Martin Gumpert

Martin Gumpert (born November 13, 1897 in Berlin , † April 18, 1955 in New York ) was a German-American doctor and writer .

Life

Martin Gumpert came from an upper-class, liberal Jewish family; his father was already a doctor. During his school days, the young Gumpert wrote expressionist poems that were published in magazines such as Die Aktion and Die Weißen Blätter . After having been stationed as a medical soldier in Turkey during the First World War , he began studying medicine at the University of Berlin in 1918 . In the first phase of his studies he was involved in the free student body , the left wing of the youth movement, a socialist student group. At the age of 21 he became a member of the council of intellectual workers in Greater Berlin and never again war pacifist. In 1919 he continued his studies in Heidelberg ; from 1920 until his state examination in 1921 he was back in Berlin. There he specialized in dermatology and at the same time carried out medical history studies, which were reflected in his dissertation from 1923, The dispute over the origin of syphilis . In the same year he married Charlotte Blaschko, the daughter of the collegial doctor friend and leading social-democratic social hygienist Alfred Blaschko . Under its influence, the initial revolutionary enthusiasm for socio-political engagement for concrete projects and groups of people sobered up.

"For me, medicine was a social science from the beginning, a science of society."

- Martin Gumpert in his autobiography 1939

In the following years Gumpert worked as an assistant doctor at the Rudolf Virchow Hospital in Berlin . From 1927 he was a resident specialist, from 1928 he also headed the city's outpatient clinic for venereal diseases . His attitude towards the social rehabilitation of his patients prompted him to acquire novel surgical practices from French colleagues and to set up the first counseling and treatment center of its kind in Germany. He was the pioneer of the healing treatment of disfigurements in the German capital Berlin . He campaigned for state institutions to provide aid to his often destitute patients and even treated them free of charge in such cases.

In addition to numerous publications on his subject, Gumpert continued to write literature. In 1933, immediately after the seizure of power, he was forced to resign. He withdrew into private life and worked again increasingly on literary works, biographies of famous researchers and doctors. However, after he was forcibly expelled as a Jew from the "Reich Association of German Writers" ( RDS) as a result of Nazi legal practice in 1935 , he saw no future for himself in Germany and in 1936 chose to emigrate.

Gumpert moved to the United States . In the fall of 1936 he opened a dermatological practice in New York . He often got together with a group of exiled German writers who met at the Bedford Hotel on 40th Street. Among them were Klaus and his lover Erika Mann , with whom he soon became close friends. Klaus Mann gives a portrait of Gumpert in his autobiographical book The Turning Point : Our friend Martin Gumpert, doctor, poet, biographer, narrator; a very calm man with a round Buddha expression, a small mouth and dark, strong eyes. The look reveals a passion that the stoic façade did not reveal anything else. That is precisely why calm is so suggestive: it is controlled temperament, disciplined fire, not apathy or coldness. The historical portrayal of the epoch of Dunant - The Novel of the Red Cross , which was published in both German and English in 1938, was very successful and has been translated into five other languages. Thomas Mann wrote in his letter to Martin Gumpert in the foreword of the English edition :

“You gave much more than the image of a very strange and touching human life. As if by chance, it became a painting of a whole century with its weaknesses and its size, its short, but figurative history, brought to full characteristic clarity. Your literary achievement is extraordinary and one can call it a poetic achievement. "

- Thomas Mann 1938

In the following years he published a series of narrative, autobiographical works - partly in German, partly in English - in which he processed the experiences of his exile. The volume of poetry The Last Time (1949) reflects his first post-war trip to Europe. The Reports from Foreign Countries , a collection of poems without rhymes previously printed in exile journals, published in Konstanz in 1948, shows the work on uprooting and self-integration in exile. These lyrical stocktaking of one's own existence are completely unsentimental in their outward gesture, in this respect similar to the verses of Bertolt Brecht that were written at the same time.

In accordance with the customs of his new adopted country, Gumpert regularly provided science journalistic medical articles for US magazines. In addition, he began to be interested in the then new field of old-age diseases , on which he also published widely. He is considered one of the founding fathers of this new medical field. Gumpert's psychological approach was based on the conviction that a positive mental attitude towards the phenomenon of death was an essential part of the possible extension of life. For years he edited the journal Lifetime living and published several scientific books on this subject that were also readable by medical laypeople in line with the great demand. He worked as a medical reviewer for the world-famous news magazine TIME and taught as a professor at New York Medical College . From 1952 Gumpert, who had been a US citizen since 1942 and only returned to Europe for short visits, was director of the geriatric clinic at the Jewish Memorial Hospital in New York City.

Works

• Concatenation - poems. K. Wolff, Leipzig 1917
• Return of the heart , Potsdam 1921
• The dispute over the origin of syphilis , Berlin 1923
• The entire cosmetics (combating disfigurement) - A floor plan for doctors and students . Thieme, Leipzig 1931
• Hahnemann - The adventurous fate of a medical rebel and his teaching, homeopathy. Samuel Fischer, Berlin 1934
• Life for the idea. Neun Forscherschicksale , Berlin 1935. After Gumpert's emigration as trail blazers of science: life stories of some half-forgotten pioneers of modern research . Translated from the German by Edwin L. Shuman at Funk & Wagnalls, New York 1936
• Dunant - The Roman of the Red Cross , Bermann-Fischer-Verlag, Stockholm 1938. Simultaneously in English with Oxford University Press, New York 1936. In Dutch translation (by Bas van Deilen), De Nederlandsche Uitgeverij, Baarn 1936
• Hell in Paradise, self-portrayal of a doctor , Stockholm 1939
• Hail hunger! Health under Hitler , New York 1940
• First papers , New York 1941
• You are younger than you think , 244 p. New York 1944
• Reports from abroad , Konstanz 1948
• The birthday , Amsterdam 1948
• The last time , poetry 1949
• The anatomy of happiness , New York [et al. a.] 1951
• You and your doctor , New York 1952

Editing:

• Sexually transmitted diseases in children , Berlin 1926 (together with Abraham Buschke)

Reception history

As an expressionist poet from the German youth movement, Gumpert was very productive, but according to the opinion of the published literary criticism, he did not come close to the originality of Gottfried Benn, who was equally active as a dermatologist and writer . Basically, when he was young, he was inspired by the Wandervogel . He emotionally processed the experience as a war participant and medical soldier in Turkish hospitals of the First World War in expressive lines of poetry like Zersprengte Jugend! / Time for us / bit our foreheads / It screams, screams, / Can not rest, / Lurks ready / Without doing. Kurt Wolff included the volume in his The Youngest Tag series. The pain over the early death of his beloved, left behind by the war, whom he found married on his return and soon afterwards fatally ill, let him emerge from it, not least through a second volume of his own poetry. The Kiepenheuer Verlag found homecoming of the heart just as worthy and expressing the times as Alfred Wolfenstein's yearbook for new poetry and evaluation .

In later publications, too, in this self-therapeutic way, he brought his experiences as a doctor, exile and contemporary witness of Nazi rule and the war (follow) into harmony with his inner life for the reader in an impressive, but without expressionistic exuberance . On two trips at that time, he was able to compare the post-war conditions in Germany with memories of his youth from Brandenburg. His prose works, which were published in German at the time, went largely unnoticed by German audiences of the 1950s and 60s. He felt like most of the burned poets of German exile literature . Also from the public libraries he was almost by Nazi decree eliminated , disappeared as if it had never existed.

His undeniable literary qualities as a narrator (e.g. The Birthday ) and descriptor of entire epochs (e.g. Hahnemann ) were only rediscovered in the 1970s. Several new editions followed in the 1980s. The Martin Gumpert Archive , located at the Berlin Academy of the Arts , played a significant role in this ; it received and researched his entire literary estate.

The autobiographical novel Hell in Paradise , which, as stated in the foreword by Professor Frithjof Trapp, is more of a description of an epoch than just the usual subjective impressions and anecdotes of a writer's life, gives a deeply illuminated, despite a sober factual tone, but linguistically expressive portrait of the times at that time. The acting to the achievement (s) of a fiftieth birthday Roman 's birthday is an impressive description of self-reflection and interim assessment at this age and at the same time a very vibrant rendition of the New York of that time (late 1940s).

Gumpert's poem "Your power is robbed" was written next to texts by authors such as Erich Fried and Nelly Sachs for the concert cycle of 17 pieces of music for 2 recorders, chitarrone, viola da gamba and harpsichord and 16 texts about exile "From the black earth this world "(1992) used by the composer Friedemann Schmidt-Mechau .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ spiegel.de: Life begins at 80 , DER SPIEGEL 2/1949 (accessed April 19, 2017)

literature

• Karin Geiger: The diagnostic eye - Martin Gumpert as a doctor, medical historian and medical writer . Gardez! -Verlag, Remscheid 2004, ISBN 3-89796-145-8 (also dissertation, University of Münster 2003)
• Jutta Ittner: Eyewitness in the service of truth. Life and literary work of Martin Gumpert (1897-1955) . Aisthesis Verlag, Bielefeld 1998, ISBN 3-89528-170-0 (also dissertation, University of Hamburg 1994)
• Markwart Michler :  Gumpert, Martin. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 7, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1966, ISBN 3-428-00188-5 , p. 306 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Doina Rosenberg: Martin Gumpert - doctor and writer . Medical dissertation, FU Berlin 2000
• Heinz Saueressig: In the corner of medical history. The life path of dermatologist Martin Gumpert . Basotherm Förderkreis, Biberach an der Riss 1987. 20 pp.
• Andreas Wittbrodt: A trained social doctor. The way of life of the migrant Martin Gumpert in Berlin and New York as reflected in autobiography . In: The fates of emigrants . Frankfurt am Main 2004, pp. 155–167

Web links

• Literature by and about Martin Gumpert in the catalog of the German National Library
• Poem "Your power has been robbed" by Martin Gumpert
• Martin Gumpert Archive in the Archive of the Academy of Arts, Berlin