Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer

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Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer, ca.1860
Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer, oil painting from the picture gallery of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences
Inscription by Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer in the Great Temple of Ramses II, Abu Simbel, Egypt

Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer (born December 10, 1790 in Pairdorf near Brixen , † April 25, 1861 in Munich ) was an orientalist and publicist. Among other things, he became known for his research as a professor at the University of Munich on the history of the Trapezunt Empire . His thesis that the ancient Greeks had died out and were ousted by Slavs and Albanians was highly controversial. The thesis is considered scientifically refuted and was used in Nazi propaganda as a justification for the crimes during the occupation of Greece .

Life

Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer was the son of the day laborer and smallholder Johann Fallmerayer and his wife Maria Klammer. Supported by a scholarship from Bishop Karl Franz von Lodron of Bressanone , Fallmerayer was not only able to successfully complete his school years, but then also study at the University of Landshut . After a comprehensive humanistic degree, Fallmerayer moved to the University of Salzburg to study oriental languages with Albert Nagnzaun . Fallmerayer finished his studies at the age of 23 and joined the Bavarian army in 1813 . After the war against France he settled as a private lecturer in Lindau . In 1818 he was appointed primary teacher at the grammar school near St. Anna in Augsburg and three years later Fallmerayer moved to Landshut in the same position.

In 1826 Fallmerayer was entrusted with a teaching position and appointed professor of philology and universal history at the University of Munich . He held this office until his dismissal in 1848. During these years he created his much discussed work “History of the Empire in Trapezunt” (1827), with which he continued the work “Imperii Trapezuntini Historia” by Pehr Afzelius and expanded it with new sources. For this publication, Fallmerayer received praise from the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and his work received an award. Fallmerayer got to know the Russian general Alexander Iwanowitsch Ostermann-Tolstoy through the classical philologist Georg Anton Friedrich Ast and accompanied him on his research trip through Greece and the Middle East from 1831 to 1834 . Fallmerayer returned to Munich in 1834, but from now on he was barred from public service because his scientific views could no longer be reconciled with general doctrinal opinion. According to his own statements, the membership offered by the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in 1835 was a great consolation. Fallmerayer now earned his living as a private lecturer and as a freelancer for the Allgemeine Zeitung, which appears in Augsburg . With the support of the editor-in-chief Gustav Kolb , Fallmerayer wrote feature articles and essays on mostly political topics relating to Greece and the Middle East. He also always presented the Russian threat in his articles by suspecting the Tsar of striving for world domination. In the years 1840/1842 and 1847/1848 Fallmerayer traveled more times to the Middle East, the trips were mainly financed by his work for the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung.

From May 18, 1848 until the end of the rump parliament on June 18, 1849 he was a member of the Frankfurt National Assembly for the constituency of Munich II. Although Fallmerayer was only passively active in this office, he was dismissed as a history professor due to his political activities. Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer died on April 25, 1861 in Munich at the age of 70.

In 1956 the Fallmerayerweg in Vienna- Floridsdorf (21st district) was named after him. In Munich a street in district 4 Schwabing-West bears his name, in Innsbruck a street in the city ​​center . In Brixen a street and the secondary school center were named after Fallmerayer.

tomb

Grave of Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer on the old southern cemetery in Munich location

The grave of Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer is on the old southern cemetery in Munich (burial ground 16 - row 11 - 2nd place) Location .

meaning

Fallmerayer became known mainly for his ethnogeographical work. From 1830 he attracted the hatred of Philhellenes and Greek patriots , especially with his controversial thesis that the ancient Greeks died out in the Middle Ages and were displaced by Hellenized Slavs and Albanians . His most important work, however, is his story of the Trapezunt Empire , which was practically unknown before his research.

In Germany he was at times accused of Pan-Slavic propaganda. His ethnographic works were but later also for the Balkan political propaganda of the Nazis used. Fallmerayer's ethnological theses are no longer represented today for this reason alone. Only his purely geographical works have been published.

Fallmerayer's thesis on the ethnogenesis of today's Greeks

Fallmerayer's History of the Morea Peninsula during the Middle Ages ( Peloponnese ), published in 1830, sparked controversial reactions. In it he postulated a uniform Hellenic ethnic group in ancient Greece and based on Slavic or Albanian place names as well as the previously controversial Chronicle of Monemvasia further advanced the thesis that these ancient Greeks had been completely exterminated in the Middle Ages. Literally he wrote:

"The race of the Hellenes has been exterminated in Europe [...] Because not a drop of noble and unmixed Hellenic blood flows in the veins of the Christian population of today's Greece."

By inferring that the inhabitants of the Greek state with the borders of 1830 were merely Hellenized Slavs and Albanians, Fallmerayer had angered the Philhellenes of Western Europe and Greek patriots alike. His highly controversial theses were not translated into Greek until the 1980s. Instead, Greek scholars of the 19th and 20th centuries postulated an unbroken continuity of Greek culture, especially Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos († 1891) and Konstantin Sathas . In contrast to Fallmerayer, Sathas advocated the opinion, which is now also considered refuted, that there were no Slavs at all in Central Greece and the Peloponnese in the Middle Ages ( Documents inédits relatifs à l'histoire de la Grèce au moyen âge, I, Paris 1880-88 ).

Fallmerayer put the thesis that the ancient Greeks were completely exterminated in the Middle Ages into perspective in his work Fragments from the Orient, published in 1845 . Fallmerayer said that the ancient Greeks on the Black Sea had a continuity with the Greek Middle Ages. Although he expressed his disappointment here too that he had not found anyone among them who corresponded to his ideal image of an educated Greek Byzantine, he called them "Byzantine Greeks" and their language "Matschuka Greek" (after the place Maçka, Greek Ματσούκα), which is probably a variant of Pontic Greek . In a novel-like reference to the Hellenistic period that is typical of Fallmerayer's texts, he even attested them to have the "shadowy expression of the Kolchians".

“When asked what there was to eat, there was the comforting answer: ἔχομεν ἀπ 'ὅλα' you can find everything with him '. […] It cannot be repeated often enough, the Byzantine Greeks are the opposite of us in everything, they are tough on themselves and callous towards their neighbors as well as animals. [...] They greeted in Greek, were Christians and served the patroness of their valley, the Panagia of Sumelas . "

Most scholars today consider Fallmereyer's thesis, even in the form he relativized, as too extreme - even if it refers to a historical core. A. Hollow way to this:

“His theory is not entirely wrong, ie it contains a historical core. Only the generalization and absolutization, to which Fallmerayer so stubbornly stuck, is wrong. There have been Slavic incursions in Greece and the Peloponnese, but not to the extent and not with the consequences as Fallmerayer has claimed. "

Historical context

The ancient Greece had for many European cultures since the Roman Empire an idealized cultural and civilizational role model. The Christian-Orthodox, “Slavic” Russian Empire, on the other hand, had seemed rather sinister and threatening to the liberal idea of ​​Western Europe, which was more open to liberal thinking, since its victory over Napoléon Bonaparte . As far as the uprisings against the Ottoman Empire were concerned, Western Europe's attention was therefore primarily directed towards the only non-Slavic bridgehead in the Turkish Empire, Greece. Against Fallmerayer, there was immediate resistance from intellectuals from Germany ( Karl Hopf ) and Austria ( Bartholomäus Kopitar ). The Bavarian philologist Friedrich Thiersch also justified the Greek Revolution .

The intimate relationship of many Germans to ancient Greek culture illustrates the exuberant remark of the German philhellenic Carl Icken: “Were not their [the modern Greeks ] ancestors also our fathers in attitude and in the exercise of virtue, in words and deeds, not also our ancestors in the Science, not our models in poetry, our teachers in art; Aren't they still educators of our youth every moment, educators of our delicacy, guidelines for the thinker, guide and escort for the writer and the folk teacher, guide for taste, compass and last in the realm of truth, knowledge and feeling? "

On the one hand Fallmerayer was viewed as a Pan-Slavist , on the other hand he was later instrumentalized by the National Socialists , who tried to justify with his theses why, despite their obvious admiration for the ancient Greeks, they harassed the Greek population after the occupation of the country. After the Second World War , his thesis, interpreted as “Slavic foreign infiltration ”, was disproved at universities in the western world.

Fonts (selection)

  • History of the Empire of Trebizond. Weber, Munich 1827 ( digitized version ).
  • History of the Morea Peninsula during the Middle Ages: a historical attempt. Cotta, Stuttgart / Tübingen 1830 (part 1) and 1836 (part 2) ( digitized part 1 , digitized part 2 ).
  • Fragments from the Orient. Cotta, Stuttgart / Tübingen 1845 ( digitized part 1 , digitized part 2 ).
  • The Albanian element in Greece. Publishing house of the k. Academy, Munich 1857 (part 1) and 1860 (part 2) ( digitized part 1 , digitized part 2 ).
  • New fragments from the Orient. Engelmann, Leipzig 1861 ( digitized ).
  • Holy Mount Athos (1908, from Fragments from the Orient. Second volume )
    • New edition: Hagion-Oros or the holy Mount Athos. Edition Raetia, Bozen 2002, ISBN 88-7283-174-1 .
  • Hans Feigl , Ernst Molden (ed. And incorporated): Writings and diaries. Fragments from the Orient. New fragments. Political-historical essays. Diaries. 2 volumes, G. Müller, Munich a. a. 1913.

literature

See Michael Grünbart : Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer: Bibliography of Secondary Literature, 1900–2011 . Vienna 2011, ISSN  1606-4216

  • Ludwig Steub:  Fallmerayer, Jakob Philipp . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 6, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1877, pp. 558-566.
  • Herbert Seidler: Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer's intellectual development. A contribution to the German intellectual history of the 19th century . Publishing house of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, Munich 1947. (Treatises of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, Philosophical-Historical Class NF 26)
  • Theodor Heuss : Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer , in: ders .: Shadow conjuring. Figures on the margins of history . Wunderlich, Stuttgart / Tübingen 1947; Klöpfer and Meyer, Tübingen 1999, ISBN 3-931402-52-5
  • Arnulf Kollautz:  Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 5, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1961, ISBN 3-428-00186-9 , p. 19 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Eugen Thurnherr (Ed.): Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer. Scientist - politician - writer. Universitätsverlag Wagner, Innsbruck 1993 ( Schlern-Schriften Vol. 292), ISBN 3-7030-0258-1
  • Thomas Leeb: Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer. Publicist and politician between revolution and reaction (1835–1861). Beck, Munich 1996. ( Series of publications on Bavarian national history, Vol. 109)
  • Gustav Auernheimer: Fallmerayer, Huntington and the discussion about the modern Greek identity . In: Südost-Europa 47 (1998), pp. 1–17
  • Nikolas Wenturis : Critical remarks on the discussion about the modern Greek identity using the example of Fallmerayer, Huntington and Auernheimer . In: Südost-Europa 49 (2000), pp. 308-324
  • Michael Grünbart : The letters from and to Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer . Vienna 2001
  • Ellen Hastaba (ed.): Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer (1790–1861). Approaches to his biography. Haymon Verlag, Innsbruck 2009. ( Series of historical sources on the cultural history of Tyrol, Vol. 4)
  • Claudia Märtl (Ed.): Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer (1790–1861), the scholar and his topicality in the 21st century . Publishing house of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, Munich 2013. ISBN 978-3-7696-0127-5

TV documentary

  • Peter Prestel, Rudolf Sporrer: Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer. Orient and back three times . Bavarian television , first broadcast in 2004.

Web links

Commons : Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ A. Hohlweg: Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer and his spiritual environment. In: E. Thurnher (Ed.): Fallmerayer. P. 65.
personal data
SURNAME Fallmerayer, Jakob Philipp
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Orientalist and publicist
DATE OF BIRTH December 10, 1790
PLACE OF BIRTH Pairdorf am Pfeffersberg near Brixen , South Tyrol
DATE OF DEATH April 25, 1861
Place of death Munich