Ernst Wilfred Puttkammer
(1891-1978)
Ernst Wilfred Puttkammer, the only child of
a second son of a
Prussian noble family, was born January 31, 1891, in
parents took him to
cottage grew into a large Victorian summer house, and figured
prominently in Puttkammer's life and the lives of his
descendants..
Well-traveled and educated by tutors and
then at
was well-versed in Latin, Greek, French, German (in which he
was bi-lingual) and English, and was fond of music and history.
Not particularly interested in painting, he was known to have measured
the artistic merit of various paintings of St. Sebastian by the
numbers of arrows piercing the martyr's body. He developed a
major collection of American stamps and the world's most com-
prehensive collection of German Empire stamps, and
eventually
gave them to the Smithsonian Institution
After Princeton Puttkammer attended the University of Chi-
cago Law School where he earned his degree cum
laude as well as
being elected to the order of the coif, then was sent to
a private in the American Expeditionary Force. He served as a
front-line observer of enemy gun positions and troop movements.
On returning to
then was asked by the University of Chicago Law School
to
take a temporary post teaching criminal law. This position lasted
thirty-six years. He was known and appreciated by his students for
speaking concisely and accurately. He seldom raised his voice; his
choice of tone and words were more effective. I [Manly W. Mum-
ford] learned this when I had to tell him that I had previously re-
served the Cliff Dwellers for a private party, and had mailed the
invitations for the same date and time that the program chairman
of that club carelessly arranged for him to deliver a lecture.
Puttkammer wrote The Administration
of Criminal Law, a major
text on the subject. To learn how the criminal law really worked,
Puttkammer went through the
Then he wrote an effective handbook advising police about their
rights and the rights of their suspects. Much of his writing was
done at Mackinac, among grading examination papers and proof-
reading the Chicago Literary Club's yearbook.
Puttkammer married Helen Baum November
28, 1931, and
begat a daughter, Helen Lorna and a son, Charles Wilfred. The
daughter married Francis H. Straus II. This note is based on the
paper, A Victorian Man in Our Time, presented by Straus to the
Chicago Literary Club on March 15, 1982.
Puttkammer joined the Chicago Literary
Club in 1923 and de-
livered nineteen papers, of which three were published; he deliv-
ered two Ladies' Night papers. He traveled widely and
often. In
late 1977 he and his family toured
early in 1978, he and his wife went on a long cruise, during which
he died on a ship in the middle of the
Read before the Club: December 7, 1998