Waldemar  Kumming

Waldemar Kumming was born in 1924 in Berlin and trained as a communications engineer. During the Second World War he served on the Eastern and Western Fronts, where he was wounded before being taken prisoner by American forces. After the war he worked for Radio Free Europe in Munich, a post that kept him from returning to Berlin during the Cold War. He joined the Science Fiction Club Deutschland (SFCD) in 1956, one of the first national science fiction associations in Europe, and soon began recording conventions to create the club’s phonothek, an archive of fan culture in its early years. In 1962 he was elected chairman, guiding the organization through a period of division and reunification until 1968. In parallel he launched the fanzine Munich Round Up in 1958, which became his central project for more than five decades.

Munich Round Up developed from a satirical club newsletter into one of the most influential fanzines in Europe. Edited first with Heinz Fries and later with Walter Reinecke, the magazine became a focal point of German fandom. Across 179 issues published through 2014, it combined satire, translations, and detailed convention reports, printing German versions of Bob Shaw’s fan writings with illustrations by Jim Barker and translations by Gary Klüpfel, and in later years appeared in bilingual editions that linked German fandom with an international readership. One of its most distinctive issues, MRU No. 119 (June 1971), featured Herbert W. Franke’s essay Das Programm DRAKULA together with computer-generated inserts from his DRAKULA plotter series, placing experimental computer art side by side with contributions from John Brunner, Forrest J Ackerman, and Donald A. Wollheim. For his work on Munich Round Up and his wider role in sustaining fan culture, Kumming received the European Science Fiction Society Special Award in 1980, the Deutscher Fantasy Preis in 1986, the Kurd Laßwitz Special Award in 1993, and the Big Heart Award at the 2005 Worldcon in Glasgow. Kumming passed away in 2017.