Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff

Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff , born on December 22nd, 1848 in Gut-Markowitz, in Posnanie, close to Mogilno, † on September 25th, 1931 with Berlin was one of most famous the German philologists.

Biography

Formation

Wilamowitz-Moellendorff was the third child of an aristocratic family of Posnanie, area located at the east of the Brandebourg, auj. in Poland. He attended the college of Pforta, one of most famous of Germany for the traditional studies (rhetoric, Latin, Greek), and obtained his baccalaureat in 1867. He specialized in traditional philology and attended the university of Bonn until 1869, where it was interested particularly in teaching of Otto Jahn and Hermann Usener. While its relations with this last professor remained always tended, and that it developed a wild competition with his school-fellow Nietzsche, it tied a durable friendship with Hermann Diels, which had the same age as him. Together, they left Bonn for Berlin and in 1870 Wilamowitz the doctorate of philosophy obtained. Volunteer in the Prussian army during the War of 1870, it made then a trip study in Italy and Greece.

Polemic with Nietzsche

On its return, it started a polemic noticed while being attacked, in two make out violent one, with the thesis of Nietzsche, the Birth of the tragedy . By these make out, published in a volume under the futuristic title of Philologie ( Zukunftsphilologie! ), an graduate dared to attack professor Erwin Rohde, of the university of Kiel, and with its student very right ability to be taught (Nietzsche). Richard Wagner, that the theory of Nietzsche consolidated in its esthetic designs, mixed with the quarrel by an open letter with the press. On the bottom, Nietzsche and Rohde disparaged the work of Euripide, in which they saw the decline and the disappearance of the initial spirit of the Greek tragedy. Wilamowitz on its side looked at the thesis of Nietzsche as an attack against the bases even of the rational thought; its make out claimed to defend traditional philology against a conjecture iconoclast. Wilamowitz recognized much later in its Mémoires that this quarrel was resulted ultimately from a misunderstanding.

Professor of university

Wilamowitz supported its thesis of enabling, devoted to the Analecta Euripidea , in 1875, and pronounced this same year its inaugural lesson like Privatdozent in Berlin. Its career from now on is very traced:

1876 - appointed traditional professor of philology at the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt university of Greifswald.
1878 - He marries the girl of the historian Theodor Mommsen.
1883 - Obtains the traditional pulpit of philology and history of Antiquity to the Université of Göttingen. It will make call a little later his former colleague of the university of Greifswald, Wellhausen (1844-1918), instigator in biblical philology of the documentary Hypothèse, as professor of theology in this same establishment.
1891 - assistant vice-chancellor of the university, corresponding member of the Academy of Science of Prussia.
1892 - member of the scientific association of Göttingen, for which it writes a Latin dictionary, Thesaurus Linguae Latinae .
1897 - Appointed professor of the Frederic-Guillaume university of Berlin, posts that it preserved until 1921, date on which it obtained the distinction of professor emeritus. Many people were pressed with its twice-weekly conferences on the ancient history.
1899 - Member of the Academy of Science of Prussia, from which he becomes president in 1902. On this station, it supported the drafting of a collection of Greek epigraphy.

International recognition

Wilamowitz was invited to pronounce conferences at the universities of Oxford (1908) and Uppsala (1912). It was named corresponding member of the academy of Oslo in 1909. On the other hand, the climate of revenge which reigned in France made that only the researchers knew the work of the Prussian philologist. It is besides the conscience of the delay of French philology on the German scholarship antiquisante, whose Wilamowitz had been one of the most important contributors, and the dependence of the French-speaking researchers with respect to the translations and Germanic research, which caused the creation of the Association Guillaume Budé right before the First World War.

Anecdote

In its novel Siegfried and the Limousin (chap. 1), Jean Giraudoux turns in Wilamowitz derision by making some the plagiarist of a French scholar in retirement, reconverted into the journalism of opposition… It should be said that Wilamowitz, little before the war, had launched a petition near the students in favor of the entry in war of Germany, petition which had collected 3016 signatures. In the same spirit, it was one of the signatories of the Manifeste of the 93 supporting the German point of view at the beginning of the First World War.

Works

Wilamowitz, across its nationalist standpoint, is a central figure of the traditional philology of XIXe and XXe centuries. Expert of the Greek literature, it opposed the textual Critique of Friedrich August Wolf and Karl Lachmann: representative of the neo-classicism, it preferred with the history of the texts, a rebuilding of the biography of the authors starting from their works. In addition to its courses (Greek literature of Antiquity, hellenistic poetry), it gave famous critical editions of Euripide, Homère, Eschyle, Pindare and Aristote published in the Teubner editions, and that one finds still today quoted in any edition of these authors.

Homerische Studien , 1878, Berlin
Aristoteles: Aristoteles und Athen , 2 vol., Berlin, 1916.
Vitæ Homeri and Hesiodi , Bonn, 1916
What a tragedy attic? Introduction to the Greek tragedy , Beautiful Letters, 2001.

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