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Famous Scholar to Speak at Germans-From-Russia
Meeting Here July 19
"Famous Scholar to Speak at Germans-From-Russia Meeting Here." Pierce County Tribune, 14 July 1971.
Germans from Russia will have a rare privilege of hearing Dr. Karl
Stumpp, Tuebingen, Germany, speak at a meeting in Rugby at the Memorial
Hall, Monday, July 19 at an evening meeting. He is considered the
patriarch of Germans-from-Russia, the foremost authority on the
subject in the world. He will speak in German but professor Joseph
S. Height of Franklin, IN., will interpret.
Dr. Stumpp has devoted 50 years of his life to intensive study
and research on the eventful history of this ethnic group. He is
75 years old and is not likely to return to America, and least of
all Rugby.
Dr. Stumpp was a guest of the North Dakota Historical Society of
Germans from Russia and has speaking engagements at Bismarck, Mott,
Eureka, S.D., Wishek, Jamestown and Beulah.
He was born May 12, 1896, in the German village of Alexanderhilf
near Odessa. He attended Central School in Grossliebental and the
Gymnasia at Dorpat and Odessa. He pursued his graduate studies at
Tuebingen, Germany, where he later wrote his doctoral dissertation
bearing the title, "The German Colonies in the Black Sea Region."
Since the outbreak of the Communist Revolution made it impossible
for him to return to his native land, he stayed in Bessarabia (then
a part of Romania) and taught school in Tarutino until 1933.
From 1933 to 1938 he was general secretary for the "Volksbund
fuer das Deutchtum im Ausland," and from 1938 to 1945 he was
director of German-Russian Research in the "Deutches Auslandsinstitut.
After the war, Dr. Stumpp was active as a professor in the Uhlandgymansium
in Tuebingen until his retirement.
When the "Landsmannschaft der Deutchen aus Russland"
was organized in 1949, he became its most ardent supporter and for
twelve years was editor of its monthly periodical, "Volk Auf
Dem Weg." For twelve years he also edited the yearbook known
as "Heimatbuch," a treasury of historical materials on
the life and culture of the German-Russian people. As an official
speaker of the Landsmannschaft he delivered over 600 lectures throughout
Germany.
His comprehensive Bibliography of Publications Relating to Germans
in Russia appeared in 1958. Its revised 1971 edition lists 515 books,
970 articles, and 117 newspapers and periodicals. His most widely
acclaimed book is doubtless the pictorial history, "Die Russlanddeutchen"
which appeared in 1967 in an English edition entitled, "The
German Russians - two Centuries of Pioneering." In 1957, Dr.
Stumpp carried out a comprehensive survey of 413 German communities
in Russia, including statistics of people who were deported, starved
to death, or murdered. Another of his works, the result of more
than forty years of meticulous research, will appear next year comprising
a thousand pages of census listings and ancestral records.
Reprinted with permission of the Pierce County Tribune.
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