Anton Spitaler

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Anton Spitaler (born July 11, 1910 in Munich ; † August 3, 2003 in Traunreut ) was a German orientalist and philologist for Arabic and Semitic languages .

Life

Spitaler studied between 1929 and 1933 at the University of Munich and in the winter semester of 1931/1932 at the University of Breslau . In 1933 Spitaler received his doctorate in Semitic philology in Munich. From 1933 to 1939 he was a research assistant at the seminar for Semitic studies and a scholarship holder of the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft at the Koran commission of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences (BAdW) . During the Second World War Spitaler served in the Wehrmacht as an Arabic interpreter - first in Belgium and then in France. In June 1946 he was able to do his habilitation in Semitic philology in Munich. In 1948 he was appointed full professor at the University of Munich and retired in 1978.

Spitaler's internationally recognized and honored scholarship was primarily shaped by Gotthelf Bergsträßer , August Fischer and Heinrich L. Fleischer . His new edition of Theodor Nöldeke's On the Grammar of Classical Arabic (Vienna 1896) with its extensive corrections and additions, both from Nöldeke's personal copy and from his own collections (Darmstadt 1963), documents his extensive knowledge of sources and his scientifically sound familiarity with Arabic philology .

Together with Jörg Kraemer and Helmut Gätje he founded the dictionary of the classical Arabic language , the first edition of which appeared in 1959 and which Manfred Ullmann worked full-time on from the third edition .

Long before his death, he had bequeathed his private library and academic correspondence, his notes on Arabic syntax , phraseology and stylistics to the “Munich job” at the Commission for Semitic Philology of the Bavarian Academy.

In 1978 he received an honorary doctorate (Dr. phil. Hc) from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and in 1993 the Maximilian Order for Art and Science from the Bavarian State Government. Since 1973 he was a corresponding member of the British Academy .

Spitaler inherited an archive from Gotthelf Bergsträßer in 1941 . This is a collection of photos of historical Koran manuscripts for Bergsträßer's planned Apparatus Criticus on the Koran . After the Second World War , Spitaler claimed that the archive was burned in 1944 in the air raid that completely destroyed the building of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in Munich. This statement was not true, however, the photos were in Spitaler's possession until the beginning of the 1990s. Since then, it has been in the care of Angelika Neuwirth , a student of Spitaler, at the Free University of Berlin , where it is digitized and evaluated as part of the Corpus Coranicum project .

Memberships

  • 1966: Full member of the Philosophical-Historical Class of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences (BAdW)
  • 1978: Vice President of the BAdW
  • 1973: Corresponding member of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

Works

  • Anton Spitaler, Otto Pretzl : The counting of the Koran according to Islamic tradition. Edited by the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. CH Beck, Munich 1935, online .
  • Grammar of the neo-Aramaic dialect of Maʻlūla (anti-Lebanon). FA Brockhaus, Leipzig 1938.
  • al-Qalamu aḥadu l-lisānaini . (= Bavarian Academy of Sciences (Hrsg.): Contributions to the lexicography of classical Arabic. No. 8. submitted on May 9, 1986). Beck, Munich 1989, ISBN 3-7696-1550-6 , online .
  • Philologica. Contributions to Arabic and Semitic studies. Edited by H. Bobzin. Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 1998, ISBN 3-447-03980-9 . The volume contains almost all of Spitaler's journal and book contributions from 1940 to 1994.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Fellows: Anton Spitaler. British Academy, accessed August 1, 2020 .
  2. ↑ Andrew Higgins, " The Lost Archive: Missing for a half century, a cache of photos spurs sensitive research on Islam's holy text, " The Wall Street Journal , January 12, 2008
  3. ^ Corpus Coranicum Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences
personal data
SURNAME Spitaler, Anton
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German orientalist, Semitic and Arabic philologist
DATE OF BIRTH July 11, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich
DATE OF DEATH August 3, 2003
Place of death Traunreut