Robert Minder

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Carl Robert Minder (born August 23, 1902 in Wasselonne (German: Wasselnheim), † September 10, 1980 near Cannes ) was a French German scholar .

Life

Robert Minder's birthplace

Robert Minder was the son of the businessman Johann Carl Minder and his wife Lucia Minder nee Band. He comes from a family of small craftsmen and traders who originally came from Switzerland and had been based in Alsace since 1647 . The Minder family spoke the Alsatian dialect , and both parents were fluent in French. The environment in what was then the realm of Alsace-Lorraine was largely German-speaking. Minder attended the Johannes Sturm high school in Strasbourg , where he passed the French Baccalauréat with distinction in 1920 . During his school years he sang in a choir led by Hans Pfitzner . Between 1919 and 1921 he took piano and philosophy lessons from Albert Schweitzer , with whom he remained friends until his death.

In 1921, Minder was accepted into the École normal supérieure in Paris , where Lucien Herr , Charles Andler and Henri Lichtenberger are among his teachers. Among his fellow students were Alfred Kastler , Vladimir Jankélévitch , Jean Cavaillès , Paul Nizan and Jean-Paul Sartre (from 1924). Together with fellow students, Minder founded a Groupe d'information internationale , which invited well-known German writers with the intention of promoting rapprochement between France and Germany. The invitations were followed by Kurt Tucholsky , Thomas Mann , Heinrich Mann , Walter Mehring , Hugo von Hofmannsthal , Ernst Robert Curtius and others. In 1925, Minder met Alfred Adler , with whose individual psychology he worked intensively. In 1926 he passed the Agrégation in German and worked as a high school teacher in Grenoble until 1933 . He also worked as a German lecturer at the University of Strasbourg , where he met Marc Bloch , Lucien Febvre and Maurice Halbwachs .

In 1933, Minder became a high school teacher in Nancy and then a university lecturer. On September 20, 1934, Minder married Hélène Claire Mégret in Nancy, who died in 1937. In 1936 he completed his habilitation in Strasbourg with the work (Thèse principale) Un poète allemand: Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853) , his side work (Thèse complémentaire; in German) dealt with the religious development of Karl Philipp Moritz . In 1937, in Paris, Minder first met Alfred Döblin , who had emigrated to France , with whom he soon became friends and for whose literary recognition he repeatedly campaigned. The sudden death of his first wife, Hélène Mégret, plunged Minder into a deep personal crisis from which he only gradually recovered. In 1938 he was appointed professor at the University of Nancy . On September 16, 1939, he married Colette Audry in Paris, from whom he was divorced in 1945. With the outbreak of the Second World War , in Paris, Minder became an employee of the German section of the Commissariat Général à l'Information under the direction of Jean Giraudoux , in which Alfred Döblin and Kurt Wolff also worked. During the Sitzkrieg (French: Drôle de guerre ), this department had the task of counteracting the German propaganda controlled by Joseph Goebbels via loudspeaker systems on the front lines and radio . In 1940, Minder and the rest of his staff were evacuated to Cahors before the advancing German troops . In 1943 he was visiting professor at the University of Grenoble . In October 1943 he escaped the Gestapo's reach and went underground. In 1945 he returned to the chair in Nancy.

In 1948, Minder became a co-founder of the Comité français d'échanges avec l'Allemagne nouvelle in Paris. The first volume of his monograph Allemagnes et Allemands appeared. In 1949 he was appointed Knight of the Legion of Honor . In 1950 he was made a member of the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz and appointed to a professorship in German at the Sorbonne . In 1956 Robert Minder became literary director of the magazine Allemagne d'aujourd'hui , and in 1957 he was appointed to the chair of Langues et littératures d'origine germanique at the Collège de France .

From the mid-1950s on, Minder emerged as the author of essays on the history of culture and literature, and thus gained increasing attention in Germany. In addition to his teaching activities in France, he repeatedly expressed himself in lectures and broadcasts in German media on aspects of German and French literature.

The last years of Miner's life were burdened by frequent health problems. On Alfred Döblin's 100th birthday, Robert Minder published previously unknown details from his biography which, in his opinion, had a decisive influence on Döblin's literary work. Döblin's son Claude then initiated a defamation process against Minder. The preparations for the trial before the Berlin Supreme Court put a strain on Messer's already ailing health. He died of heart failure on the way to vacation on the Paris-Ventimiglia express train.

Work and meaning

In his book Allemagnes et Allemands , written immediately after the Second World War, Minder describes a general cultural history of Germany and the participation of the various German regions in national history. He draws on the considerations of the Austrian literary scholar Josef Nadler, who is controversial because of his partly ethnic views . The first volume of Minder's monograph deals only with the Rhineland . The work on the planned follow-up volumes (on Swabia, Lower Saxony, Bavaria and Prussia) occupied Minder for a long time, but did not lead to any more publications. In addition to methodological problems, the political development that has occurred in the meantime with the emergence of two German states also plays a role. But regionalist aspects also play an important role in his numerous courses, lectures and essays. As a comparative literary scholar , Minder repeatedly relates German and French literature. In terms of interdisciplinarity , he draws on contemporary suggestions from other fields of work such as sociology (e.g. the concepts of collective memory , the national symbol and the collective myth ) and psychoanalysis (in particular Alfred Adler's individual psychology) and turns this applies to literary developments and individual writers.

honors and awards

Publications

  • Why literature? Speeches and essays . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1982, ISBN 978-3-518-01275-8 .
  • Poet in society. Experience with German and French literature . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1982, ISBN 978-3-518-36533-5 .
  • Culture and literature in Germany and France. Five essays . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1987, ISBN 978-3-518-36897-8 .
  • Faith, Skepticism and Rationalism. Shown based on the autobiographical writings of Karl Philipp Moritz . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1991, ISBN 978-3-518-27643-3 .
  • The discovery of the German mentality . Reclam, Leipzig 1992, ISBN 978-3-379-01438-0 .

A detailed bibliography can be found in the book by A. Betz and R. Faber (see below).

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Birth certificate 82/1902 registry office Wasselonne
  2. ^ Note in the margin in his birth certificate
  3. ^ Note in the margin in his birth certificate
  4. ↑ Kwaschnik's work was honored with the "Franco-German Parliament Prize 2010". Ten years of Franco-German parliamentary award . bundestag.de; Presidents of Parliament Lammert and Accoyer present the Franco-German Parliamentary Prize .
personal data
SURNAME Minder, Robert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French German studies specialist
DATE OF BIRTH August 23, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH Wasselnheim
DATE OF DEATH September 10, 1980
Place of death near Cannes