Manfred Kurt Kollmeier

Manfred Kurt Kollmeier, born May 31, 1947, in Munich, Germany, passed away at his home near Woodland, CA on June 2, 2024, two days past his seventy-seventh birthday. He was under hospice care, following a diagnosis of MDS (Myelodysplastic Syndromes) in March, 2023. At his bedside were his husband Ralph Hexter, son Stefan Kollmeier, good friend Ahmed Aljasar, and beloved Aussiedoodle Lennon. Beyond Ralph and Stefan the close relatives he leaves behind are daughter-in-law Bettina Burger-Kollmeier, grandson Louis Kollmeier (in Massachusetts), stepgrandson Florian Burger, brother Horst Kollmeier and his wife Traudl, nephews Peter and Florian Kollmeier and their families (in Bavaria).

Manfred grew up in Munich, Germany, son of Joseph Kollmeier and Lotte Kollmeier née Bahner. After basic schooling, he trained as a precision mechanic, first apprenticing and then working for a firm that manufactured 8mm film cameras. He married and became a father at the age of 19. His small family was torn apart when after but a few years his wife abandoned him and their young son; they divorced and he was granted sole custody of Stefan.

Caring as a single father for a young son was challenging since he had to work, though it ended up exempting him from then-obligatory military service (after a dramatic adventure with German military police he never tired of recounting). His own mother urged him to remarry and in fact he became engaged.

It was now the early 1970s, and if for gay people in the US 1969 was the year of the Stonewall riots, one of the earliest expressions of the “gay liberation” movement, in West Germany that same year saw a significant revision to Paragraph 175, the German law that criminalized homosexual acts between men. The original 1871 law had been made more severe by the Nazis, who introduced the infamous pink triangle, persecuting and prosecuting many gay men, and it was that text that was left in place by the Western allied powers and thus the operative law in the Federal Republic of Germany (BRD). Only in 1969 did West Germany decriminalize homosexual acts between men aged 21 and over, lowering the age of consent in steps until it abolished the law in 1994, after reunification. (Perhaps surprisingly, after the war, the DDR, East Germany in other words, had reverted to the original, milder form of the law, abolishing it altogether in 1988.)

It was, then, an ad in a local paper, newly possible in the early ‘70s, that caught Manfred’s eye, for he sensed that there was a part of him that needed exploring. Soon he terminated his engagement. Also, in consequence of his coming out, his mother refused to speak to him, fortunately relenting after a year. Fortunate indeed, for Stefan thereafter effectively made his home with his grandparents, permitting Manfred to work.

Manfred began a nearly seven-year relationship with a handsome man originally from Naples and at the time working in Munich whose nickname was Dino, for Benedetto. These were happy years. Manfred enjoyed his job, driving trams for MVV, the Munich transit system, which he did for roughly seven years. And there were vacations with Dino and Stefan to the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria, Naples and more than once to Greece, and often with his dear friend Marianne Schneider, with whom he had bonded as colleagues at a previous employer.

His relationship with Dino was stormy, however, and by 1979 Dino had moved out, though he still figured in family events, like New Year’s Eve 1979, when Manfred had plans to go with his mother, Dino, and Marianne to Johann Strauss’ Die Fledermaus at the Bayerische Staatsoper. To snag tickets for this gala performance, one had to stand in line all night, which he was doing with his friends Klaus (a fellow tram driver) and Klaus’s partner Gerald. Now one didn’t literally have to stand in line all the time in Munich’s cold December night air: one got a number and kept it in play by responding to the roll call every hour on the hour. Also in line was an American graduate student who happened to ask Manfred after the 1 am roll call where one could go, since the gay bar he had been staying warm in had closed. Manfred named a couple of stripper bars (he later admitted) but said that the graduate student could keep warm in his car, an invitation he gladly accepted.

December 22, 1979, 1 am CET, was then the start of the relationship that lasted the rest of his life. Manfred and Ralph, who shared many passions, went to the opera together even before New Year’s Eve. That was a performance of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, when the Papageno was no doubt Wolfgang Brendel, who over twenty years later would become, along with his entire family, close personal friends. At Die Fledermaus on New Year’s Manfred and Ralph could see each other only at intermissions, but within weeks Ralph had effectively left behind his student lodgings at Olympiazentrum and moved into Manfred’s apartment on Schäftlarnstrasse. Ralph’s DAAD fellowship was initially for only one year, but he applied for a year’s extension, which was granted. As it happened, independently both Ralph and Manfred had planned to travel to Greece in August of 1980, so itineraries were combined, which meant that Ralph’s parents met both Manfred and Stefan. Manfred met more family and friends of Ralph on his first US trip, December, 1980 – January, 1981.

The question then was whether Ralph would return to the US and Manfred accompany him or whether he would stay in Germany and find something to do. An offer of an assistant professorship in Classics at Yale University, where Ralph was getting his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, decided the matter. Ralph returned to the US in September, 1981, and after a November visit (and his first Harvard-Yale game in the Yale Bowl), Manfred moved definitively to the US in spring, 1982. New Haven was home for nearly a decade, during which time he mastered English, gained permanent residency, became a homeowner, indeed, became an investor in real estate and a licensed realtor. Stefan visited nearly annually, for he too gained permanent residency on the same application as his father’s, and his parents visited the US twice.

The next phases were marked by Ralph’s career moves. While Ralph was at CU Boulder from 1991-1995, they lived in a true mountain paradise near Nederland, CO, which witnessed the emergence of Manfred the horseman. Manfred earned his Colorado real estate broker’s license but chose not to continue in real estate, working ultimately in a firm that used additive manufacturing – the forerunner of 3D printing – to make industrial prototypes. Stefan had joined Manfred and Ralph, living in the separate cabin on their 13-acre mountain property. Manfred became a US citizen in late 1995.

In January, 1996, Ralph began as Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, so Manfred and Stefan brought horses Mimi and Arby to their next home in Clayton, CA, and Manfred eventually returned to his career in transportation now as a school bus driver, first home-to-school but soon in the much more flexible and pleasant context of a school bus charter company. The new hobby: studying violin and repairing student violins and cellos.

Manfred might have thought he’d never leave the mountains of Colorado, and the two might have thought they’d never leave California, but in August, 2005, Ralph, who had ended his time at Berkeley as Dean of Arts & Humanities and Executive Dean of the College of Letters & Science, became President of Hampshire College in Amherst, MA. Since Manfred and Ralph lived in the president’s house in Amherst, they traded their Clayton property for a condominium in San Francisco and Manfred officially retired to take up his new role, first man at the college, a role he dispatched with aplomb and one that no one could have predicted for him. On September 1, 2007, Ralph and Manfred became the first same-sex college or university presidential couple to marry legally in the US. A small civil ceremony in the president’s house was officiated by their friend Rabbi David Bauer. It is fitting that this occurred in Massachusetts, as Massachusetts had in 2004 been the first US state to permit same-sex marriages.

For all that, anchoring board dinners, hosting donor events, and even a membership at the Yale Club in New York was not really a future he wanted in the long run. 2011 was the year of complete return to California. Ralph took up his new position as Provost & Executive Vice Chancellor of University of California, Davis, the San Francisco condo was sold, and the horses – now Omar, Susi, Sher and Grayson – found a new home outside Woodland, CA. Manfred was the mastermind getting the property in shape and providing vision for renovations in three stages. New hobbies were wine-growing and wine-making, while boating on the Sacramento River gradually replaced riding. Manfred didn’t have to leave his beloved home for the fifteen months Ralph served as first Acting and then Interim Chancellor, though Manfred appreciated that as “Associate of the Chancellor” he could park wherever he wanted on campus. He enjoyed the men’s basketball games, including a trip to Tulsa when UC Davis managed to get into the NCAA final sixteen, and though he never really cottoned to American football, he didn’t mind hosting guests in the chancellor’s box at the Davis stadium.

Man gönnt sich ja sonst nichts. That was the epitaph Manfred chose for himself. One could translate the phrase “after all, one so rarely indulges oneself,” said (at least in his case) with a self-mocking wink, for Manfred loved to have a good time and to share those good times with as many people as possible. Manfred loved gaming. He took to Las Vegas the very first time he visited and then visited frequently. Indeed, among his many jobs along the way, “slot tech” in Central City, soon after Colorado permitted small stakes gambling in several historic mining towns. He loved wine and spirits, he loved cruises, he loved travels – special memories of southern France and Asia (China, Southeast Asia, and India). He loved good food, and of course good music and theatre. But above all, he loved people. He cherished his close friends: Marianne Schneider, Pat Wallace, Nancy Smith, Rich Naval and Warren Roberts. He took Nancy, who had never left California, to Germany, guiding Rich and Warren there as well, including to Oktoberfest. He frequently hosted one of his oldest friends, Peter Hinderer, in California, inviting him over on numerous occasions and taking him to Hawaii and to Alaska, among other destinations. He would do anything to help a friend.

In the past few years he was like a second father to Ahmed, who has been a member of the household since he moved to Davis when he entered the Ph.D. program in Structural Engineering. Passionate were the dinner table discussions about politics and religion. To touch on the first of the two topics, as a life-long social democrat, Manfred had trouble conceiving how far to the right the US had shifted and was horrified at how far to the right it might yet shift, though he still believed in its ideals. After voting for the first time in the US in a one-room schoolhouse in the Rockies, he volunteered as a poll worker and supported liberal democrats. He wanted to see a new generation replace the old-timers in office, and he actually imagined the US might get rid of the Electoral College. As for religion, he was a passionate atheist, considering organized religions the source of most evil in the world.

A few years ago with Ralph he established the Global Aggies LGBTQIA+ Award at UC Davis and now Ralph has established an endowment to sustain the project and memorialize both Manfred and their 44+ years together: the Ralph Hexter and Manfred Kollmeier Fund for Global LGBTQIA+ Rights. You can read about it at https://give.ucdavis.edu/go/Manfred and, since people have asked, donations to increase the support available for these grants can be made via the website.