Julian Gumperz

Julian Gumperz (born May 12, 1898 in New York City , † 1972 in Gaylordsville , Connecticut ) was a sociologist , publicist and translator who came from a wealthy German-American industrial family . He was an employee of the Institute for Social Research . He was one of the participants in the Marxist Work Week .

Life

Gumperz studied economics , first in Halle and in 1929 in Frankfurt am Main in Frederick Pollock , who was there from 1928 to 1930 on behalf of the institute. Gumperz received his PhD on The Condition of North American Workers and became Pollock's collaborator. In 1933 he sounded out the work opportunities at the Frankfurt Institute, which was closed by the National Socialists, in the USA and made his first contacts with Columbia University . After the successful move of the institute to New York in 1934, he worked (until 1941) as a staff member.

He was temporarily a stockbroker for the Hermann Weil Foundation and then made this successful activity his profession. In 1947 he published together with Johann Rindl as Ypsilon a critique of international communism.

Together with Karl Osten and Wieland Herzfelde , Gumperz published the Dadaist-expressionist magazine The Opponent from 1919 to 1922 . In the early 1920s he was a communist activist, employee of the Rote Fahne and the Malik publishing house , of which he became a co-owner in 1921. He translated u. a. Agnes Smedley and John Dos Passos . His wife Hede Eisler was working in the Malik bookstore when he met her in early 1923. They married in 1927 and divorced in 1928. In the same year he broke away from party communism.

Fonts

• On the spiritual determination of the location of Expressionism , Der Friede , No. 3, 1919.
• Art, vandalism and the proletariat, an answer to GGL [Gertrud Alexander] . Die Rote Fahne , 3, No. 110 of June 22, 1920. Repr. In: Fähnders / Rector (Ed.), Literatur im Klassenkampf , Fischer, 1974, No. 3, pp. 57-60 [1971]. ( Kunstlump debate , George Grosz versus Oskar Kokoschka )
• The United States Agricultural Crisis . H. Buske, Leipzig 1931 (= publications of the Frankfurt society for economic research , nf, issue 2 (13th issue of the entire series)).
• On the sociology of the American party system . In: Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung , Vol. 1, Issue 3, 1932, pp. 278-310.
• With Johann Rindl . Als Ypsilon , Pattern for World Revolution , Ziff-Davis, New York 1947.

literature

• Walter Fähnders, Martin Rector (Ed.): Literature in the class struggle, on proletarian-revolutionary literary theory 1919–1923. Hanser, Munich 1971.
• Willem van Reijen , G. Schmid Noerr (ed.): Grand Hotel Abgrund. A photograph of the Frankfurt School . Junius-Verlag, Hamburg 1988, ISBN 3-88506-165-1 .