Dr. med.
Paul Rosengart
1896 - 1962

“I, Paul Ludwig Heinrich Rosengart, was born in Frankfurt am Main on June 2, 1896, as the son of Dr. Josef Rosengart, a doctor of internal diseases. From April 1903, I attended the “Musterschule” secondary school in my hometown, which I left in August 1914 after passing the emergency school-leaving examination to join the German army as a war volunteer. At the beginning of September 1914, after brief military training with the 2nd Nass. Field Artillery Regiment No. 63 Frankfurt, I was put in the field until November 1914. Because of a knee injury I sustained in the field, I returned to a military hospital in Germany, from which I was discharged at the end of March 1915 as temporarily unfit for service. I now enrolled at the University of Frankfurt am Main and began my medical studies in the summer semester of 1915. I was drafted again in September 1915, interrupted my studies, and after infantry training with Inf. No. 81 in Frankfurt I was put back in the field beginning of March 1916. Wounded at Verdun on April 15, 1916, I was taken prisoner by the French, where I remained until June 1918. Then I was interned in Switzerland due to chronic malaria, which I had contracted in France. I remained there until November 1918 and was transferred back to Germany shortly before the outbreak of the revolution. After my release from the army soon afterwards, I resumed my medical studies at the University of Frankfurt am Main, where I remained for the entire duration of my studies. After the winter semester of 1919/20, I passed my Physikum, and after the winter semester of 1921/22, I passed my state medical examination”, said Paul Rosengart in his dissertation ‘On the effect of ether on the gastric mucosa’, which he submitted to Professor Dr. Gustav von Bergmann in Frankfurt am Main in 1922. He was supervised in his dissertation by Gerhardt Katsch, who more than thirty years later became chairman of the German Society for Digestive and Metabolic Diseases.

Paul Rosengart’s father, Dr. Josef (Joseph) Rosengart, born in 1860, ran an internal medicine practice at Reuterweg 81 in Frankfurt’s Westend district. Josef Rosengart had also been a member of the Society for Digestive and Metabolic Diseases since 1926. Paul Rosengart’s mother Wally, née Goldmann, was a niece of Dr. Fedor Mamroth, who was the editor of the “Frankfurter Zeitung” for a time.

Dr. Joseph Rosengart was good friends with the writer and later Nobel Prize winner Hermann Hesse. They met by chance during a hike in Switzerland. Hesse wrote about him in his autobiography: “During this short stay in our little village, Dr. Rosengart did not actually get close to me, but at least to the extent that much later, when a lecture by me was announced in his town, he invited me to his house on Reuterweg as a house guest. … For several years I had known Rosengart only as a friend and patron, as a good and witty conversationalist as well as dear host. Then came the day when I got to know him as a doctor, and he got to know me as a patient. In 1909, on a trip to northern Germany, I had, as I had many times before, days of severe indisposition, which I recognized as appendicitis. I wrote to my friend that I would like to visit him in Frankfurt on my way home and that this time I would like to consult him. He invited me and as soon as he looked at me, he advised me to have an operation, which a surgeon friend of his would perform. I agreed and was taken to hospital and operated on.”

During Paul Rosengart’s imprisonment in France and internment in Switzerland, Hermann Hesse provided him with literature. Throughout his life, Paul Rosengart was a great admirer of Hesse, which he expressed much later in letters to him: “And there is a magic in every ‘Hesse’ that protects me and helps me to live” he wrote to Hesse in 1952, echoing the verse from Hesse’s famous poem “Steps”.

In 1961, he described his first encounter with Hesse’s 1919 novel “Demian” in detail in a letter.

Education and Places of Work

Paul Rosengart completed his doctorate in the Medical Clinic under Gustav von Bergmann in Frankfurt am Main. He moved to Berlins Charité in 1927 and was succeeded in Frankfurt by Franz Volhard from Halle. After his state examination, Rosengart worked at the “Sanatorium Dr. Baumstark” in Bad Homburg, which, at the time, was specialized in metabolic diseases and still exists today as “Klinik Dr. Baumstark”.

In 1927, his father Dr. Joseph Rosengart passed away, and so he took over his late father’s Frankfurt practice as a specialist in internal medicine, specifically stomach and intestinal diseases, in the same year.

In 1925, he married Olga von Veltheim, née Schnitzler from Cologne, in Mehlem (now Bonn-Mehlem).

She was a godchild of Johannes Brahms and was married to Herbert von Veltheim, later Air Force Attaché at the German Embassy in Rome, until 1924. After the divorce, she lived in Frankfurt and Königstein im Taunus. Incidentally, her sister-in-law Hildegard from her first marriage was a daughter of the chemist and later (1912 – 1925) Bayer Director General Carl Friedrich Duisberg. Olga von Veltheim was not Jewish and remained in Germany in 1935. The marriage was divorced in 1940. The marriage law passed by the Nazis in 1938 favored the quick divorce of “mixed marriages”, probably also in this case. She had no children with Paul Rosengart, but two daughters from her first marriage to Herbert von Veltheim. She died in Cologne in 1970.

1933

Escape to Switzerland in 1935 and France in 1938

Rosengart had to flee to Switzerland in 1935. Further detailed biographical information can be found in Hermann Hesse’s autobiography: “But I must now also remember his son Paul, whom I got to know as a boy and who had to go to war in 1914 as a grammar school pupil or student. … Well, he survived the war, returned home, studied medicine, became a doctor and married a very lovely Aryan woman, took over his father’s house and practice after his death, and I was a guest there once again. … A few years later Hitler came to power, the young doctor had to leave his practice, house and wife behind and flee, went through bad times of misery, joined the French army at the beginning of the Second World War, it could have happened to him this time as a Frenchman to be taken prisoner by the Germans. But fortunately, this did not happen. Today he has a large practice in Strasbourg, and when he occasionally comes to Switzerland, he visits me, and we talk about Frankfurt and his parents and many other things that connect us.”

In Switzerland, Paul Rosengart lived in Massagno near Lugano and worked in a small chemical factory in nearby Melano. There, in 1937, he developed a “method for producing a double compound of 5.5 phenylethylbarbituric acid”, which he registered as a patent in the USA in 1939 with the German chemist Erich Rabald from Boehringer (Mannheim).

The fact that phenobarbital was one of the drugs used to deliberately kill the disabled in the Holocaust is a terrible circumstance: “During the Nazi era, phenobarbital was used to deliberately kill the sick and disabled. Hermann Paul Nitsche developed the Luminal scheme in the Leipzig-Dösen sanatorium in 1940, in which phenobarbital was injected three times a day for several days. The method of killing was inconspicuous, as the administration of phenobarbital as a sedative was common practice. About 60 patients died in the experiments in Dösen.” (Reinhard Tenhumberg).

Paul Rosengart was forced to leave Switzerland in 1938 and found refuge in France. In Paris, he met other German emigrants, including the publisher, Kurt Wolff. Decades earlier, Wolff had published Heinrich Mann’s “Der Untertan” alongside the works of Kafka, Trakl and others. It was only shortly before her death that Wolff and Rosengart encountered each other again in 1961 through the mediation of Hermann Hesse. At the end of 1939, Paul Rosengart joined the French army’s Foreign Legion and fought with them as a military doctor in France and Africa against Nazi Germany during the Second World War. He met Edmée Bickart, whom he married during the war in France in the “free zone”. Like other emigrants, he had to catch up on his French Abitur and at least part of his medical studies. Since the end of the 19th century and reinforced by several laws in the 1930s, the French state and medical organizations pursued a very restrictive policy towards the work and establishment of doctors not born in France. These measures were initially maintained after 1945. Paul Rosengart certainly benefited from his service in the French army throughout the war. He was granted French citizenship on January 7, 1947, and in the same year founded a new medical practice in Strasbourg under the name Paul Louis Henri Rosengart with a focus on gastroenterology in the Rue Auguste Lamey, very close to the Synagogue of Peace, which had been rebuilt in the 1950s.

He was regarded highly by patients and relatives and published his dissertation in French in 1947. In 1949, Edmée and Paul became the parents of Didier Rosengart. His widow Sophie Rosenzweig-Rosengart is a respected and award-winning journalist at ARTE and was a valuable support in the research for this biography.

Paul Rosengart’s family relations are interesting as well. His cousin Siegfried Rosengart, inspired by Paul’s father Joseph Rosengart, went to Switzerland as a gallery owner after the First World War and is the father of Angela Rosengart, who is still alive and runs a renowned art museum in Lucerne with the “Rosengart Foundation” and was portrayed several times by Picasso. There was also a distant relationship to Dr. Siegfried Thannhauser.

During his time in Strasbourg, Paul Rosengart exchanged letters with Hermann Hesse and visited him several times in Montagnola. Both passed away within a few months of each other in 1962.