SERING, MAX°

SERING, MAX° (1857–1939), German agricultural economist. Sering, who was born in Barby, taught in Bonn and, after 1889, in Berlin. He cooperated with walter rathenau in organizing Germany's essential materials policy in World War I. In drafting the German Siedlungsgesetz (farmers' settlement law) of 1919, his views prevailed over those of franz oppenheimer , whose emphasis was on agricultural producers' cooperatives. Having opposed racial discrimination in German agricultural legislation after 1933, Sering was vilified by the stuermer on account of his part-Jewish ancestry. One of the relatively few active German resisters of the Nazis, he transferred his research institute's comprehensive library to the International Conference for Agrarian Science, thus protecting it from confiscation. A member of Pastor Niemoeller's Confessional Church, he stood by his Jewish former students. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: Dietze, in: Berichte ueber Landwirtschaft, 168 (1957). (Hanns G. Reissner)