Karl Duncker, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

Karl Duncker

German psychologist

Date of Birth: 02-Feb-1903

Place of Birth: Leipzig, Leipzig District, Germany

Date of Death: 23-Feb-1940

Profession: psychologist, university teacher

Nationality: Germany

Zodiac Sign: Aquarius

Karl Duncker (2 February 1903, in Leipzig – 23 February 1940) was a Gestalt psychologist.
He attended Friedrich-Wilhelms-University from 1923 to 1923, and spent 1925–1926 at Clark University in Worcester, MA as a visiting professor, where he received a masters in arts degree.
Until 1935 he was a student and assistant of the founders of Gestalt psychology in Berlin: Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka. In 1935, exiled by the Nazis, he got an assistantship in Cambridge with Frederic Charles Bartlett and later immigrated to the US, where he was again an assistant of Wolfgang Köhler’s at Swarthmore College.
He committed suicide in 1940 at 37 years of age.
He had been suffering from depression for some time and had received professional treatment. His younger brother Wolfgang Duncker (1909-1942), a communist in exile in Moscow, was arrested in 1938 during the Great Purges and died in the Gulag.
Their parents were the well-known socialist and later communist propagandists Hermann and Käte Duncker.