Anton Baumstark junior

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Anton Baumstark , the Younger, (born August 4, 1872 in Konstanz , † May 31, 1948 in Bonn ) was a German philologist , orientalist and liturgical scholar . He is considered the founder of the science of the Christian Orient and comparative liturgical science .

Life

Carl Anton Joseph Maria Dominikus (baptismal name) Baumstark was the only child of the politician and writer Reinhold Baumstark (1831–1900) and his wife Clementine Beck, who had converted to Catholicism . His great-uncle was the economist Eduard Baumstark , his grandfather the philologist Anton Baumstark sen.

After finishing school, Baumstark studied classical and oriental philology and was awarded a doctorate in Leipzig in 1894 with a dissertation on Greek-Syrian translation literature. phil. PhD. At the age of 26, he was able to complete his habilitation in both subjects at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg in 1898 . His habilitation thesis is called Syriac-Arabic Biographies of Aristotle .

With the support and mediation of his teachers, Baumstark was able to work as a private scholar for a long time at the Campo Santo Teutonico in Rome from 1899 to 1904 ; u. a. He founded the scientific journal Oriens Christianus there in 1901 , which he headed until 1941, with an interruption in 1906/08. In 1904/05 he made his only trip to the Orient. From 1906 to 1921 he worked as a high school teacher at what is now the home school Lender in Sasbach (Baden), the educational establishment of his godfather, the clergyman Franz Xaver Lender . In 1909 he married the 18-year-old Protestant Frieda Anna Tröndle and had five daughters and nine sons with her between 1911 and 1927. Two children died very early, four sons and a daughter's fiancé died in World War II .

In 1921 Baumstark as an exempted Prussian teacher was Associate Honorary Professor for "history and culture of the Christian East and Oriental Liturgy" in the Faculty of Arts , University of Bonn , next to 1923 associate professor of Semitic languages and comparative literature at the University of Nijmegen , 1926 Professor of Islamic Studies and Arabic at the University of Utrecht . On the occasion of the Rhineland's millennium in 1925, the Catholic Theological Faculty of the University of Bonn awarded him the honorary theological doctorate, which was rare for a layperson at the time. In 1930 he was offered the chair for oriental studies at the Westphalian Wilhelms University in Münster .

In public, Baumstark was generally known as a loyal Catholic with a strong national sentiment. On August 1, 1932, he joined the NSDAP (membership no. 1.265.421) and became active for the party in church and society. At the University of Münster, Baumstark was considered the protégé of Gauleiter Alfred Meyer . In 1933 Baumstark was head of an equalization and cleansing commission called the "NS Preparatory Committee for Affairs of the Westphalian Wilhelms University of Münster". In this capacity he operated u. a. the discharge of the radiologist Paul Krause . As a candidate for the rectorate, Baumstark could not prevail against the legal historian Hubert Naendrup . Baumstern's political influence was in fact short-lived. In 1935 he was unexpectedly retired early for the public, obviously because of the accusation of homosexuality (his successor was Franz Taeschner ). After returning to Bonn, he continued to work scientifically and politically, he also acted as an informer against Paul Kahle . Baumstern's growing estrangement from the NSDAP is attested from 1943 onwards. Together with other orientalists and theologians, he tried in vain in 1944 to save the life of his employee Kilian Kirchhoff, OFM , who had been sentenced to death by the People's Court, by means of a petition for clemency.

In 1946 Baumstark was dismissed from the civil service, his pension was canceled and the use of the title "Professor" was prohibited. In the course of denazification in 1948, however, he was only classified in category IV ("fellow traveler"). In the letter from 1947, published as "Baumstern's scientific testament", Baumstark "before God [...] a collective guilt of our people & at least a personal complicity on my part".

Baumstark died at the age of 76 on May 31, 1948 in Bonn. His grave in Bonn's southern cemetery (Section XI, 25-27) has been preserved.

power

A major focus of Baumstern's scientific work was the Eastern church rites and the history of the oriental liturgy in all its facets. Baumstark not only researched history, but also turned his attention to its effects on cult, art and literature. He showed the roots of the Koran in the Christian and Jewish liturgy . His History of Syrian Literature (1922) is well known. His widely used Introduction to Comparative Liturgy ( Liturgie comparée ) is available in several translations. The German version was never published.

For liturgical science, Baumstark formulated the insight that historically older parts of the liturgy are most likely to be preserved on liturgical days. For example, there are many archaic, otherwise completely disappeared elements in the celebration of Good Friday . The law of preserving the old in a liturgically high-quality time is now generally recognized and has become a frequently quoted sentence.

Baumstark founded the Christian Orient section within the Orientalist Day of the German Oriental Society , which has existed since 1929.

Works (selection)

  • Lucubrationes Syro-Graecae . In: Yearbooks for Classical Philology. Supplement volume 21 (1894) 353-524 (dissertation).
  • Syriac-Arabic biographies of Aristotle. Syriac commentaries on Porphyry's Iceagogue . Leipzig: Teubner 1900. Aristotle with the Syrians from the 5th - 8th centuries. Syrian texts edited, translated and examined by Dr. A. Tree strong. First volume. Reprint: Aalen, Scientia Verlag, 1975 (habilitation thesis).
  • The fair in the Orient , Kempten - Munich 1906.
  • The law of the preservation of the old in a liturgical time of high quality. In: Jahrbuch für Liturgiewwissenschaft 7 (1927), pp. 1–23
  • Festival breviary and church year of the Syrian Jacobites . Paderborn 1910.
  • The Christian literatures of the Orient . GJ Göschen'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Leipzig 1911. Two volumes:
  • History of Syrian literature excluding Christian-Palestinian texts . Markus + Weber, Bonn 1922. Unchanged. photomechan. Reprint: de Gruyter, Berlin 1968.
  • On the historical development of the liturgy , Freiburg i. Br. 1922. Reprint: Arcturus Verlag, Schäffern 2018. ISBN 9783903060661 . - Polish transl .: O historycznym rozwoju liturgii (Vetera et nova 6). Wydawn. UNUM, Kraków 2001. ISBN 83-87022-26-8 .
  • Anton Baumstark, On the Historical Development of the Liturgy. Introd., Transl., And Annotation by Fritz West. Foreword by Robert F. Taft. Collegeville: Liturgical Press 2011. 229 pp. ISBN 978-0-8146-6259-5 .
  • Liturgy comparée . Conférences faites au Prieuré d'Amay. Edition refondue. Chevetogne n.d. [1939]; 3rd edition revue par Bernard Botte . Ed. de Chevetogne, Chevetogne 1953.
  • Comparative Liturgy . Revised by B. Botte. English Edition by FL Cross, AR Morsbray and Co., London 1958.
  • Liturgia comparada (Cuadernos phase 155–156). 2 volumes, Center de Pastoral Litúrgica, Barcelona 2005, ISBN 84-9805-086-3 ISBN 84-9805-087-1 ( without the bibliography and the index).
  • Editor of the Oriens Christianus magazine 1901–1941 (with interruptions).

literature

  • Reinhold Baumstark - Hubert Kaufhold: Anton Baumstark's scientific testament . In: Oriens Christianus 82 (1998), pp. 1-52.
  • Stefan Heid : Art. Anton Baumstark . In: Stefan Heid, Martin Dennert (Hrsg.): Personal Lexicon for Christian Archeology. Researchers and personalities from the 16th to the 21st century . Schnell & Steiner, Regensburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-7954-2620-0 , Vol. 1, pp. 138-140.
  • Michael Grüttner : Biographical Lexicon on National Socialist Science Policy , Heidelberg 2004, p. 19.
  • Helmut Heiber : University under the swastika , part I: The professor in the Third Reich , Munich 1991, pp. 465–472.
  • Rudolf Morsey : Anton Baumstark and Georg Schreiber 1933-1948. Two opposing political positions within the Görres society. In: Annual and conference report of the Görresgesellschaft 2003 (Paderborn 2004), pp. 103–129.
  • Otto Spies:  Baumstark, Carl Anton. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 1, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1953, ISBN 3-428-00182-6 , p. 669 ( digitized version ).
  • Robert F. Taft - Gabriele Winkler (Ed.): Acts of the International Congress of comparative Liturgy, fifty years after Anton Baumstark (1872-1948) , Pont. Is. Orientale, Roma 2001. ISBN 88-7210-333-9 (with Baumstark bibliography).
  • Fritz S. West: Anton Baumstark's Comparative Liturgy in its Intellectual Context , University Microfilms International, Ann Arbor 1988.
  • Fritz S. West: The Comparative Liturgy of Anton Baumstark , Grove Books, Bramcote 1995.
  • Heinzgerd Brakmann: Baumstark and Syzygoi. Eastern liturgical studies at the University of Bonn . In: Albert Gerhards - Tinatin Chronz (ed.): Orientation over the whole . LIT. Berlin 2015, 99–144, esp. 118–140.
  • Angelika Pries: A special case: a memorial sheet for an »Obernazi«? Anton Baumstark . In: "Everything is so completely destroyed in one fell swoop". Victims of National Socialism at the University of Münster . Edited by Sabine Happ - Veronika Jüttemann. Aschendorff, Münster 2018, 993-1006.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Baumstark lost the Heidelberg Venia legendi in 1900 for personal reasons. In 1921, it was replaced by the appointment of full honorary professor in Bonn.
  2. ↑ Ekkehard Ellinger: German Oriental Studies at the Time of National Socialism 1933–1945 . Deux-Mondes-Verlag, Edingen-Neckarhausen 2006, p. 35.
  3. ^ A b Ekkehard Ellinger: German Oriental Studies at the Time of National Socialism 1933–1945 . Deux-Mondes-Verlag, Edingen-Neckarhausen 2006, p. 61.
  4. ↑ Helmut Heiber, University under the swastika , Part I: The Professor in the Third Reich , Munich 1991, p. 465 ff.
  5. ↑ Gerhard Kunze: Memory of Anton Baumstark , in: Monthly publication for pastoral theology to deepen the entire pastoral work 38 (1948/49) 171f. According to Kunze, a Protestant pastor and a visitor to Baumstark in 1943, Baumstark “despaired” of the inner line of the party, “which he [...] described as Bolshevik”.
  6. ↑ Heinzgerd Brakmann: Baumstark and Syzygoi. Eastern liturgical studies at the University of Bonn . In: Albert Gerhards - Tinatin Chronz (ed.): Orientation over the whole . LIT. Berlin 2015, 99-144, esp. 136-138.
  7. ↑ Baumstark - Kaufhold: Testament (as below) 18.
personal data
SURNAME Strong as a tree, Anton junior
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Strong as a tree, Anton the Younger
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German orientalist and liturgical scholar
DATE OF BIRTH 4th August 1872
PLACE OF BIRTH Constancy
DATE OF DEATH May 31, 1948
Place of death Bonn