Hans Neumann (Germanist)

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Hans (Johannes) Neumann (born April 10, 1903 in Bielefeld ; † February 9, 1990 in Göttingen ) was a German specialist in German .

Life

Hans Neumann was the grandson of the baptized Jew and missionary of the Scottish Mission Society, Gustav Wilhelm Neumann. His father Paul Neumann († 1943) was a businessman, his mother was Elisabeth Neumann, née Bökenkamp († 1943). He attended the Humanist Gymnasium in Bielefeld, where he graduated from high school in 1923.

Neumann studied German philology , German literary history , Protestant theology and art history in Tübingen , Berlin and Münster . In 1927 he received his doctorate from Arthur Huebner in Berlin with a thesis on Johannes Rothe's late medieval didactic poem The Praise of Chastity . Then Neumann was Huebner 's private assistant in various research projects at the Berlin Academy of Sciences , especially the German dictionary ; In 1931 he also became an assistant at the Germanic seminar at the University of Berlin . In the same year he married Filomena Brateanu; the marriage was divorced in 1947. As a result of the National Socialist racial policy, he had to retire from the service in 1933 because of his “ non-Aryan ” grandfather and emigrated to Romania . In 1941 he returned to Germany to work, was drafted into the Wehrmacht as a “conscript mixed race” and was stationed in Eastern Europe. In 1945 he was briefly taken prisoner of war in the United States. After the war he went to Göttingen and completed his habilitation there in 1947 with a thesis on the medieval mystic Mechthild von Magdeburg . In 1947 he married Gerda Rudolphi. In 1948 Neumann was appointed to a chair for German Philology , which he held at his own request until his early retirement in 1969.

His area of ​​expertise was the German philology of the Middle Ages, especially the spiritual prose and Christian mysticism ( German mysticism and women's mysticism ) of the late Middle Ages ; He devoted himself above all to the work, the handwritten tradition and the edition of Mechthild of Magdeburg's work The flowing light of the divinity .

In 1950 Neumann set up a work station for the German dictionary at the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen , which, in cooperation with the Leipzig- based under Theodor Frings, was involved in revising the dictionary's opening volumes: one of the few scientific cooperation projects between the FRG and the GDR during the period of the " Cold War ". In 1950 Neumann became a member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences, from 1961 to 1970 he was its president or vice-president (alternating with the chairman of the math and science class).

1970/1971 Neumann was a visiting professor at the University of Cincinnati .

Publications (selection)

  • Johannes Rothe: The praise of chastity . Edited by Hans Neumann. Berlin 1934 (= German texts from the Middle Ages, 38).
  • Johannes Rothe: The Knight's Mirror . Edited by Hans Neumann. Hall 1938.
  • Contributions to the text history of the "Flowing Light of God" and the life story of Mechthild of Magdeburg . In: Nachrichten der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen , Phil.-Hist.Klasse 1954/3, pp. 28–80.
  • The ship allegory in the Ezzoliede . In: News of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen , Phil.-Hist. Class 1960/1.
  • Mechthild von Magdeburg and the Middle Dutch woman mysticism . In: Mediaeval German Studies , 1965, pp. 231–46.
  • Preface to the German Dictionary , Volume 30 (1960), together with Theodor Frings.
  • Mechthild von Magdeburg: The flowing light of the deity: according to the Einsiedeln manuscript in a critical comparison with the entire tradition . Edited by Hans Neumann, concerned and set up for printing by Gisela Vollmann-Profe. 2 volumes. Artemis, Munich 1990/93.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Neumann, Hans (actually Johannes). In: Christoph König (Ed.), With the assistance of Birgit Wägenbaur u. a .: Internationales Germanistenlexikon 1800–1950 . Volume 2: H-Q. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2003, ISBN 3-11-015485-4 , pp. 1323-1324.
personal data
SURNAME Neumann, Hans
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Neumann, Johannes (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Germanist
DATE OF BIRTH April 10, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Bielefeld
DATE OF DEATH February 9, 1990
Place of death Goettingen