Manfred Naumann

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Manfred Naumann (born October 4, 1925 in Chemnitz ; † August 21, 2014 in Wandlitz ) was a German Romanist .

Life

After graduating from high school in Mittweida , Manfred Naumann, who was born in humble circumstances, did military service from autumn 1943 until the end of the Second World War . He was wounded on his first mission at the front. 1945/46 he worked as a new teacher ; in January 1946 he joined the SPD and was a member of the SED since April 1946 . From autumn 1946 he studied at the University of Leipzig . In addition to Werner Krauss , Walter Markov , Hans Mayer and Ernst Bloch were among his academic teachers. His dissertation and his habilitation arose in the context of the Enlightenment research newly founded by Krauss and dealt with the idea of ​​national education in the French Enlightenment (1952) and Holbach and the problem of materialism in the French Enlightenment (1955). In 1957 he was appointed Professor of Romance Philology at the University of Jena , he was dismissed in March 1959 and expelled from the SED - he belonged to a group around Erich Loest , Gerhard Zwerenz , Winfried Schröder and Ralf Schröder , who carried out reforms in the GDR and a comprehensive one Called for de-Stalinization. After two years of probation at the Pedagogical District Cabinet in Leipzig, he succeeded in returning to science. In 1961 he became professor of Romance philology at the University of Rostock and from there in 1966 changed to the Berlin Humboldt University as professor of cultural and literary sociology ; in the same year the SED took him on again. In 1969 Naumann was one of the founders of the Central Institute for the History of Literature at the German Academy of Sciences in Berlin (GDR). There he headed the department for theoretical and methodological problems, then the research group on French literature of the 19th and 20th centuries. Since 1975 he was a member of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR, in 1981 he became director of the institute and in spring 1990 he was confirmed by the employees in a secret ballot. In the same year he retired because he had reached the age limit; the central institute was wound up in the course of German unification at the end of 1991. In 1994 he became an associate member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences , and in 2010 an honorary doctorate from the University of Osnabrück .

Naumann had been one of the most important representatives of Romance studies in the GDR since the 1960s. His scientific work consistently aimed at a broader public and, in terms of content, at a more precise understanding of the contradictory relationships between relatively autonomous writers and social realities. It applied - in the spirit of a Marxism understood as a consequence and continuation of the Enlightenment - first the Enlightenment epoch, then French prose literature in the 19th and 20th centuries, then also the reception of literature from a theoretical point of view. The articles he selected from the Encyclopedia published by Diderot and d'Alembert (1972) and Stendhal's Collected Works in individual volumes (12 volumes, 1959–1983), which to this day, also because of Naumann's afterwords, are the most well-founded German edition; This favorite author in 2001 was also the source and thought-saturated book Stendhal's Germany. Impressions of the country and its people . With studies on Proust and on the Nouveau Roman (collected with others in prose in France. Studies on the novel in the 19th and 20th centuries , 1978) Naumann contributed significantly to their understanding and to the publication of their books in the GDR. Society - literature - reading. Theoretical reception of literature (head, 1973) promoted the understanding of literature as a social communication context in the GDR and beyond; in the Blickpunkt readers collection . Essays on literary theory (1984), Naumann continued these considerations. The Lexicon of French Literature (1987 [ed.]) Was intended to develop the "desire to read" on a scientific level. From 1984 to 1997 Naumann and colleagues published the scientific work of his teacher Krauss in eight extensively commented volumes . In 2012 he presented his own “Memories of a Romanist” under the title Between Spaces.

Awards

Works

  • Epilogue to: Stendhal , Rot und Schwarz . Translated from Otto Flake . Paul List, Leipzig 1965, pp. 703–721 (and author of the following notes)
  • Society, literature, reading. Literature reception from a theoretical point of view . Management and overall editing: Manfred Naumann [among others], Aufbau-Verlag , Berlin 1973
  • Prose in France. Studies on the novel in the 19th and 20th centuries . Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1978
  • Focus on readers. Essays on literary theory . Reclam, Leipzig 1984
  • Lexicon of French Literature . Edited by Manfred Naumann, Bibliographical Institute, Leipzig 1987
  • Stendhals Germany. Impressions of the country and its people . Böhlau, Weimar 2001
  • Gaps. Memories of a Romanist . Lehmstedt, Leipzig 2012
  • Essay on: Marcel Proust, Combray. Series: Pocket Library of World Literature. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 1986
  • Epilogue: Anatole France in the mirror of his stories, in Anatole France, Thaïs, Bluebeard, Crainquebille and other stories. Translated by Irmgard Nickel, Günther Steinig u. a. Dieterich Verlag, Leipzig 1975 and others. Pp. 463 - 494, Dieterich Collection , 342

Secondary literature

  • Enjoyment and egoism. On the critique of their historical connection , ed. Wolfgang Klein, Ernst Müller, Berlin 2002 (Festschrift, with a bibliography of the publications)
  • Wolfgang Klein: Knowing and Living. Laudation for Manfred Naumann . In Lendemains. Études comparées sur la France - Journal for comparative French research , 140, Narr Francke Attempto , Tübingen 2010 ISSN  0170-3803 pp. 123-134
  • Peter Jehle: Manfred Naumann (1925-2014) . In: Das Argument , 309, 2014, p. 463f.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jens Bisky : In the spirit of Stendhal. The Romanist Manfred Naumann is dead . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of September 1, 2014, p. 10.
  2. ^ "In the sense of Voltaire", in: Neues Deutschland , September 2, 2014, p. 15
  3. ↑ Highest awards for the GDR national holiday. National Prize of the GDR. III. Class. for science and technology. In: New Germany. ZEFYS, Archive of the Berlin State Library, October 7, 1986, p. 4 , accessed on April 22, 2014 .
personal data
SURNAME Naumann, Manfred
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Romanist
DATE OF BIRTH October 4, 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH Chemnitz
DATE OF DEATH August 21, 2014
Place of death Wandlitz