"I want to talk about a friend and a life.

Werner Seligmann was a friend, an important and close friend. As follow academics, we were colleagues he the architect and I the political scientist.

But we shared much more than a common profession. For thirty-five years, Werner and his family Jeannie, Raphael, Sabina and more lately Dana, Nicolo, and Lenny have been closer to us than family. Today these bonds have been renewed in the generation of our children with the same resilience and warmth. As an architect, Werner built handsome and elegant buildings; as a teacher he taught others how to see, how to learn, how to build; as an academic and intellectual he had a sense of standards that today we might regard as old-fashioned. As a person he built strong connections and the strongest of these for he was an architect of human connections as well as spatial meaning are his friends, his home and his family. And we particularly respected the deep partnership he and Jeannie shared and the importance of that for his work and the family.

Across the years of friendship as our families grew closer, there were the long not to say legendary

Thanksgivings and Rosh Hashanah dinners, walks on beaches, casual evenings, trips together and through them all, endless noisy arguments about politics, art, academic life, raising children from kindergarten to graduate school, the decline in our culture, the twists and turns of our lives. With our late friend Jerry DiGiusto, a great sculptor who also taught in the Syracuse Architecture School, and his wonderful family, we were both family and community.

Now, long after the candles are out and the wine bottles empty, I remember those conversations. Werner was not shy about his opinions: he was insistent, stubborn, but invariably insightful. What little I know of architecture, I learned from him. I admired the pride he took and the intelligence he showed in his work - his designs, his competition entries, the architecture school he built here. Long ago, I ceased being surprised when he produced new projects that were as astonishing in their simplicity as in their creativity.

Friends gossip. As a fellow academic, I delighted in being a spectator to his work at Cornell and his institution building at Syracuse. I relished the play-by-play, blow-by-blow account of his labors here at Syracuse and at Cornell. He returned the favor by listening with humor to my tales of trials and tribulations at my own institution. He displayed a passionate determination about his work as Dean, a rock-hard self-confident pride in the accomplishments of his colleagues, and a fierce ambition for the school - so much so, that I was disbelieving when he once confessed that he was often kept awake by the unpleasant and difficult decisions a Dean is inevitably required to make.

There was, of course, another side to Werner. His father was, as you know, a distinguished musician and this endowed Werner with a passion for music - how many evenings did the phone ring with Jeannie asking if we wanted to join them for a chamber music concert or an opera.

These family roots gave him an abiding belief in the transcendent power of art and it is no surprise at all that Sabina is an architect and Raphael a student of literature as well as an accomplished musician. Werner was a generous friend - generous to a fault. He was generous with his knowledge, with himself and with his time. As Janet and I prepared one year for a summer trip through Northern Italy, we casually asked Werner for suggestions of additional sites we should visit. The result was a spectacular July week during which the four of us chased through the Northern Italian countryside - Werner at the wheel, of course - tracking down every Palladio villa and palazzo and then some. Werner: always the teacher - impatient with slow learners, to be sure, but always learned, passionate, and insistent on excellence.

Although his work took him elsewhere, he was generous to the Cortland community where he made his home. You know that he built several wonderful structures in Cortland: our synagogue, the science building on my campus, the gate to the Jewish cemetery where we bid him a final farewell. In the rigor of their design, the clarity of their aesthetics, the not-so-sly wit and humor, these structures embody the essence of his personality.

Werner brought with him a larger history that gave his life a special meaning that we would do well to study and to learn from. He was one of that remarkable generation of intellectuals who fled Europe for a safe haven in the United States and then contributed so much to American intellectual life. While he came at a young age after the war - making Central New York a home he would not leave - he was nonetheless part of that exodus. In his years as an American - but never too long away from Zurich or Florence - he managed to balance and even fuse the old world with the new. I simply could not understand, still can't, his attachment to small town life in Cortland and, even more quixotic, his affection for Syracuse University football. Aaron Appelfeld writes that "a Jew in Europe was always in exile." I should like to believe that Werner never felt himself in exile here.

Now, with some difficulty, I want to reflect on something else, something that continues to be, more than anything else, profoundly affecting to me about Werner in ways I cannot adequately define.

Werner was a Survivor. I do not use the term in our commonplace American manner. I use it in a more somber sense. He was a Holocaust Survivor - a survivor of the horror that sought to eliminate Jews everywhere and, for that matter, all civilized values. For my generation Survivors are touched in ways that none of us can fully comprehend. It is a place we cannot enter - a sacred space that is beyond our understanding.

We could spend long days speculating on the meaning of this experience for Werner, his work, and his presence as a colleague, friend, husband, and father. As far as I know, he did not speak of it - would

not speak of it. When once I obliquely approached the subject, he fell uncharacteristically silent until the conversation moved on.

Once there was a flash, a moment that came as an epiphany to me. It was during the 1960s when I had been carrying on critically about the "rationality" that led to the Vietnam war. I spoke quite agreeably, and sympathetically, I recall, of the Romantic and "feeling" side of the counter-culture. Werner lashed out at me, defending with great agitation the enduring value and capacity of human reason. Clearly, this was about something else. It was about why and how his aesthetic choices were moral choices and not just a matter of taste. He seemed to be saying to me in that conversation or at least this was how I understood it, that beyond the folk music lay the folk, and beyond the folk lay the camps.

I understood then and since how the emphasis on rationality that defined his commitments in his work and his preferences in music had been ineluctably shaped by his experience of the irrational that had led straight to the Holocaust. It was about standards that much abused word and standards not just as a matter of intellectual or aesthetic judgment, but standards as a barrier to the barbarism he had survived.

As what is known as secular Jews, Werner and I did our shared bit over the years for our little Temple in Cortland. (He designed our synagogue a wonderful small gem of a building.) Our participation in the life of cur Temple was a form of bearing witness and of standing in for those who had been lost. For more than thirty years, I watched him as he took his turn with the Torah, with his rumpled hair and a focused gaze that seemed to look past us to another time and place. Was he, I wondered for many years, there? - was he back there?

Finally, this is what I believe about Werner.

I believe that this experience endowed him with a special life force. I believe that we here cannot begin to understand the strength, tenacity, and courage that brought him as a child of eleven or twelve through the Holocaust experience. If we sometimes found him difficult to deal with, I believe that we were experiencing the tenacity and stubborn refusal to bend that brought him through the camps and as a refugee to the little town of Groton and from there to the professional and personal success he achieved.

I believe that it was this tenacity and discipline that he sought to impose on us all colleagues, students, friends, family. Whether we are conscious of it or not, it is the silent mark of his desolate, ineffable, and life-affirming journey through the inferno of evil that is the source of the love we have for him.

It is this same tenacity, strength, wit and courage that we saw in his battle against the cancer that killed him. About that illness, we need to understand: he never lost his optimism. When Janet and I would visit him in the hospital or in his little Italian garden at his home in Cortland, he was inevitably, despite the pain, at work on something new: learning to live with a computer, drawing with his felt-tip on a delicate piece of paper, deciding what he would teach in the spring semester, devising a new program that would lift Syracuse even higher, preparing a new project of scholarship. He certainly did not go gentle into that endless night.

As we age, we will be called upon often to bear witness to the loss of good friends and of loved family members. For those of us in the university community we will lose good teachers and good colleagues who, like Werner, refuse to compromise with the imperfections and the mediocre of so much of the world around us.

As we approach the end of this most terrible of centuries, few of us will again have the privilege to have our own lives so profoundly informed by an individual whose moral core and whose work and life so informs and guides our own lives and work."