Alfons Mumm von Schwarzenstein

Alfons Mumm von Schwarzenstein 1911

Philipp Alfons Mumm , from 1873 Freiherr Mumm von Schwarzenstein , (born March 19, 1859 in Frankfurt am Main , † July 10, 1924 in Portofino , Italy ) was a diplomat of the German Empire .

Alfons Mumm von Schwarzenstein, German envoy to China 1900

Alfons Mumm von Schwarzenstein (seated) in 1900 as envoy in Beijing

Reception rooms of the German embassy in Mumm's time in Beijing

Admiral Felix von Bendemann , Consul General Wilhelm Knappe and Mumm von Schwarzenstein after his arrival in China in front of the Imperial Consulate General in Shanghai

Life

Alfons Mumm was the son of the businessman and Royal Danish Consul General Jacob Georg Hermann Mumm (1816–1888) and his wife Eugenie Sophie (1822–1888). Jacob Georg Hermann Mumm successfully continued the family wine trade, which his father Gottlieb Mumm (1781–1852) had considerably expanded with the establishment of the champagne house PA Mumm & Co. (PA after Peter Arnold ). The family business was continued by Alfons older brother Peter Arnold Gottlieb Hermann Mumm von Schwarzenstein (1842–1904), the builder of Villa Mumm . In 1873 the family was ennobled and made baron .

Alfons Baron Mumm von Schwarzenstein studied after graduating from the Municipal High School in Frankfurt from 1879 Law in Göttingen , Leipzig , Heidelberg , Berlin and received his doctorate in Göttingen to Dr. iur. ; also in Göttingen he became a member of the Corps Hannovera . He completed his legal traineeship at the Superior Court in Berlin. He then joined the diplomatic service of the Foreign Office in 1885 . The first important post abroad took him to London as an attaché at the embassy , later to Paris . He was Legation Secretary in Washington, DC in 1888 , in Bucharest from 1892 to 1893, and in the Holy See from 1893 to 1894 . In 1894 he became a lecturer in the political department of the office in Berlin, where he worked as a consultant for oriental affairs. After his appointment to the secret legation councilor in 1897, Mumm went to Luxembourg in 1898 as envoy , and again to Washington in 1899 as chargé d'affaires on an extraordinary mission.

In 1900, as envoy in Beijing, he was the direct successor of the envoy Baron Clemens von Ketteler, who was murdered in the course of the Boxer uprising . The departure took place in July 1900 from Genoa and went by ship to Shanghai . With the head of the expedition corps under Alfred von Waldersee , who arrived later, Vumm, who was regarded as sinophile, was not always in agreement in assessing the situation and the necessary procedures and was able to convey his differing ideas to him. In October 1900, coming from Shanghai, where he had consulted with Consul General Wilhelm Knappe , who had been the German consul there since 1898, he then arrived in Beijing. His political line here was consideration for the growing Chinese national consciousness and reluctance to assert Germany's economic interests. It was thanks to his passion for photography that an outstanding collection of photographs from cities in China from 1900 to 1902 is still preserved today. From Beijing he also organized in 1901 the petition of the Imperial Prince Chun II (1883–1951) on September 4, 1901 in the New Palace in Potsdam to see Kaiser Wilhelm II . As a special award, when he left China in 1905, he received a hanging scroll made by the Chinese Empress Dowager Cixi with the image of a shrub peony . He was awarded the Order of the Red Eagle First Class and the Order of the Crown ; In 1903 he was raised as Schwarzenstein to the Prussian baron class.

From 1906 to 1911 Mumm represented the German Reich as ambassador in Tokyo . From the beginning he spoke out against plans for an alliance between Germany and Japan against Franco-British-Russian alliances. He saw German-Japanese relations as rather distant and, with regard to foreseeable future tensions between Japan and the USA in the Pacific, quite neutral. He carefully observed the relationship between the United States and Japan. In the long term, he considered a military confrontation between the two powers in the struggle for supremacy in the Pacific region to be inevitable.

In 1911 Mumm resigned from the diplomatic service for health reasons (due to an eye problem), but offered himself to the Foreign Office again immediately after the beginning of World War I in August 1914. Here he was on 5 October 1914 founding by Matthias Erzberger initiated Central Office for Foreign Service used (NDE) to the Foreign Office as a department manager for foreign propaganda. However, Matthias Erzberger was in charge of the actual business. Ernst Jäckh (1875–1959) and Paul Rohrbach (1869–1956), who came from the Reichsmarineamt, worked at Mumm's side . From the end of the year J. Schumacher was also part of the staff. The need for this central office arose from the fact that imperial Germany had not prepared for foreign propaganda under the conditions of war before the start of the war. France and Russia were much better prepared for this. That is why the tasks of this newly created service consisted in the publication of a multilingual dispatch service intended for foreign correspondent offices, in the printing of brochures, books and articles about foreign publishers to present German culture and "love of peace", in the establishment or takeover of newspapers for certain foreign ones Population groups, in the monthly publication of a multilingual war chronicle as well as in the production of posters and leaflets for the population of the occupied territories. The headquarters of the central office was in Berlin in the former rooms of the "Central Office for Printed Propaganda of the Reichsmarineamte", which had also risen here. The tasks of the ZfA were divided into four work areas: 1. Press control area, 2. Books and brochures, 3. Image center and 4. Dispatch. The difficulty at the beginning, however, was that 27 different offices or contact points that had already dealt with the subject of press processing for foreign countries for a long time were united under this roof. The areas of responsibility were expanded or put together differently several times. Above all, however, it became clear in the following year that the gathering and distribution of news abroad was difficult to separate from intelligence information work. During his service as head of department, Mumm published several volumes "The War Lyric 1914-1918". In 1916 Paul von Buri (1860–1922) took over the post as department head of the ZfA and Mumm switched to the field of foreign propaganda as head of department. By 1917, the Central Office for Foreign Service was restructured several times, centralized, and personnel changed, but it always moved in competition with the private news organizations and with Department IIIb of the General Staff. At the end of 1917, mainly for this reason, it was dissolved as an independent department and incorporated into the Foreign Office's intelligence department, which had been under the direction of an officer, Major Erhard Deutelmoser (1873-1956) since the end of 1916 .

Mumm continued to work in the field of foreign propaganda until the beginning of 1918, but then switched back to the diplomatic sector. As a transition to the usual working levels, he was briefly appointed head of a delegation that negotiated with representatives of the newly founded People's Republic of Ukraine about grain deliveries for Germany. He then became ambassador of the German Empire in Kiev ( Ukrainian state under Hetman Pawlo Skoropadskyj ) in 1918 and retired to Eyrichshof Palace in Franconia in November 1918, when the new state collapsed again in Ukraine .

In 1918 Mumm married Jeannie von Mumm, born in Scotland. Mackay-Watt, who moved to Germany with her family around 1900. From 1920 the couple lived permanently in the Castello San Giorgio near Portofino , the country estate Mumm had acquired in 1911 and restored and rebuilt over many years. As early as 1914, the Portofino municipality had made him an honorary citizen.

Alfons Mumm von Schwarzenstein died on July 10, 1924 in Portofino.

His wife Jeannie stayed in Portofino after his death. When the German Wehrmacht withdrew from Italy in April, Commander Ernst Reimers received the order to blow up the place. The place was already mined when 79 year old Jeannie von Mumm visited the lieutenant colonel on April 24, 1945. In a one-on-one conversation, she managed to convince him that Portofino must be spared. The grateful congregation made her an honorary citizen in 1949. Jeannie von Mumm died in 1953 and found her final resting place in the Protestant cemetery in Portofino. A bronze plaque near the cemetery today commemorates their courageous act. The Alfons & Jeannie von Mumm exhibition shown in Portofino in 2014 also commemorated the childless couple .

Mumm was an avid photographer and created a lot of photo material, especially during his diplomatic missions abroad.

His older brother was Peter Arnold Gottlieb Hermann Mumm von Schwarzenstein (born September 29, 1842 Frankfurt am Main; † May 25, 1904 ibid), the so-called champagne baron / king of the German Empire and builder of the palatial Villa Mumm in Frankfurt am Main. He continued to run the family wine trade. Shortly after the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870/71 , at the age of 25, on November 22, 1871, he married the 20-year-old Emma Louise Marie Passavant (born September 30, 1852, † November 11, 1922 in Johannisberg im Rheingau). She was called the Queen of Frankfurt. She was a patron and honorary citizen of Johannisberg in the Rheingau.

Works

• A diary in pictures (1902) , digitizedversion ofthe Tōyō Bunko exlibris by the Australian adventurer and correspondent George Ernest Morrison with a personal dedication to Mumms
• War lyric poetry (1914-18) in several privately printed volumes
• My Ligurian home (in Portofino). Compiled with friends for friends and illustrated from your own photos. (Private printing). Berlin 1915.

literature

• Dr. Mumm von Schwarzenstein, the new German envoy in China , in: Deutscher Hausschatz, XXVI. Volume, 1899/1900, No. 49, p. 863 (portrait).
• Maria Keipert (Red.): Biographical Handbook of the German Foreign Service 1871–1945. Published by the Foreign Office, Historical Service. Volume 3: Gerhard Keiper, Martin Kröger: L – R. Schöningh, Paderborn et al. 2008, ISBN 978-3-506-71842-6 .
• Franz Lerner:  Mumm (family), p. 581: Alfons Mumm von Schwarzenstein. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 18, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-428-00199-0 , pp. 580-582 ( digitized version ).
• Régine Thirez: Barbarian Lens. Western Photographers of the Qianlong Emperor's European Palaces. Gordon & Breach, Amsterdam et al. 1998, ISBN 90-5700-519-0 ( Documenting the Image 6).
• Stories and a. from the widow of the champagne king Alfons from Portofino
• Peter Hahn: Mumm - diplomat, photographer & different from the others . The life story of Alfons Mumm von Schwarzenstein. Oase Verlag, Badenweiler 2012, ISBN 978-3-88922-099-8 .
• Peter Hahn: Alfons & Jeannie von Mumm , cosmopolitans and honorary citizens of Portofino. Catalog for the exhibition of the same name by the Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany from May to September 2013 in the Castello Brown in Portofino.

Literary processing

In the historical novel Behind the Walls of Beijing (1999), Hans Dieter Schreeb processed Mumm from Schwarzenstein's time in China in a literary way.

Web links

Commons : Alfons Mumm von Schwarzenstein  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Wikisource: Convention between the Empire and the United States of America for the Mutual Protection of Copyright (1892)  - Sources and full texts

• Literature by and about Alfons Mumm von Schwarzenstein in the catalog of the German National Library
• Exhibition Alfons & Jeannie von Mumm

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Herbert Butz: Kneeling and presents: The expiatory mission of Prince Chun in Germany.
2. ↑ Ulrike Oppelt: Film and Propaganda in the First World War. Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 2002, ISBN 3-515-08029-5 , p. 107 ( digitized version )
3. ^ Fritz Fischer, German War Aims, Revolutionization and Separate Peace, 1959
4. ^ Salvator Oberhaus, German Propaganda in the Orient, Düsseldorf 2002, pp. 20f.
5. ↑ Wolfgang Ruge, M. Erzberger - a political biography, Berlin 1976
6. ↑ ^{a b c d} Chris McCall: The Glaswegian who saved an Italian village from the Nazis In: The Scotsman , October 20, 2016 (English), accessed September 27, 2019.
7. ↑ Michael Horowitz: Dolce Vita In: Kurier , April 16, 2015, accessed on September 27, 2019.
8. ↑ La Baronessa by Mumm salvò Portofino portofino.it (Italian), accessed on September 27, 2019.
9. ↑ L4672 - Lapide alla baronessa Von Mumm - Portofino pietredellamemoria.it (Italian), accessed on September 27, 2019.

predecessor	Office	successor
Clemens von Ketteler	German envoy in Beijing 1900–1905	Arthur from Rex
Friedrich Carl von Erckert	Ambassador of the German Reich in Tokyo 1906–1911	Arthur from Rex
	Ambassador of the German Reich in Kiev in 1918