Käthe Bauer-Mengelberg

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Käthe Bauer-Mengelberg
Born	Käthe Mengelberg (1894-05-23)May 23, 1894 Krefeld, German Empire
💀Died	April 22, 1968(1968-04-22) (aged 73) New York City, U.S.April 22, 1968(1968-04-22) (aged 73)
💼 Occupation

Käthe Bauer-Mengelberg (née Mengelberg; 23 May 1894 – 22 April 1968) was a German-American economist and sociologist associated with the Heidelberg School. She qualified as a lecturer at the Handelshochschule (commercial college) in Mannheim in 1923 and taught economics there until the Nazi regime dismissed her in 1934. She emigrated to the United States in 1939 and, after temporary posts at Iowa State College, New York University and Rutgers University, was professor of sociology at Upsala College in New Jersey from 1946 until 1964.

Early life and education

Käthe Mengelberg was born on 23 May 1894 in Krefeld. She was the daughter of the lawyer Heinrich Mengelberg, and the musicologist Rudolf Mengelberg was her brother. She began her studies at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in 1914 as a student of Lujo Brentano, then moved to Heidelberg University, where she graduated in political economy and sociology in 1918. Her dissertation, on the financial policy of the Social Democratic Party and its relation to socialist ideas of the state, was supervised by Samuel Paul Altmann and published in 1919.

Career in Germany

After graduating she worked as an assistant at the Handelshochschule Mannheim. In 1923 she completed her habilitation there with a study on the theory of job evaluation, published in 1926 in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, and became a Privatdozent (private lecturer) in the college's economics department. In 1930 she was offered a chair at the State Institute of Vocational Education (Berufspädagogisches Institut) in Frankfurt, which trained teachers for vocational schools. Her career at Mannheim, alongside that of the economist Elisabeth Altmann-Gottheiner, is the subject of a 1993 study of the college's first women professors.

The historian Claus-Dieter Krohn describes her German work as typical of the interdisciplinary Heidelberg School, which after the First World War sought to educate democratic elites for the Weimar Republic. Shaped by her teaching of practitioners, it aimed less at original economic analysis than at clarifying basic socioeconomic relations. After her studies of Social Democratic economic and social theory, she wrote essays on the sociology of class, including "Soziologie und Sozialpolitik" (Soziale Praxis, 1925) and studies of social estates and the bourgeoisie in the Kölner Vierteljahrshefte für Soziologie (1924, 1929). Her teaching at Mannheim led her to agrarian policy: she published the textbook Agrarpolitik in Theorie, Geschichte und aktueller Problematik (Agrarian Policy in Theory, History and Current Problems) in 1931, which surveyed the economic theory of agricultural production, the history of German agrarian policy, and current problems of German agriculture. A review in the Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft agreed with much of her final section, including her argument that the case for preserving German agriculture did not in itself justify a tariff system, but faulted the book for neglecting recent research in soil science, farm size and agrarian history, particularly the work of Max Sering, and for her view that demand for agricultural products was relatively inelastic. The reviewer concluded that it did not fill the gap left by the lack of a thorough German textbook of agrarian policy. Between 1932 and 1934 she wrote essays on suburban housing development, the German market for fats and the world wheat market for Die Wirtschaftskurve, a publication of the Frankfurter Zeitung, including an assessment of the prospects of the Nazi policy of autarky.

Dismissal

On 1 March 1934 she was dismissed from state service under Paragraph 6 of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, officially for reasons of "administrative rationalization". Krohn notes that the dismissal also reflected the Nazi aim of restricting women's employment. The Exilarchiv attributes it to her membership in the Social Democratic Party and her former marriage to a man the regime classified as "half-Jewish". At the same time she lost her venia legendi when the Mannheim commercial college was broken up, and because she had been a civil servant only briefly she received a pension for only two years.

Emigration

Bauer-Mengelberg decided to leave Germany in 1934 but did not emigrate until January 1939. Her efforts to find an academic post abroad failed: refugee relief committees could act only on behalf of scholars who had already left Germany, and she was unwilling to emigrate without a position, as a single parent with two school-age children. Recommendations from émigré scholars including Emil Lederer and Karl Mannheim drew interest from colleges in Britain and Australia, but no offers followed, which Krohn attributes to doubts about her mobility as a mother. From 1936 to 1938 she worked as an assistant at the Chamber of Commerce in Wuppertal.

Career in the United States

In the United States she first held a temporary position at Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts, funded by the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars and the Oberlaender Trust. There she published "Economic Analysis of the Food Stamp Plan" in the Journal of Farm Economics (1941). Short-term contracts followed at New York University in the summer of 1943 and at the New Jersey College for Women of Rutgers University from 1943 to 1946. In 1946 she obtained a permanent post as professor of sociology at Upsala College in East Orange, New Jersey, where she taught until her retirement in 1964.

According to Krohn, unlike her Iowa colleagues Gerhard Tintner and Adolf Kozlik, she suffered badly from her uprooting, and the insecurity of her position and heavy teaching loads at American colleges limited her research. Her principal later work was an English translation, with an introduction, of Lorenz von Stein's History of the Social Movement in France, 1789–1850 (1964).

Personal life and death

In 1921 she married the lawyer Rudolf Bauer-Mengelberg; they had two children, and the marriage ended in 1930. Her former husband, a Jewish lawyer, later lived in Paris as an émigré. Their son Stefan Bauer-Mengelberg became a conductor and mathematician. She died in New York on 22 April 1968.

Selected works

• Die Finanzpolitik der sozialdemokratischen Partei in ihren Zusammenhängen mit dem sozialistischen Staatsgedanken (dissertation). Mannheim, Berlin and Leipzig, 1919.
• "Zur Theorie der Arbeitsbewertung". Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 55 (1926): 680–719; 56 (1926): 129–159.
• "Die liberalen Tendenzen in der ökonomischen Theorie des Sozialismus". Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung 12 (1926): 199–212.
• Agrarpolitik in Theorie, Geschichte und aktueller Problematik. Leipzig and Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1931. viii + 248 pp.
• (translator and editor) Lorenz von Stein, The History of the Social Movement in France, 1789–1850. Totowa, N.J.: Bedminster Press, 1964.

References

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