Martin Sommerfeld Explained

Martin Sommerfeld (May 2, 1894 – July 26, 1939) was a Jewish emigre from Nazi Germany to the U.S. who was a professor at the University of Frankfurt and subsequently at Columbia University, the City College of New York, Smith College, and Middlebury College, where he taught German language and literature. He authored and edited a number of volumes on German literature from the 16th to the 20th centuries, and he wrote numerous contributions to the four-volume Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturgeschichte (1925–31).

Biography

Martin Sommerfeld was born in Angerburg, East Prussia, to Bertha (née Klein) and Heinrich Sommerfeld, a factory owner. After attending school in Königsberg (Prussia) and Insterburg and passing the Abitur at the Prinz-Heinrichs-Gymnasium in Berlin-Schöneberg, he studied German language and literature as well as English and French literature, art history, philosophy, and medieval and modern history in Berlin, Frankfurt, and Munich, where in 1916 he received his Ph.D. with a dissertation on Friedrich Nicolai written under the direction of Franz Muncker. In 1919 he married Helene Schott (1892–1974). After completing a habilitation thesis on Goethe and Hebbel under the supervision of Franz Schultz (1877–1950) at the University of Frankfurt, he became a lecturer there in 1922 and in 1927 advanced to a professorship. Among his students who later rose to prominence were Wilhelm Emrich, Ernst Erich Noth, Richard Plaut, and Oskar Salo Koplowitz. Among Sommerfeld's colleagues in the department of German studies at the University of Frankfurt, his antipode was Hans Naumann, who backed the Nazi book burnings in May 1933.

After the National Socialist seizure of power in 1933, Sommerfeld's professorship was terminated on the basis of the anti-Semitic Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. He emigrated to the U.S., where he was initially employed as a "Visiting Foreign Instructor of German" at Columbia University and there advanced to a visiting professorship. In 1935–36 he moved to the City College of New York as a "Special Lecturer", and in 1936 he relocated again, this time to a professorship at Smith College. He had accepted an appointment to begin teaching at the newly founded Queens College in the fall of 1939 when he died, aged 45, while teaching at the Middlebury Summer School. "He was happy in his new surroundings, enthusiastic about his American students and colleagues, and thankful to the democracy that had so generously opened its doors to him and his family."[1]

In 1936 his doctoral dissertation was placed on the Nazi list of works by forbidden authors. On May 30, 1939, the Third Reich voided his German citizenship, and on August 1, 1940, it was announced that the University of Munich had posthumously divested him of his doctorate.

Works (selected)

Literature

External links

Notes and References

  1. Whyte. John. Martin Sommerfeld – In memoriam. Modern Language Journal. November 1939. 24. 2. 141–142, here 142. 10.1111/j.1540-4781.1939.tb02887.x.

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