Claas Hugo Humbert

Claas Hugo Humbert (born August 5, 1830 in Ditzum , † May 26, 1904 in Bielefeld ) was a Franco-German Romance scholar and one of the most important "Molierists" of his time, who campaigned for a positive reception of Molière and Victor Hugo in Germany .

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The Humbert family, who came from Picardy , settled in East Friesland at the time of Napoleon , when East Friesland as the Ems-Oriental department was still part of the French Empire. After the fall of Napoléon, the father Hugues Humbert, who had married a Frisian from an old dignitary family, decided to stay in East Frisia, which first became a province of the British Kingdom of Hanover and eventually became Prussian . Claas Humbert enjoyed a polyglot education; he spoke and read German , French , Dutch , English , Spanish , as well as Latin , Greek and Hebrew . After attending school in La Capelle en Thiérache (where he lived with his grandmother) and Ditzum , he studied in Berlin , Bonn , Göttingen and Jena . He then became a language teacher (later professor) in East Frisia (1854–55) and in Westphalia (1856–1899).

In 1862 he began writing books and essays on French and English literary history. The post of a professor at the School of Bielefeld (from 1866) gave him the opportunity to work on academic Molière publish and discuss its role in the history of literature. Between 1869 and 1883 he published his three most important books on Molière, as well as over a hundred essays in Romance languages ​​and other specialist journals in Germany and France, on French and English literary history, on Molière, Cervantes and Shakespeare . In his work he particularly discussed the popular notion of an insurmountable opposition between “Germanic culture” and “Romanic civilization”. Humbert fought against such an ideologization of the cultural differences between France and Germany and, on the basis of the texts of older German and English critics by Molière and other writers, proved that there is no basis for such hypotheses. Victor Hugo wrote to him in 1878 in a letter: "La France et l'Allemagne sont faites pour s'aimer". ("France and Germany are made to love each other.")

His first important monograph from 1869 ( Molière, Shakespeare and the German Criticism ) was edited by a French author who received a prize from the Académie française ( Paul Stapfer , Molière et Shakespeare , Paris 1886). Humbert is the only foreign Romanist who was mentioned in the introduction to the Œuvres de Molière ('Collected Works of Molière') in 1873, edited by Eugène Despois.

Works

• Schiller, Lessing, Goethe, Molière and Dr. Paul Lindau: Goethe on Molière with some remarks by Lessing and Schiller . 1885. ( digitized version )
• The laws of the French verse: an attempt to explain them from the mind of the people; with special regard to the Alexandrian . 1888 ( digitized version )
• Again the e muet and the recitation of French verses: for completion, for clarification and for defense . 1890 ( digitized version )
• About Shakespeare's Hamlet . 1897 ( digitized version )
• On Molière's life and works and on Shakspeare's Hamlet . 1899 ( digitized version )

literature

• Wolbert GC Smidt: Humbert, Claas Hugo , in: Biographisches Lexikon für Ostfriesland, Vol. 2. Ostfriesische Landschaftliche Verlags- und Vertriebsgesellschaft, Aurich 1997, ISBN 3-932206-00-2 , pp. 340–342
• Wolbert GC Smidt: La France et l'Allemagne sont faites pour s'aimer. An unknown letter from Victor Hugo from 1878 , in: Francia . Journal for West European History, 25/3 (1998), pp. 163–166 ( digitized version )