Walther von Mumm

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Moritz Karl Ferdinand Wilhelm Hermann Walther Mumm von Schwarzenstein (born January 13, 1887 in Frankfurt am Main ; † August 10, 1959 in Göppingen ) was an aviation pioneer, businessman and bobsledder at the 1932 Olympic Winter Games . Before that he was temporarily the “ champagne king” in Reims in France , as one of the partners in the Mumm champagne family .

Life

Walther von Mumm was the second son of Peter Arnold Gottlieb Hermann Mumm von Schwarzenstein and his wife Emma Luise Marie, née Passavant . He grew up in Germany and France and initially worked as an equestrian and aviation pioneer . He received his license in France in 1910 on a Société Antoinette aircraft . In the same year he went to America , where he started as a pilot for France in the Gordon Bennett Cup (ballooning). By the First World War he took part in several distance competitions (including in St. Louis and Kansas City ).

When his older brother, Henri, died unexpectedly, Walther was handed over the management of the HG Mumm Extra Dry Company . He made the brand known with clever advertising, especially on the American market. He also inherited the family assets valued at an estimated $ 20,000,000.

During this time he met Frances Scoville († 1920), the daughter of a banker from Seneca , Kansas , know and married her in St George's Hanover Square Church in London . He had a daughter with her, Mary, who was raised in a school in Aiken , South Carolina after her mother's death . She later died in a car accident along with her aunt, Louise Scoville Treadwell.

Before the wedding, von Mumm had an affair with Marie van Rensimer Barnes, who shot him in her Paris apartment in 1912 when he brought her the news of his engagement to Scoville. He suffered a lung injury. Celebrity attorney Oliver Bodington represented Marie van Rensimer Barnes in the following lawsuit.

Although the von Mumm family had resided in France for more than a hundred years, Walther was born in Germany and was a German citizen. When the First World War broke out, he was classified as an enemy in France. Instead of interning in France during the war, he decided to return to Germany. He refused to fight on the Western Front and instead served on the Eastern Front against the Russians. He was injured in the lungs again by Russian fire.

The years immediately after the war were disastrous; the French government demanded the entire family's possessions as part of the reparations claims against Germany. He became estranged from his wife, who died after an appendectomy , and was involved in a lengthy custody negotiation for his daughter. His remaining shares in Germany, which were still valued at millions of dollars, were lost with the collapse of the Reichsmark and inflation . While he held the rights to the Mumm brand in the United States, the introduction of Prohibition meant that it became worthless overnight. With the rest of his fortune, he invested in Wall Street and made another good fortune - until the Wall Street Crash in 1929 left him penniless.

In 1924 he married the Baroness Marie Julia Mathilde von dem Bussche-Haddenhausen, but separated from her again in 1928. The baroness later married Prince Ulrich von Wchinitz and Tettau .

Von Mumm took a job at a stockbrokerage company and rented a room in a Manhattan boarding house for $ 10 a week. He hid his financial emergency from his friends. In October 1931 he tried to commit suicide in the house of his friend William H. vom Rath in Long Island . He left a message saying, "Bury me as I am and keep this out of the newspapers." He tried to shoot himself in the heart, but he missed and was shot for the third time in the lung. Despite initially poor prognoses, it recovered and was able to be restored.

Olympia

As early as 1932, von Mumm strengthened the German Olympic squad again as a bobsleigh driver and was seventh and last in the four-man bobsleigh competition in Lake Placid together with Hasso von Bismarck , Georg Gyssling and Gerhard von Hessert , after the second run the team was even sixth. The bobsleigh crew jumped in at the last minute after numerous athletes from the original crews were in the hospital after Werner Zahn and Fritz Grau fell seriously .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gothaisches genealogical pocket book of noble houses. 1902. Third year, Justus Perthes, Gotha 1901, pp. 637–639
  2. ^ Frankfurter Lexikon.
  3. ↑ earlyaviators.com .
  4. ^ New York Times. , November 2, 1931.
  5. ↑ sports-reference.com .
  6. ↑ sports-reference.com .
personal data
SURNAME Mumm, Walther von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mumm von Schwarzenstein, Moritz Karl Ferdinand Wilhelm Hermann Walther (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German aviation pioneer, champagne king, Olympic participant in the 1932 Winter Games, stockbroker
DATE OF BIRTH January 13, 1887
PLACE OF BIRTH Frankfurt am Main
DATE OF DEATH August 10, 1959
Place of death Goeppingen