Entlassungsgrund: Pazifismus. Albrecht Gotze, der Fall Gumbel und die Marburger Universitat 1930-1946.

AuthorBeckman, Gary
PositionBook review

Entlassungsgrund: Pazifismus. Albrecht Gotze, der Fall Gumbel und die Marburger Universitat 1930-1946. By HARALD MAIER-METZ. Academia Marburgensis, vol. 13. Pp. 248, illus. Munster: WAXMANN, 2015. [euro]38 (paper).

Albrecht Goetze--as his surname was spelled after his immigration to the USA in 1934--was not only a leading Assyriologist, but a member of the founding generation of Hittite scholars. Following his service in the German army in the First World War, during which he was severely wounded, he pursued his studies at the University of Heidelberg, where he became an Extraordinarius in 1927. In 1930, at the relatively young age of 33, he was appointed to the Chair in Assyriology at the Philipps-Universitat in Marburg.

The volume under review deals with Goetze's short tenure at this institution--he was dismissed already in 1933--and the political climate in Germany and its higher educational institutions during the later years of the Weimar Republic. Goetze, who in 1919 had briefly been a member of the Socialist Party (SPD), was out of step with the great majority of his fellow professors, who were generally right-leaning and often remained convinced monarchists. A glaring exception to this rule was the statistician and his Heidelberg colleague Emil Julius Gumbel, who enraged conservative nationalists with his book Vier Jahre politischer Mord (1922), demonstrating the favorable bias and lenient treatment of judicial authorities toward perpetrators of right-wing violence, and through his publication in the popular media of essays revealing the clandestine rearmament of Germany in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles.

Gumbel was the target of a campaign in the nationalist press seeking his dismissal or worse, a movement supported by numerous Burschenschaften (conservative student fraternities) and other political groups at the University in Heidelberg and elsewhere. Goetze became involved in the affair when he signed several petitions defending the person and rights of his friend. This, together with his association with the pacifist Liga fur Menschenrechte, was enough to place him on the black list of the Nazis, and he lost his Chair as of November 24, 1933--less than a year after Hitler had seized power. His scholarly publications, which of course make no reference to contemporary affairs in Germany, were...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT