Georg von Charasoff 7
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(Königsberger 1902-3, 1906), apart from his contributions to the analysis of elliptic
and hyper-elliptic functions. In the course of his long academic career
Königsberger attracted a number of excellent students, including some future Nobel
laureates.
8
In 1870, Ludwig Boltzmann came to Heidelberg for postgraduate studies
with Königsberger, and thirty-two years later Max Born spent the summer term
1902 in Heidelberg in order to attend Königsberger’s lectures on differential
geometry. Other famous disciples of Leo Königsberger are the mathematician (and
pianist) Alfred Pringsheim and the astronomer Max Wolf. The group of
Königsberger’s doctoral students in the period from 1897 to 1902, when Charasoff
was in Heidelberg, included Max Birkenstaedt, Marcus Lewin, Nathan
Mannheimer, Friedrich Rösch and Siegfried Valentiner.
On 22 November 1901 Georg Charasoff was announced as the winner of a prize
essay competition of the Natural Sciences Faculty (Chronik der Stadt Heidelberg
1902: 58-9). The essay he had submitted in October 1901 is a hand-written text of
101 pages, entitled ‘Parallelogrammum mysticum’ (see Universitätsarchiv
Heidelberg, Preisschriften, H-V-3/2, PR 126). Just a few weeks later, in a letter of
20 January 1902, Charasoff applied for admission to the final examination for a
doctorate; interestingly, this application was sent from Geneva (rue de Hesse, 4).
The dissertation thesis he submitted was a slightly revised copy of his prize essay.
The thesis defensio and final examination took place on 27 February 1902; shortly
afterwards, Charasoff published his thesis under the title ‘Arithmetische
Untersuchungen über Irreduktibilität’ (1902). The available documents in the
University archive show that the thesis was graded ‘summa cum laude’, but the
reports of Königsberger and the second examiner are not extant.
9
While Charasoff’s
dissertation was listed in several mathematics journals, it was not reviewed, which
suggests that it was not considered important. For analyses of the relationship
between Charasoff’s work in pure mathematics and the mathematical tools that he
used – and failed to use – in his economic studies see Mori (2013) and Parys
(2014).
Charasoff’s friendship with Otto Buek
In the Preface of Karl Marx über die menschliche und kapitalistische Wirtschaft
Charasoff thanked his ‘friend Dr Otto Buek … for advice and support during the
writing of this book and for many ideas which I formed from conversations with
him’ (1909: no page number). Who was Dr Otto Buek? How did Charasoff get to
know him and what was Buek’s role in the development of Charasoff’s
contributions to economic theory? Is it perhaps possible to throw some light, via
Buek, on the circle of intellectuals with whom Charasoff was in contact?
Otto Buek was a German-Russian philosopher, editor and translator. He was
born on 18 November 1873 in St Petersburg and died in 1966, aged 93, lonely and
impoverished, in a home for the elderly near Paris. After attending the German
gymnasium in his home town Buek enrolled as a student at the Faculty of
Mathematics and Physics of the University of St Petersburg in 1891, with chemistry
as his main field of study. Already in his gymnasium years, and in fact throughout
his life, he pursued several intellectual interests simultaneously. He is known to
have been remarkably well-read when he was still in his early twenties. He not only
had a good knowledge of the contemporary literature in the natural sciences, but
had studied carefully also the works of Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche, the writings of
the French socialists, and the first two volumes of Marx’s Kapital. Moreover, he
also had an intimate knowledge of Russian literature from Tolstoy to Gogol. In his
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History of Economics Review
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youth, he was a close friend of Lou Salomé (after her marriage: Lou Andreas-
Salomé), who later became famous as the ‘Russian muse’ of Friedrich Nietzsche
and Rainer Maria Rilke, and as Sigmund Freud’s disciple (and Anna Freud’s
confidante). In the winter term 1896-97 Buek moved to Heidelberg, where he first
continued his studies in chemistry and mathematics, but then switched over to
philosophy. In the winter term 1899–1900 he left Heidelberg in order to enrol at the
Phillips-Universität Marburg, where he wrote his doctoral dissertation under the
supervision of the Neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen, the head of the
‘Marburg school’.
10
His thesis on ‘Die Atomistik und Faradays Begriff der Materie:
eine logische Untersuchung’ (Atomism and Faraday’s notion of matter: a logical
analysis) (Buek 1905a; see also Buek 1904 and 1912) won him a prize essay
competition Around Cohen and Paul Natorp in Marburg a Kantian-socialist group
had formed, which included Robert Michels, Kurt Eisner and Otto Buek, and which
sympathised with syndicalism and anarchism, drawing inspiration in particular
from Tolstoy’s works (Hanke 1993: 130). During his time in Marburg Buek also
contributed to the election campaign of his friend Robert Michels, who ran as a
candidate for the German Reichstag as a representative of the syndicalist faction of
the Social Democrats.
In 1905 Buek moved to Berlin, where he lived a bohemian life as a private
scholar and intellectual, earning his living as an editor, translator and journalist. He
edited, co-edited and translated, inter alia, a German edition of Gogol’s works
(8 vols, 1909–1912) and a German edition of Turgenev’s collected works (12 vols,
1910–1931; jointly with Kurt Wildhagen). He was also involved in the editorial
work for Ernst Cassirer’s monumental edition of Immanuel Kant’s works.
Moreover, he also edited and translated Alexander Herzen’s Erinnerungen and
several of Tolstoy’s novels (from Russian into German), as well as the works of
Unamuno (from Spanish into German). In the 1920s, he was the European
correspondent of the Argentinian newspaper La Nacion.
Buek and Charasoff presumably met during their study period in Heidelberg.
From the summer term 1898 until the end of the summer term 1899 Buek took
residence in Gaisbergstrasse 27, where Georg von Charasoff had already resided
since the winter term 1897-98. Whether Buek’s move to Gaisbergstrasse 27 was
motivated by an already existing friendship between the two men, or whether the
latter formed only afterwards, could not be ascertained. Buek’s circle of friends and
acquaintances from his student days in Heidelberg included Georg Friedrich
Nicolai from St Petersburg, then a medical student, whom he later supported in his
peace initiatives, and the bohemian, philosopher and journalist, Kurt Wildhagen.
In Berlin, where he lived from 1905 to 1933, Buek belonged to the circle around
Alfred Richard Meyer, who was one of the major figures in the German arts and
literature scene at the beginning of the twentieth century. Buek had close contacts
with a large number of intellectuals, artists and writers, many of whom had radical
left-wing or anarchistic leanings. He was a close friend of the anarchist writer
Senna Hoy (pseudonym of Johannes Holzmann)
11
and of Franz Pfemfert, the editor
of the literary-political journal
Die Aktion (see Pfemfert 1911-32). Buek’s circle of
friends also included the publisher Max Brod, the expressionist poet (and later
minister of culture and education in the GDR) Johannes R. Becher, and the
philosopher, Ernst Cassirer.
In the summer of 1905 Buek travelled to Zurich, where he met with the Swiss
anarchists Fritz Brupbacher, Max Tobler and Raphael Friedeberg in order to
discuss the founding of an anarchistic journal. In the autumn he briefly returned to
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