Max Wehrli

Max Wehrli (born September 17, 1909 in Zurich ; † December 18, 1998 ibid) was a Swiss literary scholar and Germanist.

Life

Max Wehrli studied German and Greek from 1928 to 1935 at the universities of Zurich and Berlin (summer semester 1931). At that time, his teachers included Emil Ermatinger , Albert Bachmann , Ernst Howald (all from Zurich), Arthur Hübner and Nicolai Hartmann (both from Berlin). In 1935 he received his doctorate in Zurich with the thesis Johann Jakob Bodmer and the history of literature , and in 1937 he completed his habilitation with the study The baroque historical image in Lohenstein's Arminius . Since his habilitation and after the war he was initially a private lecturer, in 1946 titular professor and from 1947, as the successor to Robert Faesi, extraordinary professor for older German literature. In 1953 he was appointed full professor for the history of German literature from the beginnings to 1700. With his appointment, the chair was officially expanded to include a subject that is included in modern German studies at all other universities, but has been one of Wehrli's core interests since the earliest publications: the 16th and 17th centuries. Max Wehrli spent the summer semester of 1955 as a visiting professor at Columbia University in New York. From 1965 to 1967 he was dean of his faculty and from 1970 to 1972 rector of the University of Zurich . In 1973, one year before his retirement, he became President of the Swiss University Rectors' Conference, which he chaired until 1977.

Max Wehrli's students include: a .: Martin Bircher , Harald Burger , Peter Maurice Daly, Eleonore Frey-Staiger , Alois Maria Haas , Urs Herzog , Paul Michel , Klara Obermüller , Peter Rusterholz, Sibylle Rusterholz and Rosmarie Zeller-Thumm.

Fields of work

Max Wehrli's major project was to develop a context of understanding for the premodern German-language literary tradition before it was constituted in the 18th century as an autonomous literary system encompassing all genres and types. His teaching and research focus in this context included the High Middle Ages , the Baroque , Zurich as a city of culture from the Middle Ages to modern times , poetology and, above all, the history of literature . After all, his interest in contemporary literature is known. Max Wehrli was also the editor or co-editor of numerous scientific series, encyclopedias, handbooks and commemorative publications. His work as an editor and translator of literary works of the Middle Ages and the Baroque era should also be emphasized, some of which were included in the “ Manesse Library of World Literature ” series and thus made accessible to the general public.

Research priorities

Three research areas are particularly noteworthy:

Poetology

Max Wehrli's early work “Allgemeine Literaturwissenschaft” from 1951, in which he summarizes and critically reports on the state of German studies of his time, is divided into two main chapters, “ Poetics ” and “Literary History”. These two “interests” can be understood as characteristic of his literary work. However, they cannot be easily combined with one another, but rather create a field of tension: In 1951, under “Poetics”, Wehrli summarized the question of the relationship between form and content, part and whole, which was considered an indissoluble unit, which was influenced by the interpretation of his time. In the chapter entitled "Literary History", Wehrli criticizes this position as ahistorical, as it is based too strongly on the closed individual text and takes too little account of the traditional forms. Instead, he calls for epochs or styles to be viewed as independent "poetic quantities" and to analyze their internal relationships and dynamics. The systematic analysis of the “poetics” of an individual text thus gains legitimacy only when it is also understood as part of the “poetics” of an epoch or a literary historical movement. This leads to a dialectical interplay of a historical and a systematic approach, which Wehrli will call "poetological" in his later writings. Especially in his last book Literature in the German Middle Ages. A poetological introduction (1984, current edition 2006) systematically unfolds the educational and media history, literary sociological-institutional, philosophical-theological, rhetorical, aesthetic, hermeneutic and form-historical contexts in which the historicity of literature can be described.

Literary history

With the basic attitude of always placing the “indispensable historical character” of literary works at the center of observation, Max Wehrli explicitly distances himself from the idea that art is something timeless and that “aesthetic perfection is only possible against history” - there is, so Wehrli, “nothing more ephemeral than the supposedly timeless art”. Wehrli sees the conditions for understanding such a past work in his concept of the poetological-hermeneutic discussion, the dialectical encounter between the recipient's own current situation and the historical strangeness of the object. «The risk of every literary-historical understanding consists in realizing a living reference to the present and at the same time seeing the object entirely from within itself in its historical condition. It is important to see the works of the past, especially medieval literature, as something foreign, completely different, following the law of the times, and at the same time, by willing listening, to experience them as something that is one's own, something that cannot be lost, even something that is current. " Wehrli counters the teleological suspicion to which every chronologically structured representation of a historical course is exposed with a differentiation dictum: In fact, it would be "pointless to speak of progress or decay and then to evaluate it". Methodically, however, it is indispensable that literary historiography constructs an internal historical context in the act of disposition and structuring of the material - just as it presents itself to the author of literary history: «A meaning of history cannot be named for literature, at least scientifically. At most we can postulate it on the basis of the observation that, despite all the darkness and chaos, the historical course always shows traits and a direction. " The great importance that the categories of totality, synthesis and continuum occupy in Wehrli's methodological explanations at the same time necessitates a drastic relativization: literary historiography as a reconstruction of a historical context can never claim full scientificity. It occupies a "dubious position" between science and art, the legitimation of which is always questionable due to the subjective selection and the creation of coherence.

epoch

Max Wehrli's historical-poetological approach requires a specific understanding of the epoch. The expansion of the subject of older German literature to include literature up to 1700 at the University of Zurich is, in addition to individual preference, primarily a scientific program. It is about the problem of bringing older German literature into a context of understanding; A classification of the early literary evidence, which can only be grasped discontinuously and fragmentarily, only developed from close ties to a likewise fragmentary traditional field of Latin tradition and from heterogeneous references to oral vernacular tradition, and which are initially far removed from an institutionalized, autonomous one To represent the literature system. The methodical program of always encountering literature in the interplay of historical situation and systematic classification required an analytical view that necessarily had to go beyond the technical and administrative boundaries of university operations. The specific concept of epoch results from the research subject of the “history of the emergence, integration and change of such a - never autonomous, always open - [literary] system. It is the story of the merging of isolated monuments, of the various approaches and attempts to create a causal relationship or at least a meaningful constellation, the formation of certain traditions with their specific forms and functions, always in contrast to pan-European Latin and the other vernacular languages ​​in Europe. The decisive factor is not the idea of ​​a national spirit or some other mysterious greatness, but the simple fact that a literary system according to types, rhetorical forms, metrical orders and word meanings is necessarily supported by a language that is built up at the same time (in every sense). " This epoch of German literature did not end until the 18th century, or even later, after the decline of scientific Latin. With this in mind, the subject of Older German Literature at the University of Zurich was programmed from the beginnings to around 1700.

Awards and memberships

Max Wehrli's academic work has received numerous honors and awards at home and abroad: Honorary Member of the Modern Language Association of America (1964), corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences in Heidelberg (1977), Göttingen (1981) and Munich (1983) ), Winner of the gold medal of the Goethe Institute (1970), the Canton of Zurich (1972) and the Gottfried Keller Prize of the Martin Bodmer Foundation (1979). In addition, Max Wehrli was visiting professor at Columbia University New York in 1955 , and in 1986 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Munich .

Fonts

• Johann Jakob Bodmer and the history of literature. Zurich, Phil. I Sect., Diss. Frauenfeld, Leipzig 1936.
• The baroque image of history in Lohenstein's Arminius. Frauenfeld, Leipzig 1938.
• General literary studies. Bern 1951.
• Forms of medieval narrative: essays. Zurich 1969.
• History of German literature from the beginning to the end of the 16th century. Stuttgart 1980.
• Literature in the German Middle Ages: a poetological introduction. Stuttgart 1984.
• Fritz Wagner and Wolfgang Maaz (eds.): Max Wehrli: Humanism and Baroque. Hildesheim, Zurich 1993.
• Fritz Wagner and Wolfgang Maaz (eds.): Max Wehrli: Presence and Memory. Collected Essays. Hildesheim, Zurich 1998.

Editions and translations

• German baroque poetry. Selection and epilogue by Max Wehrli. Manesse, Zurich 1977, ISBN 3717515322 .
• German poetry of the Middle Ages. Selection and translation by Max Wehrli. Zurich 1955. 6th edition 1988.
• Jacob Bidermann: Cenodoxus. Edited by Max Wehrli. Düsseldorf 1958. (Reprint from: The German Drama from the Baroque to the Present. Volume 1. Ed. Benno von Wiese.)
• Jacob Bidermann: Philemon Martyr. Latin and German. Edited and translated by Max Wehrli. Olten, Cologne 1960.
• Jacob Balde. Seals. Latin and German. Edited and translated by Max Wehrli. Olten, Cologne 1963.
• with Friedrich Ohly : Julius Schwietering , Philologische Schriften. Munich 1969.
• History of Doctor Johann Faust. Edited and translated by Max Wehrli. Zurich 1986.
• Hartmann von Aue: Iwein. Translated from Middle High German, with comments and afterword by Max Wehrli. Zurich 1988.

literature

• Stefan Sonderegger, Alois M. Haas, Harald Burger: Typologia litterarum. Festschrift for Max Wehrli. Zurich 1969.
• Karl Bertau: Max Wehrli. September 17, 1909 - December 19, 1998. In: Bavarian Academy of Sciences, Munich. Yearbook 1999. pp. 259-263.
• Peter von Matt: In memoriam Max Wehrli. In: Middle Latin Yearbook. Vol. 34, 1, 1999, pp. 1-6.
• Wolfgang Harms, Max Wehrli: Wehrli, Max. In: Christoph König (ed.), With the collaboration of Birgit Wägenbaur u. a .: Internationales Germanistenlexikon 1800–1950 . Volume 3: R-Z. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2003, ISBN 3-11-015485-4 , pp. 1989–1990.

Web links

• Literature by and about Max Wehrli in the catalog of the German National Library
• Entry on Max Wehrli in Kalliope