The First Class of Fulbrighters - Fulbright-Kommission

Contributing to the
Next Generation
by Don Ziegler
ENJOYING LIFELONG GERMAN FRIEND-
SHIPS extending into the third generation, promoting
understanding of German and European history by generations
of American students, helping achieve professional
fulfillment and scholarly production—these have been the
major effects of the Fulbright experience on my life.
When I arrived in Munich in the fall of 1953 I was
lonely and ill-prepared to carry on extended conversations
in German. Soon, it was my great good fortune to have
been taken in by a family of refugees from East Prussia.
They needed my board and room money to make ends
meet. I needed the understanding and nurture of a family
setting, for I was desperately lonely for my wife and young
daughter (having been notified about the Fulbright award
so late in the summer, my wife felt unable to break her
teaching contract). Although the family was headed by the
father, a much-traveled engineer, the real force was a motherly,
middle-aged woman, who eased my transition into
German culture and taught me to speak the language “properly.”
When good fortune brought my wife and daughter to
Munich after the first of the year, my guest family insisted
that we live with them in their five-room apartment (they
also had a sixteen-year-old daughter). Years later, when I
won an outstanding teaching award with a monetary
stipend from the college where I taught, we brought the
mother to visit us in America, a highlight of her life.
Although she and her husband are now deceased, our family
friendship continues through her daughter, now a grandmother
living in Budapest with her Hungarian husband—
whom we visited a couple years ago—and their two daughters
in Germany, one of whom spent part of a summer with
us in America.
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After returning home from Munich in 1954 to take my
doctorate, I based my dissertation on original research conducted
in the Bavarian State Library. So impressed were
members of my doctoral committee that they recommended
publication by the university, which had the effect of
launching me on my professional career. Other publications
followed: a two-volume set of translated readings on 19th
century Europe with my major professor (I did most of the
German translations) and a work on great debates of the
Reformation.
WHEN I BECAME A YOUNG HISTORY PRO-
FESSOR at an undergraduate college, students were
attracted to my lectures by experiences shared from my Fulbright
year along with related insights into the larger European
historical context. More than a few went on to take
graduate degrees in history. During the 1960s I took several
student groups to Germany and countries behind the Iron
Curtain in Eastern Europe, always concluding with free
time for student travel and my return to Munich to visit
old friends.
Subsequently, I moved into academic administration,
first to a deanship in Iowa, then as the chief academic officer
of Doane College in Nebraska, the liberal arts college
from which my wife and I had graduated twenty-five years
previously. Among other accomplishments, I was able to
help further the college’s growing reputation for achieving
the most Fulbright scholars of any other higher education
institution in Nebraska, including the state university.
Today, seventeen years after my retirement, the number of
Fulbrighters from Doane (mostly to Germany) approaches
fifty. The Fulbright year was indeed a watershed experience
in my life. It significantly broadened my understanding of
both Germany and Europe, providing insights that I sought
to communicate to generations of American students.
Don Ziegler received a B.A. from Doane College, Crete, Nebraska, in 1950 and an M.A. from the University of Nebraska in
1952, before spending his Fulbright year in Munich. In 1956 he earned a Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska. He was an
Assistant Professor of History at Northern State College, Aberdeen, South Dakota (1954-56), Professor of History at Carroll
College, Waukesha, Wisconsin (1956-70), Professor of History and Vice President of Academic Affairs at Iowa Wesleyan College,
Mt. Pleasant, IA (1970-75) and held the same position at Doane College (1975-86). Ziegler’s publications include: Prelude
to Democracy. A Study of Proportional Representation and the Heritage of Weimar Germany, 1871-1920; Europe in the
Nineteenth Century, 1815-1914. A Documentary Analysis of Change and Conflict, co-authored with Eugene N. Anderson and
Stanley J. Pincetl; Great Debates of the Reformation; A College on a Hill. Life At Doane, 1871-1987; and Doane College in
Lincoln. The First Twenty Years.