Schaumann, Herbert

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Born in 1909 in East Prussia, Dr. Herbert Fran(z) Ferdinand Schaumann came to the United States in 1930 while affiliated with the University of Berlin. Schaumann was part of a team of two sent on the U. S. Debating Tour that year from the German English Speaking Union's Centre for Speech and Debate. Schaumann remained in the United States and earned his bachelor's degree from Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. After completing his bachelor's degree, Schaumann then moved on to Cornell University where he received his Ph. D. in 1936. His dissertation, Fundamental Characteristics of German-American Lyrics, is a study of the theme of homesickness in German-American lyrics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the same year Schaumann earned his Ph. D., he began his teaching career at Goucher College in Towson, Maryland, where he taught German until he began his service in the United States Army during World War II.

In 1944, Schaumann met Katherine Anne Porter at a party in Washington, D.C., where she was living. The two maintained a relationship, primarily through correspondence, seeing each other rather infrequently even before Porter left Washington in September 1944. In 1945, due to an injury, Schaumann spent some time in the hospital at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. He was released from the army in 1945 soon after the dropping of the first atomic bomb. Upon leaving the service, Schaumann accepted a teaching post at the University of Maryland where he taught Comparative Literature and Creative Writing. Between the time they met and July 1946, when Schaumann visited Porter in California, they developed an intimate relationship that ceased abruptly when he revealed his homosexuality to her during that visit.

During their relationship Porter tried, unsuccessfully, to peddle Schaumann's poetry. In turn, Schaumann read and critiqued some of Porter's manuscripts created during this period. In 1956 Schaumann published a translation, Odysseus & Calypso, of Book Five of Homer's The Odyssey . Also, some of the poems mentioned in the correspondence between Porter and Schaumann were later published in several literary magazines (e.g. Voices, Poetry, University of Kansas Review, Briarcliff Quarterly, Recuerdo, and Views ). These poems were also included as part of Schaumann's book Children on a Doorstep published in 1961 by Views Associates Press in Washington, D.C.

Schaumann was an active member of the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore and contributed an essay to the published volume, Poe in Foreign Lands and Tongues, the product of a symposium held at the nineteenth annual commemoration of the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore in Westminster Church, January 19, 1941. Also Schaumann edited the poetry journal Palinurus, a single issue of which was published in April 1959. Schaumann retired from the University of Maryland as an associate professor in 1971 and died July 18, 1982, at the Veterans Memorial Hospital (Washington, D.C.) from leukemia.

From the guide to the Herbert Schaumann papers, 1941-1947, 1944-1947, (Literature and Rare Books)

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