Ernest Untermann

Gerhard Ernest Untermann, Sr. (1864–1956) was a German-American seaman, socialist author, translator, newspaper editor. In his later life he was Director of the old Washington Park Zoo in Milwaukee, a geologist, fossil hunter, and artist.

Biography

Early years

Ernest was born in Brandenburg, Kingdom of Prussia on November 6, 1864. He studied geology and paleontology at the University of Berlin. Upon graduation, he later recalled that he was "drafted into the great army of the unemployed before I had done a stroke of useful work. Society had trained me for intellectual tasks, but had failed to provide for employment." Untermann took work as a deckhand on a German steamer sailing to New York City, and thus he was exposed to America for the first time. Untermann subsequently took several trips around the world working on German, Spanish, and American sailing vessels. In the course of his nautical adventures, Untermann was shipwrecked three times, thus exposing him to life in the Philippine Islands and China firsthand. In the third incident, he narrowly escaped with his life when his own vessel went down in the North Sea.

Following these events, Untermann was briefly in the German military, an interlude which he later recalled to be decisive in his political radicalization:

"I had learned the truth of economic determinism and of the class struggle without knowing these terms. But I still clung to the illusion of patriotism. The drillmasters of Billy the Versatile cured me of that. The class line in all its brutal nakedness became visible to me. The tyrannical and insolent arrogance of the demigods with shoulder straps roused my spirit of independence to its climax. An affront, a blow, a courtmartial, closed my military career and fixed in my mind one aim — the abolition of the ruling class."

Untermann briefly returned to the University of Berlin for post graduate courses, but later said this only "showed me the rottenness of the intellectual elite of Germany." Still, it was at this time that Untermann first came into contact with the Social Democratic newspaper ''Vorwärts'' ("Forward") and various other Marxist books and leaflets, which gave concrete political form to his emerging radicalism.

Untermann emigrated to America and joined the merchant marine, spending the next 10 years on board ships plying the South Seas trade routes. He became a US citizen in 1893.

Socialist years

Untermann was a member of the Socialist Labor Party of America (SLP) in the 1890s before leaving to join the Socialist Party of America (SPA).

Untermann was a regular contributor to Algie Simons' dissident SLP newspaper ''The Workers Call,'' published in Chicago. When Simons moved to Chicago to assume the editorship of '' International Socialist Review'' in 1900, a monthly published by the pioneer American Marxist publishing house, Charles H. Kerr & Co., Untermann became a frequent contributor to that publication as well. Untermann earned his keep as an associate editor for J.A. Wayland's mass circulation socialist weekly, '' The Appeal to Reason'' in 1903.

Untermann was the first American translator of Karl Marx's'' Das Kapital,'' beginning work on the massive project in the spring of 1905 while living on a chicken farm in Orlando, Florida and completing translations of volumes 2 and 3 for Kerr in 1907 and 1909, respectively. He also translated other socialist works for an American audience, including the memoirs of Wilhelm Liebknecht as well as ''The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State,'' by Frederick Engels