Heinz Haffter

Heinz Haffter (born June 1, 1905 in Berg TG ; † September 9, 1998 in Frauenfeld ) was a Swiss classical philologist .

Life

After taking Latin lessons in Berg's rectory in 1921, Haffter's family moved to the Winterthur area , where he attended the classical grammar school and graduated from high school in 1924. In the same year Haffter began studying classical philology at the University of Zurich (with Ernst Howald and Eduard Schwyzer ). On Howald's advice, he moved to Kiel University in 1926 , where he studied with Felix Jacoby , Eduard Fraenkel and Giorgio Pasquali for two years. Following his teacher Fraenkel, he moved to Göttingen in 1928 and to Freiburg in 1931 , where he completed his dissertation in 1932Investigations on the old Latin poet language was doctorate.

As a scholarship holder, Haffter went to the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae in Munich immediately after completing his doctorate , on the recommendation of Fraenkel, who was a member of the Thesaurus Commission. The institute was in a phase of upheaval because in those years the general editor Georg Dittmann brought in numerous young philologists to accelerate the project, which was endangered by the uncertain economic situation: Otto Skutsch , Wolf-Hartmut Friedrich and Bernhard Rehm were among Haffter's colleagues . In a few years Haffter rose to the position of editor and in 1934 founded a series of publications on articles from thesaurus work , which appeared first in the Philologus and from 1952 in the Museum Helveticum . For political reasons, Haffter decided not to do a habilitation.

When the Second World War broke out , he returned to Switzerland with his family. Here he worked at various schools as an assistant teacher before he got a job at the Winterthur high school in 1941. From 1940 to 1947 he also headed the coin cabinet and antique collection of the city of Winterthur . After the end of the war he returned to Munich in 1946 by popular request (including from his teacher Fraenkel and the President of the Swiss Thesaurus Commission, Manu Leumann ) to help rebuild and maintain the thesaurus. In the spring of 1947 Haffter took over the management of the institute as general editor. From 1949 he also worked as a teacher. In that year he also succeeded in founding the international thesaurus commission in association with Leumann. In 1952 Haffter completed his habilitation with a study on Terence at the University of Zurich and handed over the management of the thesaurus to Wilhelm Ehlers . In 1953 he was appointed to the newly established second chair for Classical Philology there. In 1970 he retired. From 1973 to 1979 he headed the international thesaurus commission, in 1979 the Bavarian Academy of Sciences awarded him the gold medal bene meriti .

literature

• Peter Flury : Heinz Haffter † , Gnomon 72 (2000), pp. 88-90

Web links

• Literature by and about Heinz Haffter in the catalog of the German National Library
• Andrea Weibel: Heinz Haffter. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .