Born and raised in the capital of Scotland, Edinburgh, Anne Adams Baade retained a warm attachment to her Scottish identity throughout her life – though she spent the greater part of it, nearly half a century, living in Austin, TX. Her father was a Scotsman from a remote Gaelic-speaking area of the Highlands; her mother, though every bit a Scotswoman, was actually from a family of distant Dutch origins which had settled in the northern English port city of Newcastle. Anne Adams Johnston’s life began in a village on the outskirts of Edinburgh, but she grew up in a central district of the city, mainly in the neighbourhoods of Newington and Morningside. It was a milieu that was to be painstakingly described some years later by the writer Muriel Spark, known to Anne by her maiden name Muriel Camberg, whose novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was turned into a famous film in the 1960s. Dame Muriel Spark based her fictitious “Marcia Blaine School for Girls” on a couple of distinguished girls’ schools in south Edinburgh, one of them being George Watson’s Ladies College, where Anne excelled as a pupil, achieving the eminent title of “dux”, equivalent to valedictorian in the US. She was both moved and very startled when she saw the world of her 1930s Edinburgh schooldays fastidiously re-created on the screen in 1969.
Anne attended the University of Edinburgh, studying French, and had the good luck to become a protegée of the distinguished literary scholar Professor Dominica Legge (1905-1986), who was well-known for the friendly support which she bestowed on students in whom she saw promise. With encouragement from Prof. Legge, Anne studied in Paris at the Sorbonne in the early 50s – a time when the eyes of the literary and philosophical worlds were very focused on the “existentialist” culture of the Left Bank, the setting in which Anne lived and studied. Afterwards she worked for a while as a translator in London, experiencing the notorious smogs of those years – which were so severe (owing to smoke from coal fires) that theater performances had to be called off when the stage became invisible. Perhaps put off by such conditions, Anne set out for Switzerland to improve her German.
She ended up, to the consternation of her family, in Germany, in the northern city of Kiel, near the Danish border and within what was then the British military administration zone of “West Germany”. There she met a young legal scholar from a German-Jewish refugee family, Hans-Wolfgang Baade, who had recently left the US (after studies at Syracuse and Duke Universities) to study in the Netherlands, at The Hague. Within about a year they were married, and shortly afterwards they set off for Durham, North Carolina, where her husband became a professor of law at Duke University. His academic career took him in due course to Toronto, in Canada, and then to UT Austin, where the Baades, by now a family of four, arrived in the early 1970s. Anne Baade’s life had much in common with the lives of many other learned women of her generation: she gave up the possibility of an academic career to follow her husband, embracing the conventional roles of mother and housewife. As for countless other women, this was not a whole-hearted embrace; besides which, for a young Scotswoman who’d been studying in Paris a few years earlier, a small city in North Carolina in 1960 was something of a culture shock. However, Duke University proved to be the environment in which she in due course returned to the world of higher education, writing her MA thesis at Duke on the German-Jewish essayist and humorist Kurt Tucholsky; later she completed a PhD in German renaissance literary studies at UT Austin, under the learned and warmly supportive guidance of George Schulz-Behrend. She was nearly 60 when she received her doctorate; a life working in academia was not an option. She studied for the sake of studying.
At about the same time, the mid-1980s, her father, aged 99, died in Edinburgh, and she and Hans decided to continue to own her parents’ house in Edinburgh, making it into their second home alongside Austin. For nearly 30 years, Anne and Hans Baade maintained their two residences in central Texas and Scotland. Anne renewed old contacts with her friends from George Watson’s, and Hans acquired a new role and a new circle of friends and colleagues at the University of Edinburgh, his wife’s alma mater. One son, James, chose to live in the UK, and the other, also named Hans, has lived almost his whole life in Austin. With the 21st century came two grandsons, Hans’s sons Alan and Miles, always a delight to their grandmother Anne. Eventually the two homes became an excessive burden, and Hans (“the elder”) and Anne decided to live in Austin all year round. He died in Austin in 2016, shortly before his 87th birthday. In widowhood, Anne went into a decline in health and awareness: which has now ended with her death in her 90th year. Her husband and she herself were resolved, as were their sons, that she should continue to live in her own home, and this was made possible by the devoted and tender support she received round the clock from an exceptional team of caregivers and care managers under the auspices of AccountableAging and Heavenly Care. Thanks to their dedication and skill, she was able to enjoy the view of “Edwards Mountain” literally to the end of her days (untouched by the Coronavirus crisis), taking delight in spotting deer, raccoons, humming birds and other distinctive Austin fauna in the back yard. She is survived by her sons James (of London) and Hans and her grandsons Alan and Miles.
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