Friedrich Maurer (Linguist)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Friedrich Maurer (born January 5, 1898 in Lindenfels , † November 7, 1984 in Merzhausen ) was a German Germanic medievalist and linguist .

Life

Maurer began studying classical philology and comparative linguistics in 1916 at the University of Frankfurt / Main , which had opened two years earlier . In the same year he was drafted for military service and seriously wounded in 1917; he spent the time afterwards in a Heidelberg military hospital. That year he re-enrolled in order to be able to continue studying as a wounded man with limited teaching at the university. After the war, he continued his full course of German studies in Heidelberg from 1918 and in Gießen from 1919 , where he also studied comparative Indo-European linguistics and classical philology. He received his doctorate in 1922 under Otto Behaghel , who had a lasting influence on the focus of his later research. Maurer was a member of the Heidelberger Wingolf from 1917 and the Giessen Wingolf from 1919 . Later he also joined the Freiburg Wingolf . He completed his habilitation in 1925 in Gießen for the subject “German Philology” and in 1929 was appointed associate professor. In 1931 he was offered a full professorship at the University of Erlangen .

Maurer, a member of the nationalist and democratic hostile helmet Federal had been after the " seizure " of the Nazis in the SA incorporated, but which he left the 1935th In 1937 he joined the NSDAP , the NS teachers 'association , the NS lecturers' association, and the NS old gentlemen's association of German students . In the same year he became a full professor at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg , where he headed the Institute for German Philology until his retirement in 1966. In 1937 and 1938 he was dean of the Philosophical Faculty and from 1940 until the end of teaching in 1944 he was Vice-Rector of the University of Freiburg. From 1938/39 Maurer worked with the SS-Ahnenerbe and set up a Baden collection point for folk tales, legends and fairy tales. In 1941, Maurer became a shop steward of the Nazi lecturers' association within the Philosophical Faculty of the Freiburg University.

During the reconstruction of the partially destroyed university from 1945 onwards, despite this involvement in National Socialism, the military government assigned him essential tasks. Among other things, he initiated the establishment of the Institute for Historical Regional Studies in Freiburg and the Institute for Franconian Language Research in Erlangen .

Friedrich Maurer was chairman of the German Association of Germanists from 1958 to 1959 and one of the founders of the Institute for German Language in Mannheim in 1964 . Since 1962 he was a full member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences .

plant

Like his doctoral supervisor Otto Behaghel in Giessen, Maurer turned to linguistic research on dialects ( dialectology and dialect geography ) as well as comparative German linguistics. He presented a number of works on medieval literature and poetry and numerous editions that particularly stood out due to the combination of literary studies, cultural history, prehistoric archeology and sociology. In 1943 he published the first edition of the three-volume work "Deutsche Wortgeschichte" in collaboration with Friedrich Stroh .

Classification of the Germanic language families according to Maurer
Modern classification of Germanic archaeological finds, 50 AD

His most important work is a linguistic work ("Nordgermanen und Alemanen", 1942), with which he follows the ideologically influenced nationalistic theories of the time on Germanic language development, which asserted an extensive linguistic unity of the Teutons in ancient times opposed the still controversial theory today. In particular , Maurer wanted to deconstruct the term " West Germanic ", which was seen as a preliminary stage of German. In contrast to the classic tripartite division into North, East and West Germanic peoples, he postulates that there were already five different cultural and linguistic areas of the Germanic peoples during the Roman Empire , which he called North Germanic (in Scandinavia ), North Sea German (Saxony, Frisian etc.) , Rhine-Weser Teutons (Cheruscans, Chatten, later Franks), Elbe Germans (Suebi, Marcomanni, Lombards, later Alemanni) and Oder-Weichsel Teutons (Vandals, Burgundians, Goths). In doing so, he relied primarily on Tacitus and Pliny the Elder . Especially with the latter, he found a sentence in his Naturalis historia , where he explicitly reports of germanorum genera quinque , i.e. five types of Germanic peoples ( Plin . Nat 4.99 ).

In the third edition of the work from 1952 he bases this assumption on archaeological finds. In doing so, he mainly relies on Rafael von Uslar and his article "Archaeological Fund Groups and Germanic Tribal Areas, Mainly from the Time of the Birth of Christ", published in the same year. He equates the five archaeological find groups identified by him with five different Germanic language or dialect groups. The admissibility of equating archaeological find groups with language groups sparked a heated discussion that is still ongoing today. Since textual evidence of the Germanic languages ​​(with the exception of the Gothic Bible from the late 4th century) is scarce up to the 7th and 8th century , his thesis could neither be confirmed nor rejected until today. Maurer recognizes the linguistic closeness between Franconian (i.e. according to his division Rhine-Weser-Germanic) and Alemannic and Bavarian (Elb-Germanic) texts of the early Middle Ages, but justifies this with a secondary process of standardization, which he started in the Merovingian period from the 4th to the 6th centuries dated. He justified the cultural, religious and also linguistic similarities that he saw between Scandinavia and the Alemanni with the fact that the Elbe Germanic Alamanni were still direct neighbors of the North Germanic in the time around the birth of Christ on the Baltic Sea and would have retained similarities on their later migration to the south-west would have.

In the area of ​​dialectology, Maurer made a significant contribution to explaining the recent dialectic linguistic landscape in the "German Southwest" with the book "Oberrheiner, Schwaben, Südalemannen" (1942), which he published and largely wrote. He formulated the Swabian - Alemannic “main barriers” and “main movements” and worked out the “Old Alemannic and Swabian spatial formations”, the “squadrons, spaces and movements in the Upper Rhine area” and the “southern Alemannic area, its unity and its parts”. Maurer understood the volume expressly as a continuation of his book on the "Northern Germans and Alemanni".

Maurer later developed the first historical linguistic atlas of the German language together with his students Konrad Kunze , Wolfgang Kleiber and Heinrich Löffler . Maurer was the founder of the " South Hessian Dictionary " as well as the author and editor of the "Religious Poems of the 11th and 12th Centuries".

Awards

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, second updated edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 , p. 396.
  2. ^ Members of the HAdW since it was founded in 1909. Friedrich Maurer. Heidelberg Academy of Sciences, accessed June 21, 2016 .
  3. ↑ Wikisource: Gaius Plinius Secundus: Naturalis Historia; Liber IV, 99
  4. ^ Johannes Hoops, Heinrich Beck, Dieter Geuenich, Heiko Steuer: Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde: Volume 7 ; Walter de Gruyter, 1989, ISBN 9783110114454 (pp. 113-114).
personal data
SURNAME Maurer, Friedrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German philologist, linguist
DATE OF BIRTH January 5, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Lindenfels
DATE OF DEATH November 7, 1984
Place of death Merzhausen