Gerhard Loewenberg

1928 - 2019
Gerhard Loewenberg, 91, died in Iowa City, IA on December 28, 2019.

Gerhard Loewenberg was born in Berlin, Germany, on October 2,1928, to Walter and Annemarie (Cassirer) Loewenberg, both physicians. When the Nuremberg Laws deprived the family of citizenship although Walter was a decorated WWI veteran who had served as a medic throughout the war, the family, including his younger sister Marianne, emigrated to New York in 1936. Loewenberg graduated from The Bronx High School of Science in 1945 and continued his education at Cornell University where he earned bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in government.

In 1953, Loewenberg joined the faculty at Mount Holyoke College where he taught in the department of political science until 1969. He later served on Mount Holyoke's Board of Trustees from 1971-1984 and then Chair of the Board from 1979-1984. In 1984, he was awarded the Board of Trustees Award.

Loewenberg's family history and his interest in European governments led him to focus his research on the development of West Germany's postwar democracy. His master work was Parliament in the German Political System, published in 1967. Loewenberg's research drew on the methods of legislative research that American political scientists had developed to study United States legislative institutions and he applied them to the German political system. Reviewers hailed the book as a superb and balanced account of the German Bundestag and its members.

Loewenberg moved to The University of Iowa in 1969 where he was a professor of political science, serving as department chair from 1982-1984. In 1984, he became Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and served in that capacity until 1992 when he returned to teaching until his retirement in 2003. During his time at Iowa, he also established the Comparative Legislative Research Center in 1971 and launched publication of the Legislative Studies Quarterly in 1976, the preeminent scholarly journal for research on legislatures in the United States and around the world. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005.

Loewenberg is survived by his wife of 69 years, Ina, his children, Deborah (Richard Ball) and Michael, brother-in-law Barry Head, grandchildren Sarah (Joshua Hakala), Joshua and Jacob Ball, and Zoë Loewenberg, and three great-grandchildren.