Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

Of all the memorable things he said in his lifetime, this remains our favourite: "One either meets or one works." Peter Drucker, who died yesterday at the splendid age of 95, is the man The Economist called "the greatest thinker management theory has produced." He lived a full, rewarding and fascinating life.

When he was born in Vienna in 1909, the city was the capital of a vast empire that comprised 50 million subjects and stretched from the Alps to the borders of Russia. When he left Vienna aged 17, the city was, in the words of historian A.J.P Taylor, "the inflated capital of a small Alpine country" that would pay a terrible price for the war that its rulers had started. It was no country for young men, in other words, so Peter Drucker, defying his father's wish that he attend university, headed to Hamburg and a job as a trainee clerk in an import-export firm. His next stop was Frankfurt and a position as a trainee securities analyst. He enrolled in a statistics course at Frankfurt University and was soon a financial journalist with the Frankfurter General Anzeiger.

Drucker's first publication, a pamphlet on Friedrich Julius Stahl (1802-1861), a philosopher, parliamentarian — and a Jew, was published in April 1933, two months after Hitler took power. It was promptly banned and burned. But like so many people at the time, Drucker dawdled in Germany, not quite comprehending what was happening. In his first book, The End of Economic Man: The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1939, he addressed the nihilism of Nazism: "It is anti-liberal, but also anti-conservative; anti-religious and antitheist; anti-war and anti-pacifist; against big business, but also against small artisans and shopkeepers..." He attended a Nazi rally at which a party speaker illustrated the abracadabra of fascism: " We don't want lower bread prices, we don't want higher bread prices, we don't want unchanged bread prices — we want National-Socialist prices."

In the excellent "The World According to Peter Drucker" by Jack Beatty, we learn what it was that finally woke Drucker up to the danger he was in. He attended a faculty meeting at the university led by a newly-appointed "Nazi commissar". Drucker was hoping that the famously liberal faculty would defend intellectual freedom. The Nazi began by announcing that Jewish faculty members would be fired immediately. Then he abused them using foul language. "It was nothing but 'shit' and 'fuck' and 'screw yourself'. When he had ended all eyes turned to a Nobel-prize-tipped biochemist. According to Drucker, "The great liberal got up, cleared his throat, and said: 'Very interesting, Mr Commissar, and in some respects very illuminating. But one point I didn't get too clearly. Will there be more money for research in physiology?"

Beatty quotes Drucker: "Although a few of the non-Jewish faculty left in solidarity with the Jewish colleagues, most did not. I went out sick unto death — and I knew that I would leave Germany within forty-eight hours."

After five years in London, he emigrated to the United States where he found fame, fortune and happiness. One final classic Drucker quote: "Marketing is a fashionable term. The sales manager becomes a marketing vice president. But a gravedigger is still a gravedigger even when it is called a mortician — only the price of the burial goes up." Peter Drucker deserves his eternal reward.