Edda Tille-Hankamer

Edda Tille-Hankamer (born March 19, 1895 in Glasgow ; † January 29, 1982 in Las Vegas , Nevada ) was a German-American German studies scholar and university professor.

Career

Edda Tille, whose father was a lecturer in German language and literature at the University of Glasgow , first grew up in Scotland and from 1900 on in Bonn . She studied German and art history in Berlin and Bonn. In 1920 she received her doctorate at the University of Bonn with a dissertation "On the language of the documents of the Duchy of Geldern". She then worked as the assistant to her doctoral supervisor Theodor Frings on the Rhenish Dictionary , which was created at the Institute for Historical Regional Studies of the Rhineland . At the same time, she worked as a librarian at the Dutch seminar and passed a state examination after completing her doctorate .

In 1925 Edda Tille completed her habilitation at the University of Cologne with the unpublished work "Studies on Folklore of the Rhineland". She was thus (after the historian Ermentrude von Ranke ) only the second woman who was able to complete her habilitation at the newly founded University of Cologne in 1919. As a private lecturer with a Venia legendi for German philology with special emphasis on Rhenish and Dutch, she rarely taught in Cologne. Instead, she took leave of absence from the university there to teach German studies as an assistant professor at the renowned Wellesley College in Massachusetts / USA , where she - with interruptions - remained active until 1932/33. In 1928 she married Paul Hankamer , who was an associate professor in Bonn and Cologne ; Their two sons were born in 1930 and 1933.

Back in Germany she followed her husband, who in 1933 moved to the University of Königsberg as full professor for German language and literary history . She, too, may have been appointed extraordinary professor of folklore in Königsberg . In any case, in September 1933 she resigned her teaching license in Cologne. Whether she took this step voluntarily or with it only anticipated the anticipated withdrawal of the license to teach for racist reasons (her mother was of Jewish origin), after 1945 caused disputes in her redress proceedings (in the dispute over pension claims and redress, she was ultimately subject to National Socialist injustice the German authorities and withdrew the application in 1956).

In 1938 Edda Tille-Hankamer emigrated to the United States after separating from her husband. In exile, she was initially forced to get by with odd jobs as a nurse or housekeeper. From 1939 she taught as a teacher at a private school in Richmond / Virginia , from 1943 in New Hope / Pennsylvania .

She only regained an academic position in 1945 as a professor at the Seton Hill women's college in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. In 1953 she was appointed to the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and retired there in 1965.

Works

• On the language of the documents of the Duchy of Geldern (Rhenish contributions and auxiliary books on Germanic philology and folklore; 7). Schroeder, Bonn a. a. 1925.

literature

• Irene Franken : "Yes, it is difficult to study women!" Students and lecturers at Cologne University until 1933. M&T Verlag, Cologne 1995, pp. 132–135 ( pdf ).

Web links

• Utz Maas : Entry: Tille-Hankamer, Edda . In: Persecution and emigration of German-speaking linguists 1933–1945

Individual evidence

1. ^ Utz Maas: Entry: Tille-Hankamer, Edda. In: Persecution and Emigration of German-Speaking Linguists 1933-1945. Retrieved December 28, 2018 . 
2. ↑ Irene Franken: "Yes, it is difficult to study women!" Students and lecturers at Cologne University until 1933. M&T Verlag, Cologne 1995, pp. 132–135, here p. 134 ( pdf ).