Paul Thieme

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Elisabeth and Oskar Thieme with the triplets Franz, Gertrud and Paul

Paul Thieme (born March 18, 1905 in Berlin , † April 24, 2001 in London ) was a German Indologist .

Life

Studied in Göttingen and Berlin

After Paul Thieme and his triple brother Franz had received lessons as adolescents from their father Oskar Thieme (1868-1943), a pastor - Thieme comes from an old Thuringian pastor family August Thiemes  - in Mechelroda , they were accepted into the Eisenach humanistic high school in 1917 . Her education in ancient Greek and Latin was very good. Paul chose Hebrew and taught himself Sanskrit from the textbook by Richard Fick .

He graduated from high school in 1923 and began studying Indology , Indo-European and Iranian Studies at the University of Göttingen . His teachers were Eduard Hermann , a student of Berthold Delbrück , Emil Sieg , who had studied with Albrecht Weber and Franz Kielhorn , and Friedrich C. Andreas. In 1925 he moved to the University of Berlin for a year . Here he had the opportunity to hear Wilhelm Schulze and Heinrich Lüders . “Both teachers had an extraordinary influence on Thieme, the strictly methodical technique of Wilhelm Schulze's etymological word research (based on thorough text studies) on the one hand, and Heinrich Lüders' recording of Indian cultural life in its historical context based on detailed philological work on the other Page". Thieme was probably also influenced by the unpretentious nature of Lüders. He finally decided to major in Indology. In 1929 he received his doctorate in Göttingen with an award-winning thesis, The Plusquamperfectum in the Veda .

The “aim of the thesis was to show, especially in terms of their syntactic use, that only those augmented and reduplicated verbal forms for the perfect stem ( i.e. as past perfect forms ) that have an imperfective meaning and are not accompanied by a present tense indicator can be used . “At an impulse from Kielhorn, Thieme then dealt with the local grammatical traditions and completed his habilitation in Göttingen in 1932 with the work Pāṇini and the Veda on the important and difficult topic of the extent to which traditional Sanskrit grammar is the language, especially the oldest Text of the Vedic corpus concerning the Ṛgvedasaṃhitā . "With the title of this book, the two main areas of work are expressed, so to speak, that were at the center of his further work."

Allahabad and Wroclaw

First, he got the opportunity to work as a lecturer for French and German at the University of Allahabad in India. There he was able to receive lessons from the Sanskrit scholar, the Paṇdit Kamalakanta Mishra , which was inevitably in Sanskrit - the two spoke no other common language. Thiemes later work on the Bhāṣya zu vārttika 5 zu Pāṇini 1, 1, 9 and its native explanations arose from this teaching .

He got in touch with English circles in Allahabad. In 1933 he married Dorothy Cearns, an officer's daughter. In 1934 their son Konrad was born. In 1935 the family moved to Göttingen and they immediately noticed the depressing atmosphere in Germany. In 1936 Thieme got a job as a lecturer in Breslau , where he then taught Indology as an associate professor from 1939. His wife was stressed by the situation in Germany and the couple decided to separate. She went back to India with her parents to live with her son. In 1938 one of the most important works by Thieme, the famous stranger in Ṛgveda, appeared .

At the time, whether consciously or not, this material had a certain explosiveness, because it was about the meaning of the “ Aryan name”. Werner Knobl (Kyoto) writes: “Given the scientific achievement that Der Fremdling undeniably represents, one should not forget that this work was published in 1938 when it was not exactly opportune to prove in Germany that it meant arya 'Protection of strangers, friendly to strangers' and 'Lord' only in the sense of 'hospitable, generous gentleman' ". Johanna Narten says: "He probably knew that under the National Socialists, who misused the word Aryans , this explanation could be dangerous for him, but such considerations left him unconcerned." During this time, many different smaller word studies appeared as magazine articles.

Halle and Frankfurt a. M.

Thieme was appointed professor for Indo-European studies in Halle in 1941 , but was initially drafted for the Russian campaign. In the troop he made friends with the Indo-Iranist Karl Hoffmann . Thieme was spared the fate of the many soldiers who perished in Russia due to the fact that he was transferred to the Indian Legion in 1942 as an interpreter for Hindustani . In 1945 he was taken prisoner by the Americans, from which he was only released a year later.

Thieme then returned to Halle. In 1949 he married Carola Schneider, and in the same year he became a member of the Saxon Academy of Sciences . In addition, the studies on the linguistics and interpretation of the Rigveda appeared , which deal with “problem words” for which Hermann Oldenberg had not found a solution. In 1952 the important essay Bráhman appeared , which shows “Thiemes mastery in the interpretation of a term so important for the ancient Indian worldview based on the text and context of the references, to which an etymological explanation is only added at the end”. His students in Halle included prominent representatives of the subject such as Klaus Ludwig Janert , Hartmut Scharfe and Friedrich Wilhelm.

Wilhelm writes: “Until 1953, Halle was a kind of niche university in the GDR ... You were always among friends here, you talked completely carefree ... You could feel safe under a professor like Paul Thieme. He sometimes said how clearly he had expressed his opinion to political bigwigs ”. In 1953 Thieme received a call to Frankfurt am Main for the Indo-European chair. He and his partner and their son and daughter from previous marriage decided to flee the eastern zone. In Frankfurt, Bernfried Schlerath , who was already doing his doctorate at the time, was one of his listeners, Janert and Georg Buddruss were doing their doctorates with him at the time.

Yale University and Tübingen

As early as 1954, Thieme moved to Yale University in New Haven (Connecticut) as Edward E. Salisbury professor . His predecessors at this prestigious chair of American Sanskrit research were William Dwight Whitney , Edward Washburn Hopkins , Franklin Edgerton and Louis Renou . His American students included George Cardona and Stanley Insler . In 1957 the monograph on Mitra and Aryaman was published .

"Through Thiemes' precise and illuminating examination of the hymns which are dedicated to this god (Aryaman) in the Rigveda and Avesta , it is clear (...) that gods of this kind are not, as was otherwise believed, personifications of natural phenomena, but about personifications of ethical concepts which the Indo-Iranians (the common ancestors of the Indians and Iranians) regard as the highest gods ”.

In 1960 Thieme accepted a position at the University of Tübingen ; the chair there, which had represented both Indology and Comparative Religious Studies since Rudolf von Roth , had become vacant. One reason for the renewed change was, among other things, a better pension. A “Thieme Circle” was formed here, to which Buddruss, Albrecht Wezler , Oskar von Hinüber and Hartmut-Ortwin Feistel belonged. Insler came to Tübingen from the USA, followed a little later by Schmidt and Janert. There were privatissima held with selected students, the content of which was traditional grammar or sophisticated art poetry. During his time in Tübingen, he wrote important magazine articles, translations in a series of representative Asian works supported by UNESCO and some monographs on Indian cultural history, including Indian theater. Thieme declined an honorable call to the University of Bonn for the oldest Sanskrit chair in Germany, which was first held by August Wilhelm Schlegel , after he had been offered a respectable increase in funding from the Ministry of Education in Baden-Württemberg.

After retirement

Even after his retirement in 1973, Thieme continued to publish. In the article on the crane and heron in Sanskrit , he explained the important distinction between vegetarian crane species and non-vegetarian heron species, which is important in India and appears again and again in literature.

In 1977 his wife Carola died. In 1981 he received an honorary doctorate from the Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi, which is extremely renowned for Sanskrit studies . He gave the acceptance speech freely in Sanskrit, which made a great impression in India. He also continued to hold unscheduled private lectures in Tübingen.

In 1982 he was elected a corresponding member of the Berlin Scientific Society and in 1983 of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences . He became an honorary member of the German Oriental Society , the American Oriental Society , the Royal Oriental Society in London and the Société asiatique . In 1988 he was awarded the Kyoto Prize , one of the world's highest awards for science after the Nobel Prize, “for excellence in the field of Creative Art and Moral Sciences”. In the same year he also received the Rabrindanath Tagore Medal from the Asiatic Society of Bengal .

In 1991 he married Renate Sons, and "At 86 years old, Thieme was the oldest bridegroom that the Tübingen registrar had ever married". Thieme gave his last public lecture at the age of 90 at the Orientalist Day in Leipzig in 1995.

Paul Thieme was certainly one of the most important Indologists of the 20th century, "especially in the past two decades as a kind of nestor of Indology, comparable at best with the great and groundbreaking pioneers of the subject from the 19th century" (Butzenberger). He has shown himself to be “one of the leading exegetes, especially of Rigveda” (R. Schmitt), “a leafing through of the new etymological dictionary of the Vedic (M. Mayrhofer), etymological dictionary of Old Indo Aryan  ... attests to its ubiquity”.

Thieme shaped a whole generation of scientists, and the principles he developed for dealing with the ancient Indian texts still have an effect. According to Thieme, only the most precise grammatical analysis leads to success, and that means for him: consideration of word form and word function, possibly including the closest related languages. In this sense, his work on Veda research is characterized by the fact that it analyzes the texts themselves with meticulous care and very soberly, free of preconceived notions, and at the same time delivers imaginative interpretations with resourceful acuteness, interpretations for which Thieme himself has demanded two things ...: 'A) a faithful literal translation that desists from explaining, b) analytical explanations that desist from taking literally' ".

Johanna Narten writes: “He left an indelible impression on those who were lucky enough to get to know him personally. He was an extremely pleasant and personable person who always managed to infect and inspire other people through his charisma and his fascinating scientific enthusiasm. ”His tradition is today (2015) at German-speaking universities by his direct students such as Thomas Oberlies in Göttingen , continued by pupils of his pupils like Axel Michaels in Heidelberg , Rahul Peter Das in Halle , Karin Preisendanz in Vienna , Ulrike Niklas in Cologne or Klaus Butzenberger in Tübingen and even pupils of his pupils like Hans Harder in Heidelberg .

Certainly the majority of his work is only accessible to specialists or to those who are about to become one. However, these are by no means "dry" treatises. His empathy, the humanity with which he repeatedly succeeds in bringing the ancient human culture behind the texts to be examined to life in the mind's eye is masterful. An example of this is the excursus on “Path” and “Street” in Fremdling , pp. 110–117.

Publications (selection)

  • The past perfect in the Veda . Dissertation. Göttingen 1929 (supplement to the journal for comparative language research , 7). doi: 10.11588 / xarep.00004083
  • Pāṇini and the Veda. Studies in the early history of linguistic science in India . Allahabad 1935.
  • Bhāṣya to vārttika 5 to Pāṇini 1,1,9 and his native exponers. A contribution to the history and appreciation of Indian grammatical scholasticism . In: News from the Royal Society of Sciences in Göttingen, phil.-hist. Class 1935, pp. 171-216. doi: 10.11588 / xarep.00004084
  • The stranger in Ṛgveda. A study of the meanings of the words ari, arya, aryaman and ārya . Leipzig 1938 ( Treatises on the Customer of the Orient ; 23.2). doi: 10.11588 / xarep.00004085
  • Studies on the word customer and interpretation of the Rigveda . Halle 1949 ( Hallische Monographien , 7).
  • Studies in Indo-European verbal studies and the history of religion. (= Reports on the negotiations of the Saxon Academy of Sciences in Leipzig. Philological-historical class. Volume 98, Issue 5. ) Akademieverlag Berlin 1952. doi: 10.11588 / xarep.00004086
  • Bráhman . In: Journal of the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft 102 (1952), pp. 91–129 [= Kleine Schriften , pp. 100–137.].
  • The home of the Indo-European common language. In: Treatises of the humanities and social science class / Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz, born in 1953, Vol. 11. Verlag der Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Wiesbaden 1954. doi: 10.11588 / xarep.00004087
  • Mitra and Aryaman . New Haven 1957 ( Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences , 41).
  • The Indian theater . Stuttgart 1966 ( Far Eastern Theater ).
  • Small fonts . 2 volumes. Stuttgart 1971 ( Glasenapp Foundation 5.1 + 2).
  • Small fonts 2 . Stuttgart 1995 (Glasenapp Foundation 5, II), ISBN 3-515-05523-1 .
  • Opera maiora. Volume 1 . Edited by Werner Knobl and Nobuhiko Kobayashi. Kyoto 1995 [contains: The stranger in Ṛgveda , pre-Zarathustrian things for the Zarathustrians and Mitra and Aryaman . Further volumes not published].

See also

literature

  • Obituary by Johanna Narten in: Yearbook of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences . 2002, pp. 311-317. ( PDF ( Memento of December 13, 2007 in the Internet Archive ))
  • Obituary by Rüdiger Schmitt in: Kratylos . Volume 47, 2002, pp. 221-225.
  • Renate Söhn-Thieme: Paul Thieme (1905-2001). Full professor for Indology and Comparative Religious Studies at the University of Tübingen 1960–1973 . In: Heidrun Brückner et al. (Ed.): India research in times of change. Analysis and documents on Indology and religious studies in Tübingen . Attempto, Tübingen 2003, ISBN 3-89308-345-6 , pp. 251-280.

Festschriften

  • Paul Thieme on completion of the 75th year of life ; Studies in Indology and Iranian Studies 1980, issue 5/6
  • On the 90th birthday: Veda-Vyākaraṇa-Vyākhyāna . Reinbek 1996.

Web links

swell

  1. ^ Shnen-Thieme: Paul Thieme . P. 253.
  2. ↑ a b Schmitt: Paul Thieme . P. 221.
  3. ↑ Kyoto, Japan; Foreword to the Opera maiora . P. Iv
  4. ↑ obituary in BAdW Yearbook, p 314th
  5. ↑ a b Shnen-Thieme: Paul Thieme . P. 263.
  6. ^ Obituary by Johanna Narten, p. 314.
  7. ↑ See Sons-Thieme: Paul Thieme . P. 267.
  8. ^ Obituary by Johanna Narten, p. 317.
  9. ^ Shnen-Thieme: Paul Thieme . P. 278.
  10. ^ Obituary by Johanna Narten, p. 313.
  11. ^ Obituary by Rüdiger Schmitt, p. 223.
  12. ^ Obituary by Johanna Narten, p. 317.
  13. ↑ Michaels and Preisendanz are students of Albrecht Wezler, that of Klaus Ludwig Janert and Albrecht Wezler, Niklas of Klaus Ludwig Janert, Butzenberger of Friedrich Wilhelm.
  14. ↑ Harder is a student of Rahul Peter Das.
personal data
SURNAME Thieme, Paul
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Indologist
DATE OF BIRTH March 18, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH April 24, 2001
Place of death London