland. He stayed in Wyoming until his move here to IU in 1947.\n"During the war years," writes Eric, "his first-hand knowledge of the average German citizen, their beliefs, lifestyle and thoughts was in great demand. He participated on panels sponsored by the University and was invited to speak by civic clubs throughout Wyoming. Many of these events were covered by the local press, which provided first-hand knowledge to the general public."\nHis experiences and resulting research made Schweitzer an expert on the Nazi economy. Even after his retirement in 1947, Schweitzer continued his research until he had a stroke at the age of 91. During his career, he published more than 50 articles and wrote three books.\nAlthough his research began with questions about the Nazi regime and who paid for it, Eric said, he also wanted to know how Hitler built up his money and why he was so popular. \nThis led to his interest in the German sociologist Max Weber. Using Weber's theories, Schweitzer compared the charismatic features of world leaders. He often taught classes at IU encompassing economics, sociology and Western European history. \n"His approach to economics was interdisciplinary, on the borderline between economics and sociology," Wicker said. "Art was an iconoclast. He pursued his research interests where ever they led him, even, at times, outside the mainstream."\n-- Contact staff writer Erika Biga Lee at ebiga@indiana.edu.