Arthur Henkel

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Arthur Henkel (born March 13, 1915 in Marburg ; † October 4, 2005 in Heidelberg ) was a German German studies scholar, literary historian and renowned Goethe and Hamann researcher .

Life

After graduating from high school Philippinum in Marburg (1934), Henkel studied art history, philosophy, German philology, Scandinavian studies and musicology in Leipzig, Marburg, Cologne and Graz from 1934/35. He had important teachers in Marburg: the philosophers Julius Ebbinghaus , Gerhard Krüger , Hans-Georg Gadamer and the New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann . He was particularly impressed by the Germanist Max Kommerell (Cologne).

Henkel received his doctorate in Graz in 1941 with a dissertation on the speculative view of music of Friedrich von Hardenberg ( Novalis ). During his time as a student assistant and assistant at the Graz Musicological Institute, he tried to find a lecturer at a university abroad. Sweden was aimed for, but inaccessible after the outbreak of war. Editing in Paris (1943/44) was approved. With the monograph “Renunciation. A study on Goethe's novel of old age ”( Wilhelm Meister's Wanderjahre ) he received his habilitation in 1952 in Marburg. In 1956, the University of Göttingen appointed him extraordinary professor for German philology. He declined calls to Berlin and Münster, instead he accepted a professorship (modern German literary history) at the University of Heidelberg in 1957 , where he remained until his retirement in 1980. He did not accept calls to Hamburg, Bonn and Frankfurt (to a new Goethe chair to be created with simultaneous management of the Free German Hochstift / Goethe Museum ). Since 1942 he was with Elisabeth (1915–1983), b. Farmer, married and had four children.

In 1965 Henkel became a full member of the philosophical and historical class of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and from 1968 to 1974 its deputy secretary. He was a member of the University Council in Heidelberg, the Goethe Society in Weimar and the German Schiller Society in Marbach / Neckar, and was temporarily a member of the Germanic Commissions of the German Research Foundation and the German Academic Scholarship Foundation . In 1983 he took over the management of the Free German Hochstift on an interim basis.

For the time of the Third Reich , the Marburg / Lahn Chamber of Justice certified Henkel's opposition to the system in 1947. The fact that he had applied for membership in the NSDAP in 1938 in order to escape the dictatorship in an external editing department burdens him just as little as the collective takeover of the Federation of German Bibles in 1933 into the Hitler Youth (1933). A first application for a habilitation in 1941 , supported by Max Kommerell in Cologne, was thwarted by the National Socialist Lecturer Association.

research

Henkel wrote studies on the Baroque, Goethe's poems, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing , Heinrich von Kleist , Gottfried Keller , Franz Kafka and others. The main business, however, was to edit the fundamentals scientifically: Johann Heinrich Merck , Julius Wilhelm Zincgref , Max Kommerell and Johann Georg Hamann . Henkel continued to issue Hamann's letters that Walther Ziesemer had started after his death. While working on this edition, the plan was to include a commentary and a general register to make the seven volumes of letters easier to read, a project that stretched over several phases until Henkel's death in 2005 and could not be completed by him. A revision of Henkel's comment is available on the Internet.

Together with Albrecht Schöne (Göttingen), Henkel published the Emblemata , the canon of baroque symbolic art.

Awards

  • Johann Heinrich Merck Medal ("Personalities who, in word and writing, help keep Goethe's universal world of thought alive") 1976.
  • Golden Goethe Medal Weimar 1993.

Publications

Editions

  • Johann Georg Hamann : Correspondence , 7 volumes (1–3 with W. Ziesemer). Insel, Frankfurt / Main 1955–1979.
  • Johann Georg Hamann : Letters. Selected, introduced and annotated . Insel, Frankfurt / Main 1988.
  • Max Kommerell : lady poet and other essays . Edited with an afterword. dtv, Munich 1967.
  • Emblemata: Handbook of symbolic art of the 16th and 17th centuries (with Albrecht Schöne ). Metzler, Stuttgart 1967, second supplemented edition 1976.
  • Johann Heinrich Merck : Works . Frankfurt / Main 1968.
  • Julius Wilhelm Zincgref : Hundreds of ethical-political emblems , 2 volumes (with Wolfgang Wiemann). Carl Winter: Heidelberg 1986.

Magazines and series

  • With Rainer Gruenter : Euphorion . Journal of the History of Literature (from 1962 to 1984).
  • Co-editor: Heidelberger Forschungen (from 1956).
  • Publisher: Deutsche Neudrucke, series: Goethezeit (from 1966).

Literary historical publications

  • Renunciation. A study on Goethe's old age novel . Niemeyer, Tübingen 1954, second unchanged edition 1964.
  • Goethe experiences. Studies and lectures. Small fonts I . Metzler, Stuttgart 1982.
  • The times picture room. Studies and lectures. Small fonts II . Metzler, Stuttgart 1983.
  • When rereading the elective affinities . In: Yearbook of the Free German Hochstift , 1985, pp. 1–20.
  • Mephistopheles or the wasted effort . In: Th. Cramer, W. Dahlheim (Ed.) Gegenspieler . Munich 1993, pp. 130-147.
  • Hamann and Shakespeare . In: Acta of the seventh International Hamann Colloquium in Marburg / Lahn 1996: Johann Georg Hamann in England […] . Lang, Frankfurt / Main a. a. 1999, pp. 107-130.

swell

Individual evidence

  1. a b c d e f g Christoph König (Ed.), With the collaboration of Birgit Wägenbaur u. a .: Internationales Germanistenlexikon 1800–1950. Volume 2: H-Q. de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2003, ISBN 3-11-015485-4 , pp. 717-719.

Web links