Karl Lehmann (archaeologist)

Karl Leo Heinrich Lehmann (from 1920 to 1944 Karl Lehmann-Hartleben after the maiden name of his first wife Elwine (1894-1944); born September 27, 1894 in Rostock , † December 17, 1960 in Basel ) was a German-American archaeologist .

Life

Karl Lehmann was the son of the Rostock lawyer Karl Lehmann and the artist Henni Lehmann , his older sister was the later Etruscologist Eva Fiesel .

Lehmann studied at the universities of Tübingen , Göttingen and Munich . He took part in the First World War as an interpreter, and served in the Turkish Navy from 1917 to 1918. In 1922 he received his doctorate from the University of Berlin under Ferdinand Noack with a thesis on the ancient port facilities of the Mediterranean , worked at the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) in Athens in 1923 and, after completing his habilitation in Berlin, in 1924 at the DAI in Rome . From 1925 to 1929 he taught at the Archaeological Institute of Heidelberg University as a private lecturer (1928–1929 as representative of the vacant chair) and in 1929 received a professorship for Classical Archeology at the University of Münster . There he was dismissed as a Jew under the law for the restoration of the civil service in April 1933 while he was doing an excavation in Pompeii . In 1935 he emigrated to the United States via Italy , where he became professor at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University .

In the 1920s, his research was initially directed towards the Trajan Column in Rome . Together with the sculptor Kurt Kluge published the epoch-making work Die ancient Großbronzen . He was also interested in the history of cities and settlements in antiquity. In New York he headed the Archaeological Research Fund he founded , and in 1938 he began excavating Samothrace , where he explored the Kabiren shrine . In 1946, as director of the Institute of Fine Arts, together with Fritz Saxl ( Warburg Institute ) and Richard Krautheimer ( Vassar College ) , he initiated the Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance .

In 1944 he received American citizenship . After divorcing his first wife, with whom he had three sons, he married the archaeologist Phyllis Williams (1912-2004) in 1944 , who had taken part in the excavations in Samothrace.

Fonts

• The ancient port facilities of the Mediterranean. Dieterich, Leipzig 1923 (dissertation 1922). Reprinted Scientia, Aalen 1963.
• The Trajan's Column. A Roman work of art at the beginning of late antiquity. De Gruyter, Berlin et al. 1926 (habilitation thesis).
• with Kurt Kluge : The ancient large bronzes . 3 volumes, de Gruyter, Berlin 1927.
• Thomas Jefferson, American humanist. Macmillan, New York 1947.
• Samothrace. 3 volumes, 1958–1969.

literature

• Christoph Schwingenstein:  Lehmann, Karl. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 14, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1985, ISBN 3-428-00195-8 , p. 85 f. ( Digitized version ).
• Karen Michels: Transplanted Art History. German-language art history in American exile. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-05-003276-6 , p. 30 and others
• Frank Schröder (Red.): 100 Jewish personalities from Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania (= writings from the Max-Samuel-Haus. Volume 4). Rostock 2003, pp. 108-109.
• Gisela Möllenhoff, Rita Schlautmann-Overmeyer: Jewish families in Münster 1918 to 1945. Biographical lexicon. Westphalian steam boat, Münster 1995, ISBN 3-929586-48-7 .
• Hans Peter Obermayer: “A man with a host of friends” - Karl Lehmann – Hartleben. In: The same: German ancient scholars in American exile. A reconstruction. de Gruyter, Berlin et al. 2014, ISBN 978-3-11-030279-0 , pp. 108-132.
• Marianne Bergmann : Lehmann-Hartleben, Karl. In: Peter Kuhlmann , Helmuth Schneider (Hrsg.): History of the ancient sciences. Biographical Lexicon (= The New Pauly . Supplements. Volume 6). Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2012, ISBN 978-3-476-02033-8 , Sp. 712-714.
• Oliver Raß: In memory of Karl Lehmann-Hartleben , floor talk, University of Münster, 2014

Web links

• Literature by Karl Lehmann in the catalog of the German National Library
• Entry in the Dictionary of Art Historians .