In memory of Steve Heims

To: Retort
From: IB

[It is just a year now since Steve Heims died.  I sent on this brief éloge from last January to a mutual friend from Pumping Station days who had not heard the news and wrote to me in grief after a holiday card was returned "Not known at this address" by the US Mail. IB] 


Those of us who were graced by the friendship of Steve Heims (including the Pumping Station gang, and a few  friends here in Berkeley from long ago - his mother had a house near the Rose Garden) knew ourselves to be touched by a luminous and gentle spirit, a spirit which is now extinguished but will be carried forward in our hearts. His gentleness and modesty were of course deceptive, for they were alloyed with a fierce and steely commitment to the task of the historian - in Steve's case, history on a large and terrible canvas. His themes were mid-20th century science and the role of scientists in the catastrophes of our epoch.

Steve Joshua Heims' great contrapuntal biography of John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener must be set alongside Passages from Berlin, his personal excavation of Kristallnacht and the diaspora of fellow students from the Goldschmidt Shule of his youth in late 1930s Germany. Both projects were steeped in a Benjaminian sense that "only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious." Steve's chosen topics made great historiographic and ethical demands, but who else can one really imagine capable of what he achieved. He himself felt that his own training and experience as a working scientist informed his approach to von Neumann's trajectory and career. On the other hand, Steve's refusal to work on any project with military implications meant that his career as a young physicist at the NASA/Ames Research Laboratory - he was recruited straight from doctoral work at Stanford - was short indeed. He dedicated his life thereafter to matters of peace and to understanding the dynamics and direction of modern science.

In order to support the research and writing involved in an enormous project that occupied two decades - the collective history of the Macy cybernetics group, of whom Wiener and von Neumann were central figures - he had to patronize himself. He taught science as a freelance on the margins of the academy. It is poignant, and worth noting, that his great work of radical scholarship was funded at first by money from CETA (a public service job training agency, the last dying echo of the New Deal, enacted in 1973 and modeled on the WPA), and by the generous amounts of free time built into the schedule at the short-lived syndicalist academy on Dogtown Common in Gloucester, Massachusetts.  After CETA was abolished - it was one of the early soft targets of the first Reagan administration - Steve removed to Cambridgeport and later to Jamaica Plain. His quiet, occasional presence at the History of Science faculty seminars in Harvard Yard redeemed those demoralizing events, although the thrust of his gracefully barbed demurrers, delivered with genuine diffidence and usually an expression of faint surprise at what he had just heard, often seemed to elude the inner circle of acolites genuflecting at the altar of official knowledge.

Steve is gone now, but his work will endure, not only as a beacon illuminating the darkness of the 20th century and its forking paths, but as a model of the obligations owed by the historian to the ancestors and which Steve Heims discharged with passionate objectivity.

IB