For more than 50 years, Hans Wallach—a major contributor to the field of visual and auditory perception and learning—was one of the most distinguished members of the Swarthmore community. That he ever arrived was as much a fluke as Wolfgang Köhler’s arrival the year before.

Born in Berlin, Wallach joined the University of Berlin’s Institute of Psychology, then the center of Gestalt Psychology, as a 22-year-old research assistant for Köhler, a role he would also play at Swarthmore. "I had enormous luck," he said in a 1976 Bulletin interview. "[W]e did a lot of different things that year. No publications resulted, but I learned a lot."

After working with Köhler for a year, Wallach continued his own experiments on perceptual phenomena at the institute. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, the institute’s administration advised him to complete a Ph.D. as quickly as possible. He did the next year—barely. As he wrote in a memoir: "Being Jewish, I knew that I had eventually to leave Germany and had better hurry getting my Ph.D. [N]ot well prepared, I took my orals. I shall never forget the kindness of [two professors] who, aware of my precarious situation, allowed me to pass."

Soon after, Köhler, who had previously told Wallach he would see to it that he would get to America, invited his former assistant to join him at Swarthmore. He arrived in 1936 but did not teach until he became an instructor after the war. "The research associates did no teaching," he said. "Being asked to teach a course at Swarthmore has never been a casual matter."

Had he not followed Köhler to the United States, Wallach had no doubts about his likely fate. "If I had not been Jewish and I had made the mistake of staying in Germany, I would be dead," he said. "All of my friends who stayed behind were of draft age and were killed on the Russian front. That’s where I would [have been], if I had stayed. Somewhere dead in Russia."

At Swarthmore, Wallach progressed through the ranks and was named a full professor in 1953. He chaired the department from 1957 to 1965 when he was named Centennial Professor of Psychology. Wallach retired from the active faculty in 1975 but continued his work as a research associate until 1987.

In that time, Wallach firmly established his reputation for brilliant scholarship and an inspirational, decidedly eccentric style. He drove a jalopy and called people "darling." He chain smoked during his seminars, often getting so immersed in thought that he would hold his Camels as they burned to the ends. And he paced.

"You could go to Hans with a question," says his former student and colleague Dean Peabody III ’49. "He’d pace in his office, into the hall, and disappear. Then, he might come back in a half hour."

Thompson Bradley, new to the Russian faculty in the 1960s, remembers how Wallach used to walk with his hands tucked behind his belt, flat against his stomach. "He’d often come to your office door, ask a question, then walk away," he says. "A day later, he’d come back and ask, ‘So, what do you think about that?’"

But despite his immersion in his work, Wallach could be surprisingly interested in life’s nonacademic aspects. "When I was deciding whether to go to graduate school in French or in psychology," says his former student Johanna Mautner Plaut ’59, "Hans Wallach told my father [Franz Mautner] that he worried that if I chose French, I’d have less chance of finding a husband. I was both touched and amused that such a serious, famous scholar would even think about my marriage prospects."

Wallach won numerous awards and fellowships during his career, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Howard Cosby Warren Medal of the Society of Experimental Psychologists. In 1986, he was elected to the National Academy of Science. His research on perceptual adaptation advanced the field’s understanding of the role of learning in the perceptual process. He is also credited with discovering the basic psychological principle that makes stereophonic reproduction possible.

In 1991, a fellowship was established in Wallach’s honor to support a summer research project in psychology by a Swarthmore student. Many of his colleagues and former students contributed to the creation of the prize.

Although known primarily for his work in perception, Wallach thought the subject had been explored enough. So he began to study memory. Ironically, he thought his own was not so good:

"I always say: ‘Half of creativity consists in forgetting what one thought about the matter before.’ So a bad memory may be an aid to creativity. I think I never had a very good memory. You can always make a virtue out of a shortcoming."

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