“Between Two Worlds” Hans Gerth: Eine Biografie 1908–1978

After Hans Gerth died in December 1978, I found myself among piles of pa­ pers. The amount was considerable, not because he was a "careful archivist" as some assumed, but because he simply could not part with any paper with writing on it. Besides his own typed scripts and notes, there were off-prints given to hirn, papers written by his students, many newspaper clippings, and letters dating back to the end of 1937. My first task was to look for and collect his essay manuscripts still un­ known to the American public. Shortly after Gerth's death, Don Martindale, our life-long friend and a former student of Gerth, encouraged me to publish a volume of Gerth' essays. By going through the piles, I found quite a few es­ says, even one he wrote as early as 1930 as a student at the London School of Economics. I am sure he had no idea that such an essay had survived among his piles of papers. I edited and typed many of his draft essays; flew to New York to work together on the final edited version with Joe Bensmann and Art Vidich; and co-published it through the Greenwood Press, for which Martin­ dale was an outside consultant. I then began to sift through Gerth's correspondence files. The corre­ spondence was kept more or less in chronological order. However, the pa­ pers were loosely placed into folders and not fastened.

Dieses Jahrbuch veröffentlicht erstmalig - in englischer Sprache- die zusammenhängende Biografie des Sozialwissenschaftlers Hans Gerth. Es ist das intellektuelle Porträt eines der letzten Mannheim-Schüler und namhaften sozialwissenschaftlichen Emigrées und zugleich angesichts des verarbeiteten bisher unbekannten Korrespondenzmaterials ein Zeitdokument ersten Ranges.