Fritz Jäger (Sinologist)

Fritz Jäger (born February 21, 1886 in Munich , † June 14, 1957 in Calw , Baden-Württemberg ) was a German sinologist and dean at the University of Hamburg .

Life

After completing his doctorate in Classical Philology at the University of Rostock in 1909 , he began his sinological studies with Otto Franke in 1910 . Jäger completed his habilitation in Hamburg (Sinology) in 1925 and became a non-official associate professor at the University of Hamburg in 1931 . In May 1933 he joined the NSDAP . Jäger was one of the signatories of the professors' commitment to Adolf Hitler at German universities and colleges in 1933. In 1934, Jäger wrote On the Question of Chinese Jews . After his assistantship, he received the Hamburg chair for the language and culture of China in 1935 (as the successor to Alfred Forke ). From 1938 to 1941 Jäger was Dean of the Philosophical Faculty in Hamburg.

Because of his proximity to National Socialism , he was ousted in 1945, but reinstated in 1947, but soon retired and was formally retired in 1957 . He led three students to a doctorate: Alfred Hoffmann , Herbert Pohl and Heinrich Eggert, who died in the war.

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In Sinology, he thought about new ways, for example in a short essay on a "figure of speech" in Shih-chi from Chinese historiography. The same applies to a 40-page book about a research trip to the Yao , a small ethnic group in southern China. Further work was directed at the old Chinese thinker Yang Hsiung , the European-Chinese cultural relations in the 16th and 17th centuries. Century, as well as the history of Chinese natural science in this period.

No printing company in Germany owned a set of Chinese characters, and otherwise oriental scripts were almost unknown here. The Augustin printing company in Glückstadt achieved world fame, also through Fritz Jäger. Otto Franke writes in his memoirs: “A great help in my scientific work came from the fact that a young, enterprising print shop owner in Glückstadt warmed himself to the work of the seminar. He had seen and admired Chinese prints in mine in the winter of 1911 ”. Jäger was very committed to Augustine and also instructed the typesetters in the handling of Chinese scripts.

Fritz Jäger was honored in the text The Present State of the translation from the Shih chi. To the memory of Fritz Jäger (1962) by the Czech sinologist Timoteus Pokora .

literature

• Michael Grüttner : Biographical Lexicon on National Socialist Science Policy (= Studies on Science and University History. Volume 6). Synchron, Heidelberg 2004, ISBN 3-935025-68-8 , p. 82.
• Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Who was what before and after 1945 . 2nd Edition. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Fritz Jäger in the catalog of the German National Library
• Jäger's estate in the Geography Archive of the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography