Fritz heistemberg

FRITZ PRINGSHEIM (1882–1967)
Fritz Robert Pringsheim, patriot and legal scholar, came of a leading German Jewish family but greatly admired certain features of English life. Forced to leave Germany in 1939 he lived wholly or partly in Oxford for nearly twenty years. He returned to the Albert-Ludwig University at Freiburg im Breisgau, from which he had been dismissed in 1935, for a few weeks in the dark days of 1946. There, seeing a glimmer of hope at a time when hardly anyone else did, he at once set about infusing a new generation of students with a spirit of intellectual rigour and civic responsibility. Committed to this mission, he shuttled between Oxford and
Freiburg for twelve years, returning permanently to Germany in 1958. Drawing on the intellectual and moral resources of Jewish, German and English culture, he fostered the reeducation of Freiburg students, and the rebuilding of the faculty of law and government and indeed of the university as a whole.
I. FAMILY BACKGROUND
The Pringsheim family was wealthy and distinguished. It became prominent in the eighteenth century, in the time of Mendel ben Chaim Pringsheim, who with his brother belonged to the
Jewish community in the Principality of Oels, in lower Silesia. Under Frederick the Great of
Prussia, who reigned from 1740 to1786, Jews had an opportunity to flourish. From about
1753 Mendel leased the Schlossbrau-Urbars at Bierutów (then Bernstadt) . He built up the family fortune from brewing and brandy making. In the next century his descendant Alfred
Pringsheim the eminent Munich mathematician (1850–1941), was a leading intellectual and authority on Wagner. In 1905 Alfred’s beautiful and accomplished daughter Katya married
Thomas Mann. To the same generation belonged Ernst Pringsheim of Wroclav (then Breslau) a well-known physicist, (1859–1917), one of Max Planck’s immediate predecessors in the study of radiation.
Fritz Pringsheim was Alfred’s cousin. His grandfather on his father’s side