Ernst Günther Schmidt

Ernst Günther Schmidt (born January 16, 1929 in Leipzig ; † February 28, 1999 there ) was a German classical philologist . As a scientist in the GDR , he was held in high esteem in both East and West.

Life

Education

Schmidt studied classical studies and German studies in Leipzig from 1947 to 1952 . He took u. a. Participated in ancient studies, Germanistic and philosophical colleges of Franz Dornseiff , Maximilian Lambertz , Wilhelm Schubart , Hans Mayer and Ernst Bloch .

In 1958 he was given a study on the polemics between the Stoa and Peripatos in Seneca's 118th letter to the Dr. phil. PhD.

Berlin and Tbilisi

The year before, he began working at the Institute for Greco-Roman Antiquity in Berlin, where he was involved in the preparatory work for a planned edition of Epicurus within a working group on Hellenistic and Roman philosophy until 1961 .

In 1961 Schmidt published a widely acclaimed book on "The ancient Armenian Zenon script". For his work on the dating and source analysis of this newly discovered text by a namesake of the Greek philosopher Zenon , Schmidt carried out extensive archive studies in Tbilisi and Yerevan and evaluated the rich Russian-language secondary literature. It was this meticulousness in particular that earned Schmidt professional reputation beyond the borders of the GDR .

Jena

Through the Zenon study, the Graecist Friedrich Zucker , at that time one of the directors of the Academy Institute, became aware of Schmidt and offered him a habilitation . In 1963 Schmidt concluded this with an investigation into the concept of the good in Hellenistic philosophy.

From 1964 Schmidt worked as a lecturer in Jena, and in 1974 he received an extraordinary professorship there . Nevertheless, it was not until 1987 that he was appointed full professor of Greek literature at the University of Jena . The reason for this comparatively late appointment - Schmidt was 58 years old - may on the one hand be due to the low status that classical philology enjoyed in the political leadership of the GDR, but on the other hand it was also directly related to Schmidt's person . As a member of the CDU , he had refused to join the SED all his life . a. attracted attention to his colleagues by reciting Wolf Biermann's "wire harp" . However, due to the political possibilities, he had to decline visiting professorships that had been offered to him in western countries. Until his retirement in 1994 he held a professorship in Jena, where, not least, he promoted very intensive scientific collaboration with other universities, especially that of Tbilisi . In the last years of his apprenticeship, he held various visiting professorships, including a. in Würzburg, Tbilisi, Innsbruck and Leipzig.

Despite his professional reputation, however, he rarely succeeded in accepting students as doctoral candidates or even post-doctoral candidates. His first doctoral student was in 1967 - the Leipzig writer who later became famous - Volker Ebersbach with his dissertation on the Roman satirist Titus Petronius Arbiter ("Petron's position on the social forces of the early imperial era"). In 1975 Schmidt, together with the institute director Friedmar Kühnert , wanted Ebersbach to get a vacant position as senior assistant in Jena, to do his habilitation with him and to become his successor. But that failed because Ebersbach was not a member of the SED and did not want to become one. This dilemma drove Ebersbach to try to get by as a freelance writer, which was ultimately crowned with success.

Shortly after his 70th birthday, Ernst Günther Schmidt died of a heart attack in his hometown of Leipzig .

Research priorities

As a researcher, Schmidt showed a wide range. In over 200 publications, which were published in 12 countries, he devoted himself to a wide variety of topics within his disciplines. In addition to monographs and diverse essays, he wrote numerous articles for scientific reference works such as the Little Pauly and the Historical Dictionary of Philosophy .

A great research interest was in the Greek epic , especially the didactic poem as well as poetry and tragedy. For the latter, he particularly examined the works of Sapphus and Pindar and those of Aeschylus and Sophocles . In the studies on tragedy, he examined both the oriental influences on the epic and the typology of the hero .

Another scientific focus of Schmidt was philosophy . He dedicated individual writings to atomism and its representatives Democritus and Lucretius with special consideration of the cosmology in the triad “Heaven-Earth-Sea” as well as Straton , Epicurus and the Stoa , the ancient Armenian philosophy and Cicero and Seneca as representatives of the Roman philosophers. Although the focus in his teaching was on Greek literature, the Roman world also came to the fore in his research, including in treatises on the Roman poetry of Virgil , Horace and Ausonius . His interest extended far beyond antiquity, such as B. the studies on Giordano Bruno prove.

In addition, Schmidt also examined historiographical questions in Herodotus and Plutarch and researched the genre history of diatribe and satire .

In addition, he turned increasingly to the reception of antiquity in German classical music ( Johann Joachim Winckelmann , Goethe and Schiller ) and the history of science . Above all, the works of Franz Dornseiff and Gottfried Hermann were taken into account, as did the Jena Graecistics from around 1800.

In addition, Schmidt increasingly dealt with comparative issues . Throughout his life Schmidt strove intensively to make antiquity and antiquity accessible to a wider audience. This approach not only led to numerous translations and adaptations of the works of Greek and Latin authors, but also to interdisciplinary projects. For example, he devoted an investigation to a performance of Antigone with the musical accompaniment of works by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy . At times he also worked as a lecturer at the University of Music and Theater in Leipzig and at the Medical Academy in Erfurt .

Another focus of Schmidt's was the studies of antiquity by Karl Marx . In 1964 in Jena, he obtained the first edition of Marx's unpublished dissertation Difference between Democritical and Epicurean Natural Philosophy . He also provided the second edition, published in 1983, with a detailed commentary on ancient history.

Schmidt also worked in various functions for the Philologus , the GDR's only classic philological journal. In addition to numerous articles, he held a position as co-editor between 1964 and 1970 and from 1993 onwards and was even responsible for the magazine as main editor between 1971 and 1992, although he understood that its reputation as a scientific organ free of political and ideological coloring was also growing in western countries receive.

Publications (selection)

• 1996 Greece and Rome , Thuringia.
• 1988 Acquired legacy , Leipzig: Reclam, ISBN 3-379-00349-2
• 1984 Шмидт Э. Г. Традиция и новаторство в "Пролегоменах" Давида Непобедимого // Философия Давида Непобедимого Ма., "1984," Нау.кимого Ма., "1984." 63-73.
• 1961 The old Armenian "Zenon" script (treatises of the German Academy of Sciences in Berlin, class for languages, literature and art; born in 1960, no. 2), Berlin: Akademie-Verlag.
• 1958 Seneca's 118th letter. A study of the polemics between the Stoa and Peripatos

obituary

• Jürgen Werner : Ernst Günther Schmidt †, Gnomon 72 (2000), pp. 472–476.

Web links

• Literature by and about Ernst Günther Schmidt in the catalog of the German National Library