Lotte Labowsky

Lotte Labowsky (born April 23, 1905 in Hamburg , † July 28, 1991 in Oxford ) was a German-Jewish philosopher and classical philologist . In 1934 she emigrated to London with the Warburg Library for Cultural Studies in Hamburg , where she worked on the Warburg Institute's philosophical publication series .

Life

Lotte Labowsky came from the Jewish part of the Hamburg upper middle class. Her father Norbert Labowsky (1876–1942) was a lawyer and was a member of the Karstadt AG supervisory board until 1933 . Lotte was the oldest of three sisters. She first attended private schools and in 1924 graduated from the humanistic Wilhelm Gymnasium in Hamburg. First she studied for three semesters Law in Freiburg , then moved on to classical philology in Munich and Heidelberg , where they interrupted by a period of study at the Paris Sorbonne , December 8, 1932, summa cum laude at Otto rainbow in classical philology on the ethics of Panaitios PhD.

After completing her doctorate, she worked as an unpaid research assistant at the Warburg Library of Cultural Studies (KBW). A decisive event in her life was the forced emigration to Great Britain by the National Socialists in 1934. The Warburg Cultural Studies Library did so with the help of the American branch of the Warburg family and because of the contacts to the Academic Assistance Council (later: Society for the Protection of Science and Learning (SPSL)) succeeded in transferring the library of around 60,000 volumes from Hamburg to London in December 1933 and founding a counterpart to the Hamburg Warburg library for cultural studies, the Warburg Institute , which was incorporated into the University of London in 1943 .

Lotte Labowsky kept her head above water in London with fixed-term and themed scholarships. Since she entered the country on a student visa, she was not allowed to work in England and therefore completed a second degree in Greek and paleography at Oxford University . In October 1936, when the edition of the “Corpus Platonicum Medii Aeviam Warburg Institute”, a complete record of the Latin Plato reception in the Middle Ages, began under the direction of General Editor Raymond Klibansky and she was appointed Klibansky’s assistant, it received a limited edition Residence permit. Since neither the symbolic salary nor the additional support of the Academic Assistance Council secured her livelihood, she accepted a scholarship from Somerville College in Oxford in 1939 . It was not until the fall of 1943 that her financial situation improved when she was employed as a librarian at Somerville College, while she continued to work on the Warburg Institute's editing project. She practiced commuting between the worlds of work in Oxford and London almost until the end of her life. In 1946 Labowsky became a British citizen and in 1956 she received the academic title of Master of Arts ( Oxoniensis ).

When Klibansky accepted a position in Montreal in 1947 , he remained general editor of the edition project. De facto, Labowsky took over a large part of his tasks, including the scientific ones, and acted as a link between the editor, who was always in the limelight, and the Warburg Institute. They both worked intensively on the aforementioned research well into old age and enjoyed extensive research trips to European libraries during their retirement - albeit not together.

In March 1961 she received an extension of her scholarship at Somerville College. She always stayed in touch with the Warburg Institute, and that was especially true of her work on the Corpus Platonicum, the main burden of which she carried, as Klibansky mostly lived in Canada. In volumes I (Meno, 1940) and III (Platonis Parmenides nec non Procli Commentarium in Parmenidem, 1953) she is named as co-editor. She traveled to Canada several times to coordinate the work with Klibansky. It was only with her permanent move to Somerville College that she came back to more independent work. She traveled several times to Italy , particularly to Venice , to reconstruct the library of Cardinal Bessarion .

The scientist died on July 28, 1991 in an old people's home in Oxford. Shortly before her death, she visited and interviewed Rainer Nicolaysen , the current head of the Hamburg Office for University History.

The discovery of her "estate" in the Marbach estate of Raymond Klibansky enables new insights into the life of the productive and committed scientist. More than 550 letters from Labowsky to Klibansky, written between 1927 and 1991, testify to the intensive working group and friendship of a transnational couple of scholars in the 20th century.

Publications

• The ethics of Panaitios. Studies on the history of Decorum in Cicero and Horaz , Leipzig 1934 (dissertation)
• Review of Karl Heinrich Becker: The legacy of antiquity in the Orient and Occident, Leipzig 1931
• Review of Sigmund Zempicki: Pindar in the literary judgment of the 17th and 18th centuries
• Bessarion's Library and the Biblioteca Marciana. 1979

Cooperation

• Corpus Platonicum Medii Aevii. Auspiciis Academiae Britannicae edidit Raymundus Klibansky, Warburg Institute, London 1940–1962
• Mediaeval and Renaissance Studies . Edited by Raymond Klibansky and RW Hunt, Warburg Institute, London 1941–1968
• Bibliography in cultural studies on the afterlife of antiquity , Volume 1, London 1934 and Volume 2, London 1938

literature

• Raymond Klibansky: Lotte Labowsky , in The Times, August 2, 1991
• Regina Weber: Lotte Labowsky (1905–1991) - student of Aby Warburg, colleague Raymond Klibansky. A scientist between foreign and self-determination in exile in England , Dietrich Reimer Verlag, Berlin-Hamburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-496-02854-3
• Concetta Bianca: Ricordo di Lotte Labowsky , in Miscellanea Marciana 7–9, Biblioteca Nationale Marciana Venezia

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e} ifb.bsz-bw.de , Lotte Labowsky
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e} www.sehepunkte.de , Regina Weber : Lotte Labowsky (1905-1991) - student of Aby Warburg, colleague Raymond Klibansky