Charles Oscar Brink

Charles Oscar Brink FBA (born as Karl Oskar Levy , born March 13, 1907 in Berlin-Charlottenburg , † March 2, 1994 in Cambridge ) was a British classical philologist of German origin. He was Kennedy Professor of Latin at the University of Cambridge from 1954 to 1974 and has been a member of the International Thesaurus Commission since 1969. His research work was devoted to the ancient history of ideas and ideas.

Life

Karl Oskar Levy was the eldest son of an assimilated Jewish family of the upper middle class. His father Arthur Levy II was a doctor of law. In his youth Levy showed great musical talent and received private lessons in composition in addition to school lessons. He later decided against a career as a conductor and to study the humanities.

Levy's family were members of the Jewish faith but did not practice it. Karl Oskar Levy joined the Evangelical Church on August 31, 1931 and changed his family name to "Brink".

Studied in Berlin and Oxford (1925–1931)

After graduation, Brink studied philosophy and classical philology at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin from 1925 . He heard lectures from the philosopher Eduard Spranger and from the philologists Eduard Norden , Paul Maas , Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and Werner Jaeger , who had a strong influence on him. On Jaeger's advice, he spent the summer semester of 1928 at Oxford University , where he heard the philosopher William David Ross , the philologist Albert Curtis Clark and the historian Hugh Macilwain Last . In 1931 Brink completed his studies in Berlin with the first state examination for the higher teaching post.

1933 Brink was at Werner Jaeger Dr. phil. PhD . In his dissertation he dealt with the Aristotle attributed writing Magna Moralia and established himself as a specialist in the philosophy school of Aristotle, Peripatos .

Work at the Thesaurus in Munich (1933–1938)

From April 20, 1933, Brink worked as an assistant at the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae in Munich, where he participated in the creation of the lexicon entries. His position was funded by a five-year grant from the Rockefeller Foundation . The fact that he was still employed as a Jew during the Nazi era was also due to the passive resistance of the thesaurus management: They did not submit the questionnaires required by their Rockefeller scholarship holders in 1933, in which the Aryan origin was to be proven. Brink's colleagues included Wolfgang Schmid and Hans Julius Wolff , who, like Brink, was a Rockefeller fellow.

A small additional income offered Brink the collaboration on the Realencyclopadie der classical antiquity , for which he wrote several individual articles on Greek philosophers and a 50-column overview article on the Peripatos.

From enemy alien to British subject : CO Brink in England

As a German emigrant (1938–1947)

Brink worked at the thesaurus until March 25, 1938. Further financing was impossible due to the political situation in Germany. After several unsuccessful applications in Switzerland, the USA and Great Britain, he received a position at the Oxford Latin Dictionary through the mediation of WD Ross , which he took up in March 1938. Brink improved his command of the English language during this time and wrote his later writings entirely in English.

After Jewish lawyers in Germany were legally prohibited from practicing their profession in October 1938, Brink tried to enable his parents to emigrate. In April 1939 he was successful: his parents traveled to England and settled in Oxford.

During this time, Brink was still a German citizen. For this reason he was imprisoned from June to October 1940 as an enemy alien (citizen of a hostile state). In 1941, the German Reich revoked German citizenship from all emigrants. In October 1941, Brink lost his job with the Oxford Latin Dictionary when work on it was suspended for the duration of the war . He found a new job as a tutor at Magdalen College , where he was appointed Senior Classical Master the following year . That same year he joined the Church of England and married Daphne Hope Harvey.

Naturalization and entry into academic teaching

In February 1947, Brink was granted British citizenship and thus the opportunity to enter the country's academic teaching. In March 1948 he Anglicized his German first name Karl Oskar to Charles Oscar . In the same year he was hired as a senior lecturer at St Andrews University . Just three years later (1951) he accepted an appointment to the Chair of Latin at the University of Liverpool . In 1954 he moved to Cambridge University as Kennedy Professor of Latin , where he worked in teaching and research until his retirement (1974). From 1973 to 1985 he served as trustee and chairman at Robinson College , which made him an Honorary Fellow when he left .

During his years at Cambridge, Brink helped reform ancient language teaching in Great Britain. He was instrumental in founding the Joint Association of Classical Teachers and the Cambridge Schools Classics Project . Brink also renewed his contacts with Oxford University, which selected him shortly after his appointment to Cambridge as a Professorial Fellow of Gonville and Caius College .

As a classical philologist, Brink gained international renown since the 1950s. In 1960 and 1966 he was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton , and in 1970 he was visiting professor at the University of Bonn . In 1964 he was elected a member of the British Academy and in 1973 a corresponding member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences . The University of Cambridge awarded him a Doctor of Letters degree in 1973 .

Brink had a long relationship with the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae . After his assistantship in the 1930s, he kept an eye on the project. In his book of Horace he demonstrated how the archive holdings and the already published volumes can support philological work. In 1967 he joined the Thesaurus Commission as a delegate from the British Academy. In 1979 he joined the Executive Committee as Vice President, and in 1988 he was elected President of the Thesaurus Commission. He died on March 4, 1994 after six years in office.

Services

As a researcher, Charles Oscar Brink dealt with the ancient history of ideas and ideas. The focus was on ancient philosophy (especially the Peripatetic ), historiography ( Tacitus ) and literary theory ( Horace ).

Philosophy: Aristotle and the Peripatos

At the beginning of Brink's career is the ancient philosophy. In his dissertation he (like Jaeger's student Richard Rudolf Walzer before him ) dealt with the pseudo-Aristotelian script Magna Moralia . Like Walzer, Brink also rejected Aristotle 's authorship, but with different arguments. For formal reasons, he dated the script to the generation of the philosopher's grandchildren .

Since Brink was already a recognized expert on peripatetic philosophy at the age of 26, Wilhelm Kroll commissioned him to write an article on the peripatos for the real encyclopedia he was editing. Brink did this job in 1935 and 1936 and also wrote a few smaller articles about individual philosophers. In the 1940s and 1950s he wrote a few essays, including a collection of fragments by the philosopher Praxiphanes .

Historiography: Tacitus

Brink's preoccupation with ancient history also goes back to his student days, especially to his teachers Wilamowitz in Berlin and AM Clark in Oxford. Since 1932 Brink dealt with the imperial author Tacitus. He worked out the specifically Roman formal aspects of the Tacite history by comparing its representation of the Julio-Claudian dynasty and the Flavians with the parallel tradition.

In addition, Brink demonstrated in a text-critical study that the Codex Laurentianus Mediceus 68.1 was not a fundamentally reliable text witness for the first six books of the Annals . Brink thus shook the foundation on which the annals text had been based since the edition of Justus Lipsius (1574). From 1953 on, Brink no longer took part in the scientific controversy that followed this thesis. He advised Francis Richard David Goodyear (1936–1987) on his edition of the first six books of the Annals .

Literary theory: Horace

Brink's greatest and most highly regarded work, Horace on Poetry, dealt with those Horace satires whose main subject is literature. The work on which Brink had been working since 1957 appeared at long intervals in three volumes (1963, 1971 and 1982). In the first volume ( Prolegomena ) Brink attacked the method of the Oxford professor Eduard Fraenkels , who (most recently in his book Horace , 1957) advocated the opinion that only the text itself is necessary to understand a text. In contrast, Brink interpreted the satires in the context of other Horazi writings, especially the Ars Poetica . For this approach, Brink was heavily criticized by Fraenkel students. Reactions in the rest of Great Britain also remained muted, while the rest of Europe received the book very positively.

Brink dealt with four research problems in his book on Horace:

1. The structure, structure and line of thought of the Ars poetica are difficult to understand, which is why researchers assume disorder , disorder. Brink considers this alleged disorder to be a superficial characteristic, based on a specific poetic concept of the poet. In order to assess the coherence of the text, Brink believes it is important to apply different standards to a poetic work than to prose .
2. The Ars Poetica provides a source for the ancient tradition of literary theory. It contains fragments of the lost treatise of Neoptolemus of Parion , which represents the link between Horace and Aristotle . In order to clarify the relationship between Horace and Neoptolemus and the relationship between both and Aristotle, Brink endeavors to separate facts and hypotheses that have been closely interwoven in previous research. In explaining the Ars Poetica , Brink is primarily text-immanent .
3. Horace and the tradition of literary theory. Because of the problematic sources, Brink draws on the literary satires ( sermones ) and the letters to Augustus ( epistulae ) and abstracts Horace's literary theoretical model from these works.
4. The form of the ars poetica : is it a versified treatise or a poem? Brink sees in the Ars "a poetic mirror of the ancient theory of poetry" ( a poetic mirror of the ancient view of poetry ).

History of science

Brink's preoccupation with the history of classical philology came about in the course of his work on the Book of Horace. He worked out these “by-products” into a series of lectures that he gave in 1977 at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa : Studi classici e critica testuale in Inghilterra (“Classical Studies and Textual Criticism in England”). On this basis he wrote his retirement English Classical Scholarship (Cambridge 1986). In this book, which was translated into German by Marcus Deufert in 1997 ( Classical Studies in England ), Brink advocated his fundamental conviction that mastering Greek and Latin literature and language was of central importance for understanding antiquity . He demonstrated this to three British philologists, Richard Bentley (1662–1742), Richard Porson (1759–1808) and Alfred Edward Housman (1859–1936), whom he regarded as the most important philologists in England. In Bentley, Brink saw a forerunner of modern classical studies , which emerged in Germany in the late 18th century. He compared Housman's handling of fundamental philological issues with that of his contemporary Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1848–1931).

Fonts (selection)

• Style and shape of the pseudaristotelian Magna Moralia . Ohlau 1933 (abridged version of his dissertation)
• Varron: six exposés et discussions; Vandoeuvres-Genève, 3–8 sept. 1962 . Geneva 1963
• Horace on Poetry . Three volumes, Cambridge 1963–1982
  • Volume 1: Prolegomena to the Literary Epistles . Cambridge 1963
  • Volume 2: The “Ars poetica” . Cambridge 1971
  • Volume 3: Epistles Book 2: the letters to Augustus and Florus . Cambridge 1982
• English Classical Scholarship: Historical Reflections on Bentley, Porson, and Housman . Cambridge 1986. Paperback 2010
  • German translation by Marcus Deufert : Classical studies in England: historical reflections on Bentley, Porson and Housman . Stuttgart / Leipzig 1997

literature

• Theodor Bögel : Thesaurus Stories. Contributions to a Historia Thesauri linguae Latinae with an appendix: Directory of persons 1893–1995 . Ed. V. Dietfried Krömer and Manfred Flieger. Teubner, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3-8154-7101-X , p. 192
• Henry David Jocelyn : Charles Oscar Brink † . In: Gnomon Volume 67 (1995), pp. 650–655 (with picture)
• Henry David Jocelyn: Charles Oscar Brink, 1907-1994 . In: Proceedings of the British Academy Volume 94 (1997), pp. 319-354 (with picture)
• Henry David Jocelyn: Brink, Charles Oscar (1907-1994) . In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 2004.
• Ernst Vogt : Charles Oscar Brink . In: Yearbook of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences (1995), pp. 261–264 (PDF) ( Memento from April 26, 2014 in the Internet Archive )

Web links

• Literature by Charles Oscar Brink in the catalog of the German National Library
• Part estate of Charles Brink in Gonville and Caius College archives (English)
• Martin Forrest: Obituary: Professor Charles Brink . In: The Independent , Saturday 26 March 1994

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Manfred Flieger: The "much trumpeted internationalization" . In: [BADW] Akademie Aktuell , issue 3/2009 ( PDF )
2. ↑ Jocelyn (1995), p. 653. Jocelyn (1997), p. 319.
3. ^ Brink (1963) VII.
4. ↑ Brink (1963) VIII.
5. ↑ Brink (1963) VIII.
6. ^ Brink (1963) IX.
7. ^ Brink (1963) IX.