- Yg. 1931, No. 1 -

At the age of 78, my uncle Abraham Gumbel, known to the readers of this newspaper as "Emel", went gently into Heilbronn to the country from which there is no return. He was born in the village of Stein am Kocher, where our ancestors had been based for over 200 years, buried in Heilbronn. With him, one of the few independently thinking, free people who our supposed "land of poets and thinkers" has to show died.

Already under the Socialist Law he showed that the prevailing opinion, that is, the opinion of the rulers, did not influence him, the shouting of the street had not affected him. He was deeply rooted and close to his home soil and that was precisely why he was a staunch European. So he understood the native earth, the people, to love the clod, and to accuse the gentlemen, the saber-rattling habebalds and hives, the Fatherland Party and the "ancestral" princes.

In 1914, when his son had died, he turned to the question of war guilt. With tremendous eagerness, diligence and emphasis he advocated the theory, which he was able to prove with ever new documents, that the German people were innocent, but that the sole guilt came to the Berlin court. His profound knowledge of all the diplomatic files made the picture of the origin of the war easier and easier. He has proven this in numerous articles and persisted in some polemics.

During the war, he hoped for a spiritual revolution that would root out the old regime and all those who affirmed the war. After the defeat he had always seen coming, he took Eisner's view that only a new Germany could achieve a just peace. He was only able to fight the Versailles Treaty on this basis. He fought against the assertion of innocence for men in 1914 as veiled propaganda to restore the monarchy and the strata that had ruled it. In this sense, he worked on the expropriation of the princes.

When the scholars and "experts" failed with inflation just as they did during the war and attributed it to reparations or even the passive trade balance, he showed the simple truth: inflation comes from printing slips of paper. Without success he demanded the destruction of the printing press. He recognized the immense danger of National Socialism early on.

He remained a preacher in the desert. He only worked in the narrow circle of his Swabian homeland. He gave me more than any other person. He loved the truth; he was upright and free. His life was hard, his death painless.

EJ Gumbel