Bruno Snell

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Bruno Snell (born June 18, 1896 in Hildesheim , † October 31, 1986 in Hamburg ) was a classical philologist , university professor, university dean and rector. He worked primarily as a Graecist .

Life

Bruno Snell was born the son of the psychiatrist Otto Snell (1859-1939). The graduate of the Johanneum Lüneburg first studied law and economics in Edinburgh and Oxford . Snell was in England when the First World War broke out and remained there as an English civilian prisoner during the war. He then turned to studying classical philology in Leiden , Berlin , Munich and Göttingen . After receiving his doctorate in Göttingen in 1922, he completed his habilitation in 1925 at the University of Hamburg on the intellectual-historical position of the Aeschylean tragedy . He then went to Pisa as a German lecturer . From 1931 to 1959 he held the chair for Classical Philology in Hamburg. In 1944 he founded the research center " Thesaurus Linguae Graecae ", which is still working today .

Snell was a staunch opponent of National Socialism. In 1935 he used a miscarriage in the magazine Hermes in order to take a barely hidden position against Hitler's policies and against his compatriots' following along. There he pointed out that in the ancient Greek language - unlike in Latin and German - the utterance of the donkey was articulated with "Oo". This was reproduced with a particularly long omega , which - according to Snell - was clearly recognizable for every Greek as “uh, uh” (οὐ, οὐ), a word that means “no” in Greek. The difference between Oo and οὐ-οὐ is “only a slight deviation, which the Greeks noticed even less than we did”, since the first letter of the verb with which the call of the donkey is named, namely ὀγκᾶσται , was also called οὖ. Thus the donkey could appear naysayers. Snell concluded his remarks with the remark: “It turns out that the only real word that a Greek donkey could speak was the word for 'no', while curiously the other way round, the German donkey always only say 'yes'. “He was referring to the posters with which the Nazi government had advertised on advertising pillars and public buildings throughout the country for the“ yes ”to Hitler's election as Reich President in 1934. 89.9% of the Germans had approved the law to unite the offices of the Reich President and the Reich Chancellor. In the reprint of the text in the context of Snell's 1966 'Gesammelte Schriften', he explained the background and the 'actual' meaning of the article.

From 1945 to 1946, Snell was the first dean to head the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Hamburg after the Second World War, and from 1951 to 1953 he was its rector. In addition, he played a major role in the establishment of the Joachim Jungius Society of Sciences in 1947 and in the founding of the Mommsen Society in 1950. Furthermore, on Snell's initiative, the Europa-Kolleg Hamburg was founded in 1953 . Snell was also a leader in the Hamburg office of the Congress for Cultural Freedom .

Snell's work is characterized by meticulous metric analysis and careful consideration of papyrus finds. He created editions of the Bakchylides and the Pindar as well as two volumes of the Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta . He also founded the lexicon of the early Greek epic . Snell was a member of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen , Munich, Vienna, Copenhagen, London , the German Academy for Language and Poetry and the PEN. He was co-editor of the journals Philologus , Antike und Abendland and Glotta .

Anonymous urn grove at the Riedemann mausoleum,
Ohlsdorf cemetery

In 1975 he received the Austrian Decoration of Honor for Science and Art . In 1977 he became a member of the Pour le mérite order for sciences and arts . In memory of Bruno Snell, the Mommsen Society has awarded the Bruno Snell Prize annually since 1989 for outstanding work by young researchers in the field of Greco-Roman antiquity.

About the importance of ancient Greece, Snell stated: “Our European thinking starts with the Greeks. (...) Strictly speaking, this relationship between language and scientific concept formation can only be observed in Greek, since only here the concepts have organically outgrown the language: only in Greece did theoretical awareness develop independently, ... all other languages ​​draw on it, have borrowed, translated, what was received trained. "

Bruno Snell was buried in the Hamburg cemetery Ohlsdorf , grid square AD 10 ( anonymous urn grove in front of the Riedemann mausoleum across from Chapel 8).

Fonts (selection)

  • Lives and Opinions of the Seven Wise Men. Greek and Latin sources from 2000 years. With the German broadcast. Heimeran, Munich 1938.
  • The discovery of the mind. Studies on the origin of European thought among the Greeks. Claassen & Goverts, Hamburg 1946.
  • The structure of the language. Claassen, Hamburg 1952.
  • Greek metrics (= study books on classical studies. H. 1, ZDB -ID 503258-1 ). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1955.

literature

  • In memory of Bruno Snell (1896–1986). Speeches at the academic commemoration on January 30, 1987 (= Hamburg University Speeches . Volume 46). Press office of the University of Hamburg, Hamburg 1988.
  • Ernst Vogt : Bruno Snell: June 18, 1896 - October 31, 1986. In: Yearbook of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. Born in 1989, Munich 1990, pp. 198–202.
  • Ernst Vogt:  Snell, Bruno. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 24, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-428-11205-0 , p. 518 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Tobias Joho: Snell, Bruno. In: Peter Kuhlmann , Helmuth Schneider (Hrsg.): History of the ancient sciences. Biographical Lexicon (= The New Pauly . Supplements. Volume 6). Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2012, ISBN 978-3-476-02033-8 , Sp. 1170–1172.
  • Gerhard Lohse: Bruno Snell and Hermann Fränkel. For an appointment procedure at the University of Hamburg 1930/31. In: Antiquity and the Occident . Volume 60, 2014, pp. 1-20.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Personal data of teachers in Prussia ( Memento from January 3, 2017 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ Bruno Snell: The I-Ah of the golden donkey. In: Hermes 70, 1935, p. 355 f.
  3. ↑ See Dirk Werle: Changieren. Ernesto Grassi's conception of 'humanism' (1935-1942) . In: Andrea Albrecht et al. (Ed.): The academic "Berlin-Rome axis"? Berlin / Boston 2017, here: p. 198, note 49; Hans Peter Obermayer: German ancient scholars in American exile. A reconstruction. Berlin / Boston 2014, p. 305.
  4. ↑ Bruno Snell: The discovery of the spirit , Göttingen 1986, p. 7, 205.
  5. ↑ Celebrity Graves
personal data
SURNAME Snell, Bruno
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German classical philologist
DATE OF BIRTH June 18, 1896
PLACE OF BIRTH Hildesheim
DATE OF DEATH October 31, 1986
Place of death Hamburg