Elise Richter

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Elise Richter (photograph from Wiener Bilder , September 18, 1907)

Elise Richter (born March 2, 1865 in Vienna ; died June 21, 1943 in the Theresienstadt ghetto ) was an Austrian Romance studies and university professor. In 1905 she was the first woman to do her habilitation at the University of Vienna .

Life

Signature of Richter (1927)

Elise Richter was born as the daughter of the chief physician of the Südbahn-Gesellschaft , Maximilian Richter (* 1824 Trencsen , Hungary; † 1890 Vienna), and his wife Emilie (Emmy) Lackenbacher (* 1832 Essegg ; † 1889 Vienna) and grew up in an upper-class family assimilated Jewish family. She had a sister, Helene , who was four years older than her . The girls were taught by a Prussian-North German private teacher and brought up "religiously, but non-denominationally". The family celebrated Christmas and, according to Richter's memoir, attended "all kinds of religious services, except for Jewish services." At the age of 20 she developed rheumatism , which she never got rid of. After the death of her parents, she lived with her also unmarried sister Helene, who became known as an English scholar and theater critic. The two inherited the considerable inheritance of their father, which enabled them to build a house in the Währing cottage district as well as numerous trips through Europe and North Africa.

From 1891 she was allowed to attend individual lectures at the University of Vienna as a guest student. a. with the philologist Theodor Gomperz . After women were allowed to take the matriculation examination in 1896, Richter passed the Matura at the age of 32 as an external student at the Academic Gymnasium in Vienna - the first woman. A year later women were also admitted to the philosophy faculty of the University of Vienna. Richter enrolled in classical philology , Indo-European studies and Romance studies as a regular student (among others with Adolf Mussafia and Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke ). She completed her studies in 1901 with a doctorate in philosophy and was the first woman to qualify as a professor at the University of Vienna in 1905 .

She then taught there as a private lecturer . Her inaugural lecture in October 1907 - the first by a woman in the German-speaking area - dealt with the "history of inclinations ". It triggered "a counter-demonstration by clerical and national students" and was moved to another classroom. The protest was allegedly directed not only against the appointment of a woman, but also a woman of Jewish descent. Leo Spitzer was one of her students .

The house of Elise and Helene Richter in Weimarer Straße 83 was a meeting place for the artistic and intellectual elite of Vienna. From 1906 onwards, the two women invited people to "chat" every week. Karl von Ettmayer described these rounds as the last Viennese “salon”. The circle around the Richter sisters included the women's rights activists Marianne Hainisch and Rosa Mayreder , the music critic Max Kalbeck , the writer Richard Kralik , the Burgtheater director Hugo Thimig and the philologist Hans von Arnim . Richter was particularly close friends with the actress Olga Lewinsky . In January 1911, Helene and Elise Richter (who had left the Israelite religious community in 1897 ) were baptized in the Lutheran City Church in Vienna.

In 1921 she was again appointed as the first woman to be an associate professor and was given a teaching position for Romance linguistics, literature and phonetics. From 1928 she headed the Phonetic Institute. She examined the physiological and psychological foundations of language. When the chair for Romance literature at the University of Innsbruck was vacant in 1929 , there were no habilitated Romance scholars in all of Austria except for the 61-year-old Elise Richter, who was out of the question due to her age. She taught at the University of Vienna until she was expelled by the Nazi rulers due to the race laws in 1938.

Richter was also politically active. Since she rejected the emphatically proletarian anti-bourgeois attitude of the Social Democrats , she became involved in the "Civil-Freedom Party" under Richard Wettstein from 1919 and, after its merger with the Democratic Party, in the "Civil-Democratic Labor Party" under Ottokar Graf Czernin . In 1922 she founded the “Association of Academic Women in Austria”, which she chaired until 1930, and in 1927 called for the establishment of a women's party. But she did not see herself as a women's rights activist. In 1934 she joined the Fatherland Front and supported the Austro-Fascist corporate state under Engelbert Dollfuß and Kurt Schuschnigg .

In October 1942 Richter, like her sister, was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto . Helene died just a month after arrival, Elise a few months later on June 21, 1943.

Richter Library

Due to the burden of the Jewish property levy, the two sisters felt compelled to sell parts of their valuable library from the summer of 1941. In March 1942, almost 3,000 volumes were sent to the University and City Library of Cologne . However, the agreed purchase price was not paid. After the correspondence to the library was found in the archive, this library has been reconstructed, published and - if possible - restituted to heirs since 2005 as part of NS provenance research . In addition, a small square in Cologne between the university and city library and the Philosophikum is to be named after the sister judges.

Honors

Memorial plaque on the Elise Richter Hall of the University of Vienna

Elise Richter is the most honored scientist at the University of Vienna: The humanities faculty entered her name on the marble plaque in the side hall in 1965. In 1985 a memorial plaque with a relief portrait was installed at the Institute for Romance Studies. Since 1998, a gate at Garnisongasse 13, which leads into the “new courtyards” of the university campus in Alservorstadt , has borne Richter's name. A lecture hall in the main building of the university has been called the Elise Richter Hall since 2003. In June 2016 she was honored with a bust in the arcade courtyard of the University of Vienna .

A program to promote women run by the Austrian Science Fund FWF has been named Richter's name since 2005. In 2008 the Elise-Richter-Weg in Vienna- Floridsdorf (21st district) was named after her.

Elise Richter Prize

The German Romanists Association awards since 1999 on the occasion of the German Romanists day one endowed with 1,500 Euro prize for outstanding Romanist Habilitation and dissertations, which is named after Elise Richter.

The prize (currently 1000 euros) for her habilitation at the CAU went to Karen Struve in 2019.

Fonts (selection)

  • To develop the Romance word order from the Latin . Max Niemeyer Verlag , Halle (Saale) 1903
  • Foreign language skills. Teubner, Leipzig 1919.
  • Phonetic education. Introduction to Phonetics. Teubner, Leipzig / Berlin 1922.
  • How we speak Six popular lectures. 2., completely redesigned. Ed. Teubner, Leipzig 1925.
  • The evolution of the latest French. Velhagen & Klasing, Bielefeld / Leipzig 1933.
  • Contributions to the history of Romanisms I. Chronological phonetics of French up to the end of the 8th century. Niemeyer, Halle, Saale 1934.
  • Smaller writings on general and Romance linguistics. Institute for Linguistics at the University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck 1977.
  • Sum of life. WUV University Press, Vienna 1997 (autobiography, typescript 1940).
  • Education and development. In: Elga Kern (Ed.): Leading Women in Europe , Munich; Basel: E. Reinhardt, 1999 (1928), pp. 45-61

literature

Web links

Commons : Elise Richter  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The first female private docent in Austria. In:  Wiener Bilder , Volume 12, No. 31, September 18, 1907, p. 5 (with picture) (online at ANNO ).Template: ANNO / Maintenance / wrb
  2. ^ Astrid Schweighofer: Religious seekers in the modern age. Conversions from Judaism to Protestantism in Vienna around 1900. De Gruyter, Berlin / Munich / Boston 2015, pp. 141–142.
  3. ↑ Christiane Hoff Rath: Books traces - The fate of Elise and Helene Richter and her library in the Third Reich. Böhlau, Vienna 2009, p. 24.
  4. ^ Renate Heuer, Archive Bibliographia Judaica (ed.): Lexicon of German-Jewish authors. Volume 18, Phil - Samu. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2010, p. 236, entry Richter, Helene .
  5. ^ Astrid Schweighofer: Religious seekers in the modern age. Conversions from Judaism to Protestantism in Vienna around 1900. De Gruyter, Berlin / Munich / Boston 2015, p. 143.
  6. ↑ Christiane Hoff Rath: Books traces - The fate of Elise and Helene Richter and her library in the Third Reich. Böhlau, Vienna 2009, p. 55.
  7. ^ Lisa Kienzl: Nation, Identity and Anti-Semitism. The German-speaking area of ​​the Danube Monarchy 1866 to 1914. V&R unipress, Göttingen 2014, pp. 178–179.
  8. ↑ Christiane Hoff Rath: Books traces - The fate of Elise and Helene Richter and her library in the Third Reich. Böhlau, Vienna 2009, pp. 33, 83.
  9. ^ Astrid Schweighofer: Religious seekers in the modern age. Conversions from Judaism to Protestantism in Vienna around 1900. De Gruyter, Berlin / Munich / Boston 2015, pp. 86–88.
  10. ^ Astrid Schweighofer: Religious seekers in the modern age. Conversions from Judaism to Protestantism in Vienna around 1900. De Gruyter, Berlin / Munich / Boston 2015, pp. 144–145.
  11. ^ Ingrid Brommer, Christine Karner: The diary of an autobiography. Elise Richter's 'public' and 'private' writing during the Nazi dictatorship (1938–1941). In: Li Gerhalter, Christa Hämmerle: War - Politics - Writing. Women's diaries (1918–1950). Böhlau Verlag, Vienna / Cologne / Weimar 2015, pp. 55–70, on p. 55.
  12. ↑ Brief history of the Institute for Romance Studies at the University of Innsbruck. University of Innsbruck
  13. ↑ Christiane Hoff Rath: Books tracks. The fate of Elise and Helene Richter and their library in the “Third Reich”. Böhlau Verlag, Cologne / Weimar / Vienna 2009, pp. 39–40.
  14. ↑ Petra Stuiber: Elise Richter: "My second life should not be murdered". The standard from June 12, 2015.
  15. ↑ Melanie Malzahn: Commentary on Elise Richter: Zur Geschichte der Indeklinabilien (1907). In: Thomas Assinger ao: The inaugural lecture. Vienna University Speeches by the Philosophical Faculty. V&R Unipress, Göttingen 2019, pp. 183–188, on p. 188.
  16. ↑ Elise Richter , death notice at holocaust.cz
  17. ^ Christine Haffmans: Reparation through memory, victims and beneficiaries: The reconstruction of the Richter library in the University and City Library of Cologne. In: With Us. (Employee magazine Uni-Köln), June 09, pp. 20f + September 09 Part II: Emergency sale to Cologne. (PDF; 11.3 MB), p. 22f.
  18. ↑ orf.at - Seven women's monuments for the University of Vienna . Article dated October 28, 2015, accessed October 28, 2015.
  19. ↑ derStandard.at - Arkadenhof of the University of Vienna now also houses women's monuments . Article dated June 30, 2016, accessed July 1, 2016.
  20. ↑ Anonymous: Excellent Romance Studies from Kiel. In: Kieler Nachrichten No. 241, October 16, 2019, p. 14.
personal data
SURNAME Judge, Elise
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian Romanist
DATE OF BIRTH March 2, 1865
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH June 21, 1943
Place of death Theresienstadt ghetto