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Hans Meyerhoff was born on December 1, 1914, in Braunschweig, Germany, where he completed his studies in the gymnasium before emigrating to the United States in 1934 because of a Nazi edict forbidding the matriculation of Jewish students in German universities. He was awarded the degree of Bachelor of Arts at UCLA in 1936 and began graduate work in the Department of German from which he received his Master's degree in 1938 before transferring to the Department of Philosophy. There he served as Teaching Assistant for Visiting Professor Bertrand Russell and became, in 1942, one of the three students who were the first to be awarded the Ph.D. by that Department. Immediately after receiving his degree he entered the service of the federal government and, in 1943, the Army of the United States. Assigned to the Office of Strategic Services for duty in Washington, England, France, and Germany, he was engaged in the Battle of the Bulge and was present at the liberation of the prisoners at Dachau. After the war he was employed by the Department of State as Section Chief in the Division of Research for Europe until he joined the staff of the Department of Philosophy at UCLA in 1948. During the seventeen years preceding his tragic death in an automobile accident on November 20, 1965, he became an eminent member of the University faculty and an eminent representative of the University elsewhere--as a Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan n 1955-56, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brandeis University in 1957-58, at Columbia University in the summer of 1962, and at the Frederick William University in Bonn in 1963-64. He also held a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962-63.

As a philosopher, Professor Meyerhoff was most interested in the human condition. He turned to history, the social sciences and literature in his effort to understand man, his place in the world, and his responsibilities; and he constantly tested his conclusions by considering their applicability to the problems of our time. He is best known, in the United States and in Europe, for his book Time in Literature, which has had a stimulating effect upon intellectuals on both continents, and for The Philosophy of History in Our Time, an anthology of essays which he selected and edited with a knowledge and discrimination which has made it the most widely known book on that subject. The breadth of his humanistic interest is illustrated by his contributions to journals of philosophy, history, psychoanalysis, literary criticism, and public affairs and by his translation into English of Max Scheler's Man's Place in Nature and Paul Friedlander's monumental three-volume Plato--a labor sustained by his affectionate regard for a friend and former teacher and completed just before his death. In 1963 he was honored by his native city of Braunschweig by the publication of a volume of his selected poems in German and in English, and he left behind the unfinished manuscript of his study of contemporary Existentialism.

He was one of the University's most beloved teachers, whose classroom was always crowded with students who surrounded him after his lectures and pursued him through the corridors and into his office because his words--whether on Plato, on the existentialist philosophers, or the philosophy of history--had for them some special meaning derived from the vitality of his own thought and feeling. He was generous with his time to graduate students in his own Department and in the departments of literature where students found his published writings and extensive knowledge a stimulus to their own researches. Through public lectures and evening classes for adults he extended his vital influence throughout the community, and he was always ready to take a public stand on the basic moral issues of his time. His ethical philosophy and his personal experience with war made him acutely concerned with American foreign policy, and his last appearance before the students at UCLA was in opposition to that policy in Vietnam and their last communication with him was in the form of a standing ovation to the passionate integrity of his moral commitment. It is fitting that, at the request of the students, the free speech area of the campus should have been renamed Meyerhoff Park in his honor.