{"id":138967,"date":"2018-06-20T14:30:01","date_gmt":"2018-06-20T18:30:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?post_type=school-college-post&#038;p=138967"},"modified":"2018-06-20T14:30:01","modified_gmt":"2018-06-20T18:30:01","slug":"extensions-center-learning-retirement-offers-memoir-writing-club","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2018\/06\/extensions-center-learning-retirement-offers-memoir-writing-club\/","title":{"rendered":"Extension\u2019s Center for Learning in Retirement offers memoir writing club"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Professor Emeritus of Political Science Curt Frederic Beck recently self-published a memoir entitled\u00a0<em>From Wannsee to Storrs: A Perpetual Optimist\u2019s Journey.\u00a0<\/em>Beck penned the book while a member of an ongoing weekly memoir writing club offered through\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/clir.uconn.edu\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">UConn\u2019s Center for Learning in Retirement<\/a>. CLIR is a\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.extension.uconn.edu\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">UConn Extension<\/a>\u00a0program.<\/p>\n<p>Beck is past president of CLIR, and currently serves on its board of directors. He was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1924, but with growing political concerns among the Jewish community during the early 1930s, his family fled Germany for Czechoslovakia in 1933, then emigrated to the United States five years later.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAs a writer and publisher of a philosophical magazine, my father had no intention of staying in a country run by Adolf Hitler, who had been appointed chancellor in January of 1933,\u201d Beck explains. \u201cWhen Hitler took neighboring Austria in March 1938, my parents decided to escape Hitler\u2019s expected conquest of Central Europe and seek refuge in the United States, where we arrived on September 13,1938.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Beck studied at Cornell, where he felt pulled toward political science. He earned his bachelor\u2019s degree in history, his master\u2019s from Tufts University Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and then his Ph.D. in government and international relations from Harvard. He was hired in the summer of 1947 as the first faculty member in UConn\u2019s newly established Department of Government and International Relations.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/naturally.uconn.edu\/2018\/06\/19\/clir-memoir-class\/\">Continue reading at Naturally@UConn<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>CLIR provides educational opportunities for adults interested in lifelong learning through lectures and classes on a wide variety of topics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2224],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[1871],"class_list":["post-138967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cahnr"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-03 12:30:18","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/92"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=138967"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138967\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138967"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=138967"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=138967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}