Eberhard Berent

Eberhard Berent (1967)

Eberhard Berent (born February 25, 1924 in Guben , Germany ; † December 11, 2013 in Freilassing , Germany) was a German-American German studies scholar and professor at New York University .

From 1964 to 1970 he was Chairman of the German Department at NYU's Washington Square College. After early retirement for health reasons in 1987, he retired to his country estate in the Hudson Valley.

Life

Eberhard Berent grew up as the son of the dermatologist Kurt Berent and his wife Empe, nee Poetko, a merchant's daughter, together with his sister Uschi in Guben. The family was Protestant. Since he had increasing difficulties at the secondary school in Guben because of his Jewish grandparents on his father's side , his parents sent the then eleven-year-old in autumn 1935 to the Ecole d'Humanité in Versoix near Geneva , led by the reform pedagogues Paul and Edith Geheeb (the founders of the Odenwald School ) .

Since the situation in Germany continued to deteriorate for persecuted Jews , the parents tried to emigrate . For this reason, the now fourteen-year-old had to break off high school education in Switzerland prematurely in 1938 and begin an apprenticeship as a fitter in Germany. Due to the outbreak of war, emigration was no longer possible after a short time, but the training could be continued and completed until the skilled worker examination. With a lot of luck and some help, the young Berent began studying engineering at the Ilmenau technical center in 1941 , which he completed in the summer of 1944 as a mechanical engineer. After completing his studies, Eberhard Berent initially worked as a design engineer for the Guben machine factory Carl Heinze, before he was seized on the street by the approaching Russian troops in February 1945 and deported to Odessa as a forced laborer .

After his return from two years of internment in Russia, Eberhard Berent found chaotic conditions in Germany. Only the mother and sister who fled to Sweden survived the persecution. So he tried a wide variety of professional paths until he found a reasonably suitable position in the foreign department of Siemens-Schuckertwerke in Erlangen in 1951 as an engineer and translator for English and French.

In 1953, Eberhard Berent decided to follow his aunt Margarete Berent , who worked as a lawyer for the City of New York , and emigrated to the United States . His first stop in the United States was Ithaca, New York State . There is the Ivy League University of Cornell , where one of its sponsors, Professor Shepherd, taught. The longing for a humanistic education was very great in the young Berent. However, since formal admission to the course was not possible due to the lack of school education and the lack of a high school diploma, the solution was found at the university in a trial semester as a guest student, during which Berent had to show, based on special achievements, that an extraordinary admission to the course of German studies was justified.

After receiving his doctorate in 1959 on the subject of " Opitz and Weckherlin's conception of love and its historical preliminary stages", which was also published in book form in 1970 by Mouton (Hague), Berent went from 1959 to 1962 as assistant professor to the renowned Brown University in Providence , Rhode Island. After three years of teaching, interrupted by a brief interlude at Emory University in Atlanta , Berent decided to go to New York University , where he was Chairman of the German Department at NYU Washington Square College from 1964 to 1970 . From then until his retirement in 1987, Berent was a member of the faculty of the German Department at NYU, where he primarily gave lectures on the Baroque and Goethe .

Berent was married to the German doctor Christa Gädeke († 1989).

In 2003 Eberhard Berent returned entirely to Germany. In 2007, under the impression of the decline of the once flourishing German culture , and in order to counter the increasing decline that had also gripped German studies in the USA, he donated a permanent Goethe chair to the German Department of New York University.

In addition, it was his declared goal to keep the Middle Ages with its great epics and minstrels in the general consciousness, after many American universities have meanwhile started to simply drop these areas of knowledge, similar to the ancient languages.

In addition, Eberhard Berent favored the Swiss boarding school Ecole d'Humanité , the school of his childhood that shaped him for the rest of his life, in his will and thus enabled the construction of a new school building in Hasliberg Goldern. Under the motto “and what you are, you owe it to others” (Goethe), the Eberhard-Berent-Haus was built as a study center with library and meeting place, and thus his vision was realized.

In 2008, Eberhard Berent received the Sir Harold Acton Medal from the Dean of New York University, Edward Sullivan, for his services to New York University .

Fonts

• Opitz and Weckherlin's conception of love and its historical preliminary stages . Mouton, The Hague and Paris 1970.
• Adoration and contempt for women in early Baroque poetry . In: Studies in Germanic languages ​​and literature: Presented to Ernst AG Rose. Reutlingen 1967, pp. 21-34.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Obituary notice on tributes.com (accessed February 4, 2015).
2. ↑ http://media.www.nyunews.com/media/storage/paper869/news/2008/03/26/University/Nyu-Gets.Fine.Arts.German.Grants-3283938.shtml  ( page no longer available , Search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
3. ↑ http://www.nyu.edu/nyutoday/article/1420
4. ↑ Eberhard Berent and the bond with the Ecole d'Humanité. In: The Ecolianer, June 2016, p. 17.