Hermione Hartleben

Hermine Ida Auguste Hartleben (born June 2, 1846 in Gemkenthal near Altenau / Harz , † July 18, 1919 in Templin ) was a German teacher and biographer of the hieroglyphic decipherer Jean-François Champollion .

Life

Hermine Hartleben came from a family of mountain and forest people based in the Harz Mountains. Her father, Johann Heinrich Friedrich Hartleben, was a forester near the formerly free mountain town of Altenau in the Harz Mountains, first in Gemkenthal and later in Torfhaus . The mother died when Hermione was three years old. Hermine attended the Höhere Töchterschule in Clausthal from 1859 to 1861 and after a long stay in her father's house became a partner of the Baroness von Mengersen in Lemmie near Hanover. She stayed here until 1867 and then moved to Netra in Hesse as a teacher in the house of the domain tenant Weichberger.

From Michaelis 1869 to Michaelis 1871 she attended the teachers' seminar in Hanover and after passing the exam, which qualified her for teaching at daughter schools including English and French, she moved to Hoheneiche south of Eschwege as a teacher in the house of the landlord Giessler. From Easter 1875 to Michaelmas 1876 she was a teacher at the daughter school in Stade . The next station of her education was Paris, where she finally received the letter of employment of the Greek school for girls in Constantinople in 1879 (today Zappeio Highschool for Girls or Zapeion Likio in Istanbul ). Here she taught French, German and music and should “be available for pedagogical supervision and conversation for the rest of her time at school”. After her work as a teacher in Istanbul, she spent six years in Egypt, where she lived in the house of Khairi Pasha, an official of the Turkish viceroy, in Cairo and taught his children. During this time she had the opportunity to travel to Egypt, the country for which she had “had a very unusual interest” since childhood.

After returning to Germany, Hermine Hartleben wrote several letters in 1889 for research into Egyptian culture and history and suggested the establishment of an Egyptian fund to which donors should provide money for excavations and the establishment of an archaeological-Arab institute in Cairo. Objections that a woman wanted to set up such a company, dismissed it with reference to the English writer Amelia Edwards (1831-1892), who founded the Egypt Exploration Fund in her home country in 1882 .

Research on the life of Jean François Champollion

On December 9, 1891, Hartleben received a letter from the German Egyptologist Wilhelm Spiegelberg (1870–1930), who was then working in Paris . By describing his thoughts in front of the portrait of Champollion in the Louvre , he stimulated her interest in the life of the great Frenchman with the following words: "We adore our master in him - unfortunately we know nothing about people". And after Georg Steindorff (1861–1951), who met Hartleben in front of a copy of the Champollion portrait in the Egyptian Museum in Berlin, drew attention to the need to remember the founder of Egyptology , she went in search of traces of whose life.

After researching the Royal Library in Berlin, Hartleben published two articles under the pseudonym Theodor Harten on December 22nd and 23rd, 1891 in the features section of the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung under the title Champollion . This article was also read in Paris and came into the hands of the last name-bearer of the family, Aimé Champollion. He contacted Hartleben by letter in early 1892 and made their material available via his uncle, which formed the basis for another article that appeared in the supplement to the Münchener Allgemeine Zeitung at the end of March and beginning of April 1893 . After she had initially assumed that her preoccupation with Champollion would be over, her research, which was to lead her all over Europe, began with it.

In the following years she researched in the library of the Institut de France and viewed the material in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. She got in contact with a niece of Champollion, whom she visited several times between 1895 and 1903 in order to have many details from the life of the French Egyptologist reported against the background of her extraordinary memory. She drove to Figeac , the place of birth, and to Grenoble , Champollion's first place of activity. She was supported by Georges Perrot (1832-1914), the director of the École normal supérieure in Paris and Gaston Maspero (1846-1916), the general director of the Service des Antiquités in Cairo. She visited archives, libraries and museums in Denmark, Sweden, Italy and Germany. The German Egyptologist and writer Georg Ebers (1837–1898), who at that time was a professor in Leipzig, gave her special help .

In 1906, her life's work Champollion, his life and work appeared in two volumes in the Weidmann bookstore in Berlin. In 1909 she had two volumes in the Bibliothèque Égyptologique with the edition of Champollion's letters under the title Lettres de Champollion le Jeune . For this she received the Bordin Prize , awarded by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres . Apparently, she also planned a translation of her biography of Champollion into French, but this was no longer carried out. The translation by Denis Meunier did not appear until 1983 under the title Jean François Champollion. Sa vie et son œuvre. 1790–1832 in Paris. In 1986 a new edition of her letter edition appeared .

Last phase of life

Due to the lack of other sources, much in Hermione Hartleben's life remains a mystery. One of the most important unanswered questions is their economic situation. How the unmarried teacher earned her living and financed her trips is unclear. An attempt by a Berlin writer to obtain an honorary salary from the Goethe-Schiller Society was unsuccessful. However, the application shows that Hartleben had to go into debt for the publication of her Champollion biography. Presumably she received support from her family, which could explain her frequent changes of residence or residence. It is not known whether she was able to practice teaching alongside her research. She spent the last years of her life in Templin in the Mark Brandenburg . There is evidence that she lived in the Elisabethstift there from October 1915 to July 1919, after having been to Egypt again in 1913.

She died on July 18, 1919 and was quietly buried in the Templin cemetery. Her gravestone bore the inscription: “Hermine Hartleben, biographer of the Egyptologist Champollion, b. June 2nd, 1846, d. July 18th, 1919 ".

Fonts (selection)

• Champollion. His life and his work . 2 volumes. Weidmann, Berlin 1906 ( digitized version ).
  • New edition: Champollion. Sa vie et son œuvre 1790–1832 . Traduction et documentation de Denise Meunier selon l'adaptation du texte allemand de Ruth Schumann Antelme. Presentation de Christiane Desroches Noblecourt . Pygmalion / Watelet, Paris 1983, ISBN 2-85704-145-4 . Reprints in 1990 and 1997.
• Lettres de Champollion le Jeune. Paris 1909.
• Volume 1: Lettres écrites d'Italie ( digitized version ).
• Volume 2: Lettres et journaux, écrits pendant le voyage d'Égypte ( digital copy ).

literature

• Axel Wellner: A remarkable educator and biographer from Altenau. Hermine Hartleben (1846-1919) . In: Our Harz . Volume 54, Issue 11, 2006, pp. 203-216.
• Morris L. Bierbrier: Who was who in Egyptology . 4th revised edition. Egypt Exploration Society, London 2012, ISBN 978-0-85698-207-1 , p. 244.

Web links

• Literature by and about Hermine Hartleben in the catalog of the German National Library