Jean Gottmann

Gottmann married Bernice Adelson in 1957.

On February 28, 1994, he passed away at the age of 78 years at his home in Oxford, England, after suffering from cancer.

He was born on October 23, 1915, in Kharkov, Ukraine, Russian Empire in a Jewish industrialist family to Elie Gottmann and Sonia-Fanny Ettinger as their only child. His parents were assassinated in February 1918 after the 1917 ‘Russian Revolution’.

He was adopted and raised by his aunt Emily Gottmann and uncle Michel Berchin, with whom he fled to Paris in 1921.

He studied in the Sorbonne and during his student life came under the guidance of French geographer Albert Demangeon and remained one of the latter’s closest collaborators.

In 1937 he became a research assistant in economic geography at the ‘University of Paris’ under the supervision of Albert Demangeon. However in 1941 his career in France was suddenly impeded by the ‘World War II’ and he had to give up the position following the invasion of Nazis in France and the 1940 Statute of Jews that prevented him from holding public job.

On December 7, 1941, the day when the Japanese conducted surprise aerial attack on the United States’ Pearl Harbor naval base on the Oahu Island, Hawaii, Gottmann landed in the United States.

For the next thirty years he relocated himself in several cities in America and Europe holding various research, teaching and political positions.

After receiving a fellowship from the ‘Rockefeller Foundation’ he attended the ‘Institute for Advanced Study’ in Princeton, New Jersey. From 1942 to 1965 he remained an associate researcher at the institute.

He joined the ‘La France Libre’, the government-in-exile, which was led by French military general and statesman Charles de Gaulle during the ‘World War II’. During that time he also joined the ousted academic community of France who were teaching at the private research university in New York City, the ‘New School for Social Research’.