Ernest Untermann

Gerhard Ernest Untermann, Sr. (1864–1956) was a German-American seaman, socialist author, translator, newspaper editor. In his later life he was Director of the old Washington Park Zoo in Milwaukee, a geologist, fossil hunter, and artist.

Ernest was born in Brandenburg, Prussia (Germany) on November 6, 1864. He studied geology and paleontology at the University of Berlin. Upon graduation, he later recalled that he was "drafted into the great army of the unemployed before I had done a stroke of useful work. Society had trained me for intellectual tasks, but had failed to provide for employment." Untermann took work as a deckhand on a German steamer sailing to New York City, and thus he was exposed to America for the first time. Untermann subsequently took several trips around the world working on German, Spanish, and American sailing vessels. In the course of his nautical adventures, Untermann was shipwrecked three times, thus exposing him to life in the Philippine Islands and China firsthand. In the third incident, he narrowly escaped with his life when his own vessel went down in the North Sea.

Following these events, Untermann was briefly in the German military, an interlude which he later recalled to be decisive in his political radicalization:

"I had learned the truth of economic determinism and of the class struggle without knowing these terms. But I still clung to the illusion of patriotism. The drillmasters of Billy the Versatile cured me of that. The class line in all its brutal nakedness became visible to me. The tyrannical and insolent arrogance of the demigods with shoulder straps roused my spirit of independence to its climax. An affront, a blow, a courtmartial, closed my military career and fixed in my mind one aim — the abolition of the ruling class."

Untermann briefly returned to the University of Berlin for post graduate courses, but later said this only "showed me the rottenness of the intellectual elite of Germany." Still, it was at this time that Untermann first came into contact with the Social Democratic newspaper Vorwärts ("Forward") and various other Marxist books and leaflets, which gave concrete political form to his emerging radicalism.

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