Personal background

Chamberlin was born on March 27, 1939, in Jersey City, New Jersey. In 1961 he moved to Heidelberg, Germany. There he married his first wife, Angela Maria Schüssler, and began his association with the University of Maryland’s European Division. He eventually received a BA, MA, and PhD in modern German history from the University. The Chamberlin’s divorced in 1978. In the same year, he met his second wife, Lynn-Marie Smith. Their marriage lasted until his death in 2020.^[2][5][7]

Professional background

Following his PhD, Chamberlin taught for the University of Maryland at several US military bases in Germany and Italy. In 1976, he was hired by the Institut für Zeitgeschichte (IfZ-Munich) and the Bundesarchiv (Federal Archives – Koblenze) as manager for a project to catalog and microfilm the records of the Office of Military Government (U.S.) OMGUS. In 1983, Chamberlin was approached by the organizers of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum to begin developing an archive. He led efforts to microfilm archives throughout Eastern and Western Europe, Israel, and the former Soviet Union, which became the core of the USHMM’s collection. Chamberlin also developed a cooperative relationship between Yad Vashem and the USHMM, resulting in an unprecedented sharing of archival holdings available to scholars in the US and worldwide. He served as Director of the Archives and Library, and then Director of the International Programs Division until he retired in 2001.^[5][8][6][9]

Later work: Ernest Hemingway and Lawrence Durrell

In 2001, Chamberlin and Smith moved to Key West, Florida, where he served as a research associate at the Key West Art and Historical Society (KWAHS). Shortly after he arrived, he was approached by Benjamin ‘Dink’ Bruce, son of the close friend and assistant to Ernest Hemingway, Toby Bruce, to organize an extensive collection of Hemingway's papers and photographs that had been left in the back room of Sloppy Joe’s bar. Mary Hemingway gave the collection to Toby Bruce.  As he worked with the papers and photographs, he realized the significance of it to Hemingway scholars and alerted The Hemingway Letters project at Penn State University. The University ultimately purchased the collection, which was opened to scholars in 2022. His work with the KWAHS and the Hemingway collection resulted in his publishing The Hemingway Log: A Chronology of His Life and Times.^{[1][10][11][12]}

In 2001, he also began a ten-year association with The Durrell School of Corfu, where he served on the board and presented papers on various topics addressed by the writers Lawrence and Gerald Durrell.^[2][5] In 2007, he published A Chronology of the Life and Times of Lawrence Durrell and a revised edition, The Durrell Log, in 2019.^[5]

During his time in Key West, Chamberlin published 11 books, including novels, travel, poetry, and plays. The Berlin series expanded to four volumes, three of which were published (Schade’s Passage, Schadow’s Meditations, Peregrine’s Island), and the fourth, Ursala’s Triumph, was left unfinished at his death.