RUDOLF HOEHN-SARIC

HOEHN-SARIC--Rudolf. Rudolf Franz Walter Hoehn-Saric (Hoehn-Saric) (February 5, 1929 - April 28, 2022) was born in Graz, Austria to a family steeped in medicine and entrepreneurship. The family traces its roots to South German royalty and distantly to Martin Luther. Growing up, my father lived the tumultuous but fortunate life of a family that built a storied water and hotel/spa business in what is today Radenci, Slovenia. Growing up years coincided with the transition from the Austro-Hungarian Empire and end of WWI through the First Austrian Republic to the Anschluss and WWII. Rudolf attended 12 schools during his youth moving near constantly between Graz, Radenci and other towns in the region. The end of the War brought challenges to his young life with the ascent of Communism and Josip Tito. Tito nationalized the family's business and property ending a 100-year-old family business in favor of state control. Having lost his father and brother, my father, his sister, and mother moved back to Graz to rebuild their lives. He would finish his studies and complete his medical school at the Karl Franzens University in 1954. He did his post- graduate training in Vienna, in Montreal at McGill University and Johns Hopkins University. He immigrated permanently to the United States, became a citizen and was on the faculty at Johns Hopkins for 49 years focusing his research on anxiety disorders. Rudolf worked to untangle the mysteries of cognitive, neurologic, and behavioral issues involving anxiety disorders including having written multiple books and numerous peer-review papers. He ran the Anxiety Disorder Clinic at Johns Hopkins. He retired in 1999 as a Professor Emeritus and in 2012, my mother Evanne, also a Hopkins trained physician, were honored by the establishment of the Rudolf and Evanne Hoehn-Saric Chair for Obsessive-Compulsive and Anxiety Disorders at Johns Hopkins Medical School. My father met my mother while at Johns Hopkins. Evanne Loh had immigrated to the United States in 1948 at 12 years old as the Communists in China had ascended to power. Having also grown up as immigrants born of Communist displacement and as echoes of WWII, Evanne similarly pursued life with unapologetic optimism and grit. She had recently graduated Johns Hopkins Medical school as one of four women, and the unlikely pair found true love. They married in 1960 in Maryland because anti-miscegenation laws in Virginia prevented mixed race marriages. They would go on to have three boys, R. Christopher, Edward, and Alexander. Their family has grown to include three wonderful daughters-in-law, Pamela, Amy, and Loren, eight grandchildren, two amazing grandchildren-in- law and five great-grandchildren. Growing up in an unusual family in 1960s/70s America, when conformity and social upheaval fought culture wars, our little united nations family was similarly a place of the conventional focus on education and hard work coupled with a maelstrom of wonderful cultural experiences. My father was an imposing 6'2" Austrian, psychiatrist with the full Freudian accent and demeanor. Yet, he was a playful prankster who loved a good joke, swore in Slovene, and spoke English, German, French, and Italian. He was as comfortable debating Byzantine history, traveling camelback on the Silk Road, analyzing the Nabatean Kingdom and the architecture of Petra as discussing the latest medical imaging technologies. The house was filled with joy, caring, the sounds of opera and Alfred Brendel, his cousin with grace notes of Baez, Dylan, and Pete Seeger as conversation would drift to Vietnam and social justice. My father was a gourmet and my mother, a chef, made family dinners a melting pot that ranged from Chinese Red Cooked Pork to Austrian deserts, good Bordeaux, and Hungarian goulash. His love of learning and a commitment to a life of contribution inspired my brothers and me. As kids, we would come to my parent's bedroom and find stacks of scientific journals heaped on each side of their bed and each of them deep in reading. Family trips meant one had to be prepared to get on the orient express, fly to Tibet, or visit every church in Europe. But the intellectual interests were always anchored in a commitment to hard work. My father's passion for research and commitment to educating his children was only possible by a level of work commitment that inspired all of us. Growing up, he would work six days a week including two non-academic jobs to pay the bills. He would work until he was 79 when it became more difficult to receive support for long-term research grants. My parents always made clear that work was a privilege, that passion was for what one did and not for some unattainable goal, and that the work must help others. Their work required confidentiality but over years numerous people would tell me how my father had helped them during a difficult period of their life. In their retirement years, my parents never slowed down. Just a few years ago, my parents moved to Beijing for a month to study Mandarin. They would walk to a school filled with 20 somethings each day while they were in their 80s. While age has taken its toll on mobility, I still found my father in the past year working on his Chinese calligraphy. Over twenty-five years ago, my father began an effort to have the Slovenian government return the Radenska water company and the land stolen by the Tito government. This dream has been unfulfilled and it is now up to our generation to right this wrong. Our family is heartbroken but, in his passing, each of us is inspired to be just a bit better father and spouse, work just a bit harder, complain a little bit less, help others just a bit more and make one's life one of wonder and contribution.