The First Class of Fulbrighters - Fulbright-Kommission

John B. Payne was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1931. He received a B.A. from Texas Christian University
in 1953 before embarking on his Fulbright year at the Universität Heidelberg. Upon returning, he
attended Vanderbilt University Divinity School from which he received a bachelor of divinity degree in
1956. Then he received a Ph.D. from Harvard University in the study of religion in 1967. Payne taught
religion at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College (1960-68), and Bradley University (1968-71), and was
professor of church history at Lancaster Theological Seminary (1971-99). His publications include Erasmus:
His Theology of the Sacraments and the translation and annotation of The Paraphrases on Romans
and Galatians and The Annotations on Romans in The Collected Works of Erasmus. He is the editor of
Reformation Roots. Payne is ordained with dual ministerial standing in the United Church of Christ and
the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). He and his wife Nancy have three adult children.
Memories of
My Fulbright Year
by John B. Payne
MY YEAR AS A FULBRIGHTER at the beginning of
the German program in 1953-54 was most memorable and
influential upon my life. It began with a seven-day voyage
with all the other Fulbrighters on the S.S. Independence from
New York via Lisbon and Gibraltar to Genoa and then a
trip by train through the Alps to Bad Honnef am Rhein
for a three-week orientation session before we departed for
our respective universities.
Several of us, who had not received tourist-class dining
room tickets when we boarded, lucked out. We were
bumped up to the cabin-class dining room. I remember
with delight the animated conversation at every meal,
although I must confess that I missed some breakfasts
because I stayed up so late talking or playing bridge or
singing German songs with other Fulbrighters. I remember
the excitement, the heightened state of anticipation,
the camaraderie as we journeyed together toward a foreign
land. My only prior experience in a foreign country was a
trip to Canada as a teenager. I suspect this very limited
exposure to another culture was true of most of the other
Fulbrighters as well.
There was some anxiety about the language—whether,
when we reached our respective destinations, we would be
able to speak and understand German well enough to get
along. Some modest efforts at trying out the language were
made on the trip, but it was not until we reached German
soil in Bad Honnef that those efforts began in earnest.
There, my roommate, Bill Bader, and I contracted to speak
only German with one another, a contract to which we did
not entirely adhere. Most of us knew that we needed much
improvement in language skills. Fortunately, I had received
a solid grammatical foundation in college and was rather
confident that with sufficient practice the speaking and the
understanding would come along. And that proved to be
the case.
I remember being favorably impressed by the friendliness
and hospitality of the German people already in Bad
Honnef—the management and waiters of the Hotel Klein;
the citizens of the town; the mayor of Cochem an der
Mosel, who greeted us on our bus tour of the Rhine and
Mosel Valley; a pastor in Bad Honnef who invited several
of the theological students to his house for coffee and conversation;
and a student from Heidelberg who offered his
help in finding living quarters there.
For me, the supreme illustration of hospitality was that
of the Familie Lauer, with whom I lived during my entire
period of study in Heidelberg. They were a working-class
family who lived in a modest house on the outskirts of
Heidelberg in Pfaffengrund. They took me in with open
arms. Frau Lauer in particular cared for my every need,
including nursing me when I contracted the flu in winter
and a kidney stone in summer. Fifteen years later my family
and I made a visit to Heidelberg in order to attend the
Stiftungsfest of the Heidelberger Kreis, to which I had
belonged during the latter half of my academic year. We
stayed with the Lauers, and Frau Lauer cared for the children
so that my wife and I could take part in events of the
Fest, the ball in the Schwetzingen Schloss and the boat trip
on the Neckar.
The Heidelberger Kreis, “eine Verbindung, die keine schlagende
war,” 1 afforded me another memorable experience of
hospitality as I was warmly received at the meetings and
social events by the members who called me “Bürger
Payne.” That the original Citizen Paine’s 2 name was spelled
differently, didn’t matter. The meetings, with their lectures
and discussions on such topics as the justification for the
attempted assassination of Hitler on July 20, 1944, provided
much intellectual stimulation.
Even more stimulation and learning took place, however,
in the lectures and seminars of the University of Heidelberg,
whose theological and philosophical faculties were
perhaps, then, at their apex. I was delighted to hear and
try to understand the lectures by such prominent scholars
and thinkers from the theological faculty such as Gerhard
von Rad, Günther Bornkamm, Heinrich Bornkamm and
Edmund Schlink and, on the philosophical faculty, Karl
Löwith and Hans-Georg Gadamer.
One of the most outstanding learning experiences of
the year was the time in Berlin, to which we traveled in
June by military train from Frankfurt. We had the oppor-