Leonardo Olschki

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Leonardo Olschki (born July 15, 1885 in Verona ; died December 7, 1961 in Berkeley ) was an Italian Romanist , Italianist, orientalist and literary scholar of German-Jewish descent who would later become a US citizen.

life and work

Olschki's parents had moved to Italy from the German Empire in 1883, where his father Leo S. Olschki founded a bookshop in Verona . He grew up bilingually there, in Venice (1890 to 1897) and Florence, and studied in Florence and Rome from 1903. In 1905 he went to Germany (Munich, Strasbourg, Heidelberg ), did his doctorate with Karl Vossler on GB Guarini's “Pastor Fido” in Germany (Heidelberg 1908) and also completed his habilitation in Heidelberg in 1913 with The ideal center of France in the Middle Ages in reality and poetry (Heidelberg 1913). There he was appointed associate professor in 1918 and full professor of Romance philology in 1924.

During a visiting professorship in Italy he learned that he had been retired by the National Socialists on August 21, 1933 because of his Jewish descent. Olschki found a job as a lecturer at the Sapienza in Rome, but emigrated to the USA in 1939 because of the Italian race laws . There the stages of the difficult integration were as follows: Johns Hopkins University , Baltimore (poorly paid "lecturer"), Sweet Briar College, Virginia (1940/41 Substitute teacher of Spanish), Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Harvard (private scholar), Eugene, Oregon (1943 Army language training program), California (1944, Olschki's wife works in a factory), 1945 American citizenship; Berkeley, Department of Oriental Languages ​​(research associate) and 1948 lecturer.

1950 Dismissal for refusal of Loyalty Oath in Second Red Scare, temporary return to Italy, 1952 suspension of dismissal and return to the USA. In 1953 he was reinstated as a professor emeritus by the University of Heidelberg . Since 1955 he was a corresponding member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences .

Olschki published his essays in Latin, Italian, German, English and French, but from 1933 no longer wrote in German. At the age of 65, he studied Chinese for five years.

Fonts (selection)

  • Paris based on the old French national epics , 1913
  • Edited by Dante, La Divina Commedia , Heidelberg 1918
  • History of modern-language scientific literature [From the Middle Ages to Galileo], 3 vols., Leipzig 1919, 1922, 1927
  • Giordano Bruno , Bari 1927
  • The Romance literatures of the Middle Ages , Potsdam 1928; 1932
  • Manuscrits français à peintures des bibliothèques d'Allemagne , Genève 1932
  • La poesia italiana del cinquecento , Firenze 1933
  • Struttura spirituale e linguistica del mondo neolatino , Bari 1935
  • Storia letteraria delle scoperte geografiche , Firenze 1937 (Reprinted by Firenze 1999)
  • Marco Polo's Precursors , Baltimore 1943; New York 1972
  • Guillaume Boucher. A French artist at the courts of the Khans , Baltimore 1946; New York 1969
  • The Genius of Italy , New York 1949, London 1950 (Italian 1953, German Italy: Genius and History , Darmstadt 1958)
  • The Myth of Felt , Berkeley 1949 cf minix.ch (PDF; 424 kB)
  • Dante "Poeta veltro", Firenze 1953
  • L'Asia di Marco Polo , Firenze 1957 (Berkeley 1960)
  • Il castello del Re Pescatore ei suoi misteri nel “Conte del Graal” di Chrétien de Troyes , Roma 1961 (English Manchester and Berkeley 1966)

literature

  • Richard Baum: Leonardo Olschki and the tradition of Romance studies . In: Hans Helmut Christmann , Frank-Rutger Hausmann (ed.): German and Austrian Romanists as persecuted by National Socialism , Tübingen 1989, pp. 177–200
  • Ettore Brissa: Le patrie di Leonardo Olschki . In: Daniela Giovanardi, Harro Stammerjohann (ed.): I Lettori d'Italiano in Germania , Tübingen 1996, pp. 91-98
  • Anke Dörner: La vita Spezzata. Leonardo Olschki: a Jewish Romanist between integration and emigration . Tübingen 2005
  • Christoph Hoch: The Italian Renaissance as a paradigm of German cultural historiography - comments on the work of the Romanist Leonardo Olschki . In: Anna Comi, Alexandra Pontzen (Ed.): Italy in Germany / Germany in Italy. The German-Italian interrelationships in 20th century fiction . Berlin 1999, pp. 357-388.
  • Utz Maas : Persecution and emigration of German-speaking linguists 1933-1945. Entry on Leonardo Olschki (accessed: April 15, 2018)
  • Olschki, Leonardo. In: Lexicon of German-Jewish Authors . Volume 17: Meid – Phil. Edited by the Bibliographia Judaica archive. De Gruyter, Berlin a. a. 2009, ISBN 978-3-598-22697-7 , pp. 368-372.
  • Werner Röder, Herbert A. Strauss (Eds.), International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933-1945 , Vol II, 2 Munich: Saur 1983 ISBN 3-598-10089-2 , p. 874
  • Salomon Wininger : Great Jewish National Biography . Volume 7. Chernivtsi 1927, p. 357
  • Kürschner's German Scholars Calendar , 1931
  • Anke Dörner: “This forced fate”. Emigration and remigration of German Romanists after 1933 , in "Border Crossings. Contributions to Modern Romance Studies." 12th year 2005, issue 24, specialty issue : Romanists in Exile ISSN  0944-8594

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Members of the HAdW since it was founded in 1909. Leonardo Olschki. Heidelberg Academy of Sciences, accessed on June 18, 2016 .
  2. ↑ On the problem of the integration of German Romanists in the scientific community in the USA, as well as their efforts to rehabilitate in the late 1950s and 1960s in the FRG and to remigration.
personal data
SURNAME Olschki, Leonardo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Italian-American Romance Studies
DATE OF BIRTH July 15, 1885
PLACE OF BIRTH Verona
DATE OF DEATH 7th December 1961
Place of death Berkeley