Alice Voinescu

Alice Voinescu (1885–1961)

Alice Voinescu , née Steriade (also spelled Stériad and Steriadi ), (born February 10, 1885 in Turnu-Severin , Kingdom of Romania ; † June 3 , 1961 in Bucharest ) was a Romanian philosopher, essayist, university teacher and translator who suffered persecution in communist times. She was the first Romanian with a PhD in Philosophy and the job title of University Professor .

education

Registration card of the student “Alice Steriad” (surname initially written with “tt” instead of “d” ) in the residents' card index of the city of Marburg, registered on April 15, 1911, de-registered on April 19, 1912 for Paris

Alice Steriade was born as the daughter of the Romanian lawyer Sterie Steriadi, who holds a doctorate at the Sorbonne , and his wife Massinca, née Poenaru, in Turnu-Severin in southwestern Romania. As a child she learned - as was not uncommon in Romanian families of the educated middle class at that time - in addition to her Romanian mother tongue, German and French. After attending the Lyceum in Turnu-Severin, she graduated from the Faculty of Philology and Philosophy at the University of Bucharest in 1908.

In 1909 she went on an academic educational trip to the University of Leipzig , where she attended seminars with Theodor Lipps and Johannes Volkelt . In 1910 she traveled on to Paris via Munich , where she intended to write a dissertation on Neo-Kantianism and the Marburg School at the Sorbonne with Lucien Lévy-Bruhl , the concept of which she had learned about in Leipzig.

On the advice of Levy-Bruhl, she went to the University of Marburg for a year in the spring of 1911 to get to know the protagonists of Neo-Kantianism Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp personally. Here she made friends with the Baltic German Nicolai Hartmann , who later became an important representative of ontological philosophy. In 1912 she was able to submit her dissertation to Lucien Lévy-Bruhl at the Sorbonne; Alice Steriade was the first Romanian ever to acquire the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. The work entitled L'interprétation de la doctrine de Kant par l'École de Marburg was published in Paris in 1913 with the name Alice Stériad .

After her return to Romania in 1915 she married her fiancé, the lawyer Stelian Voinescu, known as "Stello", whose family name she subsequently takes; she describes marriage as troubled.

Working life

It was not until 1922 that Alice Voinescu entered professional life as a professor of aesthetics and theater history at the Bucharest Royal Conservatory for Music and Drama ; she became the first Romanian who received the job-related title profesor universitar ("university professor"). From 1925 to the beginning of the Second World War in 1939, she accepted every year invitations to the Decades of Pontigny in France, a meeting organized by Paul Desjardins of outstanding European cultural workers, including André Malraux , André Gide , the brothers Thomas and Heinrich Mann , TS Eliot , also the Romanist Ernst Robert Curtius . In the 1930s she also traveled twice to Italy and once to Great Britain to attend conferences there.

She was active in public education on the radio, gave lectures at the Universitatea Liberă (a kind of adult education center), published on Montaigne , made extensive contributions on French skepticism and on the Marburg School for the monumental work Istoria filosofiei moderne (History of Contemporary Philosophy). She also wrote theater reviews and in 1938 a French-language brochure with the title Contribution de la psychologie dans l'assistance en Roumanie (Psychology's Contribution to Social Work in Romania), in which references to Paul Natorp's educational philosophy can be identified.

Her husband Stello died in 1940, but in her literary diary, which she began in 1929 at the suggestion of Roger Martin du Gard , who later won the Nobel Prize for Literature - an acquaintance from Pontigny - she continues to live fictionally in the name form Stelu as a conversation partner. She wrote quite a few sections in French, German and English. Published posthumously in 1997 under the Romanian title Jurnal (= diary), it is considered to be an important intellectual testimony to the social upheavals in Romania in the first half of the 20th century.

In 1941 she published the volume Aspecte din teatrul contemporan (Aspects of contemporary theater).

Persecution and Action in the Post-War Era

Wooden church in the exile place of Costeşti , Jassy district

In 1948 Alice Voinescu was forced to retire because she spoke out against the deposition of King Michael I of Romania by the communists with the remark: "Those who do not recognize their history have no future." She had been in the intellectual environment in the previous decades of the royal family and was several times a guest in the royal residence of Peleș Castle in Sinaia .

Two years after her release, she began writing letters to my son and daughter , two fictional characters, because their marriage had remained childless. She entrusted her thoughts to them until 1957 and passed on her oppressive personal experiences in the Stalin era to posterity: In 1951 she was arrested and sentenced in a political process to 19 months of forced labor in a labor camp, then to the small, remote northeast Romanian village of Costeşti exiled in Jassy County , where she was prohibited from doing any scientific work. She was only able to return to Bucharest in 1954.

Alice Voinescu now worked as a literary translator, including Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas and the novels by Thomas Mann. After she had compiled encounters with tragic heroes in literature and drama in 1960/1961 , which also included earlier writings and which were only published in 1983, Alice Voinescu died in poor circumstances on the night of June 3rd to 4th, 1961 .

Aftermath

Since the political change in Romania in 1990, Alice Voinescu and her important role for Romanian culture has been increasingly recognized. Her writings are being published or reprinted; the original French-language dissertation was published in 1999 in a Romanian translation. In particular, as a pioneer in the struggle for equal rights for women in science, she is now receiving the recognition she deserves. Her hard life's fate is related to that of the philosopher Lucian Blaga , and her influence on the ontologist Constantin Noica , who was one of her circle of friends, is the subject of philosophical-historical debates.

Posthumous honors Alice Voinescu are the naming of a school after her in her native town Drobeta-Turnu-Severin ( Ṣcoala Gimnazialǎ "Alice Voinescu" ) and the establishment of an Alice Voinescu cultural foundation ( Fundatia Culturalā "Alice Voinescu" ). The public library in its place of exile, Costeşti, is now called Biblioteca Comunală ”Alice Voinescu” . At the Memorial of the Victims of Communism Memorial Sighet in Maramures County , harrowing documents from her diary entries during her imprisonment in the labor camp are part of the exhibition.

Works (in selection)

• Alice Stériad: L'interprétation de la doctrine de Kant par l'école de Marburg: Étude sur l'idéalisme critique , Giard & Brière, Paris 1913.
• Alice Voinescu: Montaigne. Omul și opera [Montaigne. Man and Work], Revista Fundațiilor Regale, Bucharest 1936.
• This: Aspecte din teatrul contemporan [Aspects of contemporary theater], Fundația Regală pentru Literatură și Artă, Bucharest 1941.
• This: Eschil [Aeschylus], Rev. Fundațiilor Regale, Bucharest 1946.
• This: Întâlnire cu eroi tragici din literatură și teatru [Encounters with tragic heroes in literature and theater], edited by Dan Grigorescu, Editura Eminescu, Bucharest 1983.
• This: Scrisori către fiul și fiica mea [letters to my son and daughter], Editura Dacia, Cluj-Napoca 1994.
• This: Jurnal [diary], Editura Albatros, Bucharest 1997. New edition, 2 volumes, Humanitas, Bucharest 2013.
• This: Kant și școala de la Marburg [Kant and the Marburg School; Translated from the dissertation], Editura Eminescu, Bucharest 1999.
• This: Scrisori din Costeşti [Letters from Costeşti], ed. and annotated v. Constandina Brezu, Editura Albatros, Bucharest 2001.

literature

• Heinrich J. Dingeldein : On the influence of Neo-Kantianism on Romanian philosophy: Alice Voinescu and the Marburg School . In: Romanian-German cultural encounters. Edited by Rodica Miclea, Sunhild Galter, Doris Sava, University Press Sibiu / Hermannstadt 2008, pp. 107–120.
• Ders .: community of thoughts . In: Marburger Uni-Journal No. 32 (2009), pp. 46-48. - Second published under the title Alice Steriade Voinescu: Community of Thoughts in the electronic magazine Schattenblick on October 6, 2009: (Online) .
• Eugen Simion: Ficțiunea jurnalului intim [The fiction of intimate diaries], vol. III, Diarismul românesc [Romanian Diarism], Editura Univers Enciclopedic, Bucharest 2001.
• Interview with Alice Voinescu in: Lumea de mâine [The world of tomorrow], ed. v. Ion Biberi, Bucharest 1945.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Alice Voinescu School on Facebook . Retrieved December 7, 2016.
2. ^ Fundatia Culturalǎ "Alice Voinescu" . Retrieved December 7, 2016.
3. ^ Entry in the catalog of the Romanian National Library . Retrieved December 9, 2016.
4. ^ Museum: Room 19 - The year 1948 - the Sovietization of Romania . memorialsighet.ro. May 29, 2009. Retrieved May 28, 2011.