Ernst Meyer (Schliemann researcher)

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Ernst Meyer (born February 21, 1888 in Groß-Bieberau , † August 15, 1968 in Berlin ) was a German high school teacher and Schliemann researcher. In 1936 he was granted the right to be the only researcher to publish Heinrich Schliemann's posthumous letters, and for decades blocked other scholars from accessing Schliemann's written estate.

Life

Ernst Meyer finished his school years at the Landgraf-Ludwigs-Gymnasium in Gießen with the Abitur and then studied until 1912 at the University of Gießen , interrupted in the summer semester 1909 by a semester at the University of Munich , classical philology , German studies and classical archeology . In the summer of 1912 he was given a doctorate by Otto Immisch in Giessen with an ancient philological thesis. phil. PhD. After his participation in the First World War , Meyer worked from 1919 as a teacher at the Carolinum grammar school in Neustrelitz , which Heinrich Schliemann had also attended for a short time. In the 1930s he prepared an edition of Heinrich Schliemann's letters, which appeared in 1936. The express aim of the work, as Meyer wrote in the preface, was to avoid the danger of "stripping Schliemann of his greatness". Furthermore, Meyer said in this foreword the Jewish Schliemann biographer Emil Ludwig "the organ for the German in Schliemann from". In the following years - he was released from school service from 1937 in order to be able to devote himself to Schliemann research - Meyer continued to deal with Schliemann's estate. It was his fault that some of the documents were lost in 1945. In 1952 he left the Soviet occupation zone and moved to West Berlin. For decades he prevented other researchers from gaining insight into the part of Schliemann's written estate that was still there. Nevertheless, Heinrich Alexander Stoll published Heinrich Schliemann's life novel in 1956 , which shaped the idea of ​​Schliemann's personality , especially in the GDR .

Meyer's edition of Schliemann's letters and his way of working in general were later devastatingly criticized: “The fact is that after 35 years of work on Schliemann, Meyer never understood him. He never learned to treat sources, especially autobiographical ones, skeptically nor to seek controls, that is external sources, to confirm or refute what Schliemann said about himself. His editing of the letters is a scandal, comparable to Dore Hensler or Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche . ”And:“ The more recent Schliemann research, initiated in 1972, expressly differs from Ernst Meyer and refers to the tradition of Ludwig and Stoll. ”

Schliemann's estate

When the Troy excavator Heinrich Schliemann died on December 26, 1890, he left behind over 60,000 letters and 18 travel or excavation diaries, as well as numerous business books and manuscripts. The documents initially remained in the possession of his family. In 1936 they were transferred to the Gennadius Library in Athens .

As early as 1928, Schliemann's widow Sophia had asked the writer Emil Ludwig to write a biography of Schliemann. Ludwig was allowed to use the entire written estate of Schliemann for this purpose. Heinrich Schliemann would probably not have been satisfied with the result, as it deviated in many respects from the image that he and his relatives and friends had spread. Ludwig did not shy away from reporting on Schliemann's traumatizing childhood experiences, for which his father was primarily responsible, and critically examining Heinrich Schliemann's character and his excavations. His book, entitled Schliemann - History of a Gold Prospector , was burned by the National Socialists a year after its publication, along with Ludwig's other works . Sophia Schliemann no longer lived to see this book burning; she died in 1932.

Schliemann himself had z. B. said very derogatory about his father in an Italian language exercise: “My father [...] was a dissolute person, a sybarite ; he did not abstain from adulterous relations with the maids, whom he preferred to his own wife. He abused his wife and I remember from my earliest childhood that he verbally abused and spat at her. He made her pregnant to get rid of her and abused her more than ever during her (last) pregnancy. So it came about that a nerve fever from which she fell ill quickly led to her death. My father then feigned great suffering and grief and organized a splendid funeral for those whom he had killed for wickedness [...] “Heinrich Schliemann did not, however, make such statements public.

In the run-up to the publication of his collection of letters, which was tendentious both by the selection of the material and by the abbreviations, Ernst Meyer succeeded in obtaining the assurance of sole publication rights from Schliemann's children Andromache and Agamemnon . In addition, Schliemann's written estate, which had not been sorted at all, was brought to the Gennadius Library in 1936 as a loan. Meyer evaluated the documents there for several years. In 1944 he wrote in Low German Observer : " It is thanks to the initiative of our Gauleiter and Reich Governor Friedrich Hildebrandt that I was given the opportunity to devote myself to this work from 1937 onwards."

In 1941 the German army occupied Greece. In April 1942, Meyer, as a uniformed cultural officer, fetched archival material from the Gennadius Library, which he wanted to evaluate in his quarters in Athens. Later he deposited two suitcases with Schliemann archives in the Paulshöhe state bunker in Schwerin . The exact fate of these documents is unclear. Meyer himself was of the opinion that the suitcases had come into the possession of the Soviet occupying forces and tried to get the documents released from 1946 onwards. Of course, he did not succeed in this. In 1952 Meyer fled the Soviet occupation zone to West Berlin. There he discovered some of the archival material that had been in the suitcases in an antiquarian bookshop and bought them. In the following years, in which Meyer continued to research Schliemann, he denied all other interested parties the insight into Schliemann's written estate.

After Agamemnon Schliemann's death in 1954, his sister Andromache had sole control over Heinrich Schliemann's estate. She soon passed this on to her sons Alex and Leno Melas. In 1962, Schliemann's descendants sold the documents to the Gennadius Library. Only after this sale was it possible for researchers other than Ernst Meyer to deal with the archive material. In 1966 the Gennadius Library succeeded in acquiring other, previously unknown, documents from the Schliemann family's holdings.

In 1980 the Gennadius Library carried out the first scientific inventory of the documents. In 1997/98 the diaries and the incoming correspondence were microfilmed. These microfilms were made available to the Heinrich Schliemann Museum in Ankershagen in 2002 , while the Gennadius Library itself has now started to scan the diaries and publish them online. The next project is to scan the letters and publish them. Schliemann's correspondence with his father and eight siblings, comprising more than 2,000 letters, is currently (spring 2012) being evaluated for the first time.

Fonts

  • The upstart. A contribution to ancient ethology. Giessen 1913 (= dissertation)
  • Letters from Heinrich Schliemann. Collected and with an introduction to choose from . With a foreword by Wilhelm Dörpfeld . Berlin and Leipzig 1936.
  • Heinrich Schliemann. Correspondence. From the estate in selection 1: From 1842 to 1875. Berlin 1953
  • Rudolf Virchow. Wiesbaden 1956
  • Heinrich Schliemann. Correspondence. From the estate in selection 2: From 1876 to 1890. Berlin 1958
  • Heinrich Schliemann. Businessman and researcher. Goettingen 1969.

literature

  • Stefanie AH Kennell: Schliemann and his Papers. A Tale from the Gennadeion Archives. In: Hesperia 76 (2007) pp. 785-817
  • Stephan Sehlke: Educators - Pastors - Patriots. Biographical handbook on print material for children and young people by authors and illustrators from Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania from the beginnings up to and including 1945. Books on Demand, 2009, ISBN 3837094979 , p. 255.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kürschner's German Scholars Calendar. Volume 7, 1950.
  2. ↑ a b c d nordkurier.de ( Memento from February 11, 2013 in the web archive archive.today )
  3. ↑ German: “The fact is that Meyer, [also] after 35 years of work on Schliemann, never understood him. He never learned to view sources, especially autobiographical ones, with skepticism, nor to look for controls, that is, external sources, in order to confirm or refute what Schliemann said about himself. His letter edition is a scandal that can be compared with Dore Hensler or Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. ”In: William M. Calder, Justus Cobet (Ed.): Heinrich Schliemann after a hundred years. Vittorio Klostermann 1990, ISBN 978-3465022664 , p. 375.
  4. ^ Justus Cobet: Heinrich Schliemann. Archaeologist and adventurer. 2nd Edition. Beck 2007, ISBN 978-3406410574 , p. 111.
  5. ↑ Call for donations for the restoration of the grave of Schliemann's mother ( memento from September 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive ).
personal data
SURNAME Meyer, Ernst
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German high school teacher and Schliemann researcher
DATE OF BIRTH February 21, 1888
PLACE OF BIRTH Groß-Bieberau
DATE OF DEATH 15th August 1968
Place of death Berlin