Talk:Walter W. Marseille

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This article baffles me, and I am usually a perceptive person. It was the personal project of User:Milt who is long-gone. Google suggests that this man existed, at least, and might be notable, although his main claim to fame is that Bertrand Russell wrote him a letter. But it is very poor form to write that "details of Marseille's personal and private life have yet to be discovered". The passive voice implies that no-one in the entire world has discovered details etc. What is he a doctor of? Physics? Crumbs. Lupine Proletariat 12:08, 24 May 2006 (UTC)

Frankly, I could find so little about WWM that I began to doubt his existence. The details that are now preserved in the stub settle that question. Milt 01:58, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

Walter Marseille was a pupil of Martin Heidegger with whom he doctorated in 1926 at Marburg university. Further information is given by his friend Karl Löwith. He tells us, that Marseille left Germany in 1933, went to Vienna, where he married a woman of Jewish origin and than emigrated to the United States. Literature: Karl Löwith, Mein Leben in Deutschland, p. 59

More info

Alright so I just came here to rate the importance of this article to psych. And then I hyperfocussed. Firstly, what's the source on his middle name because god I tried to find it. What I'm calling his academic period (it's basically just when he was in Germany and Austria):

• Walther Marseille writes a dissertation on graphology terms at the Philipps University of Marburg in Germany. I have no idea if it was ever published in an actual journal. [1]
• Walther Marseille writes a bunch of journal articles in Vienna - here's a list of a bunch of them (but not all).
• He attends some philosophy lectures in Vienna: I found a couple of books on phenomenology that mention him as being significant to the field (not sure how this related to his psych research but sure). [2] [3]
• A random thing I found - a printed card with what I suspect is a poem on it. It has his name, in Vienna, at the right time. It also has a family member called "Hansi Marseille". This could be a sibling, cousin, etc. It could also be the woman he's married to. Apparently Hansi is a diminutive form of Hans (so a masculine name) and a feminine form of Hans, so that person's gender can't even be established.
• During this time, he invented a game called Five-suit bridge with the help of Paul Stern (there's a bunch of citations in the WP article on it that show this). Some sources call him Walther; some call him Walter. This is likely because the cited articles were written in English and some probably just anglicised his name.

What I'm calling his international relations period (basically just when he was in the US).

• The 1940 US federal census lists him as being in Manhattan. This is the first instance I found of him being "Walter W. Marseille". It appears that he anglicised his name on moving to the US. It also lists his wife, Mary H. Marseille. There's a bunch of other info on here, like their ages (she was 20 and he was 38; oof), country of birth (I think his wife is from Texas? Maybe he got remarried), occupation (he's a psychologist).
• At some point he probably moved to California - he's listed as joining a Cali politics discussion club in 1947, in their records for 1946-7.
• He had some publication in a journal, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (not the greatest source if you're looking for actual research on atomic issues) - e.g. [4] [5]. I will note that these are opinion pieces and letters to the editor, so not super scientific or even important.
  • sometimes his opinions were controversial, and later there would be a bunch of responses - e.g. [6]
• Then there's some actual papers (not sure which if any of them would be RS)
  • A book on Herman Kahn (seems to at least be a reliable publisher)
  • A book, it describes his relevance to Bertrand Russell (in Finnish but easy to copy-paste into google translate; seems to at least be a reliable publisher)
  • A dissertation that mentions him in a footnote (no idea if it ever got published in a journal, I simply didn't check).

I'm not a history-inclined person. I don't have any idea of what archives to check. Someone more experienced than me can almost certainly find more/better, but this should at least allow some elaboration on the current article, for anyone that cares to do it. --Xurizuri (talk) 23:25, 30 September 2021 (UTC)