Ernst Grünfeld (economist)

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Ernst Grünfeld (born September 11, 1883 in Brno , Austria-Hungary , † May 10, 1938 in Berlin ) was an economist and social scientist from Moravia . He founded the German Lorenz von Stein research and was one of the leading cooperative theorists of his time. His posthumously published work Die Peripheren. One chapter of sociology was often misinterpreted as an emigration book in post-war German sociology and is now considered to be one of the great books on internal emigration .

Life

Ernst Grünfeld became the son of the leather goods manufacturer, member of the Moravian state parliament and Turkish consul Arnold Abraham Grünfeld (December 24, 1848 - May 17, 1919) and his wife Annie, née Haas (May 23, 1859 - December 27, 1936) Crown land Moravia of the Danube Monarchy born. The parents converted to the Catholic faith. His older brother was the music writer Paul Stefan Grünfeld .

Ernst Grunfeld put the final examination at the secondary school Brno from, served 1901-1902 as a volunteer in a regiment of dragoons of the Imperial Army and was subsequently Agricultural volunteer on an estate in Opava . He studied agriculture (exam as a qualified farmer) at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna and then economics and political science at the universities of Vienna , Leipzig and Halle , where he received his PhD in 1908. phil. received his doctorate . The title of his dissertation was: The Social Doctrine of Lorenz von Stein , speaker was Heinrich Waentig .

From 1910 to 1912 he worked in the East Asian Economic Archives of the South Manchurian Railway in Tokyo , from where he made trips to Manchuria and Korea . In 1913 he qualified as a professor at the University of Halle with the thesis The Port Colonies in China. He was involved in the First World War as an officer in the Austrian Landsturm . He was highly decorated ( Franz Joseph Order ) and promoted to Rittmeister . In 1918 he married the actress Valerie Nowotny. From 1919 Grünfeld taught at the University of Halle, and from 1929 as the first full professor for cooperatives in Germany.

In 1925 Grünfeld took on Prussian citizenship and joined the Evangelical Church with his wife . At first he was politically active in the German Democratic Party and after its dissolution in 1930 switched to the German State Party , for which he worked as a city councilor in Halle until the National Socialist takeover in 1933 .

The grave in the Hietzinger Friedhof

Because of his Jewish origin and his unpopular political activities, he was given leave of absence from the university in May 1933 under the law to restore the civil service and dismissed in September 1933 , although war participants had been granted a "grace period" until 1935. The chair for cooperatives was converted into one for business administration .

Little is known about his final years; there are contradicting statements about the end of his life, which are particularly reflected in the history of the reception of his book Die Peripheren . Wittebur says that Grünfeld emigrated to the Netherlands in 1936 and died there in 1938. The University of Halle stated that Grünfeld moved to Berlin after his release and committed suicide there in 1938 because the adopted daughter Irene was taken away from the childless “non-Aryan” couple. This is represented by Papcke and Stieglitz / Zeillinger as well.

Grünfeld's body was exhumed in Berlin and buried on April 17, 1951 in the grave of his parents designed by Richard Kauffungen in the Hietzinger Friedhof (Group 7, No. 6) in Vienna .

In Halle the "Ernst-Grünfeld-Weg" was named after him.

Significance for social science

Grünfeld achieved something special in several areas of social science. He founded the German Lorenz von Stein research and thus pioneered the writing of sociological history. His contributions to the development of the cooperatives and their social corrective function were groundbreaking for reform policy discussions. With his posthumously published work The Peripheral he concluded constructively in the digression on the stranger of Georg Simmel and also made the first German contribution to research into the "marginal man", by Robert E. Park had run out. Even before the First World War , he had devoted himself to problems of social marginalization in connection with Japanese labor migration.

"The Peripherals"

The Peripherals (Book) .JPG

In 1939 Grünfeld's work Die Peripheren was published. A chapter in sociology posthumously in Amsterdam . In it Grünfeld takes up the problem of the alien, already presented by Georg Simmel . He divides the periphery into two groups, the stranger and the (non-stranger) segregated. Whether strangers or segregated people can be described as marginalized or outsiders is a question of the distance to the entity "from or to which a new distance has been gained." In his study, Grünfeld particularly emphasizes the experience of being isolated:

“Anyone who has had experiences like this has naturally become a different person if he is not completely dull. Such an experience elevates one person, it depresses the other. But the characteristic of the separating experience will not soon be able to be erased from the soul of the periphery. "

René König reads Die Peripheren in spite of the “completely relevant systematics” as Grünfeld's sociological processing of his own emigration experiences. According to Papcke, this is an error that Richard Albrecht and Rainer Lepsius are also making, because Grünfeld's last and best-known book was published in the Netherlands. According to research by Sven Papcke , the book was smuggled into the Netherlands by Grünfeld's widow Valerie when she emigrated after his death. Grünfeld had written Die Peripheren in Germany, in the inner emigration and reported so authentically of the experience of the separated that it worked like a "sociological account of exile as a way of life."

Valerie Grünfeld wrote in the foreword to the periphery :

"My husband was one of the first to try to unravel the mystery that surrounds all those people who, through birth, fate or guilt, are placed on the periphery of their circle of life."

According to Sven Papcke, Grünfeld's theoretical analysis of the "administratively targeted segregation of entire population groups (...) is one of the few great books on internal emigration."

Fonts

author
  • Lorenz von Stein and the social theory . (Dissertation). Kaemmerer, Halle 1908
    Reprints:
    (Social science studies. Volume 1). G. Fischer, Jena 1910.
    DOGMA, Bremen 2012, ISBN 978-3-95454-791-3 .
  • The port colonies in China. (Habilitation thesis). The expanded version appeared as
    port colonies and colony-like conditions in China, Japan and Korea. G. Fischer, Jena 1913.
  • Japanese emigration . (Communications from the German Society for Nature and Ethnology of East Asia. 14. Supplement). Behrend, Berlin 1913 and Hobunsha, Tokyo 1913.
  • Guide for students of economics at the University of Halle. Niemeyer, Halle 1920; 2nd edition 1921.
  • German foreign trade control (the policy of barriers) from the outbreak of war to the entry into force of the peace treaty. (Bonn Political Studies. Volume 2). K. Schroeder, Bonn 1922.
  • Instructions for independent work for economists. G. Fischer, Jena 1922.
  • The cooperatives. ( The German economy and its leaders series. Vol. 8). Together with Otto Gennes and Theodor O. Cassau. Flamberg, Gotha 1925.
  • The cooperative system, viewed economically and sociologically . ( Handbuch des Genossenschaftswesens. Four volumes. Ed. By Julius von Gierke , Karl Hildebrand and Ernst Grünfeld. Volume 1). H. Meyer, Halberstadt 1928.
  • Cooperative system, its history, economic significance and business administration. Spaeth & Linde, Berlin 1929.
  • The periphery. A chapter in sociology. NV Noord-Hollandsche Uitgevers Mij., Amsterdam 1939.
editor
  • Hallische Hochschulhefte. Niemeyer, Halle.
  • Contemporary social organizations. Magazine. CL Hirschfeld, Leipzig and H. Meyer, Halberstadt. 1924
Introductions and prefaces
  • Vahan Totomianz: Introduction to Cooperatives. Translated from Russian by Sophrone Miujekidse. With a foreword by Ernst Grünfeld. H. Meyer, Halberstadt 1925.
  • Charles Gide : Cooperatism. After the 5th edition, translated by Kurt Bretschneider and introduced by Ernst Grünfeld. H. Meyer, Halberstadt 1929.
translator

literature

Web links

Wikiquote: Ernst Grünfeld  - Quotes

References and comments

  1. ^ Obituary notice for Arnold A. Grünfeld. In:  Neue Freie Presse , May 23, 1919, p. 15 (online at ANNO ).Template: ANNO / Maintenance / nfp
  2. ↑ a b c Olga Stieglitz, Gerhard Zeillinger: The sculptor Richard Kauffungen (1854-1942). Between Ringstrasse, Künstlerhaus and women's art school. Peter Lang, Frankfurt / M. 2008, ISBN 978-3-631-52203-5 , p. 472.
  3. ↑ This biographical information, like all other not separately documented, comes from Sven Papcke: Deutsche Soziologie im Exil. Diagnosis of the present and critique of epochs 1933–1945. Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1993, in it Chapter V: Distance as a sociological problem. Ernst Grünfeld on experiences of separation , pp. 100–120.
  4. ↑ National Socialist students had defamed him as a Jew and a Marxist who always belittled national interests.
  5. ↑ Klemens Wittebur: The German Sociology in Exile. 1933-1945. LIT, Münster / Hamburg 1991, p. 59 f.
  6. ↑ Entry on Ernst Grünfeld in the Catalogus Professorum Halensis (accessed on July 28, 2015)
  7. ^ Sven Papcke: German sociology in exile. Diagnosis of the present and critique of epochs 1933–1945. Frankfurt am Main 1993, in it Chapter V: Distance as a sociological problem. Ernst Grünfeld on experiences of segregation , pp. 100–120, here p. 100f. and 114.
  8. ↑ Also in Herbert A. Straus, Werner Röder (ed.): Biographisches Handbuch der Deutschensprachigen Emigration nach 1933. Saur, Munich 1983, there is no entry for Grünfeld.
  9. ^ Vienna cemeteries: Search for the dead
  10. ↑ Education in passing: additional signs for Halle streets
  11. ^ Sven Papcke: German sociology in exile. Diagnosis of the present and critique of epochs 1933–1945. Frankfurt / M. 1993, in it Chapter V: Distance as a sociological problem. Ernst Grünfeld on experiences of separation , pp. 100–120, here p. 100.
  12. ↑ Ernst Grünfeld: The Japanese emigration. Behrend, Berlin 1913.
  13. ^ Ernst Grünfeld: The periphery. A chapter in sociology. NV Noord-Hollandsche Uitgevers Mij., Amsterdam 1939, p. 3.
  14. ^ Ernst Grünfeld: The periphery. A chapter in sociology. NV Noord-Hollandsche Uitgevers Mij., Amsterdam 1939, p. 79.
  15. ↑ René König: The situation of the emigrated German sociologists in Europe. In: ders .: Studies in Sociology. Theme with variations. S. Fischer, Frankfurt / M. 1971, ISBN 3-436-01379-X , pp. 105 f.
  16. ↑ See Sven Papcke: Deutsche Sociologie im Exil. Diagnosis of the present and critique of epochs 1933–1945 . Campus, Frankfurt am Main 1993, p. 117.
  17. ^ Richard Albrecht: Scientists in Exile. But also: exile in science. In: grandstand. Journal for the Understanding of Judaism. 23. Jg./Heft 9 (1984), ISSN  0041-2716 , p. 96ff., Here p. 104.
  18. ↑ Ralph Dahrendorf finds an answer to the questions in the book: “Why were so many sociologists Jews? Is there a reason for this that also applies to those emigrated sociologists who weren't? ”He falsely ascribes the authorship for“ Die Peripheren ”to an Ernst Grünfeld who was director of the Institute for Social Research before 1933 , but that was Carl Grünberg . Cf. Dahrendorf: Paths from Utopia. On the theory and method of sociology . Piper, Munich 1974, ISBN 3-492-00401-6 , p. 93.
  19. ↑ The book is dedicated to "Erie" and the author of the foreword describes herself as "Erie Grünfeldt", probably a nickname that the couple used.
  20. ↑ Erie Grünfeldt in the foreword to Ernst Grünfeld: Die Peripheren. A chapter in sociology . NV Noord-Hollandsche Uitgevers Mij, Amsterdam 1939, without a page number.
  21. ^ Sven Papcke: German sociology in exile. Diagnosis of the present and critique of epochs 1933–1945 . Campus, Frankfurt am Main 1993, in it Chapter V: Distance as a sociological problem. Ernst Grünfeld on experiences of separation , pp. 100–120, here p. 102.
personal data
SURNAME Grünfeld, Ernst
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German economist and social scientist of Austrian origin
DATE OF BIRTH September 11, 1883
PLACE OF BIRTH Brno
DATE OF DEATH May 10, 1938
Place of death Berlin