Nicolaus Sombart; German writer and connoisseur of eroticism (NICE)
Hyfler/Rosner
August 6, 2008
Nicolaus Sombart: German writer and connoisseur of eroticism
The German writer and historian Nicolaus Sombart was not
just a famous cultural sociologist and international
scholar. He was also a dandy, a self-professed connoisseur
of beautiful women and a devotee of eroticism, both
intellectual and physical. Sombart, known as "Weltgeist in a
silk scarf", was a grand representative of a less
politically correct age.
As the son of Werner Sombart, the sociologist and economist
who corresponded with Friedrich Engels, Nicolaus Sombart was
truly a scion of the intellectual aristocracy of the
Wilhelmine and Weimar eras. An early influence was the
international expert on constitutional law, Carl Schmitt,
who was a constant visitor to the house. But it has also
been suggested that the dryness of Werner Sombart's
life-work on the study of capitalism provoked the younger
Sombart's later libidinous interests.
Sombart's Romanian mother, Corina Leon, the daughter of a
university rector, was the second wife of Professor Werner
Sombart, and around 30 years his junior. She was a distant
cousin of the conductor Sergiu Celibidache, who later became
a close friend of Nicolaus and, many years later, a mentor
to his daughter, the concert pianist Elizabeth Sombart.
Nicolaus Sombart's childhood and teenage years in Berlin
provided the material for his most acclaimed volume of
memoirs.
Born in 1923, Nicolaus Sombart could not escape the lot of
his generation in the Second World War. In 1945 he was in a
Luftwaffe flak unit with Army Group North, besieged because
of Hitler's obstinacy in Courland on the Baltic. There,
along with 300,000 other men, he faced a "camp death in
Siberia", as he wrote later. The Courland pocket, unlike the
rest of the Wehrmacht, did not surrender on May 8. On May 9,
Sombart, by an extraordinary stroke of luck, was picked by a
naval officer to man the anti-aircraft guns on one of the
last ships to leave for Germany. He celebrated his 22nd
birthday, steaming across the Baltic under Soviet air and
motor torpedo attack, taking part in the last naval action
in European waters.
On reaching German territory the survivors became prisoners
of the British. The Red Army, outraged that German soldiers
were escaping in their tens of thousands to the western
sector to avoid forced labour in the Soviet Union,
vociferously demanded the return of those who had been on
Soviet territory. Sombart was convinced that some of his
companions were returned to the Red Army and that he had
been spared a second time. He believed that he had used up a
whole lifetime's "capital of luck" in just a few days.
After two months in a British PoW camp in Holstein, Sombart
was released, with "a loaf of army bread and a good dose of
DDT", into an unrecognisable world. The family house in
Berlin had been destroyed in 1943 by Allied bombs. His
father had died and their house in the country was now in
the Soviet zone. In a moment of what seemed like
inspiration, he suddenly decided to start a new life in
Heidelberg. Fortunately, his instinctive choice revealed a
subconscious logic. Colleagues of his father were at the
university, he knew some girls there through his sister, and
above all, Heidelberg was not Prussian. Prussian militarism
was a personal bête noire, as his main work on Wilhelm II
revealed many years later.
Although it might be said that Sombart had been born with a
pen in his mouth, he had been attracted to architecture as a
profession. But seeing the destruction as he crossed Germany
made him realise the sort of soulless buildings which would
be built. Heidelberg, virtually untouched by war, and the
ancient tradition of its university, proved far more
appealing. And thus he began his career as a scholar,
studying cultural sociology under Alfred Weber, the brother
of Max Weber. During this postwar period, Sombart was a
founder member of the legendary literary circle known as
Gruppe 47 and published his first largely autobiographical
novel, Cappriccio No 1.
Sombart's doctoral thesis under Weber was on St Simon, one
of the first social philosophers. This led Sombart to
France, especially to Paris, where he rapidly caught up on a
lack of misspent youth during the war years. This period is
covered in another volume of memoirs, Pariser Lehrjahre,
1951-1954.
In Paris he met and married Tamara Khoundadzé, a talented
pianist. Her father was a Georgian émigré who had escaped
the Russian Civil War, while her mother was Scottish. The
Sombarts' four impossibly good-looking children were thus a
blend of German, Romanian, Georgian and Scottish blood.
French was their mother tongue, but they grew up speaking
several languages effortlessly.
For nearly 30 years, Sombart benefitted from the post of
senior cultural civil servant attached to the Council of
Europe in Strasbourg, while also continuing his career as a
writer and academic, principally in Berlin at the Freie
Universität, where most of his work on Wilhelmine Germany
was completed. He also contributed to Unesco projects, such
as Pro Venezia Viva.
Sombart was a great wit and conversationalist, and his
Sunday afternoon salon in his large, book-lined apartment on
the Ludwigskirchstrasse became a well-known rendezvous for
the brilliant, the beautiful and the outrageous. Sombart had
a wide circle of friends in many countries, including
publishers such as Lord Weidenfeld and Hubert Burda, as well
as musicians, politicians, artists and of course historians.
In 2003 he published the astonishingly indiscreet Journal
intime 1982/83, which was described by Die Welt as a
"mixture of scholarship, cultural criticism and the erotic".
Yet it was his beautifully written memoir, Jugend in Berlin,
published in 1984, which had the greatest success. His last
book Rumänische Reise: Ins Land meiner Mutter, (Romanian
Journey - In the Country of my Mother) was published in
2006. It was a final visit to a vanished past.
He was appointed a Commander of the Legion of Honour in 2003
by the French Government. He is survived by his wife, two
sons and two daughters.
Nicolaus Sombart, writer and historian, was born in Berlin
on May 10, 1923. He died on July 14, 2008, aged 85