Paul Guttfeld

Paul Samuel "Pegu" Guttfeld , also Paul Gutfeld (born January 16, 1893 in Berlin ; † 1991 ), was a German pacifist , settler and agricultural instructor.

Life

Paul Guttfeld's parents were the knitwear manufacturer Nathan Max Guttfeld and Agatha Guttfeld, nee. Sandman. The company Nathan Guttfeld & Co, tricot manufacture, founded by Nathan Guttfeld in 1902, was liquidated in 1936. It was based in Paul-Singer-Str. 72 in Berlin-Mitte. The family had 5 children, in addition to Paul, the twins Erich and Recha and the brothers Theo and Bruno.

Guttfeld was a war volunteer and, after being seriously wounded, was able to work as a garrison in the clerk's office in a Berlin barracks. In 1915 he became a member of the pacifist “ Bund Neues Vaterland ” and their liaison to the revolutionary young workers, who received financial support from the federal government.

In the dispute between supporters of the Bremen Left and the Spartacus group that broke out among the revolutionary young workers in 1917 , Guttfeld was on the side of Bremen. When Leo Jogiches, during a conversation that took place with Franz Pfemfert , tried to get Guttfeld to hand over to him the money he had received from the federal government for the revolutionary young workers, Guttfeld refused. He was in contact with the leading personalities of the revolutionary working-class youth , evidently Karl Becker and Karl Plättner , but politically tended towards the bourgeois pacifists who were willing to cooperate with the revolutionary working-class youth. He participated several times in the meetings of the circle around Fritz Klatt (also Klatt or Westender circle), "to activate him [politically]".

In November 1917 Guttfeld was a roommate of a commune in Berlin-Friedenau (Isoldestr. 5) and opened up to more and more pacifist and socialist ideas. Despite the contradictions between revolutionary and reformist socialism, the circle remained intact. The members engaged in active anti-war propaganda, u. a. by printing and distributing pamphlets (such as Leonhard Frank's “ Man is good ”). These activities brought police house searches to the municipality and Guttfeld and Hans Koch-Dieffenbach to prosecute for Spartakist activities. At the end of 1917, Guttfeld deserted to Munich with a forged leave of absence , where Oskar Maria Graf housed him under the false name Friedrich Wunder (the name of a fellow inmate Grafs in the Haar mental hospital ) in the rear building of his apartment at Schnorrstrasse 3.

On January 29, 1918, Graf, Guttfeld and Georg Schrimpf were arrested in Munich when they tried to commission the printing of the “Memorandum of Prince Lichnowsky ”. Guttfeld became a member of the Federation of Free People founded by Graf in 1918.

In 1919 Guttfeld edited together with Titus Tautz during the time of the Munich Soviet Republic the “Central Council News Gazette ”, which replaced the Münchner Latest News , the Münchner Zeitung . the Munich-Augsburger Abendzeitung and the Augsburger Kurier appeared. Guttfeld oversaw the features section and published texts by the Chinese philosopher and poet Zhuangzi .

After the failure of the November Revolution, Guttfeld took part in various settlement projects as a “replacement for the now limited political-revolutionary action”. Until June 1919 he stayed in the community founded by Koch-Dieffenbach in Blankenburg near Donauwörth (the list of members of the local settlement shows him as a " traveler "), then he went to Heppenheim an der Bergstrasse , where he worked with Martin Buber Titus Tautz expected. In 1919 and 1920 he was then, "only provided with a bread bag and sandals, on the way between various anarchist-communist groups from Rostock in the north (Marie Ehlert) to Lake Constance . Around this time he became acquainted with and subsequent friendship with the Mila and couple Eugen Esslinger-Rauch, through whom Guttfeld got to know and appreciate the Heidelberg Indologist Heinrich Robert Zimmer at the latest in 1924 .

In 1920 Guttfeld visited the Lindenhof in Kleve in the Wilstermarsch . "With his bald, sun-scorched skull, with his velvety, dark eyes, with his strangely short cut, faded Manchester doublet, with his brown bread bag and his bare, sandaled feet, he looked like a Buddhist monk."

“ [Hugo] Hertwig brought me to [Ernst] Fuhrmann's at the beginning of the 20s and I stayed in constant contact with him until his death and then with Arend Fuhrmann until his death. […] I saw Schulze-Sölde for the last time around 1926 in Berlin. […] In the 1920s I got a postcard from him, 'It's me!' When he came a few days later, I asked him who he was and he said the prophet John , which I didn't take very seriously. I was in the hall at some popular assemblies, sometimes lived in his mother-in-law 'Lieskaen' house, who liked to mother me, but I had no contact with Franziska [Schulze-Sölde] ... "

In 1925 Guttfeld married his cousin Eva (later Chava) Jenny Herrmann (born February 17, 1901 , † 1983 ) in Berlin (residing at Oldenburgallee 58a), and their son Michael was born there on August 22, 1928 .

From 1931 on, Guttfeld was involved in the magazine “The Opponent” published by Franz Jung and Harro Schulze-Boysen , and in 1932 he was responsible for the content of issues 1/2 and 3. For a time he managed the business of the Folkwang-Auriga Verlag and was committed to the establishment of an “Ernst Fuhrmann Institute for Biological Research”.

In 1933 the family moved to Wiesbaden (Martinstrasse 7), where their daughter Hanna-Liv was born on July 6, 1935 .

On May 21, 1936 , the family emigrated to Palestine and settled in the city ​​of Kirjat Bialik near Haifa , which was founded by German immigrants in 1934 . Guttfeld worked as an agricultural instructor. His daughter outlined his philosophy of life with the following words: "My father either deals with crap or with God."

On March 27, 1948 , Michael Guttfeld died as a soldier near Nablus and was buried in the military cemetery in Nahariya .

In 1962, Paul Guttfeld summarized his professional activity in a letter to Franz Jung: “I have represented the need for organic fertilization for 26 years and although I have propagated as little as possible against the chemicals on which agriculture is based today, I am considered a fanatic, which does not take into account the scientific results. Now, tired of the compromise, I refuse to deal with farms that use concentrated chemicals. As a result, I have severed all my ties to the agricultural organizations, including the one I worked with and set up. "

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Guttfeld to Ulrich Linse, letter of November 12, 1971 and Guttfeld to Hans Koch-Dieffenbach, letter of June 4, 1968
2. ↑ Otto Luban, The Effects of the Jena Youth Conference 1916 and the Relationship of the Headquarters of the Revolutionary Young Workers to the Leadership of the Spartacus Group, in: Archive for Social History, Vol. 11th 1971, pp. 185-223, here p. 210
3. ^ Guttfeld to Hans Koch-Dieffenbach, letter of June 4, 1968
4. ^ Guttfeld to Ulrich Linse, letter of November 12, 1971
5. ↑ Ulrich Linse: The commune of the German youth movement. Munich: Beck 1973, p. 95
6. ↑ https://www.literaturportal-bayern.de/ortelexikon?task=lpbplace.default&id=275
7. ^ Lenbachhaus Munich: Georg Schrimpf, Oskar Maria Graf, 1918. Berlin: Kulturstiftung der Länder 1992, p. 22
8. ^ Guttfeld to Huguette Hermann, letter of March 1, 1984
9. ↑ cf. Ulrich Linse 1973, p. 152
10. ^ Guttfeld to Hans Koch-Dieffenbach, letter of June 4, 1968; see. Ulrich Linse 1973, p. 152
11. ↑ Max Schulze-Sölde, A man of this time. Flarchheim: Röth 1930
12. ^ Guttfeld to Werner Gerber, letter of December 3, 1985
13. ^ Stamm, Rainer: The Folkwang-Verlag. On the way to an imaginary museum. Booksellers Association, Frankfurt am Main 1999, p. 117
14. ^ Bulletin of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wiesbaden, August 9, 1935
15. ↑ Huguette Herrmann to Katharina Geiser, mail from May 27, 2009
16. ↑ https://www.izkor.gov.il/%D7%9E%D7%99%D7%9B%D7%90%D7%9C%20%D7%92%D7%95%D7%98%D7% A4% D7% 9C% D7% 93 / en_144591f13753ab5fd7efd4411cdb973e
17. ↑ Guttfeld to Franz Jung, letter of September 29, 1962, German Literature Archive, A: Jung, Franz, media number HS00672417X

literature

• Ulrich Linse : The commune of the German youth movement . Munich: Beck 1973, ISBN 3-406-10805-9 .
• Oskar Maria Graf: We are prisoners . Munich: dtv 1982, pp. 335-361, 389, 406-407, 423-31, 436-438, 440, 470, 486, 494.
• Werner Gerber: Did you notify PEGU too? Paul Guttfeld and Max Schulze-Sölde. A contemporary witness reports from Haifa. Two documents , in: Werner Gerber: Hagener Bohème. People around Osthaus . Hagen: vd Linnepe 1990, pp. 109-114, ISBN 3-89431-008-1 .
• Katharina Geiser : Vierfleck or Das Glück . Salzburg u. Vienna: Jung u. Jung 2015, pp. 45–46, 255–256, ISBN 978-3-99027-065-3

Web links

Wikiquote: Paul Guttfeld  - Quotes