Elise Riesel

Elise Riesel , née Grün (in Russia also known as Элиза Генриховна Ризель / Elisa Genrichovna Rizel ; * October 12, 1906 in Vienna ; † September 28, 1989 in Moscow ), was an Austrian - Soviet Germanist , linguist and style researcher.

Life

Origin, education and life in Austria

She was born as the daughter of the doctor Heinrich Grün and the music teacher Matilde Grün, née Goldstein, and was of Jewish faith . Attending a grammar school with a high school diploma in 1925 was followed by a degree in German and teacher training at the Vienna University of Education until 1927 and the University of Vienna until 1929. In 1930 she was with the dissertation The neo-Latin drama of Protestants from the Peace of Augsburg to the Thirty Years' War in Robert Franz Arnold and Dietrich Kralik doctorate . She had been teaching German at a Viennese elementary school since 1928 and in 1930 moved to a grammar school in the same position. In 1932 she married the mechanical engineer, technical draftsman and mining planner Josef Riesel (* 1901; †?), Who emigrated to the Soviet Union in December of the previous year . She lost her job as a teacher as a result of her participation in the February uprising in 1934, and in the summer she was forced to leave for Moscow .

Life in the Soviet Union and academic career

Riesel traveled with Grete Birkenfeld with the approval of the relevant Soviet party authorities and had the status of a political émigré , which resulted in various political and social benefits. Together with her husband, she was employed at the Karl Liebknecht School in Moscow in 1934 and 1935 , where she taught the fifth grade as a German teacher. For ideological reasons she was only allowed to teach middle school students, for which she showed understanding. From 1935 she worked as a university teacher for German studies at the Moscow Institute for History, Philosophy and Literature. The Riesels were granted Soviet citizenship in 1936 . After another doctorate ( called " candidate thesis" in the Soviet Union ) in 1938 on The Neo-Latin Protestant Drama in the 16th Century , Riesel was upgraded to the level of lecturer. Evacuated to Yekaterinburg for security reasons between 1941 and 1943 , Elise Riesel held the chair for German studies at the local college of education . After returning to Moscow she was a lecturer in German studies and professor for Romano-Germanic philology at Lomonossow University until 1945 . During this time she wrote her habilitation thesis (in the Soviet Union called " doctoral thesis ") on German magic spells , with a special focus on the Merseburg magic spells . Her habilitation took place in 1944 .

After the end of the Second World War , Riesel lived again in Vienna between 1945 and 1947 and worked in the school science department of the Federal Ministry for Education. During these years she was also a member of the Austrian Communist Party . In 1947 she received a professorship for German and stylistics at the Pedagogical University for Foreign Languages ​​in Moscow. In the 1960s she gave numerous guest lectures abroad, including at the Humboldt University in Berlin , the Technical University of Dresden , the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg , the University of Leipzig and the Friedrich Schiller University Jena . Although Elise Riesel retired in 1982 , she continued to work as a consultant professor at her former chair until her death.

Elise Riesel was the first linguist to deal theoretically with national variants of standard languages . With it, the conception of the functional differentiation of language, which now has a permanent place in the stylistic and variety-linguistic specialist literature, found its way into German studies. In 1953 she dealt with the “national peculiarities” of Austrian German in her essay in Russian on the question of the national language in Austria . From 1962 onwards she made a distinction between different “national variants (forms) of the German literary language”, referring to her home country, Germany and Switzerland . For the first time, it saw Austrian German as an independent, national language , but did not yet differentiate in its terminology between linguistic variants and linguistic variety . In addition, Riesel is considered the founder of functional stylistics and adopted five classes of functional styles in the modern language in her work:

1. Everyday traffic style
2. Fine literature style (fiction)
3. Style of journalism
4. Public (official) transport style
5. Style of science / style of professional communication

Honors

• 1963: F. C. Weiskopf Prize

Publications (selection)

• Elise Riesel et al. : Stories and Poems - For 8th and 9th grades of middle school . State Publishing House for Textbooks and Pedagogy of the People's Commissariat for Popular Education of the RSFSR , Moscow , 1940
• Elise Riesel: On the question of the national language in Austria . Article from 1953
• Elise Riesel: An outline of the German style . Foreign Language Literature Publishing House , Moscow, 1954
• Elise Riesel: Studies on the language and style of Schiller's “Kabale und Liebe” . Foreign Language Literature Publishing House , Moscow, 1957
• Elise Riesel: Stylistics of the German language . Foreign Language Literature Publishing House , Moscow, 1959
• Elise Riesel: From the workshop for stylistic vocabulary work . In: Special publication of the magazine "Sprachpflege", 1964
• Elise Riesel, Walter Dietze ( Hrsg. ): The style of the German everyday speech . Reclam-Verlag , Leipzig , 1970
• Elise Riesel: Theory and Practice of Linguistic-Stylistic Text Interpretation . University Press, Moscow, 1974
• Elise Riesel, Evgenia Schendels: German stylistics . University Publishing House, Moscow, 1975

Web links

• Literature by and about Elise Riesel in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Natalija Mussijenko, Alexander Vatlin : School of Dreams - The Karl Liebknecht School in Moscow (1924 to 1938) . Verlag Julius Klinkhardt, Heilbrunn , 2005, ISBN 3-7815-1368-8 , page 247
2. ↑ Christoph König (Ed.), With the assistance of Birgit Wägenbaur u. a .: Internationales Germanistenlexikon 1800–1950 . Volume 3: R-Z. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2003, ISBN 3-11-015485-4 , p. 1498.