Bruno Gebhard

Bruno Friedrich Willy Gebhard , anglicized Bruno Frederic W. Gebhard (born February 1, 1901 in Rostock ; † January 12, 1985 in Carmel-by-the-Sea , California ) was a German-American doctor and founder of the first American health museum in Cleveland .

parents house

Bruno Gebhard was the only son of the caretaker at the Medical - Surgical University Clinic Fritz Gebhard (died 1948), who also ran a breakfast room with a beer . His mother Meta, b. Ross, died on August 13, 1901, when Bruno was just seven months old. Until he was 10 years old, he was looked after by his maternal grandmother. When the boy was seven years old, the father remarried. Gebhard's ancestors had been day laborers or shepherds in the service of the von Blücher family since 1720 .

Gebhard's relatives owned the Strandperle guesthouse in the Baltic resort of Alt-Gaarz (since 1938 Rerik ), where the von Schirach family spent all of their summer holidays between 1910 and 1918. During this time Gebhard established a close friendship with Karl von Schirach, the older brother of Baldur von Schirach (1907–1974), who committed suicide after graduating from high school. Gebhard had a far less intimate relationship with Baldur von Schirach.

Study time

Trusted by frühester childhood with the medical operation of the University Hospital, Gebhard began after the completion of secondary school in the winter semester 1919/20 the medical studies at the University of Rostock . He took part in sections under Hermann Voss , who was then the second prosector in Rostock, and heard lectures from Professors Dietrich Barfurth , Paul Walden , Paul Althaus , Moritz Schlick , Willy Andreas , Heinrich Pohl and Ernst Schwalbe .

Gebhard belonged to the German Christian Student Association and the civil technical emergency aid . As a member of the general strike in the course of the Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch in March 1920, he was entrusted with the maintenance of food transports to the city of Rostock together with the Rostock student battalion under the leadership of pathology professor Ernst Schwalbe (1871-1920). Schwalbe was killed in the shootings between the student battalion and the armed union members.

Gebhard spent the summer semester of 1921 at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich , where he a. a. attended lectures and seminars with Siegfried Mollier , Otto Frank , Emil Kraepelin and Artur Kutscher .

When he returned to Rostock, Gebhard passed the Physikum in 1922, a. a. with Curt Elze and Hans Winterstein and the then private lecturer Richard Nikolaus Wegner. During this time Gebhard began to deal more intensively with social hygiene and in the summer of 1922 took part in several social hygiene study trips by Hans Reiters . In the same summer Gebhard met his future wife Gertrud Adolph (1898–1975) in a children's holiday camp organized by the Protestant regional church in the Hohe Düne .

Gebhard spent the following winter semester 1922/23 and the subsequent summer semester 1923 at the Humboldt University in Berlin , not only to listen to some of the best clinical professors of the time, but also because his future wife was a teacher at a private school in Bad Saarow was. In Berlin Gebhard u. a. Events with Adalbert Czerny , August Bier , Alfred Goldscheider , Louis Lewin and Alfred Grotjahn . In addition, Gebhard was involved in the social working group Berlin-Ost (SAG), whose task was also to establish and promote personal relationships between workers and academics.

In the winter semester 1923/24 Gebhard returned to the University of Rostock again to pass the state examination under Otto Körner and then with the thesis on the state of health in Rostock school beginners in the years 1920-23 with Walter von Brunn to the Dr. med. to get a doctorate .

Professional career

Following his doctorate, Gebhard was a medical intern, initially for six months in Rostock with Erich Grafe (1881-1958) in the medical outpatient clinic . During this time Gebhard was very interested in tuberculosis care. Gebhard's goal was to become a specialist in paediatrics and welfare or social doctor . In the summer of 1925 he therefore moved to Leipzig to complete the second half of his medical internship . At the Pathological Institute there he was subordinate to Werner Hueck (1882–1962), whom Gebhard knew from his time in Rostock as the successor to Ernst Schwalbe.

After the attempt to complete the specialist training as an assistant to Arthur Schloßmann (1867-1932) in Düsseldorf failed, Gebhard came to Stefan Engel at the infant home in Dortmund on Schloßmann's recommendation . During this time Gebhard visited the GeSoLei exhibition Schloßmanns in Düsseldorf several times . Gebhard's further professional career was unconsciously steered in a different direction by this exhibition , when he was unsuspectingly looking at models from the Hygiene Museum Dresden . A few months later, Gebhard applied for the vacancy of a scientific assistant at the Hygiene Museum and, under the direction of Georg Seiring , began his service on February 15, 1927 in Dresden. From then on, Gebhard devoted himself entirely to medical exhibition work in his professional life. In Dresden he supervised a. a. the exhibitions Mother and Child and Childhood Diseases .

In 1929 Gebhard joined the local branch of the Social Democratic Party in Dresden-Strehlen . He was also closely connected with union work and in 1930, on the advice of his union friends, passed the state examination as a medical trainee lawyer with the prospect of a business doctor's position. Gebhard was not a member of the NSDAP .

In the summer of 1930 the Hygiene Section of the League of Nations held a meeting of the directors of 16 hygiene schools from all over the world in the Dresden Hygiene Museum, which was also attended by a delegation of almost 100 from the American Public Health Association . Here Gebhard had the opportunity for the first time to make contact with American doctors and social hygienists who would be of use to him later in his career.

In the spring of 1932 Gebhard took up the newly created position of Scientific Director at the Exhibition and Trade Fair Office of the City of Berlin . For this purpose he was given an indefinite leave of absence from his position as a scientific assistant at the Dresden Hygiene Museum. Gebhard was now a private employee of the Berlin exhibition and trade fair office. His employment contracts were now mostly extended every year. When Gebhard and his wife returned to Berlin, they revived their contacts from their student days. Over the years, her apartment has become the focal point of like-minded people and also a focal point for those persecuted by the regime. Together with Paul Tillich (1886–1965), Carlo Mierendorff (1897–1943) and Henry E. Sigerist (1891–1957), Gebhard was one of the editors of the Blätter für den Religious Sozialismus (later Blätter für den Neue Sozialismus ). .

The first exhibition that Gebhard organized in Berlin under the direction of Albert Wischek was The Woman in Family, Home and Work . The opening speech on March 18, 1933 was given by the Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945), whom Gebhard personally guided through the exhibition. Even Reich Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach visited the exhibition that both the Nationalist Observer and in The attack was praised.

Gebhards second Berlin exhibition was German people - German work , for which he, the department , the empire of the Germans worked in which he an outline of German history from the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation on the Empire of 1871 gave to the presence of the 1934th The patrons of the exhibition were President Paul von Hindenburg (1847–1934) and Reich Propaganda Minister Goebbels, who set the opening date of the exhibition to be a week before Adolf Hitler's (1889–1945) birthday, more or less as a “birthday present” .

As a social democrat, initially waiting to be neutral towards National Socialism , Gebhard's attitude towards the new rulers turned into strict rejection at the latest with the events of the Röhm putsch . In the face of increasing political terror, the persecution of the Jews and the perversion of law and justice, thoughts of leaving Germany first germinated in him and his wife in the summer of 1934. Possible destinations were Switzerland , England or America.

During his time in Berlin, Gebhard had the dubious honor of speaking to Adolf Hitler in person twice , the first time on the occasion of a guided tour of the exhibition German People - German Work on the night of June 5 to 6, 1934 and for the second time in the Exhibition Germany in 1936. In his autobiography Im Strom und Gegenstrom , Gebhard characterizes Hitler as follows: He was an extremely frustrated man who balanced his feelings of inferiority with a thirst for power, which over time increased into a hatred of everything bad -German, especially everything Jewish. That a change in character took place in Adolf Hitler during the war cannot be doubted.

In 1934 Gebhard was for the first time in the United States at the invitation of the Carl Schurz Memorial Foundation and with funds from the Reich Ministry of the Interior . In the following years he presented some of his exhibitions there, e.g. B. 1934 Eugenics in New Germany , 1935 The Miracle of Life and 1936 on the occasion of the Olympic Games the exhibition Germany .

At the end of March 1935, immediately after the opening ceremony of the exhibition Miracles of Life , Gebhard was released from his contractual relationship with the German Hygiene Museum on June 30, 1935. For Gebhard and his wife, the decision to leave Germany as soon as possible had become an immovable fact. First, however, his engagement at the trade fair office in Berlin was extended for the years 1936 and 1937.

In 1937 Gebhard was invited to participate in exhibitions in the American Public Health Association by the Oberlaender Trust of the Carl Schurz Memorial Foundation , whose task it was to promote the German-American exchange of scientists, economists and students . For this purpose Gebhard went to the USA in 1937 and from 1937 to 1940 he held the position of technical advisor for the Hall of Medicine and Public Health at the New York World's Fair in 1939/40 .

In 1940 Gebhard founded the Cleveland Health Museum as the first health museum in the United States, of which he was director until 1965 and which has now been incorporated into the Cleveland Museum of Natural History . Gebhard received American citizenship in 1944 .

family

On April 8, 1927, Bruno Gebhard married the teacher Gertrud Adolph (1898–1975). The marriage resulted in three daughters (Susanne Elisabeth (born 1931), Christiane Dorothea, Ruth Ursula (born 1934)) and a son (Jochen, 1929–1932). The children followed their parents to the United States in 1938. The Gebhard family lived in Shaker Heights / Ohio for many years .

Awards

• Medal of honor second class of the Austrian Red Cross (for the exhibition "Mother and Child" in Vienna in 1928)

Publications

Bruno Gebhard published a total of over 200 articles in various specialist journals, which cannot be listed here, but only a small selection.

• Fight cancer . German publishing house for people's welfare, Dresden 1931
• Woman's life in healthy and sick days . Stuttgart 1937
• From medicine show to health museum . In: Ciba Symposia Vol. 8, No. 10, pp. 566-600, Summit, NJ, USA 1947
• In the stream and countercurrent: 1919-1937 , Wiesbaden 1976

literature

• Bruno Gebhard: In the stream and countercurrent: 1919–1937. Autobiography, Wiesbaden 1976 (= contributions to the history of science and technology, issue 14)
• Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (eds.): Biographical manual of German-speaking emigration after 1933. Volume 2, Munich 1983
• Walther Killy (Ed.): German Biographical Encyclopedia. Volume 3, 1996

Web links

• Literature about Bruno Gebhard in the state bibliography MV
• Gebhard Collection, Cleveland Health Museum Photographs

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See Bruno Gebhard's first matriculation in the Rostock matriculation portal
2. ↑ See Bruno Gebhard's second matriculation in the Rostock matriculation portal
3. ↑ See the entry of Bruno Gebhard's third-party matriculation in the Rostock matriculation portal
4. ↑ Cf. Bruno Gebhard: Im Strom und Gegenstrom: 1919–1937. Wiesbaden 1976, p. 67.