Kurt May

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Kurt Franz May (born April 25, 1892 in Heilbronn , † February 23, 1959 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a German scholar of German studies and literary scholar who taught at the universities of Göttingen and Frankfurt am Main .

Life

The officer's son May attended the Protestant grammar school in Strasbourg from 1901-10 . He studied German, history and art history at the Universities of Strasbourg (1910) and Munich (from 1911). He did not finish the dissertation he had begun with Rudolf Unger on Klopstock's aesthetics, but volunteered for the First World War in 1914 . Due to an illness he was discharged in 1916 and worked until 1919 as an auxiliary teacher for German, geography, French, history and Latin at the Reformrealgymnasium in Stuttgart. After the war he continued his studies with Unger in Halle (Saale) , in 1920 he moved to Julius Petersen in Berlin . With Petersen and Gustav Roethe he received his doctorate in 1923 with a thesis on "Lessing and Herder's art theoretical thoughts in their context". As early as 1921 he worked on the sections “Modern Literature History” (until 1927) and “Pre-Classical Period and Lessing” (until 1929) in the “Annual Report on Scientific Phenomena in the Field of Modern German Literature”. In 1925 he completed his habilitation at the University of Erlangen with Franz Saran on "The world view in Gellert's poetry".

He then taught as a private lecturer in German language and literature, first in Erlangen and from 1928 in Göttingen, where he represented his former teacher Rudolf Unger. May is characterized as reserved and not very ambitious, which is why his academic career developed slowly. In 1933 he became a non-official associate professor in Göttingen. In November of the same year he signed the professors' declaration of Adolf Hitler at German universities and colleges . May joined the NSDAP in 1937 and the SA in 1938 . The following year he was appointed as an adjunct professor. In 1940/41 he was a professor in Marburg and in 1943/44 at the University of Prague . In September 1944 he was called up for military service as an infantry sergeant.

Göttingen, Stadtfriedhof: grave of Professor Kurt May

After 1945 he remained an adjunct professor in Göttingen, where he represented Hermann Pongs' chair for modern German literary history . In 1948 he married Oda Carola Steuber, who had a doctorate in German. As the provisional successor of Franz Schultz , he switched to the chair for modern philology in Frankfurt am Main in 1951. In 1952 he was appointed full professor. He died in Frankfurt in 1959 as an emeritus .

He established his reputation as a Germanist primarily through work on German classical music , from Lessing to the late Goethe . His main work is an analysis and interpretation of Goethe's Faust II , which appeared in 1936 and was reissued posthumously in 1962. His well-known students include Walter Höllerer , Karl Markus Michel , Herbert Heckmann , Volker Klotz and Norbert Miller . In 1958 he founded the series “Literature as Art” with Höllerer.

Publications (selection)

  • The world view in Gellert's poetry , 1928
  • Form and meaning. Interpretations of German poetry of the 18th and. 19th century , Berlin 1936 (3rd edition: Klett Stuttgart 1972 ISBN 3-12-905550-9 )
  • Faust Part II. Interpreted in the language form , Berlin 1936 (most recently Ullstein Berlin 1986 ISBN 978-3-548-02884-2 )
  • Friedrich Schiller. Idea and Reality in Drama , Göttingen 1948
  • Form and meaning. Interpretations of German poetry of the 18th and 19th centuries. 1957

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Christoph König (Ed.): Internationales Germanistenlexikon 1800–1950. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2003, entry Kurt May , pp. 1179–1180.
  2. ↑ a b Christoph König:  May, Kurt. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 16, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-428-00197-4 , p. 522 f. ( Digitized version ).
  3. ↑ a b c Ulrich Hunger: German studies between intellectual history and "folkish science". The seminar for German philology in the Third Reich. In: Heinrich Becker u. a .: The University of Göttingen under National Socialism. 2nd edition, KG Saur, Munich 1998, pp. 365-390, here p. 375.
personal data
SURNAME May, Kurt
ALTERNATIVE NAMES May, Kurt Franz (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Germanist
DATE OF BIRTH April 25, 1892
PLACE OF BIRTH Heilbronn
DATE OF DEATH February 23, 1959
Place of death Frankfurt am Main