Helene Richter (English studies)

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Helene Richter (born August 4, 1861 in Vienna ; died probably November 8, 1942 in the Theresienstadt concentration camp ) was an Austrian English scholar, theater scholar and critic.

Life

Helene Richter came from the assimilated Jewish bourgeoisie: she was the daughter of the chief physician of the Südbahn-Gesellschaft , Maximilian Richter (1824–1890) and his wife Emilie (Emmy) Lackenbacher (1832–1889). Like her sister Elise Richter , who was four years younger than her, she was tutored by a Prussian-North German private teacher. The girls were brought up "religiously but non-denominationally". The family celebrated Christmas and attended "all kinds of religious services, except Jewish ones." Since women were still denied an academic training at the time, she trained as a self-taught woman and began in 1886 with studies of Percy Bysshe Shelley .

After the death of her parents, she lived with her also unmarried sister Elise, who later became a Romance studies, first post-doctoral candidate and first (associate) professor at the University of Vienna . The two inherited the considerable inheritance of their father, which allowed them to build a house in the Währing cottage district as well as numerous trips through Europe and North Africa. From 1891 the sisters attended lectures at the University of Vienna, for example with the philologist Theodor Gomperz and the Romance scholar Adolf Mussafia .

In 1892 Helene Richter published an article on Shelley's 100th birthday in the Vossische Zeitung , in 1897 an article on " Mary Wollstonecraft , the advocate of women's rights" followed in the social-democratic workers' newspaper . She devoted herself to extensive biographical and literary-critical works on Shelley (1898), Thomas Chatterton (1900), William Blake (1906), George Eliot (1907), Oscar Wilde (1912), George Bernhard Shaw (1913) and Lord Byron ( 1929). She also wrote a three-volume work "The History of English Romanticism" (1911-18).

From 1906 the two Richter sisters invited to a weekly salon, where prominent scholars and artists met. These included B. the women's rights activists Marianne Hainisch and Rosa Mayreder , the music critic Max Kalbeck , the writer Richard Kralik , the Burgtheater director Hugo Thimig and the philologist Hans von Arnim . In January 1911, Helene and Elise Richter were baptized in the Lutheran City Church in Vienna.

Her work for the Shakespeare yearbook led her to theater criticism. She wrote about the Vienna Burgtheater with books such as “Actor Characteristics” (1914), “Our Burgtheater” (1918) and “ Joseph Lewinsky , 50 Years of Viennese Art and Culture” (1925) . In 1926 she was appointed "Burgtheater Biographer".

Because of her achievements, the universities of Heidelberg and Erlangen awarded her an honorary doctorate in 1931 - on the occasion of her 70th birthday . In the same year she was honored as an honorary citizen of the City of Vienna .

After Austria's annexation to Nazi Germany, her teaching permit was revoked in March 1938 and she was banned from library use. In the following years she also had to sell her English-language private library. In March 1942, she and her sister were forced to move to a Jewish retirement home. From there, both were deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in October of the same year , where she probably died on November 8, 1942.

Honors

The gate of the University of Vienna, which leads from Garnisongasse 13 to the “new courtyards” of the campus in Alservorstadt , has been called “Richter-Tor” since 1998, in memory of Helene and Elise Richter. In 2008 the Helene-Richter-Gasse in Vienna- Floridsdorf was named after her (instead of Margret Dietrich ). The German Anglists' Association awards a Helene Richter Prize for "a dissertation, habilitation or comparable academic work [...] that is characterized by the intensity of the research work, clarity in structure and argumentation, meaning of the results, close textual proximity and skilful linguistic representation ".

Richter Library

In 1942 the library of the two sisters, consisting of around 3,000 volumes, was transferred to the University of Cologne under the political pressure of the Nazi era . After the correspondence to the library was found in the archive, the library has been reconstructed, published and - if possible - restituted to heirs since 2005 as part of NS provenance research . In addition, a small space between USB and Philosophikum is to be named after the two judges' sisters.

literature

  • Christiane Hoffrath: Traces of books - The fate of Elise and Helene Richter and their library in the Third Reich. Böhlau, Vienna 2009.
  • Judge, Helene. In: Lexicon of German-Jewish Authors . Volume 18: Phil – Samu. Edited by the Bibliographia Judaica archive. De Gruyter, Berlin a. a. 2010, ISBN 978-3-598-22698-4 , pp. 236-241.
  • Elisabeth Lebensaft : Richter, Helene. In: Brigitta Keintzel, Ilse Korotin (ed.): Scientists in and from Austria. Life - work - work. Böhlau, Vienna / Cologne / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-205-99467-1 , pp. 619–621.

Web links

Wikisource: Helene Richter  - Sources and full texts
Commons : Helene Richter  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Astrid Schweighofer: Religious seekers in the modern age. Conversions from Judaism to Protestantism in Vienna around 1900. De Gruyter, Berlin / Munich / Boston 2015, p. 141.
  2. ↑ Christiane Hoff Rath: Books traces - The fate of Elise and Helene Richter and her library in the Third Reich. Böhlau, Vienna 2009, p. 24.
  3. ↑ a b c d Renate Heuer, Archive Bibliographia Judaica (Ed.): Lexicon of German-Jewish authors. Volume 18, Phil - Samu. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2010, p. 236, entry Richter, Helene .
  4. ^ Astrid Schweighofer: Religious seekers in the modern age. Conversions from Judaism to Protestantism in Vienna around 1900. De Gruyter, Berlin / Munich / Boston 2015, p. 143.
  5. ^ Astrid Schweighofer: Religious seekers in the modern age. Conversions from Judaism to Protestantism in Vienna around 1900. De Gruyter, Berlin / Munich / Boston 2015, pp. 86–88.
  6. ^ Astrid Schweighofer: Religious seekers in the modern age. Conversions from Judaism to Protestantism in Vienna around 1900. De Gruyter, Berlin / Munich / Boston 2015, pp. 144–145.
  7. ^ Hanns Jäger-Sunstenau: The honorary citizens and honorary citizens of the city of Vienna. F. Deuticke, Vienna 1992, p. 18.
  8. ↑ Helene Richter Foundation at the German Anglistenverband (anglistenverband.de); Retrieved November 11, 2014.
  9. ^ Christine Haffmans: Reparation through memory, victims and beneficiaries: The reconstruction of the Richter library in the University and City Library of Cologne. In: With Us. (Employee magazine Uni-Köln), June 09, pp. 20f + end of 09 Part II emergency sale to Cologne. P. 22f. See also uni-koeln.de pdf pp. 22-25
personal data
SURNAME Judge, Helene
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian Anglicist
DATE OF BIRTH 4th August 1861
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH uncertain: November 8, 1942
Place of death Theresienstadt concentration camp