Ladislao Mittner

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Ladislao Mittner (born April 23, 1902 in Rijeka , † May 5, 1975 in Venice ) was an Italian Germanist , literary critic and linguist . Mittner is considered to be the founder of modern German studies in Italy.

Life

Ladislao (also Ladislaus or Ladislav) was born in 1902 in the then Habsburg Free City of Fiume ( Croatian : Rijeka , now in Croatia ). His father Zoltán Mittner came from Hungary, his mother Giovanna (née Burich) came from an Italian-Croatian family from Fiume. Ladislao's parents were both school teachers, his father also wrote school books for Italian, among other things. Enrico Burich, an uncle on Ladislao's maternal side who was only thirteen years older, was a German specialist and taught German.

In contrast to this linguistically and theoretically very stimulating family environment, the literary life of Rijeka offered little attraction for the young Mittner. In addition, there were language-political tensions between the local irredenta and the seemingly overwhelming mosaic of peoples of the Danube monarchy . Mittner's interest in German language and literature , as well as Trieste , which was flourishing in literary terms at the time, but in Mittner's eyes romanticized , turned his attention to the German-speaking area. Mittner himself later said that the diversity of his youthful impressions formed the basis for his later scientific work.

After graduating from high school in Fiume, Ladislao Mittner enrolled in 1919 to study literature and philosophy at the University of Bologna , with guest semesters in Florence (1921) and Padua (1922). He received his doctorate in 1923 under Giuseppe Tarozzi and a scientific thesis on the subject of "The beautiful and the sublime in Schiller's aesthetics ". Stays abroad in Vienna and Munich followed .

Mittner began his professional career as a German teacher at the Italian high school “A. Cantore ”in Bruneck (1925–1934). In 1930 he married his wife Letizia (née Battistig von Tauffersbach) and in the following years published his first works on German grammar and semantics. From 1934 to 1939 he was a German teacher at the “C. Cavour ” in Turin . Influenced by world political events, he studied Old Germanic mythology and poetry as well as the syntax of the Proto-Germanic language at the end of the 1930s ; at the same time he dealt with German opera, music and philosophical poetry of the Enlightenment . After his habilitation in 1939, he took over a teaching position for Germanic Philology at the Italian Institute for German Studies ( Istituto Italiano di Studi Germanici ) at the Villa Sciarra-Wurts in Rome . In 1942 he was finally appointed to the chair for German language and literature at the economics (later linguistics) faculty of the University of Venice .

German-speaking romanticism became one of his core themes at the end of the 1940s . Other research focuses were Expressionism and the life works of Goethe , Holderlin and Mann . Between 1964 and 1971, Ladislao Mittner published his most famous work, the monumental “Storia della letteratura tedesca” (History of German Literature) in three volumes. In 1967 he became a corresponding member at the German Academy for Language and Poetry , and in the following year at the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei . Mittner stayed at Ca 'Foscari for 30 years until he retired (1942–1972). He died in 1975 at the age of 73.

Afterlife

Mittner is one of the most important German scholars in Italy. On the one hand because of the volume of his scientific publications, but above all because he managed to span an arc from the Germanic origins to the contemporary avant-garde. Many of his writings are among the standard works of Italian Germanists. Ladislao Mittner was a teacher of other important Italian Germanists and writers, such as B. Giuliano Baioni , Paolo Chiarini and Claudio Magris .

Because of its mediation of German culture in Italy and the associated cultural dialogue between the two countries, the German-Italian University Center has awarded the annual Ladislao Mittner Prize since 2001 . The prize consists of a sum of 5,000 euros financed by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and a grant for a research stay in the Federal Republic of Germany.

Honors

Works and writings (selection)

  • La concezione del divenire nella lingua tedesca , Vita e pensiero, Milan, 1931
  • L'opera di Thomas Mann , Sperling & Kupfer , Milan, 1936
  • To be and become in the Gothic Bible: a semantic investigation , Winter, Heidelberg, 1939
  • Fate and Becoming in Old Germanic , Winter, Heidelberg, 1939
  • La lingua tedesca e lo spirito dell'antica poesia Germanica , GC Sansoni, Florence, 1942
  • Grammatica della Lingua Tedesca , Scolastiche Mondadori, Milan, 1953
  • The Kenning as a tragic-ironic symbol in the Edda in Die Sprache , Vienna, 1951
  • Ambivalenze romantiche. Studi sul romanticismo inglese , G. D'Anna, Messina u. Florence, 1954
  • Wurd - The Sacred in the Old Germanic Epic , Francke, Bern, 1955
  • La letteratura tedesca del Novecento e altri saggi , Einaudi , Turin, 1960
  • Storia della letteratura tedesca: I. Dai primordi pagani all'età barocca (dal 750 al 1700 circa) , Einaudi, Turin, 1964
  • Storia della letteratura tedesca: II. Dal pietismo al romanticismo (1700-1820) , Einaudi, Turin, 1964
  • Storia della letteratura tedesca: III. Dal realismo alla sperimentazione. 1. Dal Biedermeier al fine secolo (1820-1890) , Einaudi, Turin, 1971
  • Storia della letteratura tedesca: III. Dal realismo alla sperimentazione. 2. Dal fine secolo alla sperimentazione (1890-1970) , Einaudi, Turin, 1971
  • Saggi, divagazioni, polemiche , Morano, Naples, 1964
  • L'epressionismo , Laterza, Bari, 1965
  • Bilancio dell'Espressionismo , Vallecchi, Florence, 1965

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Christoph König (Ed.), With the assistance of Birgit Wägenbaur u. a .: Internationales Germanistenlexikon 1800–1950 . Volume 2: H-Q. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2003, ISBN 3-11-015485-4 , pp. 1240–1241 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
  2. ^ Maria Paola Arena: Ladislao Mittner in the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani , 2011
  3. ↑ Italian title: "Il bello ed il sublime nell'estetica di Schiller"
  4. ↑ Mittner price  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , German-Italian University Center at the University of Trento@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.deutschitalienischeshochschulzentrum.org  
  5. ^ Winner , Friedrich Gundolf Prize for the mediation of German culture abroad

literature

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Mittner, Ladislao
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mittner, Ladislaus
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian specialist in German and linguist
DATE OF BIRTH April 23, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH Rijeka , Austria-Hungary
DATE OF DEATH May 5th 1975
Place of death Venice , Italy