Ernst Grumach

Ernst Grumach (born November 7, 1902 in Tilsit , † October 5, 1967 in London ) was a German classical philologist and literary scholar . He was editor of the East Berlin Goethe Edition and the East Berlin Academy Edition of Aristotle .

Life

Ernst Grumach was the son of the lawyer Nathan Grumach and Rika Grumach, née Mendelsohn. In 1920 he met the schoolgirl Hannah Arendt , with whom he was first connected by a childhood love that led to a friendship. He studied at the Universities of Königsberg , Leipzig , Berlin , Heidelberg and Marburg . Martin Heidegger and Paul Friedländer influenced him in Marburg . He studied classical philology and philosophy , but also Egyptology and linguistics . Grumach received his doctorate in Königsberg with Richard Harder with a thesis on physis and agathon in the old stoa . In 1930 he became a lecturer at the University of Königsberg; In 1933, however, he was expelled from the university under the Law Restoring the Professional Civil Service .

On March 3, 1933, he married Margarete Breuer. After his discharge from the university he ran a small bookshop in Königsberg to support himself and his family. In 1937 he was appointed lecturer at the Institute for the Science of Judaism in Berlin, where he taught students who had been expelled from the universities. However, the school was closed by the Nazi regime. He survived the Shoah in a "non-privileged mixed marriage ". During the Second World War , Grumach was obliged to do forced labor in the central library of the Reich Security Main Office . From 1941 to 1945, the "Grumach Group" had to record books, magazines and manuscripts stolen by the SS from all over Europe, a total of around two million objects. Later the group was drawn into heavy physical labor. A large part of this stock was destroyed in a bomb attack in 1943.

After the Second World War, Grumach was appointed to the Humboldt University in Berlin in 1949 and was entrusted with the management of the Goethe edition at the German Academy of Sciences in Berlin, which had been published since 1952. His research areas were mainly the Cretan script, ancient philosophy and Goethe. For his numerous projects in very different areas, he soon released his duties at the university (1957) and the academy (1959). From 1956 he was editor of the great Aristotle edition in German translation. He was also the founder and editor of the magazine Kadmos , a magazine for pre- and early Greek epigraphy . For a long time he worked on an edition of Stephanos of Byzantium that Felix Jacoby had taken over and that was taken over by Rudolf Keydell after his death . In the 1960s he married his second wife, the Germanist Renate Grumach , née Fischer-Lamberg.

Ernst Grumach died on October 5th, 1967 in London. The burial took place on October 13, 1967 in the state-owned cemetery Heerstraße in the Berlin district of Charlottenburg (today's Westend district ). Rudolf Kassel spoke words of remembrance at the grave .

On the occasion of his 65th birthday, the commemorative publication Europe, Studies on the History and Epigraphy of the Early Aegean was published shortly after his death .

estate

Ernst Grumach's estate was handed over to the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem by his daughter Irene Shirun-Grumach .

Fonts (selection)

Goethe and the ancient world. Potsdam 1949
Contributions to Goethe research. Berlin 1959
(Ed.): Aristotle edition, 18 volumes, Berlin-Ost 1956 ff. (Continued by Hellmut Flashar from 1970)

literature

Hellmut Flashar : Ernst Grumach †. In: Gnomon 40, 1968, pp. 221-223.
Dov Schidorsky: Confiscation of Libraries and Assignments to Forced Labor. Two Documents of the Holocaust. In: Libraries & Culture 33, 1998, pp. 347-388 ( online ).
Biography of Ernst Grumach, in: Utz Maas : Persecution and emigration of German-speaking linguists 1933–1945 online (accessed: April 13, 2018)

Web links

Individual evidence

^ Rika Rahel Mendelsohn [sic]; born December 17, 1865 in Allenstein, died in the Theresienstadt ghetto . Ernst's sister Betty Grumach, b. 1895, died in Auschwitz concentration camp. Another sister, Helene, survived the Shoah and died of old age.
^ Elisabeth Young-Bruehl: Hannah Arendt. Life, work and time. Fischer, Frankfurt a. M. 2004, ISBN 3-596-16010-3 , pp. 68, 72, 76, 79f, 106. (American. Original edition: Hannah Arendt. For Love of the World, Yale University Press 1982)
↑ see Grumach's curriculum vitae . A volume published by both of them from 1959 still runs under the maiden name of his future wife.
↑ Bodo Plachta: Ernst Grumach and the 'whole Goethe' . In: Roland S. Kamzelak u. a. (Ed.): Modern German editors in a scientific context . De Gruyter, Berlin and Boston 2011, ISBN 978-3-11-025136-4 . Pp. 219–250, here p. 219, also footnote 1.
^ Ed. William C. Brice, de Gruyter, Berlin 1967

personal data
SURNAME	Grumach, Ernst
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	German philologist and literary scholar
DATE OF BIRTH	November 7, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH	Tilsit
DATE OF DEATH	5th October 1967
Place of death	London

[1] Rika Rahel Mendelsohn [sic]; born December 17, 1865 in Allenstein, died in the Theresienstadt ghetto . Ernst's sister Betty Grumach, b. 1895, died in Auschwitz concentration camp. Another sister, Helene, survived the Shoah and died of old age.

[2] Elisabeth Young-Bruehl: Hannah Arendt. Life, work and time. Fischer, Frankfurt a. M. 2004, ISBN 3-596-16010-3 , pp. 68, 72, 76, 79f, 106. (American. Original edition: Hannah Arendt. For Love of the World, Yale University Press 1982)

[3] see Grumach's curriculum vitae . A volume published by both of them from 1959 still runs under the maiden name of his future wife.

[4] Bodo Plachta: Ernst Grumach and the 'whole Goethe' . In: Roland S. Kamzelak u. a. (Ed.): Modern German editors in a scientific context . De Gruyter, Berlin and Boston 2011, ISBN 978-3-11-025136-4 . Pp. 219–250, here p. 219, also footnote 1.

[5] Ed. William C. Brice, de Gruyter, Berlin 1967