Franz Baermann Steiner

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Franz Baermann Steiner (born October 12, 1909 in Karolinenthal , Austria-Hungary ; died November 27, 1952 in Oxford ) was a Czechoslovak-British ethnologist and poet.

Life

He belongs to the last generation of Prague Jewish-German literature. He grew up as the son of an assimilated Jewish merchant in Prague, speaking German, and was close friends with Hans Günther Adler since his youth . At the Karl Ferdinand University in Germany , he studied Semitic languages and ethnology at the Charles University in the Czech Republic . From 1926 to 1930 he was a member of the Red Student Union in Prague. During a one-year stay at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem , Steiner learned Arabic and then began to study Judaism and Zionism , and finally he regularly attended the synagogue in Oxford. He received his doctorate in Prague in 1935 with the dissertation Studies on Arabic Root History . He continued his anthropological studies in England from 1936 at Magdalen College , Oxford, where Alfred Radcliffe-Brown held the chair of social anthropology . In autumn 1936 he emigrated from the Czech Republic to England. In the spring of 1937 he undertook a research trip lasting several weeks to Carpathian Ruthenia , the easternmost part of Czechoslovakia . From 1939 he was teaching anthropology at Oxford University , where he worked for the Africa Institute.

In exile in England he was friends with Elias Canetti, who lived in London and whom he already knew from Vienna. Steiner introduced Canetti to the Student Movement House on Gower Street, where they met for several years. It was also Canetti who was the first to show the work of Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd on Buschmann folklore , which he had just acquired in one of the antiquarian bookstores around the British Museum . Specimens of Bushman Folklore later provided Canetti with important insights into the nature of transformation (in “mass and power”).

Steiner's main scientific work on the sociology of slavery remained unfinished. A letter from Hans Günther Adler to Chaim Rabin and Adler's epilogue to Unrest without a watch give first-hand insights into Steiner's character and career, his scientific methodology and his relationship to Canetti . Steiner's scientific work is almost entirely available in the edition Civilization and Danger published by Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon . The poetic work can be found in the complete edition Am stürzendenpfad, edited in 2000 .

Franz Baermann Steiner is buried in the Jewish cemetery in Oxford. Baermann's parents Hermann Steiner and Martha Gross were murdered in the Treblinka concentration camp in 1942 .

reception

With the exception of his poetry, Franz Baermann Steiner wrote in English and remained a stranger in post-war Germany. Rüdiger Görner discussed this in detail with Jeremy Adler and Michael Krüger on November 7, 2016 at an event organized by the International Morphomata College of the University of Cologne (audio recording).

Peter Handke writes: "Franz Baermann Steiner (to be found at HG Adler) 'failed' to take photographs during the Second World War - 'these waivers during the war had a penitential function'."

Works

  • Taboo . With a preface by Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard . Cohen and West, London 1956. Again Penguin, Harmondsworth 1967
  • Restlessness without a watch. Selected poems from the estate . Afterword by Hans Günther Adler. Lambert Schneider, Heidelberg 1954 (publications of the German Academy for Language and Poetry Darmstadt, 3)
  • Conquests. A lyric cycle . With an afterword ed. by Hans Günther Adler. Schneider, Heidelberg 1964 (publications of the German Academy for Language and Poetry Darmstadt, 33)
  • Jeremy Adler, Richard Fardon (Ed.): Franz Baermann Steiner: Selected Writings . 2 Vols. Berghahn Books, Oxford 1999 (Methodology and History in Anthropology, Vols. 2 and 3)
  1. Taboo, Truth, and Religion
  2. Orientpolitik, Value, and Civilization
  • Jeremy Adler (ed.): On the falling path: Collected poems . Wallstein, Göttingen 2000 (publications of the German Academy for Language and Poetry Darmstadt, 76)
  • Jeremy Adler, Richard Fardon (ed.): Franz Baermann Steiner. Civilization and danger. Scientific writings. Wallstein, Göttingen 2008 ISBN 978-3-89244-615-6
  • Findings and experiments. Records 1943–1952. Ed. U. van Loyen, E. Schüttpelz. Wallstein, Göttingen 2009 (publications of the German Academy for Language and Poetry 90,) ISBN 978-3-8353-0548-9

literature

  • Alfons Fleischli: Franz Baermann Steiner. Life and work. Hochdorf AG, Hochdorf 1970
  • Jürgen Serke : Bohemian Villages. Wanderings through a deserted literary landscape. Zsolnay, Vienna 1987 [On German-language literature from Prague and the Bohemian countries. HG Adler and Franz Baermann Steiner, among others, are treated]
  • Accents. Zeitschrift für Literatur , 42, 1995 [contains among other things: Jeremy Adler: The friendship between Elias Canetti and Franz Baermann Steiner ]
  • “Plain message.” The Friends of HG Adler, Elias Canetti and Franz Baermann Steiner in exile in England. Arr. Marcel Atze . Contributions by Jeremy Adler, Gerhard Hirschfeld. German Schiller Society, Marbach 1998 (Marbacher Magazin, 84)
  • Michael Mack: Anthropology as Memory: Elias Canetti's and Franz Baermann Steiner's Responses to the Shoah. Niemeyer, Tübingen 2001
  • Elias Canetti : Party in the Flash. The English years. Munich 2003 [p. 125–134 "Franz Steiner"]
  • HG Adler: About Franz Baermann Steiner. Letter to Chaim Rabin. Wallstein, Göttingen 2006 ISBN 3-8353-0028-8
  • Ulrich van Loyen: Franz Baermann Steiner. Exile and metamorphosis. On the biography of a German poet and Jewish ethnologist. Aisthesis, Bielefeld 2010 ISBN 978-3-89528-788-6
  • Steiner, Franz Baermann. In: Lexicon of German-Jewish Authors . Volume 19: Sand – Stri. Edited by the Bibliographia Judaica archive. De Gruyter, Berlin a. a. 2012, ISBN 978-3-598-22699-1 , pp. 447-451.
  • Marcel Atze: Steiner, Franz Baermann. In: Andreas B. Kilcher (Ed.): Metzler Lexicon of German-Jewish Literature. Jewish authors in the German language from the Enlightenment to the present. 2nd, updated and expanded edition. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2012, ISBN 978-3-476-02457-2 , p. 483f.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jeremy Adler, Rüdiger Görner and Michael Krüger: German-speaking exiles in London under the sign of the Shoah. Morphomata - University of Cologne, November 7, 2016, accessed on March 14, 2017 (German).
  2. ↑ Peter Handke: In front of the tree shadow wall at night, signs and approaches from the periphery 2007-2015 . Jung und Jung, Salzburg 2016, ISBN 978-3-99027-083-7 , p. 37 (2008) .
personal data
SURNAME Steiner, Franz Baermann
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Bohemian ethnologist and poet
DATE OF BIRTH October 12, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Prague , Austria-Hungary
DATE OF DEATH November 27, 1952
Place of death Oxford