Helmut Stimm

Helmut Stimm (born July 15, 1917 in Ludwigshafen am Rhein , † March 30, 1987 in Munich ) was a German Romance studies and university professor .

Grave of Helmut Stimm and his wife Liselotte in the Obermenzing cemetery (Munich)

life and work

Stimm graduated from high school in 1937. After work , military service, military service and imprisonment, he studied French, Latin and Indo-European studies in Tübingen (and Paris) from 1946 . As a student of Ernst Gamillscheg , he received his doctorate in 1951 with studies on the history of the development of Franco-Provençal and completed his habilitation in 1955 in Tübingen in Romance philology with the publication of an old French-Provencal text.

He was initially a deputy professor in Heidelberg and was appointed to the Saarland University, where he taught from 1957 to 1965, first as an associate and then as a full professor of Romance philology. In Saarbrücken he was dean from 1959 to 1960, rector from 1960 to 1962 and vice-rector from 1962 to 1964. In 1963 he turned down an offer to Munich . He accepted another call to the University of Munich in 1965 and built up the newly created chair for Romance linguistics there. In 1968 he was dean in a politically turbulent time, namely during the West German student movement in the 1960s .

In 1969 he refused to become rector in Munich in order to be able to devote more time to his research. The commemorative publication dedicated to him on his retirement in 1982 is entitled Facts and Theories. Contributions to Romance and general linguistics . Stimm's life project of an etymological dictionary of Old Provence was taken over by his successor and has been published since 1996 under the title Dictionnaire de l'occitan médiéval (DOM). From 1971 he was a full member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and from 1971 to 1986 linguistic editor of the magazine for French language and literature .

Fonts

• Studies on the history of the development of Franco-Provencal. Mainz 1952 (= treatises of the humanities and social science class of the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz. Born 1952, No. 6).
• Old Franco-Provencal translations of hagiographic Latin texts from the manuscript of the Paris National Library fr. 818. I. Prose legends. Publishing house of the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz. Commissioned by Franz Steiner Verlag, Wiesbaden 1955 (= Academy of Sciences and Literature. Treatises of the humanities and social science class. Born 1955, No. 1).
• The Romance words for "free". Saarbrücken 1967.
• Medium and reflexive construction in Surselvic. Munich 1973.
• Dictionnaire de l'occitan médiéval (DOM). ouvrage entrepris par Helmut Stimm, poursuivi et réalisé par Wolf-Dieter Stempel avec la collaboration de Claudia Kraus, Renate Peter et Monika Tausend. Tübingen, Niemeyer 1996ff.

Obituaries

• Peter Blumenthal in the magazine for French language and literature. 97, 1987, pp. 225-230.
• Hans Helmut Christmann in the magazine for Romance philology. 104, 1988, pp. 592-602.
• Rolf Hachmann , Max Pfister : Limitless respect for Helmut Stimm. In: campus, news and opinions from Saarland University. 17, 1987, No. 3, pp. 18f.
• Max Pfister in the 1987 yearbook of the Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz. Pp. 97–99 and in Revue de linguistique romane. 51, 1987, pp. 686-671.
• Wolf-Dieter stamp in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. April 1, 1987.

Web links

• Literature by and about Helmut Stimm in the catalog of the German National Library