Joseph Peter Stern

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Joseph Peter Maria Stern (* 25. December 1920 in Prague , Czechoslovakia ; † 18 November 1991 in Cambridge , UK ) was in England acting in German studies with a focus on the literature and philosophy of the 18th to 20th centuries.

Life

Born in Prague in 1920, he had completed grammar schools there and in Vienna and in 1939 emigrated to England via Poland with his father after Hitler's annexation of Czechoslovakia and the suicide of his mother due to the Jewish descent of both parents . His sister Ilsa was deported to the Litzmannstadt ghetto in Łódź in 1941. His father was a member of the Czechoslovak government in exile in London . He resigned after completing his schooling in Welsh Glamorgan and a semester studying in Cambridge in June 1941 in the Czech section of the Royal Air Force one. The shooting down of his plane over the Atlantic was followed by a one-year hospital stay with a subsequent resumption of study of German literature as well as Sanskrit , Russian and education at St John's College in Cambridge. In 1945 he obtained a Bachelor of Arts (BA). At the same place he continued his education, only interrupted by a year of study in Göttingen (1946–1947), until 1949, the year the doctorate was awarded ( Ph.D. ).

In 1950 he took up a position as a research assistant in the Department of German at Bedford College of London University on. In the same function, he moved to his student place of work, the Cambridge St John's College, in 1952, where he was made a Fellow two years later . He taught there until 1972, repeatedly interrupted by visiting professorships in New York , Berkeley and Charlottesville . He then took over the management of the German Studies Department at University College London until his retirement in 1986 . At the University of London from 1978 to 1979 he was " Chairman of the Board of Studies for German Language and Literature" and from 1981 to 1985 Honorary Director of the Institute of German Studies. One of his students was Edward Timms . From 1986 he accepted visiting professorships, held lecture tours and became increasingly active as an author. In 1987 he introduced the BBC viewers to the history of Western philosophy in several episodes. In 1988 he was elected a corresponding member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences .

Joseph Peter Stern died on November 18, 1991. His wife Sheila Frances, née McMullan, who worked as a lecturer and translator and whom he met as a student in 1940 and married in 1944, survived him by almost 14 years to the day.

Teaching and research areas

Stern taught German and Czech language and literature (along with Austrian literature ), as well as comparative literature . His main focus was on the 18th to 20th centuries. In his book Re-Interpretations , published in 1964, he devoted himself to the German prose poetry of the 19th century and found in it “a peculiar mixture of prophetic and archaic and saw in the distance from social and political reality an essential difference to the tradition of European realism”. His dissertation was on the subject of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg , who connects natural science and literature (he published the Göttingisches Magazin der Wissenschaft und Litteratur ). While writing it, he was in close contact with Ludwig Wittgenstein, who made his mark . He, too, was able to combine two strands, namely the literary and the philosophical. Later he worked several times for Friedrich Nietzsche , where he again explored the points of contact between literature and philosophy as a "conscious border crosser". In addition to his specialist areas of literary realism , Lichtenberg, Wittgenstein and Nietzsche, he also devoted himself - committed to his own family history - to the person of Adolf Hitler, obedience of the people and the resistance movement . In his publication Hitler: The Führer and the People from 1975, which has been translated into several languages, he investigated the question “to what extent the figure of Hitler embodied the values ​​of German society at that time” and again chose “an original combination of methods”, which consisted in the combination of "rigid historical facts with literary analysis". Alexander Weber concluded his obituary in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung with the following sentences: “In his moving portrait of the Hitler assassin Johann Georg Elser , Stern showed that the language of National Socialism was not a semiotic system that was able to determine its speakers completely . Stern was not only a keen thinker and literary interpreter, but also a brilliant stylist ”.

Fonts

  • 1953: Ernst Jünger: A Writer of our Time (Bowes & Bowes, Cambridge)
  • 1959/1963: GC Lichtenberg. A Doctrine of Scattered Occasions. Reconstructed from his Aphorisms and Reflections (Ed. 1963: Thames & Hudson , London)
  • 1964: Re-Interpretations: Seven Studies in 19th Century German Literature (Thames and Hudson, London)
  • 1967: Thomas Mann ( Columbia University Press , New York / London)
  • 1971: Idylls and Realities. Studies in 19th Century German Literature (Methuen, London)
  • 1973: On Realism (Routledge & Kegan Paul Books, London / Boston); German on literary realism ( CH Beck , Munich 1983)
  • 1973: History and Allegory in Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus (University College, London)
  • 1975: Hitler: The Führer and the People ( William Collins & Sons , London); German Hitler: The Führer and the People ( Carl Hanser Verlag , Munich 1978)
  • 1977: About literature and ideology. Lecture ( Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht , Göttingen)
  • 1978: Nietzsche (Fontana Press, London)
  • 1979: A Study of Nietzsche ( Cambridge University Press , Cambridge); German Nietzsche. The morality of extreme exertion (Hohenheim Verlag, Köln-Lövenich 1982)
  • 1980 (Ed.): The World of Franz Kafka (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London)
  • 1981 (together with Michael Stephen Silk ): Nietzsche on Tragedy (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge)
  • 1990: Literary aspects of Ludwig Wittgenstein's writings . In: Wittgenstein and. Philosophy - Literature , ed. by Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler [u. a.] (Verlag der Staatsdruckerei Österreich, Vienna), pp. 23–36
  • 1991: About Prague German Literature . In: Encounters with the "foreign". Borders - Traditions - Comparisons. Files of the 8th International Germanist Congress in Tokyo 1990 , ed. by Eijiro Iwasaki (Iudicum, Munich), pp. 62-75
  • 1992: The man without ideology. Texts on the Elser discussion (Edition Moerlin, Illerkirchberg)
  • 1992 (posthumous): The Heart of Europe. Essays on Literature and Ideology (Blackwell Publishers, Oxford)
  • 1995 (posthumous): The Dear Purchase. A Theme in German Modernism (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge)

Translations

  • 1952: Rainer Maria Rilke. A Study of His Later Poetry (Bowes & Bowes, Cambridge); German The late Rilke (Hans Egon Holthusen)
  • 1952: Leibnitz and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (Bowes & Bowes, Cambridge); German Leibniz and the European regulatory crisis (Rudolf W. Meyer)

Awards

literature

  • Michael Beddow: Joseph Peter Maria Stern, 1920–1991 . In: Proceedings of the British Academy . tape 84 , 1994, pp. 529-537 ( thebritishacademy.ac.uk [PDF]).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i editors, Sheila Frances Stern: Stern, Joseph Peter Maria . In: Christoph König (Ed.): Internationales Germanistenlexikon 1800–1950 . edited and introduced by Christoph König. tape 3 : R - Z. Verlag Walter de Gruyter , Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-11-015485-4 , p. 1811 ff .
  2. ↑ a b c d e f Alexander Weber: Look and interpret. From Prague to Cambridge: On the death of the German specialist Peter Stern . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . November 23, 1991, p. 30 .
  3. ↑ Kevin RD Shepard: Autobiographical Reflections. The Professor of German. In: citizenphilosophy.net. 2014, accessed on July 27, 2014 (Chapter 6).
  4. ↑ Holger Krahnke: The members of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen 1751-2001 (= Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Philological-Historical Class. Volume 3, Vol. 246 = Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Mathematical-Physical Class. Episode 3, vol. 50). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-525-82516-1 , p. 233.
personal data
SURNAME Stern, Joseph Peter
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Stern, Joseph Peter Maria (full name); Stern, Joseph; Stern, Peter; Stern, JP
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British German studies specialist
DATE OF BIRTH December 25, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH Prague
DATE OF DEATH November 18, 1991
Place of death Cambridge