Róbert Gragger

Róbert Gragger , German Robert Gragger (born November 7, 1887 in Aranyosmarót ; † November 10, 1926 in Berlin ) was a literary historian , university professor and philologist of Hungarian descent who mainly wrote his academic work in Germany, at the Berlin University .

Scientific work

Gragger studied at the universities of Budapest , Paris ( Sorbonne ) and in Berlin with Erich Schmidt and Gustav Roethe . From 1909 he worked as a secondary school teacher in Budapest and from 1912 as a professor at the Budapest College for Teacher Training.

With the support of the ethnologist Johannes Bolte , who included Gragger in researching the sources of the Grimm fairy tales , and the literary historian Max Roediger and Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff , the rector of the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, despite the war-related restrictions im university department Gragger, who was considered to be an excellent expert on Hungarian-German relations in the field of language and literature, was appointed extraordinary professor for Hungarian language and literary history on October 1, 1916 . The establishment of this chair, at which 84 students initially studied and which is now the oldest and from the beginning continuously existing abroad, was set up with the active support of the Hungarian cultural authorities and, in terms of cultural policy, is to be seen against the background of the German / Austria-Hungarian arms alliance at the time.

Building of the Collegium Hungaricum Berlin (2017)

In 1916, Gragger also set up a Hungarian seminar by bringing in his private library of 10,000 volumes. By the year he died in 1926, the seminar library had grown to 25,000 volumes and contained 120 current journals and 15 daily newspapers. In 1921 the professorship was converted into a full one. A year later he had established the Finno-Ugric Department within the Hungarian Institute. The brainchild of Gragger at Berlin University first hungarologische center in Germany was gradually added, and finally consisted of the Hungarian Institute, the editorial offices, the Society of Friends of the Hungarian Institute in Berlin, the first hungarologischen magazine, the "Hungarian yearbooks" and the Collegium Hungaricum in Dorotheenstadt (1924). The Hungarian Institute in Berlin, founded by Gragger, is the only one of its kind set up abroad that has been working without interruption since it was founded.

Due to his expertise, Georg Leidinger , the head of the manuscript collection of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek , brought in Gragger in 1922 as a reviewer for a foreign text in a Latin codex from the 13th century, which the Turkologist Franz Babinger had identified as Hungarian. This later so-called Löwener Codex was acquired in 1919 from the well-known Munich antiquarian Ludwig Rosenthal by a German state commission headed by Richard Oehler . After German troops had completely destroyed the library and its holdings in neutral Belgium during the First World War , Germany had to restore the University Library of Leuven in connection with the Treaty of Versailles . Gragger now discovered that the text was an "Old Hungarian Lamentation of Mary " - the first known testimony in the Hungarian language from the 13th century. For the Hungarian language and literature it is comparable to the Hildebrandslied for Germany. In 1923 he was able to present the first scientific representation of the text to the public in the Hungarian original and in a German translation.

Gragger's main area of ​​research was comparative literary history. He also examined Molière's influence in Hungary and worked on Theodor Storm , Theodor Fontane, and Nikolaus Lenau .

Honorary grave of Róbert Graggers in the Dahlem cemetery

In 1925 Gragger was appointed honorary professor at the University of Pécs . After settling until October 1926 intensively to the purchase of the former Heart Palais' and its refurbishment had sought as the new headquarters of the Collegium Hungaricum, he died suddenly and unexpectedly on 10 November 1926. His final resting place was Róbert Gragger on the cemetery Dahlem in a grave of honor . His academic legacy remained at the Berlin University and has been systematically processed since 2014 after previous individual viewings.

Works (selection)

literature

• From a Lower Rhine pharmacopoeia of the 15th century. With comments by Johannes Bolte and Oskar Ebermann. In: Journal of the Association for Folklore 26, 1916, pp. 194–201.
• Prussia, Weimar and the Hungarian royal crown. With the facsimile of a letter from Goethe . Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin 1923.
• German manuscripts in Hungarian libraries . (Hungarian Library 2), Association of Scientific Publishers, Berlin and Leipzig 1921.

Editing

Hungarian yearbooks , 1st issue, 1st year, 1921, published by Róbert Gragger (front and back)

• Old Hungarian stories . Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin 1927.
• Ó-Magyar Mária-siralom , in: Magyar Nyelv 1923, 1-13, An old Hungarian Marienklage , Hungarian Yearbooks, 1923, 27-46, also as volume 7 of the “Hungarian Library”, Berlin-Leipzig 1923.
• Anthologia hungarica . (“ Bibliotheca Mundi ” series) Insel-Verlag, Leipzig 1922.
• Alexander Petőfi . Poems . (Selection and afterword as well as by Bettina von Arnim : Petöfi der Sonnengott ), Insel-Verlag, Leipzig [1923] - Insel-Bücherei 351 / A.
• Literary monuments from Hungary's Turkish times . (together with Franz Babinger, Eugen Wednesday and JH Mordtmann), Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin 1927.
• Hungarian ballads . (Transfer: Hedwig Lüdeke), Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin 1926.
• Hungarian library . Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin and Leipzig 1923 ff.
• Hungarian yearbooks . Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin and Leipzig 1921–1943.

Róbert Gragger Prize

Since 2006 the Society of Hungarian Germanists has awarded the Róbert Gragger Prize for outstanding research results in the field of German studies.

literature

• Péter László: Új magyar lexikon irodalmi I . (A-Gy). Főszerk. Akademieverlag, Budapest 1994 - ISBN 963-05-6805-5 [New Hungarian Writer's Lexicon I (A – Gy)]
• Gábor Ujvári: The Hungarian Institute of the Berlin University, the Collegium Hungaricum and German-Hungarian Economic Relations (1916-1944) . in: Scientific relations and their contribution to modernization. The German-Hungarian example . published by Holger Fischer, Oldenbourg, Munich 2005, pp. 299 to 334 ( ISBN 3-486-57884-7 )

Web links

• Literature by and about Róbert Gragger in the catalog of the German National Library
• Györgyi Brand: On the documentation of the establishment of the Hungarian chair at the University of Berlin (excerpt from the unpublished dissertation "A hungarológia intézményrendszerének létrehozása. Gragger Róbert a berlini egyetemen")
• Róbert Gragger Institute
• Berlin Gragger Archive of the Humboldt University in Berlin
• Culture portal west-east

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Due to the war, only around 3,000 of the approx. 8,150 enrolled students were actually able to take part in lectures.
2. ^ András Vizkelety: The Löwener Codex. Balance of research - new results - further tasks . (Hungarian Studies 1985 1/1), Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest 1985 ( digitized version - accessed on January 2, 2016).
3. ↑ The manuscript was acquired by Hungary in May 1982 in an exchange process with the participation of the Széchényi National Library with incunabula of Belgian provenance.
4. ↑ Seven boxes of life; Searching for traces in the estate of Robert Gragger, the founder of the Hungarian Chair at the Humboldt University in Berlin ( Memento of the original from December 8, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (HUB press portal from October 14, 2015) 
5. ↑ The transmissions originate from a. by Ludwig Aigner , Ludwig Fulda and Ignaz Schnitzer .
6. ^ Website on the Róbert Gragger Prize