Ilona Opelt

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Ilona Opelt (* as Helene Opelt on July 9, 1928 in Prague ; † September 30, 1991 in Bombay ) was a German classical philologist .

Life

Helene Opelt was born on July 9, 1928 in Prague as the daughter of a businessman. Together with her older sister, she attended the German Protestant elementary school and then the German high school for girls. Towards the end of the Second World War (1945), the family fled to Passau, where Helene Opelt took her matriculation examination in 1946 - at a high school for boys. Opelt was only able to begin her planned studies of classical philology and natural sciences at the Passau Philosophical-Theological University after completing one semester of student training. In the summer semester of 1947 she began her studies in Passau, but already moved to Freiburg im Breisgau for the following semester . Her focus here shifted from the natural sciences to Oriental and Romance studies , which she pursued alongside classical philology. From 1949 to 1950 she was able to study in Basel for a year on a scholarship , where she took the Hebraicum and was shaped by Professors Peter von der Mühll and Harald Fuchs . In the summer of 1950 she returned to Freiburg, where she received her doctorate a year later from Karl Büchner with the dissertation The tyrant as a monster in the tragedy of LA Seneca . In the autumn of the same year, she also passed the first state examination in Latin, Greek and French.

After completing her studies, Ilona Opelt, as she wanted to be known from then on, initially worked as a scholarship holder at the Middle Latin Dictionary in Munich (1952–1954). From 1954 to 1955 he worked at the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae in Hamburg. From 1956 to 1962 she worked as an assistant at the Franz Joseph Dölger Institute in Bonn. During these years she wrote articles for volumes III to V of the Reallexikons für Antike und Christianentum (1957–1962) and essays for the yearbook for antiquity and Christianity (from 1958). Opelt also worked on her habilitation thesis, which she completed as a research assistant to her doctoral supervisor Büchner in Freiburg: She had the position since March 1962 and qualified as a professor in December of the same year. In addition to her habilitation thesis (1965), Opelt published a number of essays and lexicon articles during her second period in Freiburg, which dealt particularly with the literature of the imperial era and late antiquity . In addition, she gained experience in teaching and administration. In the spring of 1968 she received a call to the newly created chair for Latin studies at the University of Düsseldorf , which she accepted.

The Philosophical Faculty of Düsseldorf University was still being established at this time. For a long time Opelt was the only female professor of Classical Philology; a second professorship (with a focus on Greek Studies ) was only established in 1984 . During the founding period, Opelt still found a lot of time for her research work in addition to teaching and administration. She published not only German, but also English, Italian, French and Spanish fonts. The broad spectrum of her work is also evident in the list of publications that appeared in the commemorative publication Roma renascens on her 60th birthday (1988).

In the late summer of 1991 Ilona Opelt undertook an extensive research and lecture tour that took her from Harvard , Yokohama and Beijing to Calcutta , New Delhi , Hyderabad , Bangalore and finally to Bombay . Here, on the evening of September 25th, after her lecture on the Indian image of the cosmological indicator , she suffered a fractured skull as a result of a fall in a hotel . Despite an emergency operation at the local Jaslok Hospital, she could not be saved. She died on September 30, 1991 without regaining consciousness.

Opelt's academic papers are in the Düsseldorf University Archives ( papers 7/18).

Fonts (selection)

  • The tyrant as a monster in the tragedy of LA Seneca . Freiburg 1951 (dissertation).
  • On the translation technique of Gerhard von Cremona . In: Glotta. Volume 39, 1959, pp. 135-170.
  • The Latin swear words and related linguistic phenomena. A typology . Heidelberg 1965 (habilitation thesis)
  • From the ridicule of the Romans . Munich 1969
  • Greek philosophy among the Arabs . Munich 1970
  • Jerome's pamphlets . Heidelberg 1973
  • The Polemics in Christian Latin Literature from Tertullian to Augustine . Heidelberg 1980
  • Paradeigmata poetica Christiana. Studies on Christian Latin Poetry . Düsseldorf 1988
  • Dietmar Schmitz (Ed.): Ilona Opelt: Small writings . Frankfurt am Main u. a. 1997

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ University archive Düsseldorf, inventory overview, bequests: 7/18 - Prof. Dr. Ilona Opelt (1928–1991)
personal data
SURNAME Opelt, Ilona
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Opelt, Helene
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German classical philologist
DATE OF BIRTH July 9, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Prague
DATE OF DEATH September 30, 1991
Place of death Bombay