Julius Keller

Julius Keller (photo from 1907)

Julius Keller (born May 16, 1847 in Berwangen ; † August 15, 1911 in Ziegelhausen ) was a German high school teacher . He was active in the school service in Konstanz, Wertheim, Karlsruhe, Lörrach and Mannheim and wrote numerous speeches and essays during this time, which became known to a wider public after his death through a complete edition.

Life

Julius Keller was the son of the principal teacher Ludwig Keller, who had to change jobs because of his involvement in the 1848 revolution and found a new job in Neuenheim . Keller attended grammar school in Heidelberg from 1857 to 1863 and, after his father moved again, that in Mannheim until 1866 . He originally wanted to study medicine, which his father could not finance, so he started studying philology in Heidelberg, Leipzig and Berlin.

In 1870 he took part in the 2nd Company of the 2nd Baden Grenadier Regiment in the Franco-German War and was wounded in the leg at Nuits-Saint-Georges towards the end of the year . Because of the injury, he retired from military service, was then briefly at the pedagogy in Durlach and passed his state examination in the fall of 1871.

He then did an internship at the Progymnasium in Baden-Baden and in 1876 moved to Constance as a professor . There he came out with a treatise on the history and criticism of the infinite judgment . At the same time he began to agitate against liberal and for conservative politics. In 1878 he was transferred to Wertheim. There he published the brochure The Fruits of Liberalism in Baden . In addition to his school service, he also led a Protestant church choir in the basement. In Wertheim he became a well-known critic of Lazarus Geiger , whom he discussed in detail in 1882/83 and to whom he countered his own theses in 1884 with the work The Origin of Reason . In 1884 he became deputy head of the Progymnasium in Durlach, and in 1885 he switched to the Karlsruhe Gymnasium. In Karlsruhe he wrote a paper on The Limits of the Art of Translation , in which he advocated the impossibility of a completely covering transfer.

In 1892 he married Bertha Ottilie Kurz from Stuttgart, the marriage had two sons and a daughter who died young. From 1898 to 1906 he was the head of the grammar school in Lörrach . Then he would have liked to move to Freiburg im Breisgau , but he was called to Mannheim , where he also ran the grammar school. For the 100th anniversary of the grammar school, he published the commemorative publication Die Grundlinien in 1907 on a psychology of words and sentences .

In Mannheim, Keller fell ill with dysphasia , which did not give way even after a long spa vacation. He soon lost all of his speech and was only able to express himself in writing, but this ability also quickly deteriorated. In 1909 he retired due to illness. In 1911 he died in Ziegelhausen.

His speeches and treatises, which during his lifetime mostly only appeared in the context of school publications, were posthumously published in a two-volume edition and thus found a wider public. Othmar Meisinger , who had taught together with Keller in Lörrach from 1902 to 1906, reviewed the collection in 1914 and emphasized in particular the great importance of Keller's writing beyond the limits of the art of translation.

Fonts

• The limits of the art of translation are critically examined, taking into account language teaching at the Gymnasium , Karlsruhe 1892.
• Basic lines for a psychology of the word and sentence , in: Großh. Mannheim high school. Festschrift for the centenary of the institution , Mannheim 1907.
• Collected speeches and treatises , 2 volumes, Karlsruhe and Leipzig 1913.

literature

• August Herzog: Foreword (with a brief outline of life), in: Julius Keller: Gesammelte Reden und Abhandlungen Vol. 1, Karlsruhe and Leipzig, undated (approx. 1913), pp. III – XVI.
• Othmar Meisinger : Julius Keller , in: Südwestdeutsche Schulblätter 1914, No. 3.
• Josefine Kitzbichler, Katja Lubitz, Nina Mindt: Julius Keller , in: Documents on the theory of the translation of ancient literature in Germany since 1800 , de Gruyter, berlin, 2009, p. 237.