Helene Weyl

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Hermann and Helene Weyl 1913

Friederike Bertha Helene Weyl (born March 30, 1893 as Helene Joseph in Ribnitz , † June 1948 in Princeton ) was a German writer and translator . She was married to the mathematician Hermann Weyl .

Life

Weyl grew up as the daughter of the Jewish country doctor Bruno Joseph (June 13, 1861– June 10, 1934) and his wife Bertha in Ribnitz. Her father came from Pomerania , the mother from a long-established Mecklenburg family. Weyl and her younger sister were raised atheistically. When she was fourteen, her parents sent her to a secondary school in Berlin . Here she discovered a great passion for the theater and became acquainted with the actress Tilla Durieux . After graduating from high school, Weyl returned to Mecklenburg and began studying German and history at the University of Rostock . There she came into contact with the philosophical trend of phenomenology through Emil Utitz , who taught here . With the passion for philosophy awakened in this way, she began studying this subject at the University of Göttingen with a minor in mathematics. During the first semester she met her future husband Hermann Weyl, who worked as a private lecturer at the university. During this time she became close friends with Arnold Zweig , who was 25 years old at the time. Zweig was fascinated by the beautiful and bright student. There was a long, intensive correspondence between the couple Zweig and Helene Weyl during the years 1912 to 1934 and 1938 to 1939, which were preserved in fragments. This correspondence was published in 1996 under the title Come here, we love you - letters from an unusual friendship for three . Helene and Zweig's wife Beatrice became the model for the main character in the novels about Claudia .

Hermann Weyl was appointed professor at the ETH Zurich , and the couple, who were now engaged, moved to this city in 1913. Helene continued to attend mathematical lectures, but soon gave up this activity completely when her first son Fritz Joachim Weyl (February 19, 1915– July 20, 1977) was born in 1915. When her husband was drafted into the German army in 1916, she returned to her parents' house in Ribnitz for a short time. At the request of the Swiss government, he was released from military service a year later and both were able to return to Zurich. In autumn 1917 their second son Michael was born. Since many German intellectuals had fled to Switzerland during the First World War , she came into contact with many scientists, writers and actors there. Acquaintances with Albert Einstein , Elisabeth Bergner , William Dieterle and Walter Dällenbach (1892–1990) developed.

In 1923 Hermann Weyl received invitations to lectures in Madrid and Barcelona , and the couple went to Spain for three months . The trip and her acquaintances there shaped her so much that from then on she dealt intensively with Romance languages ​​and especially Spanish. She got in touch with the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset and translated several of his books into German. Ortega's philosophical world of thought, his brilliant style and the challenge of translating nuances of language and what is foreign to Spanish into German attracted her. She also translated works by Arthur Stanley Eddington and James Jeans from English into German and, during her time at Princeton, set about translating Ortega's essays into English. Ortega y Gasset writes about his translator in the fourth volume of the collected works of 1956:

“It is clear that a country's audience does not particularly value a translation in their own language, as it has that in abundance in the production of local authors. What it appreciates is the opposite: that the idiosyncratic language of the translated author shines through in a translation in which the possibilities of one's own language have been exploited to the extreme limit of comprehensibility. The German translations of my books are a good example of this. In just a few years more than fifteen editions have appeared. The case would be incomprehensible if it weren't for four-fifths of the successful translation. My translator Helene Weyl, who died in 1948, pushed the grammatical tolerance of the German language to the limit in order to translate exactly what is not German in my way of speaking. In this way, the reader will find himself effortlessly making mental gestures that are actually Spanish. It allows him to recover a little from himself, and it amuses him to feel like someone else for once. "

From 1930 to 1933, her husband again accepted a teaching position in Göttingen. After the Nazis came to power in Germany, the family decided to accept a position offered by Hermann Weyl at Princeton University and to give up the teaching post in Göttingen. Weyl died in Princeton in 1948 after a long and serious illness.

Works (selection)

  • Arnold Zweig, Beatrice Zweig, Helene Weyl: Come here, we love you - letters from an unusual friendship for three . Ed .: Ilse Lange. Structure , Berlin 1996, ISBN 3-351-03439-3 .
  • Andalusian travel sheets . 1923
  • The excavations in the caliph's castles near Cordoba . 1923

Translations from Spanish

  • José Ortega y Gasset: The revolt of the masses . 2007, ISBN 978-3-421-06503-2 .
  • José Ortega y Gasset: The task of our time . German publishing house.
  • José Ortega y Gasset: Star and Star . 1937.
  • José Ortega y Gasset: Book of the Viewer .
  • José Ortega y Gasset: About love . 1933, ISBN 3-421-06187-4 .
  • José Ortega y Gasset: The Expulsion of Man from Art .
  • José Ortega y Gasset: Triumph of the moment - splendor of duration .
  • José Ortega y Gasset: Asking for a Goethe from within .
  • José Ortega y Gasset: Conversation while Golfing or About the Idea of ​​Dharma .
  • José Ortega y Gasset: Europe .
  • Pedro Antonio de Alarcón : The tricorn .
  • Pedro Antonio de Alarcón: The fish haul . 1925.
  • Ramón Menéndez Pidal : The Cid in History .
  • Ramón Menéndez Pidal: The Afterlife of the Cid . 1925.
  • Gonzalo de Céspedes y Meneses: The steadfast Cordobesin . 1930.

Translations from English

  • Arthur Stanley Eddington: Is space expanding? 1933.
  • James Jeans: The New Foundations of Knowledge of Nature . 1934.
  • James Jeans: The Wonder World of the Stars . 1934.
  • James Jeans: Through space and time . 1936.
  • Hermann Weyl: Mathematics and the laws of nature . 1948.

literature

  • Fritz Joachim Weyl: In memoriam Helene Weyl . 1948.
  • Correspondencia: José Ortega y Gasset y Helene Weyl . Ediciones Tharpa España, 2008, ISBN 978-84-9742-839-2 , p. 270 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Fritz Joachim Weyl: In memoriam Helene Weyl. P. 7.
  2. ^ Neue Zürcher Zeitung of May 21, 2001
personal data
SURNAME Weyl, Helene
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Weyl, Friederike Bertha Helene (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer and translator
DATE OF BIRTH March 30, 1893
PLACE OF BIRTH Ribnitz
DATE OF DEATH June 1948
Place of death Princeton