Emil Julius Gumbel

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Memorial plaque for the German and Austrian refugees in Sanary-sur-Mer , among them Emil Julius Gumbel

Emil Julius Gumbel (born July 18, 1891 in Munich ; died September 10, 1966 in New York ) was a German-American mathematician , political publicist , pacifist and opponent of fascism . He taught from 1923 to 1932 at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg , 1933-1940 in Lyon and 1953 as a professor at Columbia University .

He was best known for his book Four Years of Political Murder, first published in 1922 . In it, he pointed through comparative analysis of statistical surveys the political Rechtslastigkeit of Justice in Germany of the Weimar Republic from 1919 to 1922 by by the judgments in politically motivated killings by right and left perpetrator turned opposite each other and came to the conclusion that the 354 Offenders from the anti-republic right spectrum tended to be spared - if at all - with extremely mild sentences, whereas the 22 offenders from the spectrum of the political left were sentenced to disproportionately harsh sentences. With the fall of the Weimar Republic, Gumbel became the target of a press that was aligned with the law. The so-called "Gumbelkrawallen" broke out in 1930/31 at the University of Heidelberg. In 1932 his teaching license was withdrawn. In 1933 he fled to France and in 1940 went into exile in the USA.

childhood and education

Emil Julius Gumbel was born as the son of Hermann (1857–1916), private banker, from 1887 in Munich, and Flora (1869 Bruchsal − 1916 Munich). His grandparents were Isaak Gumbel (born December 15, 1823 in Stein am Kocher ; died January 15, 1891 in Heilbronn ) and Güta, née Stern (born January 15, 1829, died September 16, 1897 in Heilbronn).

After graduating from the Wilhelmsgymnasium in Munich in 1910 , Gumbel studied mathematics and economics at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich . In 1913 he became an assistant at the seminar for statistics and insurance science. He received his doctorate on July 28, 1914 as Dr. oec. publ. with the work on the interpolation of the state of the population .

Professional career

A few days after his doctorate, Gumbel reported as a war volunteer in the 1st Bavarian snowshoe regiment in Alsace. The real experience of the war soon made him a pacifist . In the spring of 1915 he was exempted from military service under a pretext. In the autumn of 1915 he joined the pacifist New Fatherland League , which was renamed the German League for Human Rights in 1922. Until the end of the war in 1918 he worked for the aircraft maintenance department at the Johannisthal airfield in Berlin. Then, supported by Georg Graf von Arco from the New Fatherland Federation, he worked at Telefunken in Berlin.

In 1921 he was a teacher at the works council school of the General German Trade Union Confederation in Berlin and studied physics.

In 1923 Gumbel received his habilitation at the University of Heidelberg , although as a political activist he was already highly controversial among the predominantly conservative-monarchist professorships. Gumbel was initially a private lecturer in mathematical statistics in Heidelberg. When in 1924, as part of his pacifist engagement , he spoke of the field of dishonor at an event organized by the German Peace Society on the tenth anniversary of the outbreak of war , the entire philosophy faculty, with the exception of Karl Jaspers , applied for his suspension. The Baden Minister of Culture Willy Hellpach ( DDP ) rejected this; From 1925 to 1926 Gumpel was on a sabbatical in Moscow with the mathematical explanations of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

In 1930 Hellpach awarded Gumbel the title of professor .

Gumbel was a red rag in particular for the student body , which was increasingly dominated by the National Socialist Student Union. It also played a role that Gumbel was Jewish. At the turn of the year 1930/31, following his appointment as associate professor and the dissolution of the National Socialist General Student Committee in the "Gumbelkrawallen", which was ordered by the Minister of Education, the university was occupied by students and the university was evacuated by the police. When Gumbel spoke at an internal meeting of the Heidelberg Socialist Student Union in memory of the starvation deaths of the turnip winter of 1916/17 that a turnip was better suited as a war memorial than a lightly clad virgin, on August 6, 1932, the Minister of Education, Eugen Baumgartner ( Center Party ) the teaching authorizations. In June 1932 Gumbel was one of the signatories of the urgent appeal of the International Socialist League .

At the time of the Nazi takeover in January 1933, Gumbel was already in Paris, where he had been giving guest lectures at the Sorbonne since July 1932. While his apartment in Heidelberg was ransacked and his writings burned , he worked from France to oppose National Socialism in Germany and supported emigrants who came from Germany. In August 1933, he was stripped of his German citizenship as part of the first expatriation list of the German Reich . In 1934 he moved to Lyon and worked at the university. In 1939, he and his family received French citizenship.

In October 1940, after the invasion of the German troops, he managed to escape via Portugal to the USA . In New York he worked at the New School for Social Research . He wrote reports for the US government agency Office of Strategic Services on the roots and development of the NSDAP and its influence in other European countries.

In the 1950s and 60s he returned to Germany for a few guest stays. The desired reinstatement at the University of Heidelberg was denied him; the Free University of Berlin offered him a visiting professorship. So he stayed in the USA, became an American citizen and in 1953 accepted a professorship at Columbia University .

Gumbel played a key role in the development of extreme value theory , on which he wrote the first monograph, his main mathematical work, in 1958, Statistics of Extremes . The Gumbel distribution and the Gumbel copula are named after him.

When he died in New York in 1966, no German newspaper paid tribute to him.

Political commitment

He has been politically active since his war experience. In 1917 he joined the USPD , with the majority of which (after the left wing had split off for the first time in 1920) he moved to the SPD in 1922 . Above all, however, he was relatively independent politically as a pacifist on an international level. On March 14, 1919, he escaped shooting because he had not yet returned to a meeting of international friends of peace in Bern, which he had attended as a delegate of the New Fatherland Federation.

In February 1920, at an event of the German Peace Society in Berlin-Charlottenburg, he was injured to feel right-wing terror at first hand.

In addition to his books, he published regularly in the cultural magazine Die Weltbühne and was the translator and editor of writings by the British mathematician Bertrand Russell such as "Politische Ideale" (Berlin, 1922) and "Introduction to mathematical philosophy" (Berlin, 1923).

The numerous political murders in the turmoil of the post-war period since the November Revolution became his main topic . As a statistician , he let the numbers speak for themselves. In two publications he showed that the number of murders from the right-wing spectrum clearly predominated. He was able to show that in the period from 1919 to 1922 of 376 politically motivated murders, 354 were assigned to the right spectrum and only 22 to the left. The one-eyedness of the judiciary in the Weimar Republic , which he pointed out, was striking: the murderers from the left-wing camp were treated with extreme severity, there were ten executions out of 22 murders. Right-wing killers, on the other hand, were treated with great indulgence: 354 murders resulted in a single life sentence, not a single execution, and a total of 90 years in prison - an average of four months per murder. Many murders from the right went completely unpunished. His publications reached fairly high circulation and even led to a parliamentary committee of inquiry in the Prussian state parliament after the results of Gumbel's book Four Years of Political Murder were confirmed in a study commissioned by the Reich Justice Minister Gustav Radbruch .

Probably as a result of the analysis of political murders, Gumbel became an expert on nationalist secret organizations that developed from the voluntary corps and were responsible for many murders from the right-wing spectrum. In particular, internal so-called femicide were at times the order of the day in these organizations. In his books Conspirators (1924) and Traitors Fall for Feme (1929) (the title is a quote from the statute of the Consul organization ) he analyzed their structures and also drew attention to the Black Reichswehr . This brought him lawsuits for treason , which like most such processes fizzled out and probably mainly served to put unpopular journalists and authors under pressure. He was “the contemporary connoisseur” of the “ national camp ”, of a right-wing radical milieu ( Ulrich Herbert ) and a network of ideologically indistinguishable “patriotic” associations, ethnic circles, student corporations and unions, of Reichswehr leaders and educated greats such as Martin Spahn or Arthur Moeller van the bridge . In 1938 he published "Freie Wissenschaft" - without exclamation marks and with an emphasis on "frei" - a "collector's book from German emigration" (Sebastian-Brant Verlag, Strasbourg), to which he wrote the introduction entitled "Die Gleichschaltung der Deutschen Universities "as well as the contribution" Aryan natural science? " contributed. He dedicated this to the memory of university teachers who died 'unnaturally' in the course of the seizure of power. It is "characteristic of the current situation that it is not always possible to determine whether, how and when" (p. 7).

Private life

In 1930 he married Marieluise, née von Czettritz , divorced Solscher (born August 9, 1892 in Hau ; died November 1952 in New York ). She was the daughter of General Staff Officer Hermann Czettritz (1865–1946) and his English wife Mary Page. She died of cancer in November 1952. She brought her younger son Harald (born 1921), who later called himself Harold , into the marriage, while her older son Jürgen stayed with his father.

Fonts (selection)

Four years of political murder , the book-burning memorial on Bonn's market square
  • Four years of lying. E. Berger, New Fatherland, Berlin 1919. (leaflet of the Federal New Fatherland No. 5.)
  • Two years of murder. New Fatherland, Berlin 1921. From the 5th, significantly expanded edition under the title:
  • Four years of political murder. Verlag der neue Gesellschaft, Berlin-Fichtenau 1922. Many other editions, from 1927 with a preface by Albert Einstein , Buch u. a. digitized here.
    • Reprint 1980: "Four Years of Political Murder" and "Memorandum of the Reich Ministry of Justice on" Four Years of Political Murder "". Foreword by Hans Thill . Das Wunderhorn, Heidelberg 1980, ISBN 978-3-88423-011-4 . (The memorandum see below)
  • The memorandum of the Reich Minister of Justice on "Four Years of Political Murder". Edited by Emil Julius Gumbel, Malik, Berlin 1924.
  • Conspirators. Contributions to the history and sociology of the German nationalist secret societies since 1918 . Malik, Vienna 1924.
  • From present-day Russia. E. Laubsche Verlagbuchhandlung, Berlin 1927. Foreword by Albert Einstein.
  • Traitors fall into the distance. Malik, Berlin 1929
  • “Let heads roll!” Fascist murders 1924–1931. German League for Human Rights , Berlin 1931. Reprint 1991
  • Freedom of science. A scrapbook from the German emigration. Sebastian-Brant Verlag, Strasbourg 1938. 283 pages with essays and autographs from: (Chapter 'Geistige Situation' :) Anna Siems, Theodor Geiger , Walter A. Berendsohn , FW Förster, Fritz Lieb , Siegfried Marck ; (Chapter 'State and Society :) Julius Lips , A [rthur] Baumgarten, Carl Misch , Gottfried Salomon , Alfred Meusel , Arthur Rosenberg ; (Chapter 'Natural Science' :) Walter Landauer [biologist !, not the publisher], Julius Schaxel , E [mil] J [ulius]. Gumbel.

literature

  • Kurt Tucholsky : The Book of German Shame. Review of Gumbel's book "Zwei Jahre Mord" (first edition of "Vier Jahre Politischer Mord"), in: Die Weltbühne , September 8, 1921, No. 36, pp. 237–242. Facsimile at archive.org
  • Eike Wolgast : Semper Apertus. Six hundred years of Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, 1386–1986. Volume 3: The Twentieth Century: 1918–1945. Springer, Berlin 1986, ISBN 3-540-16829-X , pp. 7-9 ( online ).
  • The Emil J. Gumbel Collection, Political Papers of an Anti-Nazi Scholar in Weimar and Exile , Archives of the Leo Baeck Institute, New York City, ISBN 1-55655-212-2 . 1990, 32 pages (English) with a biography of Arthur Brenner (pp. 13-22).
  • Christian Jansen: Emil Julius Gumbel. Portrait of a civilian. Das Wunderhorn, Heidelberg 1991, ISBN 3-88423-071-9 .
  • Annette Vogt (Ed.): Emil Julius Gumbel. In search of truth. With an essay by the editor (pp. 9–45) and various source texts. Dietz, Berlin 1991, ISBN 3-320-01664-4 .
  • Klemens Wittebur: The German Sociology in Exile. 1933-1945. A biographical cartography (= contributions to the history of sociology, 1). Lit Verlag, Münster 1991, ISBN 3-88660-737-2 , pp. 60f.
  • Christian Jansen: The life and maxims of the politically committed mathematician Emil Julius Gumbel (PDF; 912 kB). In: Eugen Eichhorn, Ernst-Jochen Thiele (ed.): Lectures in memory of Felix Hausdorff. Heldermann, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-88538-105-2 , pp. 213-226.
  • Christian Jansen: Gumbel, Emil Julius. In: Harald Hagemann , Claus-Dieter Krohn (Hrsg.): Biographical manual of the German-speaking economic emigration after 1933. Volume 1: Adler – Lehmann. Saur, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-598-11284-X , pp. 211-214.
  • Ralph Lange: From the 'Gumbel Affair' to the 'Wilbrandt Case'. The 'Lustnau Battle': a contribution to the political culture of the University of Tübingen in the Weimar Republic . In: Building blocks for the history of the University of Tübingen, Volume 9 (1999), pp. 29–54.
  • Arthur D. Brenner: Emil J. Gumbel. Weimar German Pacifist and Professor. Brill u. a. 2001, ISBN 0-391-04101-0 ( Studies in Central European Histories 22).
  • Harald Maier-Metz: Reason for dismissal: pacifism. Albrecht Götze, the Gumbel case and the University of Marburg 1930-1946 . Waxmann, Münster, New York 2015, ISBN 978-3-8309-3193-5 .
  • Dietrich Heither : "I knew what I was doing". Emil Julius Gumbel and right-wing terror in the Weimar Republic. PapyRossa Verlag, Cologne 2016.
  • Fernández, Lexuri, and Matthias Scherer: Emil J. Gumbel's last course on the “Statistical theory of extreme values”: A conversation with Tuncel M. Yegulalp. Extremes 21.1 (2018), pp. 97–113. doi: 10.1007 / s10687-017-0299-z
  • Harold Gumbel: Memories from the 20th Century. From Weimar Germany to American Exile , edited by Lexuri Fernández, Matthias Scherer, Annette Vogt; Hentrich & Hentrich Verlag Berlin Leipzig (2019) German National Library

Movie

  • David's reputation. Crime Statistics - A mathematician is fighting the Nazis. Animations by Nuno Viegas. November 21, 2019 on SWR television. Documentary film with historical images, newspaper clippings, interviews and scenic animations. "It's about populism, linguistic radicalization, fake news and the defamation and threats of individual and entire sections of society."

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Brenner (2001), p. 13-14
  2. ^ Annual report from the K. Wilhelms-Gymnasium in Munich. ZDB -ID 12448436 , 1909/10
  3. a b c d Christian Jansen : The "Gumbel Case" and the Heidelberg University. 1924-32. Heidelberg 1981, digital edition (2012). 89 pages.
  4. ^ A b c d The Emil J. Gumbel Collection, Political Papers of an Anti-Nazi Scholar in Weimar and Exile , Archives of the Leo Baeck Institute, New York City, ISBN 1-55655-212-2 . 1990, 32 pages (English), page 15
  5. Meinrad Schaab , Hansmartin Schwarzmaier (ed.) U. a .: Handbook of Baden-Württemberg History . Volume 4: Die Länder since 1918. Edited on behalf of the Commission for Historical Regional Studies in Baden-Württemberg . Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2003, ISBN 3-608-91468-4 , p. 56 f.
  6. Michael Hepp (Ed.): The expatriation of German citizens 1933-45 according to the lists published in the Reichsanzeiger . tape 1 : Lists in chronological order. De Gruyter Saur, Munich 1985, ISBN 978-3-11-095062-5 , pp. 3 (reprinted 2010).
  7. Benjamin Lahusen: The right eye . In: The time . No. 7 , 2012.
  8. Otto Langels: Murderous Statistics. In: Deutschlandfunk , September 10, 2018, accessed on September 10, 2018.
  9. ^ Daniel Furth: Arithmetic against terror. Statistician Emil Gumbel. In: Spiegel Online , April 27, 2012 (series: one day ), accessed on September 10, 2018.
  10. ^ Gustav Radbruch : Complete Edition. Volume 19: Speeches in the Reichstag. CF Müller, Heidelberg 1998, ISBN 3-8114-6698-4 , p. 182.
  11. Dietrich Heither , Enlightenment in the best sense of the word, preprint from: “I knew what I was doing”. Emil Julius Gumbel and right-wing terror in the Weimar Republic, Cologne 2016, according to: Junge Welt , August 26, 2016, No. 199, p. 13.
  12. The biographical information on Marieluise Gumbel is inconsistent. The first name appears in various spellings, and the year of birth 1891 is also mentioned. Czettritz or von Czettritz appears as the birth name.
  13. Brenner 2001, p. 6.
  14. ^ Text archive - Internet Archive
  15. republished by Annette Vogt (Ed.) 1991, pp. 82–164, see literature
  16. republished by Annette Vogt (Ed.) 1991, pp. 48–80, see literature
  17. Young documentary SWR 2019