Eliza Marian Butler

The title of this article is ambiguous. For the battle painter, see Elizabeth Thompson .

Eliza Marian Butler (born December 29, 1885 in Lancashire ; † November 13, 1959 ), also EM Butler and Elsie Butler , was a British German scholar . In 1936 she received the Henry Simon Chair of German Language and Literature at the University of Manchester, from 1946 until her retirement in 1951 she held the John Henry Schröder Endowed Chair at Cambridge University . Her works include a trilogy on ritual magic and the legend of the Faust as well as reflections on German philhellenism .

Life

She grew up in Lancashire in a family of Irish descent and was raised in German by a Norwegian governess. Her wealthy parents, Theobald Fitz-Walter Butler, a coal and steel industrialist , and Catherine Elizabeth Barraclough came from Ireland. Her school education took place at private schools in Hanover , Paris and Reifenstein in the Harz Mountains , among others .

She graduated from Newnham College, Cambridge University in 1911 with a Bachelor of Arts (BA). A stay in Bonn in 1913/1914 aroused her interest in Friedrich Hebbel , a planned doctorate with Berthold Litzmann never came about and she broke off her stay due to the war. At times she worked as a teacher at girls' schools.

During the First World War, after having quickly learned Russian from graecist Jane Ellen Harrison , she served as one of four English nurses and supervisor and translator in the medical service in Russia and Macedonia .

Teaching

Between 1920 and 1936 she taught at Newnham College, the women-only college of Cambridge University . After the publication of her book The Tyranny of Greece over Germany , she took over the Henry Simon Professorship for German and Literature (1936–1945) in Manchester. From 1945 to 1951 she held the Schröder Professorship of German at Cambridge.

According to her autobiography Paper Boats , teaching at Cambridge was a difficult one. Except for Shakespeare specialist Dadie Rylands , she apparently had few friends here. Butler doesn't quite fit into the otherwise often repeated stereotype of the death of the German cousin . Before the First World War, the Germans were described from the English point of view as somewhat idiot cousins ​​living in the provinces and then as bloodthirsty Huns . Butler, on the other hand, had been amused by the sentimentality and ridiculous aspects of the Germans since school days. In her biography she did not include the inflation period before 1923, but rather the Roaring Twenties in Germany that began after that . Since 1926, her private life has been characterized by living with the Indologist and Pali expert Isaline Blew Horner (1896–1981), with whom she made numerous trips to Asia, including Ceylon , but also to Germany and Greece (Lesbos). Paper Boats was released in the year of her death.

Last but not least, the obituaries referred to their Irish origins and their cheerful and highly spiritual personality, which is only incompletely reproduced in their unconventional views and books, which they put down in writing.

The Tyranny of Greece over Germany

A fundamental work is The Tyranny of Greece over Germany from 1935. The German enthusiasm for Greece and its diverse, also negative effects were already discussed by Friedrich Paulsen , who successfully campaigned for the strengthening of the modern language grammar school. Butler described and disseminated the importance of German philhellenism as an obsession harmful to the German genius - Hitler was also a philhellene - for the English-speaking world. Naturally, the book was critically reviewed in Germany; an abridged translation was not made until 1949. After Butler had sharply criticized Thomas Mann with his novel Doctor Faustus for other reasons , it was hardly received in Germany after the end of the war. It was not until 1965 that it was honored with a fiery obituary by the Swiss Germanist Walter Muschg ; and much later the far-reaching consequences of their approach were recognized; Not only the poets, but above all the educational politicians, were under the disproportionate spell of Greece, such as Wilhelm von Humboldt and Werner Jaeger . Suzanne L. Marchand continued her work and used Butler's theses to criticize Edward Said's theory of orientalism , who systematically underestimated and omitted the specifically German view of the Arab world and the associated research and fiction.

Works

• The Myth of the Magus. Cambridge: University Press 1948; again in 1993, ISBN 0-521-43777-6
• Ritual Magic. Cambridge: University Press 1949; again in 1998
• The Fortunes of Faust. Cambrdige: University Press 1952
• Paper boats. Collins: London 1959 (autobiography)
• The Tyranny of Greece over Germany: a study of the influence exercised by Greek art and poetry over the great German writers of the 18., 19. and 20. centuries. Cambridge: University Press 1935; second edition Beacon Press 1958
• The Saint-Simonian Religion in Germany. A Study of the Young German Movement. Diss. 1926

Prices

• Honorary doctorate (D.Litt.) From London University in 1957
• Honorary Doctorate (D.Litt.) From Oxford University 1958

literature

• Walter Muschg: German Studies? In memoriam Eliza M. Butler. In: WM, Euphorion. Volume 59, 1965, pp. 18-45
• Claudia Schmölders: Elsie Butler's Tyranny. Floor plan of a classic. In: Journal for the History of Ideas, Volume IX, 1, spring 2015, pp. 99–114, ISBN 978-3-406-67381-8
• James Bowman: Presenting the Prince. The Fortunes of Hermann von Pückler-Muskau and his British Biographer. In: Oxford German Studies , vol. 43,2, 2014, pp. 107-124

Web links

• Archive entry at the University of London (English)
• Eliza Marian Butler on thepeerage.com , accessed August 19, 2015.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Christoph König (Ed.), With the collaboration of Birgit Wägenbaur u. a .: Internationales Germanistenlexikon 1800–1950 . Volume 1: A-G. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2003, ISBN 3-11-015485-4 , p. 304.
2. ↑ Peter Edgerly Firchow: The Death of the German Cousin: Variations on a Literary Stereotype, 1890-1920, Bucknell University Press, 1986, pp. 198 ff
3. ^ ^{A b} Butler, in Paper Boats, pp. 16 and 20, quoted in Firchow: The Death of the German Cousin . 1986, p. 198 ff
4. ^ Obituary in The Times, by Frank C. Roberts
5. ^ Suzanne L. Marchand,  Down from Olympus: Archeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750-1970 , Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003, pp. 153–154; also Suzanne L. Marchand, "German Orientalism and the Decline of the West",  Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society , Volume 145, Issue 4, 12/2001, p. 465.