Henry Rudolph Always True

Henry Rudolph Immerwahr (birth name Heinrich Rudolf Immerwahr , born February 28, 1916 in Breslau ; † September 15, 2013 in Chapel Hill , North Carolina ) was a German-American classical philologist and epigraphist who worked at the University of North Carolina from 1957 to 1977 at Chapel Hill worked. From 1977 to 1982 he was director of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens .

Life

Heinrich Rudolf Immerwahr was a son of the timber merchant Kurt Immerwahr and his wife Johanna geb. Friend. He had two younger siblings: Hilda and Werner Immerwahr (1924-2006), who later took the name Vernon Ingram . The parents were of Jewish origin, but raised their children in the Christian faith.

Immerwahr attended the Johannesgymnasium in Breslau , where he passed his matriculation examination in 1934. To avoid persecution by the National Socialists , he studied classical philology at the University of Florence from 1934 to 1938 . After receiving his doctorate as Dottore in Lettere in 1938, he received a scholarship from the American School of Classical Studies at Athens for 1939/40 , which had a decisive influence on his further career: in Athens he worked intensively on the Attic vase inscriptions, which became one of his main research areas .

After the outbreak of World War II , Immerwahr left Athens and continued his studies at Yale University . The ancient historian Michael Rostovtzeff , a leading economic historian of antiquity, who worked there, supervised his dissertation on the Dipinti of Dura-Europos , an ancient city in Mesopotamia that had been intensively researched by archaeologists from Yale University in the 1930s. After receiving his Ph. D. in 1943, Immerwahr became a US citizen that same year and changed his first name to Henry Rudolph . From 1943 to 1946 he served in the United States Army and participated as a medic in World War II. During this time he married the archaeologist Sara Anderson (1914-2008) in 1944 , whom he had met in Athens.

After the end of the war, Immerwahr received a Guggenheim scholarship for combatants in 1946 , which enabled him to spend another year studying at Harvard University . From 1947 he taught at Yale University. In 1957 he moved to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill , where he was appointed Full Professor in 1963 and Alumni Distinguished Professor of Greek in 1975. In 1977 he ended his teaching there and went to the American School of Classical Studies at Athens as director, where he stayed for five years until 1982. Upon his return to Chapel Hill (as Emeritus ), he became a member of the American School's Managing Committee. He continued his scientific work until his death at the age of 97.

Imerwahr was a member of the American Philological Association , the Archaeological Institute of America , the German Archaeological Institute (corresponding member) and the Friends of the Gennadius Library .

Scientific work

The focus of research was always on Greek literature and Greek inscriptions, especially inscriptions on vases .

He owed his philological training (apart from his thorough preparatory training at the Breslau grammar school) primarily to Giorgio Pasquali in Florence, who was one of Italy's leading Graecists. At Pasquali Immerwahr wrote his dissertation on Tyche at Plato . Later he dealt with the historian Herodotus and tried to find a new, balanced interpretation of his work: While this "father of historiography" was viewed by historical-critical research as an implausible storyteller, Immerwahr placed him against the background of the intellectual development at that time Greece. For him Herodotus was above all a cultural critic and thinker, less of a historian according to modern understanding.

His other focus, the Greek inscriptions, came from his stay in Athens and his doctoral studies at Yale University. One of the fruits of his epigraphic studies was the Attic Script Handbook . A Survey (1990). Everwahr spent his life collecting material for a corpus of Attic vase inscriptions, which he stored in computer databases. Over the decades its database moved to various computer systems until it was finally published on the Internet as the Corpus of Attic Vase Inscriptions at the Beazley Archive . A continuation of this corpus is the project Attic Vase Inscriptions by Rudolf Wachter at the University of Basel .

Fonts

• Dipinti from Dura . Dissertation, Yale University 1943.
• Form and Thought in Herodotus . Cleveland 1966.
• Attic Script. A survey . Oxford 1990.

literature

• Philip A. Stadter: Henry R. Immerwahr † . In: Gnomon . Volume 86 (2014), p. 191

Web links

• Entry on Henry Rudolph Immerwahr in the Database of Classical Scholars, written by Philip A. Stadter (English)
• Obituary for Henry Rudolph Immerwahr , Department of Classics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• Attic Vase Inscriptions at the University of Basel
• Database of Attic Vase Inscriptions at the Beazley Archive