Prof. Alfred E. Senn: You Won’t Find This in the Books

Prof. Alfred Erich Senn, American historian of Lithuanian-Swiss origin, held a lecture at Vytautas Magnus University, ‘Heroes of History as People’, and told stories about his life, family, and encounters with interesting historical figures.

Martynas Gedvila (m.gedvila@mkt.vdu.lt)

One of the most prominent historians of 20th century Lithuania, Professor Senn shared the unique experience he has gained by uncovering unknown facts through oral history. Facts should never be bare and there’s always a person to be found underneath them, revealing a perspective on any given situation, he says.

Senn began using oral history when he researched some less-documented cases and realized that the best way to verify them is to interview people. Applying this method, the VMU Honorary Doctor met with Lithuanian journalists, historians, politicians and other historical personalities, including Juozas Tumas-Vaižgantas, Vincas Krėvė, Antanas Salys, Mykolas Biržiška, and many others. For over a decade, Prof. Senn taught journalism and history at VMU.

“Students loved Prof. Alfred Erich Senn’s lectures. Even among historians, his innovations stand out because he always researched the more sensitive, less familiar topics. The oral history method allowed him to discuss the less verifiable things and meet some interesting people. We might know them as heroes of literature, but the professor managed to both learn the factual aspects and grasp their personality, sensibility and life experience – all through interviews”, VMU Vice-Rector for Public Relations Prof. Auksė Balčytienė remembered.

Lithuania Across the Pond

Over the past two years, Prof. Alfred Erich Senn has been translating Alfonsas Eidintas’ book about Antanas Smetona, the first President of Lithuania, into English. The historian says this work was interesting because it deals with people he or his parents have known.

Senn’s lecture was a rare opportunity to learn the less familiar details on the greats of Lithuanian history, i. e. the personal impressions one would not find in books.

Prof. A. E. Senn’s mother, Lithuanian Marija Vedlugaitė, and father, Swiss linguist Alfred Senn, met in Lithuania. “My father came here to Lithuania from Switzerland thinking he was going to be a businessman. Turns out he had probably less business sense than I do, which is zero”, Prof. Senn joked. Due to the circumstances, the historian’s parents were forced to leave Lithuania and he was born in the U.S., but his two older sisters were born in Lithuania. One of them was even baptised by Lithuanian writer Juozas Tumas-Vaižgantas.

“Perhaps you don’t know that Vaižgantas baptised my sister and was her godfather. He was a very good friend of my parents and I grew up with a warm feeling for him. I didn’t have the vaguest idea of who he was, I just knew he was a nice guy because my parents thought he was”.

Senn’s mother had nothing against moving, but didn’t really want to live in the USA. “I asked her once, ‘Did you want to live in America when you were little?’. She said, ‘No, America has criminals and people die doing military service’. ‘Where did you want to go?’. She said, ‘I wanted to go to India’. That was my mother”.

Quirky Krėvė Chronicles

Even though they lived in the United States, Prof. A. E. Senn’s family always remembered Lithuania: its language was the focus of research and Lithuanians were frequent guests in the household.

“I was in Vincas Krėvė’s Russian class for two years. He had a pet parakeet, and it would walk across the floor and do somersaults. Then they started wondering why it made these peculiar sounds. It became obvious that it was Krėvė at his typewriter”, VMU Honorary Doctor smiled, remembering the story.

But his favourite Krėvė story is a different one. ”I met and talked to him several times a week. When he first came to the USA, it was obvious he had very bad front teeth, and he tended to talk to people like this, trying not to expose them. Then he went to a dentist and got good teeth – big, beautiful teeth. And his whole attitude changed, as he smiled at us constantly”.

Edge Over Other Historians

The professor revealed that he never studied Lithuanian, but once he started the research, he recognized that something gave him an edge over other historians: Senn was the only one who knew even a little of the Southernmost Baltic nation’s language.

“I’ve never studied Lithuanian, so I still speak it by ear, as I hear it. Frequently I can hear my own mistakes and I haven’t the vaguest idea how to correct them. My conversation with Mykolas Biržiška was probably the first full conversation I ever had in Lithuanian”, UW-Madison Professor Emeritus A. E. Senn admitted.

Mykolas Biržiška, historian and Lithuanian Independence Act signatory, knew Senn’s father, which eventually led to the meeting with his son.

“Using my father’s name, I got an interview with Mykolas Biržiška and visited him in his home. He received me very nicely, wanted to know about my parents. There was a chance in 1956 that Columbia University would have a scholarly exchange with Moscow, and my professor told me I might be the student going from the USA. I told this to Biržiška, and he wrote to my father, worried whether I was strong enough to resist a semester in Moscow, whether my brain could resist a Communist brainwash”, Prof. Senn remembered.

Think Twice: Written Word May Be Wrong

The historian says he recognised early that one can become the prisoner of the interviewee: you might like him so much that it seems like he can do no wrong. For this reason, Prof. Senn decided to interview people who contradict each other, to balance them out. Interviews were at the core of the research, because there was very little useful documented written history about the period he was researching, the 1920s Lithuania. Facts had to be carefully double-checked – this was an important lesson.

“I leaned heavily on diplomat Vaclovas Sidzikauskas. I often went to see him in his office in New York. It was fantastic to [discuss his correspondence with a German diplomat]. He even looked at me and said, ‘I really don’t remember the case, but it’s quite possible that I just made something up to see what kind of reaction I would get from him”. That was another step in my learning to look critically at documents. Think twice. The fact that it is issued as a document does not necessarily mean that it is any better than what someone has told you“, the historian is convinced.

Photo report by Jonas Petronis (j.petronis@mkt.vdu.lt)

About Alfred Erich Senn

Alfred E. Senn is a famous historian of the 20th century Lithuania who has Swiss and American citizenship.

His father, Swiss philologist and lexicographer Alfred Senn taught at the University of Lithuania (later VMU) in the 1920s in Kaunas. In 1930 he moved to the USA, where A. E. Senn was born. A. E. Senn followed in his father’s footsteps and showed interest in Lithuania early in his life. In the 1950s he started looking into the country’s history, meeting and discussing it with many prominent Lithuanian émigrés and contributing significantly to Lithuania’s better understanding in the English-speaking world. Eventually A. E. Senn gained prominence as one of the greatest historians of the Baltic state in the 20th century.

Senn received a BA in 1953 from the University of Pennsylvania and then an MA in 1955 and a Ph.D. in 1958 from Columbia University in East European history. He has taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison since 1961, from which he retired as professor emeritus.

Soon after the Vytautas Magnus University’s re-establishment in 1989, Prof. Egidijus Aleksandravičius invited Alfred Erich Senn to hold lectures at the same university where his father once worked. Since then, Prof. A. E. Senn has frequently visited and held guest lectures at VMU. In 1999 he was awarded the VMU Honorary Doctorate.

A. E. Senn has also authored eight books and many scholarly articles, most of them on the history of Lithuania. His book Gorbachev’s Failure in Lithuania was awarded the Edgar Anderson Presidential Prize by the American Association of Baltic Studies in 1996.