Born in Halle near Leipzig as the fourth of five children to Dr Herman Loofs, a non-practicing German lawyer, and his wife Gertrude Wissowa, the granddaughter of Georg Wissowa, the great German classicist, Helmut's life commenced without suggestion that soldiering was in store.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Educated at the Thomas Gymnasium Leipzig where Bach served as Kantor, he took Latin and Greek, and preferred Art over Mathematics. He said only of Bach's choral pieces that a premature saturation left him with an appetite for other music. As to soldiering he had little say, living through the bombing of Leipzig and drafted into the anti-aircraft units charged with stopping the inevitable.
Sent to the Eastern Front in early 1945 aged 17, he later quipped: "The front came much quicker to us than we got to it, which saved on marching". The front swept by, and he recounted how his band of 10 became two when the main players decided the youngest were surplus to requirements. He freely confessed to being hopeless at politics, acknowledging this as an early example.
He and his companion made it to the American Zone, eating petrol-soaked bread the Russians had thought to leave behind. Relief at stumbling into the arms of his mother was short lived; picked up by American MPs he was returned eastwards and the journey was required to be made a second time.
“It is true," he once said, "that I am not that fond of Americans".
Post-war Germany left him disillusioned, and in 1948 he enlisted in the French Foreign Legion for the mandatory seven years. When asked how he even considered the Legion given what he had endured, he replied: "Of course, I did it to forget."
Pressing further would elicit the entirely ludicrous response: "I don't know: you see I have forgotten...". But then he might add: “It is always soldiers who might become pacifists; commanders never seem to take enough responsibility to reach that point".
The Legion first took him to Algeria; an officer saw his sketches and insisted he draw for the entire unit, which lead to cartography and an escape from ordinary soldiering. In French Indochina he was promoted to captain and attached to the press and information service of the French army. There he met Admiral Jean Delaborde (unrelated to his more prominent name-sake), and the two became the most unlikely of friends. Helmut was the only survivor of an ambush and lay half-conscious on a rice field for three days before being found. Recovered, he fenced Epée, regarding Foil as frivolous and Sabre as crass. He avoided Dien Bien Phu thanks to the timely sabotage of a provincial runway.
Promised a military career of substance, he rejected it. The long hours of sentry duty and the freedom as a press officer had left him contemplating what he would wish to know most of all. The answer that came to him was as to the origins of mankind. At 29 he commenced his studies in archaeology in Tübingen, gaining a scholarship to the Sorbonne and ultimately obtaining a doctorate summa cum laude in Fribourg. He befriended the emerging artist Hans Joachim Zeidler with whom he remained close until his death in 2010.
Studies were interrupted by a year photographing in Patagonia with French ethnologists and Jean Delaborde, now retired, Helmut employed by the French photographic library Roget-Viollet. He returned to meet a young German student, Sigrid, who worked cleaning the glass negatives the photographers then used. He proposed after three days. Her response was equally without measure: "No. I have come to Paris to meet a Frenchman, not a German". He courted her for two years signing love letters 'Jean-Jacques', and they married on 11 November 1960 in Hanseatic Lübeck, her home.
Young archaeologists were not spoilt for career choices, yet in 1961 a lecturer's position opened in Professor Basham's renowned Asian Studies department at the Australian National University. Despite his international experience, Canberra in the 1960s remained stubbornly foreign for Helmut.
Other non-Australian academics were similarly bemused and they soon coalesced into an ensemble of sorts, including Igor de Rachewiltz, Mongolist; Hans Bielenstein, Sinologist; Professors Alice Tae and Eugene Kamenka, and his cousin Dr Peter Sack. Later frequenters were a young Roger Pulvers, who became the Japanese literature expert, novelist and social commentator of today, and artist Jörg Schmeisser.
In 1968 he and Professor Bill Watson undertook digs in middle Thailand as members of the Thai-British Archaeological Expedition, with multi-governmental assistance. Following the murderous Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, Helmut was one of the first Westerners invited to enter that otherwise gentle country at the behest of Prince Norodom Sihanouk.
However, it was his students to whom he was the most devoted. He enjoyed lecturing, belatedly mastering his third language but never sufficiently to pass as a native speaker, a weakness he used to great effect.
Throughout Helmut sought to make his love of France accessible to others. Aiming to bridge the divide between the countries of his youth he came to know every French and German Ambassador and cultural attaché from the 1970s onwards.
He was elected president of the Alliance Française de Canberra in 1969, serving extensively over three decades, and oversaw the construction of their premises in Turner. He invited Gough Whitlam, whom he admired, to attend Marcell Marceau’s performance at the Albert Hall, and gave a largely plausible denial of having put Marceau up to a routine in which a front-seated Gough was mime-flicked with wet sculptor’s clay. In 1974 he was awarded the Palmes Académiques, Chevalier, for cultural services to France, elevated to Commander in 1993. In 1983 he was awarded the Legion of Honour, infrequently awarded to Germans.
A trip to Europe in 2000 lead to a remarkable find: in a Hamburg antique shop were his lost collection of drawings of life in Indochina. After a brief failed attempt at claiming ownership he purchased the collection and had them published in 2009 in a book entitled A Peaceful Legionnaire: an Indochina sketchbook, 1948-54. He remained in contact with the Legion, dissuading young aspirants from joining. He marched at the rear of ANZAC commemorations, with the un-allocateables, observing with pleasure: "They don't really know what to do with us".
At 90 he finished his last book Hill of Prosperity: Excavations at Khok Charoen, Thailand (BAR Publishing, Oxford, 2017), edited by John Crocker, finally completing the analysis of the material he and Bill Watson had excavated and returned to the people of Thailand. He valued a positive review from a former critic Charles Higham.
To quote Stephen Fry, Helmut was undoubtedly on the side of the mind. The many unwanted battles he was required to fight were undertaken without aggression, preferring reason and dignity at all cost. And the man had charm.
As the beast of time began to stalk him and Sigrid he turned to her and said: “What you need to understand is that, as a wife of an archaeologist, you become more fascinating to me the older you become…” He was appalled by current US politics and saw echoes of the social discourse he witnessed in his youth. Vale Helmut, the gentlest of men. He is survived by his wife Sigrid, his son Jean-Jacques and daughter Mona, and grandchildren Zachary, Ulrike, Oskar and Adelynde.
A Remembrance Day for Helmut is intended on November 10, 2018, at the Alliance Française, Turner ACT, 3.00-5.00pm. If interested, please RSVP Jean-Jacques at jjloofs@chambers.net.au by October 26.
