Jürgen Ehlers (Iranist)

Jürgen Ehlers in February 2011

Jürgen Ehlers (born May 28, 1930 in Hamburg ) is a German Iranist . He is known in professional circles for his work on the Persian national epic , the Šāhnāme .

Life

Jürgen Ehlers attended school in Hamburg and also studied there. Even before graduating from high school (1950), he began working as a journalist (1949–1952) as a freelance worker in the shipping editorial team of the daily newspaper Hamburger Freie Presse and the Hamburg trade journal Wirtschafts-Correspondent . From 1950 to 1955 he studied English, Romance studies, pedagogy, philosophy and newspaper studies at the University of Hamburg. As a student, he took part in the activities of the student group Amicale , which aimed to promote Franco-German understanding and promote the idea of ​​Europe. He finished his studies in 1956 with the state examination for higher teaching qualifications. After his legal clerkship, he taught at two high schools in Hamburg from 1958 to 1990, where he was director of studies at the Oberalster high school for ten years . From 1950 to 1965 he wrote countless articles on shipbuilding and marine engines as a part-time Germany correspondent for the English trade journal The Motor Ship .

After his early retirement due to illness, he studied Iranian Studies at the University of Hamburg: Persian language and literature, Avesta and Pahlavi , after having previously learned the basics of the Persian language. Inspired by his Iranian teachers, lecturers Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh, at the same time in the publication of the first critical edition of the Persian national epic Šāhnāme working, he soon began to take an interest and for its area of expertise. His other teachers in Iranian Studies were Prof. Dr. Ronald Emmerick and Dr. Gerd Gropp.

He received his doctorate in 1994 with a thesis on Nature in the Imagery of Shāhnāmeh . Since then he has published various works on the Persian national epic and is among other things from the editors of the Encyclopaedia Iranica , New York, to a contribution on Fritz Wolff , the author of a glossary on Šāhnāme, and from the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin to a contribution by Ferdausi and the Šāhnāme for a festschrift of the museum on the occasion of an exhibition for the 1000th anniversary of the completion of the Šāhnāme (2011).

Jürgen Ehlers lives with his wife in Hamburg-Duvenstedt.

scientific publications

• xāk and gard . A contribution to the investigation of the imagery in the Šāhnāme . Journal of the German Oriental Society (ZDMG), Vol. 143/1, pp. 72-105, Stuttgart 1993.
• Nature in the imagery of the āhnāme . In the series: Contributions to Iranian Studies, Vol. 16, Wiesbaden 1995. Dissertation.
• With a golden seal . About letters, scribes and messengers in the Šāhnāme. In the series: Contributions to Iranian Studies, Vol. 19, Wiesbaden 2000.

Annotated translations

• Ferdausi, Rostam . The legends from the Shāhnāme. Reclam, Stuttgart 2002.
• Ferdausi, The tragic story of Prince Esfandiyār and his father Goštāsp . The beginning of Zoroastrianism in Persia. Norderstedt 2004.
• Ferdausi, Shahnameh . The Rostam Legends . Reclam, Stuttgart 2010.

(a paperback edition of Rostam, 2002).