Alfred Pringsheim

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Alfred Pringsheim in his younger years

Alfred Pringsheim (born September 2, 1850 in Ohlau , Province of Silesia , † June 25, 1941 in Zurich , Switzerland ) was a German mathematician and art patron .

Family and academic career

Alfred Pringsheim came from an extremely wealthy German-Jewish family from Silesia . Along with his sister Martha, he was the first child and only son of the Upper Silesian railway entrepreneur and coal mine owner Rudolf Pringsheim (1821–1906) and his wife Paula, née. Deutschmann (1827-1909).

Pringsheim attended the Maria-Magdalenen-Gymnasium in Breslau. He was a highly gifted student in the subjects of music and mathematics. From 1868 he studied mathematics and physics in Berlin and at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg . In 1872 he received his doctorate in mathematics under Leo Königsberger . In 1875 he moved from Berlin, where his parents lived, to Munich, in order to complete his habilitation there in 1877. Two years later he became a private lecturer at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich .

Hedwig Pringsheim as a young woman
Palais Pringsheim at Arcisstraße 12
inside view

In 1878 he married the Berlin actress Gertrude Hedwig Anna Dohm (1855-1942), whose mother was the well-known Berlin suffragette Hedwig Dohm (1831-1919). Together they had five children: Erik (* 1879), Peter (1881–1963), Heinz (* 1882) and the twins Klaus and Katharina , born in 1883, called Katia. His first-born son Erik was exiled to Argentina because of his lifestyle and gambling debts , where he died young. His sons Peter and Klaus, like their father, embarked on an academic career and held professorships in physics and composition. Heinz was a PhD in archaeologist. The daughter Katia was Munich's first high school graduate and was one of the first active students at Munich University. She later became the wife of the writer and Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann . Thomas Mann portrayed his father-in-law in the person of Samuel Spoelman in his novel Royal Highness .

In 1886 he was appointed associate professor of mathematics at the Ludwig Maximilians University. In 1889, Pringsheim and his family moved into the neo-renaissance villa at Arcisstrasse 12. The house was planned by the Berlin office of Kayser & von Großheim , and the interior was supplied by Joh. Wachter and court furniture manufacturer O. Fritsche in Munich.

In 1898 he was elected a full member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences , from which he was dismissed in 1938. In 1901 he was appointed full professor at Munich University, and in 1906 he was President of the German Mathematicians Association . In 1922 he retired . He was a corresponding member at the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen . The Leopoldina also made him a member.

In addition to mathematics, Pringsheim has been intensively involved with music since his youth. He arranged various compositions by Wagner for piano. Later he also dealt with art history and built up an important art collection ( majolica and paintings). Particularly noteworthy is its collection of works of gold and silversmiths of the Renaissance.

Auction of the mathematical library left behind during the emigration with 3,353 titles (1934)

Mathematical work

In the field of mathematics, Pringsheim published numerous works on function theory . Here he devoted himself particularly to the infinite rows . To this end, he wrote essays in the Mathematische Annalen and the meeting reports of the Bavarian Academy. Other topics included the basics of arithmetic and the theory of functions, which he wrote as an article for the Encyclopedia of Mathematical Sciences .

He appeared primarily as a representative of Weierstrasse analysis and was particularly concerned with the history of mathematics as well as with real and complex functions .

Acquaintance with the Wagner family

From a young age he was very intensely involved with music, and was particularly fascinated by the works of Richard Wagner . He conducted correspondence with Wagner personally, which he later took with him into exile in Switzerland. The musical inclination led him to publish some arrangements of Wagner's works. He was also active as a writer in the field of music.

The acquaintance with Wagner was so intense that he gave him great financial support and also supported the Bayreuth Festival . As a thank you, he received a certificate that titled him as patron and guaranteed him the right to a seat at certain performances. His granddaughter Erika Mann wrote in her memoirs about this acquaintance with Wagner that Pringsheim had even once got involved in a duel when someone insulted Wagner. He earned the nickname “Schoppenhauer” by hitting a beer glass on the head of a guest in a Bayreuth restaurant who had made derogatory comments about Wagner.

Income and Nazi persecution

Pringsheim was very wealthy through family fortunes alone. As a full professor, he also had a very good monthly salary. After the death of the founding father in 1913, he had a fortune of 13 million and an annual income of 800,000 marks , which corresponds to a fortune of around 54 million or an income of 3.3 million euros based on today's monetary value. All of Munich met on big evenings in his Munich home at Arcisstrasse 12 . This upper-class villa, however, appeared rather modest compared to the parental “Palais Pringsheim” in Berlin.

With the First World War , however, the financial decline began for him too. He considered himself a German citizen who no longer practiced the " Mosaic faith ". But he had always refused Christian baptism. As a “German patriot”, he signed war bonds that had lost their value after the war, so that he lost a large part of his capital. The consequences of the fatal hyperinflation of 1922/1923 led to further large losses. As a result, he had to part with the pieces in his art collection, including probably the wall frieze by Hans Thoma . He commented on the losses with the words: I live from the wall to the mouth .

After the National Socialists came to power in 1933, the 70-year-old initially did not want to go abroad, like most of his family members, but to stay in Germany. When the persecution and expropriation of the Jewish population began, he went all the way of humiliation and disenfranchisement that the Nazi regime imposed on citizens of Jewish descent. He was initially refused to leave the country. Even Winifred Wagner could no longer help the old Wagner admirers. Through the intervention of his former neighbor Karl Haushofer , who was friends with Rudolf Heß , and the mathematics professor Oskar Perron , a former student of Alfred Pringsheim, as well as through the initiative of a courageous SS man who obtained their passports at the last minute, After further very severe humiliations, he succeeded in traveling to Zurich with his wife on October 31, 1939 . With the remaining proceeds of the forced auction of the majolica collection, which the National Socialists pushed ahead very quickly , he was able to pay the so-called Reich flight tax.

His house was forcibly sold to the NSDAP in 1933 . It was torn down and an NSDAP administration building was erected in its place, in which the files of all German NSDAP members were stored until 1945. Today the building is called the Munich House of Cultural Institutes . The current address is Katharina-von-Bora-Straße 10; Arcisstrasse is now shorter than it was in Pringsheim's time.

Pringsheim died in Zurich on June 25, 1941. Allegedly, his wife then burned the entire estate of Alfred Pringsheim that had been taken to Switzerland, including Richard Wagner's letters. She passed away a year later.

Works

  • Daniel Bernoulli - Attempt of a new theory of the valuation of fortunes , 1896
  • Irrational numbers and the convergence of infinite processes , Leipzig 1898
  • On the value and alleged worthlessness of mathematics - speech given at the public meeting of the Royal Bavarian Academy of Sciences in Munich to celebrate its 145th foundation anniversary on March 14, 1904
  • On convergence and the function-theoretical character of certain limit-periodic continued fractions , Munich 1910
  • Majolica , Leiden 1910
  • About Taylor's Theorem for the Functions of a Real Variable , Reprint of the Royal Academy of Sciences 1913,
  • Alfred Pringsheim majolica collection in Munich , Leiden 1914
  • Lectures on numerical theory - first volume, second section, I.2, Infinite series with real members, Leipzig 1916
  • On singular points of uniform convergence - presented on December 6, 1919 in Munich, Bavarian Academy of Sciences, 1920 (meeting reports of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, Mathematical-Physical Class; special print year 1919)
  • Basics of general function theory
  • Lectures on functional theory. First section: Basics of the theory of the analytical functions of a complex variable , Leipzig and Berlin 1925
  • Lectures on numbers and functions , 2 volumes (Bibliotheca Mathematica Teubneriana, volumes 28,29). Leipzig, 1916–1932
  • Critical-historical remarks on the theory of functions , Reprint 1986 ISBN 3-7696-4071-3
  • Directory of his mathematical work 1875–1933 , Munich 1934. ( Digitized by Univ. Heidelberg )

swell

  • Ernst Klee : The cultural lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-039326-5 .
  • Franz Neubert (Hrsg.): Deutsches Zeitgenossen-Lexikon , Leipzig 1905
  • Herrmann AL Degener : Who is it , Leipzig 1911
  • Herrmann AL Degener: Who is it , Berlin 1935
  • Tilmann Lahme : From the wall to the mouth - order and late suffering in the house of Thomas Mann's in-laws: The Pringsheims in the Munich Jewish Museum , article in the FAZ of April 7, 2007

literature

  • Ulf Hashagen:  Pringsheim, Alfred. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 20, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-428-00201-6 , p. 724 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Inge and Walter Jens : Katia's mother. The extraordinary life of Hedwig Pringsheim. Rowohlt, Reinbek 2005, ISBN 3-498-03337-9
  • Inge and Walter Jens: In search of the prodigal son - Hedwig Pringsheim's trip to South America 1907/8 . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2006, ISBN 3-498-05304-3
  • Kirsten Jüngling / Brigitte Roßbeck: Katia Mann. The wizard's wife. Propylaea, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-549-07191-4
  • Alexander Krause: Arcisstraße 12: Palais Pringsheim - Führerbau - Amerika Haus - University of Music and Theater . Buch & Media, Munich 2005, ISBN 978-3-86520-094-5
  • Katia Mann: My unwritten memoirs . Fischer, Frankfurt 2000, ISBN 3-596-14673-9
  • Inge and Walter Jens: Mrs. Thomas Mann. The life of Katharina Pringsheim. Rowohlt, Reinbek, 2003, ISBN 3-498-03338-7
  • Lorenz Seelig: The Munich Alfred Pringsheim Collection - auctioning, confiscation, restitution. In: Dishonored. Looted. Aryanized. Disenfranchisement and expropriation of the Jews, arr. by Andrea Baresel-Brand (= publications of the coordination office for the loss of cultural assets, vol. 3) . Magdeburg 2005, pp. 265-290, ISBN 3-00-017002-2

Movie

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Eleonore Büning : Sensational find in the Wagner year: And Cosima grins friendly , FAZ.Net, February 21, 2013.
  2. ^ W. Bronnenmeyer: Richard Wagner. Citizens in Bayreuth . Ellwanger, Bayreuth 1983, p. 122 f .
  3. ↑ Klaus Harpprecht: Thomas Mann. A biography , Rowohlt, Reinbek 1995, p. 215.
  4. ↑ Purchasing power as a measure of the value of money ( Memento from January 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive )

Web links


personal data
SURNAME Pringsheim, Alfred
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German mathematician and patron of the arts
DATE OF BIRTH September 2, 1850
PLACE OF BIRTH Ohlau ( Lower Silesia )
DATE OF DEATH June 25, 1941
Place of death Zurich , Switzerland