Hans-Gert Roloff

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Hans-Gert Roloff (* 11. September 1932 in Hohenstein , East Prussia ) is an Emeritus Professor of Medieval German Literature and New Latin at the Free University of Berlin .

Live and act

Roloff was born in Hohenstein in the Osterode district in 1932 as the son of a family of landowners . His mother Anna Elisabeth, née Abramowska , came from a Polish aristocratic family, and his father Johannes died in March 1945 as an officer in the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. Roloff came to Berlin with his mother in 1944, where he attended the Goethe Gymnasium and then studied German philology , classical philology and philosophy with Richard Alewyn , Richard Newald , Helmut de Boor and Wolfgang Baumgart , among others .

After graduating in 1958 he was in Berlin working as an assistant and in 1965 with a dissertation on the Melusine of Thüring of Ringoltingen doctorate . Since 1966 lecturer at the TU Berlin , he completed his habilitation in 1970 with a thesis on the drama of the 16th century and became a professor at the TU Berlin. As such, he was the managing editor of the yearbook for international German studies published by Athenäum-Verlag in Frankfurt am Main . In 1984 he moved to the Free University of Berlin , where he took over the management of the Institute for Middle German Literature founded under his aegis. He retired in the 1997 summer semester, but has remained actively involved in his subject and previous institute ever since.

During his time as a professor at the TU Berlin and the FU Berlin, he held various visiting professorships , for example in 1981 at the University of Melbourne , in 1988 he was visiting professor at the Sorbonne , in 1995 at the University of Kansas in Lawrence and finally in 1997 at the university Wroclaw .

Roloff is the discoverer of Tugent Spyl , a German-language two-day game written by Sebastian Brant and performed by him in Strasbourg in 1512/13 with a framework story based on the Prodikos fable by Herkules am Scheidewege . The Tugent Spiel , which, as we know today, is Sebastian Brant's most important German-language work after the ship of fools , was for a long time only attested in its existence and performance by incidental statements by Jakob Wimpheling and was published by Roloff in the only surviving print, a posthumous Strasbourg Edition from 1554, discovered in the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel and reissued in 1968.

Roloff's main research area is German and Neo-Latin literature from the 14th to 18th centuries, for whose knowledge and philological development he has made a particular contribution as the editor of several series of publications. In a critical examination of conventional principles of periodization, he advocated understanding late medieval and early modern German literature up to the 18th century under the term "middle German literature" as an independent and coherent research area in German and international German studies, which is something at the FU Berlin led to the establishment of its own institute (later research center) for Middle German Literature.

From the University of Breslau, he had developed a close and scientifically momentous for the development of library materials on Polish territory cooperation since the 1970s under then politically difficult conditions with their German studies, Roloff was at the request of the Faculty of Philology on 22 May 1991 the Honorary doctorate awarded.

literature

  • Susanne Wendt / Jörg Jungmayr: Bibliography of Hans-Gert Roloff's publications since 1961 . In: James Hardin / Jörg Jungmayr: "The letter kills - the spirit gives life". Festschrift for the 60th birthday of Hans-Gert Roloff from friends, students and colleagues , Peter Lang, Bern a. a. 1992, ISBN 3-261-04522-1 , Vol. II, pp. 1263-1282

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personal data
SURNAME Roloff, Hans-Gert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German old Germanist
DATE OF BIRTH September 11, 1932
PLACE OF BIRTH Hohenstein, East Prussia