Julian Gumperz

Julian Gumperz (May 12, 1898 - February 1972 in Gaylordsville, Connecticut) was a United States-born German sociologist, communist activist, publicist, and translator.

Institute for Social Research

Julian Gumperz was an assistant at the Institute for Social Research ("Institut für Sozialforschung") of the University of Frankfurt am Main in Germany, of the lesser known proponents of the Frankfurt School. His work focused on economics. He was married to Hede Gumperz, who later married Gerhart Eisler and then Paul Massing.

In the summer of 1922, he attended the Institute's "Erste Marxistische Arbeitswoche" (First Marxist Work Week) in Ilmenau, Thuringia. Among the participants at the week-long session were Georg Lukács, Karl Korsch, Richard Sorge, Friedrich Pollock, Karl August Wittfogel, Bela Fogarasi, Karl Schmuckle, and Konstantin Zetkin (the younger of two sons of socialist leader and feminist Clara Zetkin).

In 1933, due to political persecution in Germany, the institute sent Gumperz to the USA to explore the situation. Gumperz had been a student of Pollock’s since 1929 and at one time a Communist Party member, although he later gave it all up, became a stockbroker, worked as publicist, translator and wrote an anti-communist book in the 1940s. He was born in America and thus was fluent in English. He returned from his trip with a favorable report, assuring Horkheimer and the others that the Institut’s endowment, which still brought in about $30,000 a year, would be enough to guarantee survival in depression era America.

Publicist

For a time, Gumperz was the editor of the Communist newspaper Die Rote Fahne. In 1919 Gumperz and Karl Otten founded the Berlin monthly publication Der Gegner (The Opponent). It was published between April 1919 and 1922 by Gumperz together with Wieland Herzfelde. One of a series of small German periodicals published in Berlin following WWI (Jedermann sein eigner Fussball, Die Pleite and Der Blutige Ernst), which followed on the heels of the German review Der Dada. Frequent banning orders compelled a constant change of title. With art by George Grosz, Der Gegner decried an art with no relevance to the working class and which ignored revolutionary action. The communist uprising in Berlin in 1918, crushed by the government, had given rise to these satirical, radical, and political reviews.

References

* Walter Fähnders: Verlagshausierer. Ein unveröffentlichter Brief von Franz Jung an Julian Gumperz. In: "Sklaven" (Berlin) 1997, Nr. 34, p. 17-20.