Emil Julius Gumbel (1891-1966)

Emil Julius Gumbel was a staunch republican, contentious pacifist, and early warner against National Socialism. As a mathematician and statistician, Gumbel devoted the methods of his science to the anti-republican forces of the extreme right. After massive hostility, he was dismissed from the University of Heidelberg as early as 1932. In 1933, his works fell victim to the book burnings, and he himself emigrated via France to the USA, where he received a chair at Columbia University in 1953. Known as a statistician through his main work Statistic of Extremes and the "Gumbel distribution" named after him, the memory of his services to the republic is hardly kept alive in Germany.

Emil Julius Gumbel was born in Munich to a Jewish family in 1891. In 1914 he volunteered to take part in the war, but quickly developed into a staunch pacifist and opponent of the war. He joined the USPD, declared his support for the Republican Constitution in 1918, and later joined the SPD. During the Weimar Republic, he belonged to the intellectual circle around Carl von Ossietzky.

The statistician Emil Gumbel used the methods of his science to document the political murders during the years of revolution and counterrevolution, internal unrest and civil war. In Two Years of Murder, published in 1921 and reissued in an expanded version in 1922 under the title Four Years of Political Murder, Gumbel calculated that the overwhelming majority of the acts were attributable to the political right. Often they went unpunished, or the sentences were lenient, while political murders from the left, which occurred much less frequently, were often punished with draconian sentences. Gumbel increasingly turned his attention to the anti-Republic, far-right networks behind the murderers, the "conspirators" who remained hidden behind mere statistics. In 1924 he published Verschwörer. Zur Geschichte und Soziologie der deutschen nationalistischen Geheimbünde 1918-1924 (Conspirators. On the History and Sociology of the German Nationalist Secret Societies) followed in 1929 by Verräter verfallen der Feme! (Traitors fall Prey to the Fever) Victims - Murderers - Judges (1919-1929). These writings can be counted among the earliest scholarly contributions to actor-oriented research on right-wing extremism.

If Gumbel had already been subjected to violent attacks in 1918, the political right orchestrated a real campaign against him from the mid-1920s onward. A private lecturer at the University of Heidelberg, he was attacked for his pacifist statements and his writings in defense of the republic. While students acted as the driving force behind the campaign, only a few members of the Heidelberg University faculty showed solidarity with their colleague. Beginning in 1930, students, led by the National Socialist German Student League, protested ever more vigorously against Gumbel's appointment as associate professor. At the height of the campaign, there were riots, the "Gumbel riots." A university commission finally decided to dismiss the mathematician in 1932.

In 1933, Gumbel was staying in Paris. His writings immediately fell victim to the book burnings. Until the German invasion, he taught in Paris, Strasbourg and Lyon and from there supported the anti-fascist resistance against the National Socialist regime. In 1940 he managed to escape to the USA. Here, the eminent mathematician did not receive a professorship at New York's Columbia University until 1953. In the USA he wrote his main work, Statistic of Extremes, and described the "Gumbel distribution" which was later named after him. Towards the end of his life, he became involved in opposition to the Vietnam War. In 1966, Emil Julius Gumbel passed away.