德國老師教12、13歲孩子歷史的時候，是要孩子去找原始文獻。
比如說希特勒政壇崛起過程，1933年五月曾經發動焚書運動（Book Burnings），之前又發生「國會縱火案」（Reichstag fire），老師就要學生先看事件發生前某個重要演說內容，接著看當時的報紙報導、不同陣營政治領袖發言內容、某場會議記錄...
然後整班同學聚集討論。
Yale Daily News (blog)-May 15, 2015
Emeritus Sterling Professor of History Peter Gay — described as “the ultimate homme de lettres” — died Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 91 years old.
The cause of death was “old age,” his stepdaughter Elizabeth Glazer told the Associated Press.
Born in Berlin in 1923, Gay, along with his family, escaped from Nazi Germany during his teenage years. Although he and his parents were identified by the Nazis as Jews — his father’s business was one of thousands of Jewish establishments attacked during Kristallnacht in 1938 — the family did not identify with the religion, the New York Times reported. The family fled first to Havana, Cuba, where Gay taught himself English by reading magazines and listening to broadcasts, before arriving to the United States in 1941.
He went on to study Jewish history and write about Nazi Germany, among many other topics, and he eventually became one of the English language’s most elegant writers. As history professor Jay Winter, who learned from Gay as an undergraduate, put it, he was “a man who writes like an angel.”
“The world of ideas was an elegant idea; [Gay] thought it should be expressed in elegant prose,” said Jon Butler, a former Yale history professor who overlapped with Gay in the department for nearly a decade. “There were very few historians who could or would equal his achievements.”
Gay, born Peter Joachim Fröhlich, wrote prolifically on topics as wide-ranging as Mozart, Freud and the Enlightenment. In his decades-long career, he published nearly 30 volumes, writing at a rate his colleagues agreed is astonishingly fast. His book “The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. The Rise of Modern Paganism,” considered the quintessential text on the period, won the National Book Award in 1967, and in 2003, Gay was honored with a lifetime achievement award from the American Historical Association.
History professor David Sorkin, a scholar of Jewish history whose work departs from Gay’s, described him as “tremendously influential, tremendously admired.”
“He was a wonderful historian, an outstanding stylist,” Sorkin said. “Even if you disagree with him, you have to admire what he did.”
Focused largely on Western Europe, Gay also delved deep into the field of psychology, even completing all the coursework required for psychoanalyst training in order to better understand the human psyche and its role in history. Gay also wrote a well-received biography of Sigmund Freud.
After over two decades of teaching at Yale, Gay retired in 1993, one of the final years during which Yale still mandated faculty retirement after the age of 70. Butler said the scholar would have much preferred to continue stay on.
Still, Gay’s departure from Yale hardly slowed his career. In 1999, he became the founding director of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, a global fellowship program housed within the New York Public Library. He filled that role until 2003 while also continuing his own scholarship. Since 1993, Gay has continued to publish, including several volumes of his five-part series “The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud” and his autobiography, “My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin.”
Even in his later years, when his health began to decline, Gay’s mind remained sharp, friends said. His most recent book, “Why the Romantics Matter,” was published in January, and University of Illinois history professor Mark Micale, a former graduate student advisee of Gay’s who compiled the footnotes for the volume, said there was “no loss of literary grace at all.” According to Yale history professor John Merriman, a close personal friend, Gay had another book under contract when he died this week.
But beyond his intellectual contributions, those who knew Gay also described him as a person of sophistication, warmth and personal elegance. They also remembered him for his impressive art collection and personal library, his penchant for tuna salad sandwiches and his photographic memory. Several recalled the graduate student tutorials he hosted in his home in Hamden and the many meals eaten with him at Yorkside Pizza Restaurant.
“He just cared about people, not just vaguely in the abstract but on a day-to-day basis,” said Merriman, who asked Gay to be a groomsmen in his wedding. “He was one of my heroes and one of my best friends.”
*****
Emil Julius Gumbel (18 July 1891, Munich – 10 September 1966, New York City) was a German mathematician and political writer.
Born in Munich, he graduated from the University of Munich shortly before the outbreak of the First World War. He was Professor ofMathematical Statistics at the University of Heidelberg.
Following the murder of a friend, he attended the trial where he saw that the judge completely ignored evidence against the Brown Shirts Nazis. Horrified, he ardently investigated many similar political murders that had occurred and published his findings in Four Years of Political Murder in 1922. In 1928, he published Causes of Political Murder and also tried to create a political group to counter Nazism. Gumbel was also one of the 33 signers of the 1932 Dringender Appell.
Among the Nazi's most-hated public intellectuals, he was forced out of his position in Heidelberg in 1932. Gumbel then moved to France, where he taught in Paris and Lyon, and then to the United States in 1940. He taught at the New School, Columbia University, and the École Libre Des Hautes Études in New York City until his death in 1966.[1]
As a mathematician, Gumbel was instrumental in the development of extreme value theory, along with Leonard Tippett and Ronald Fisher. In 1958, Gumbel published a key book on the topic: Statistics of Extremes. He derived and analyzed the probability distributionthat is now known as the Gumbel distribution in his honor.
When he died, Gumbel's papers were made a part of The Emil J. Gumbel Collection, Political Papers of an Anti-Nazi Scholar in Weimar and Exile. These papers include reels of microfilm that document his activities against the Nazis.[2]
Notes[edit]
- ^ Much of this discussion is drawn from an account in The Lady Tasting Tea, a book about the history of Statistics and biographies of Statisticians.
- ^ More biographical details of Gumbel's opposition to Nazism can be found in The Emil J. Gumbel Collection, Political Papers of an Anti-Nazi Scholar in Weimar and Exile
Further reading[edit]
- Brenner, Arthur David. Emil J. Gumbel: Weimar German Pacifist and Professor. ISBN 0-391-04101-0.
- Salsburg, David. The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century. ISBN 0-8050-7134-2.
External links[edit]
Works by Emil Julius Gumbel at Project Gutenberg
Works by or about Emil Julius Gumbel at Internet Archive
Emil Julius Gumbel Papers at University of Chicago Library
Emil J. Gumbel Collection at the Leo Baeck Institute, New York
Drawing depicting E. J. Gumbel
ミュンヘンで生まれ、第一次世界大戦が始まる直前にミュンヘン大学を卒業した。その後、ハイデルベルク大学の数理統計学の教授となったが、ナチ党によってその座を逐われた。ガンベルはフランスに逃れたが、第二次世界大戦の勃発でドイツがフランスに侵攻したため1940年にアメリカ合衆国へとさらに移った。戦後に一旦ドイツに帰国したが、ハイデルベルク大学に復帰することは叶わず、再びアメリカに戻りコロンビア大学などで教えた。レオナルド・ティペットとロナルド・フィッシャーとともに、極値理論の数理分野を切り開いた。ガンベル分布は彼の名前にちなんでいる。
友人が暗殺された後、彼は過去の政治家の暗殺事件について調査し、その結果をまとめて1922年に Four Years of Political Murder として出版した。また1932年のUrgent Call for Unity には33人の署名者の1人として名を連ねている。
1966年にニューヨークで死去した。
伝記[編集]
- Brenner, Arthur David. Emil J. Gumbel: Weimar German Pacifist and Professor. ISBN 0-391-04101-0.