Douglas A. Unfug, emeritus professor of history at Emory University and founding editor of Central European History (CEH), passed away on October 14, 2017, at the age of eighty-eight. His editorship spanned more than two decades and helped establish the journal as the leading North American venue for scholarship in the field. He taught at Emory from 1957 until his retirement in 1997.

Douglas Unfug was born on June 6, 1929, in Pueblo, Colorado. He earned his undergraduate degree at Yale University in 1951, where he also received his PhD in 1960. His doctoral advisor at Yale was Hajo Holborn, the doyen of postwar historians of Germany in the United States. Unfug was one of the more than fifty PhD's trained by Holborn, a cohort that included future leaders in the discipline like Theodore S. Hamerow, Leonard Krieger, Arno J. Mayer, and Otto Pflanze. While completing a dissertation on German policy in the Baltic states in 1918–1919, Unfug held a Ford Foundation teaching internship at Williams College from 1956 to 1957, and an instructorship at Emory from 1957 to 1962. With Holborn's endorsement, he then joined Emory's history department at the rank of assistant professor. Promotion to associate professor followed in 1970, a rank he held until his retirement.

Despite Holborn's encouragement, Unfug never published his dissertation. He would instead make his professional mark as a journal editor, beginning with his appointment in 1968 as inaugural editor of Central European History. The founding of CEH was the fruit of efforts by members of the Conference Group of Central European History (the forerunner of what is today the Central European History Society) to found an American journal devoted to the history of German-speaking Central Europe. Here Unfug was one of several scholars, led by Theodore S. Hamerow, who lobbied actively within the Conference Group to achieve this goal. The enterprise became especially urgent after 1964, when The Journal of Central European Affairs ceased publication. Although the founding of the Austrian History Yearbook (AHY) in 1965 partially filled the resulting vacuum, the AHY followed its predecessor in focusing largely on the Habsburg monarchy and its successor states. The decision to launch Central European History, ratified at the Conference Group's annual meeting in December 1966, set in motion the creation of a journal focusing on the history of German-speaking Central Europe as a whole.Footnote ¹

As editor of the fledgling journal, Unfug was able to draw on the talent of a distinguished founding board of editors that included Holborn and Hamerow, as well as Gordon A. Craig, Carl J. Friedrich, Oron J. Hale, Robert A. Kann, Enno E. Kraehe, and Hans Rosenberg. Yet, the success of CEH in its early years also owed much to the high standards of professionalism that Unfug brought to the journal, a feat all the more impressive given that CEH was a shoestring operation during much of his editorship. His first wife, Glee Unfug, eventually joined on as a skilled copy editor; and two of his former graduate students, Theodore V. Brodek and David Hendon, assisted in various editorial capacities. Unfug sometimes had to struggle to retain the financial support of his home institution. That was especially the case in the journal's first decade. Emory was not yet the well-financed research institution it would become in 1979, when it was the beneficiary of what then was the largest single gift ($105 million) to any institution of higher education in American history. During a period when Emory still saw itself primarily as an undergraduate institution, Unfug had to work hard at times to convince administrators that supporting a scholarly journal was a worthwhile investment of the university's resources.

Unfug remained committed, above all, throughout his editorship to making CEH open to new directions in the discipline. To be sure, political history—in line with scholarship in the Central European field as a whole—persisted as the dominant focus of the journal during its first decade. But, by the 1980s, articles in the areas of social, economic, and women's history had come to make up a substantial portion of CEH’s contents. That the 1980s would end with a special issue edited by Michael Geyer and Konrad H. Jarausch under the title “German Histories: Challenges in Theory, Practice, Technique,” is emblematic of the journal's evolution during the final decade of Unfug's editorship.Footnote ²

His contributions as editor were best on display in the double issue of June/September 1984, most of which was devoted to the controversy that followed the publication of David Abraham's Collapse of the Weimar Republic: Political Economy and Crisis (1981).Footnote ³ This is not the place to rehearse the charges and countercharges hurled in what Peter Novick called “the best publicized historical controversy of the 1980s.”Footnote ⁴ What deserves emphasis here is rather the care, tact, and skill with which Unfug handled the thankless task of editing the lengthy and rancorous exchange between Abraham and his foremost critic, Gerald D. Feldman. Those who knew Doug may recall him as a quiet and shy man, sometimes painfully so. But his editorial persona was different, as was evident in the judicious but firm comments with which he closed the Abraham-Feldman exchange. He was justly praised for his editing of the dispute, which allowed fundamental disagreements to be aired while, at the same time, disentangling the confused blend of personal, professional, and scholarly issues that had made the controversy so toxic. In this capacity, he played a key and constructive role in helping the profession weather a fraught and divisive moment in its history. As Jonathan Sperber wrote privately to Unfug shortly after the publication of the exchange:

Noting in his characteristically unassuming way the appreciative letters he had received, Unfug wrote to the CEH board that, “while I welcome the praise for the journal, I would gladly have done without it if I could have done without the year's work and aggravation.”Footnote ⁶

By that time, editing CEH had taken a toll on Doug in other ways. When I joined Emory's history faculty in 1987, the journal was running at least two years behind schedule. The lag had partly to do with his perfectionist streak, which had occasioned delays in the past, but other causes exacerbated the delays. These included the failing health of his wife, Glee, who finally succumbed to cancer in 1992, as well as the accumulated exhaustion incurred by Unfug's long editorship. It was a difficult period for Doug. At his request, and in an effort to reduce the backlog of submissions, I joined CEH in 1989 as its associate editor. The results of my efforts were arguably modest: still untenured at the time, I had professional distractions of my own and neither the experience nor editorial bent to do what was needed to bring the journal up to date. Clearly, it was time for the journal to find a new editorial home.

The years following Unfug's departure as editor brought their share of personal sorrows. Preceding him in death were not only Glee, his wife of forty years, but also his daughter Molly and his grandson Keenan. Those years brought him great joy as well. He remarried in 1996 and is survived by his second wife, Harriet Gilbert Unfug, who had also suffered the loss of a longtime spouse. Harriet brightened his remaining years through her sparkle, wit, vivacity, and, not least, the flock of stepchildren, step-grandchildren, and step-great-grandchildren she gave him in marriage.

Douglas Unfug loved the company of young people, as junior colleagues who knew him will attest. He always had time to chat with them in the hall, and he always found time to read their work-in-progress, generously placing his editorial skills at their disposal. That made him an invaluable resource for his colleagues, just as it did for the journal to which he selflessly devoted so much of his career.