Looking Over the Fence

An academic's journey is often a mixture of determination and serendipity where the ambitions of a young mind and a chance meeting of an influential scholar open opportunities that may not have been foreseen. For John Moses, "a boy from the Bush" of Queensland with mixed religious and ethnic heritage, an education for the Anglican priesthood at St Francis Theological College in Brisbane unexpectedly set him down of learning German history, when is Latin teacher, a German Jew converted to Christianity, bequeathed him his books and memoirs of his life in Wilhelmine Germany during the Weimer Republic and up to the Nazi seizure of power. As both mentor and friend, Canon Dr Wilhelm Lorenz Rechnitz (1899-1979) offered the young man a uniquely personal insight into the most shattering spiritual and political catastrophe to envelop the Western world.