Ramón Menéndez Pidal

Ramón Menéndez Pidal

Ramón Menéndez Pidal (born March 13, 1869 in La Coruña , Spain , † November 14, 1968 in Madrid ) was a Spanish philologist and historian .

life and work

He graduated from the University of Madrid in 1893 and became a lecturer in philology there in 1899. He is considered the actual founder of modern Spanish philology and founded the Centro de Estudios Históricos (Center for Historical Studies) in Madrid in 1910 and the Revista de Filología Española (Journal of Spanish Philology) in 1914 . He opened the philological and literary sciences of his country to the historical methods of comparative literature and was considered one of the most important contemporary Romanists in his era .

Already in his doctoral thesis, written between 1908 and 1912, the researcher dealt with the text of the old Spanish heroic epic about the Castilian knight El Cid ( El Cantar de Mio Cid ). After that he devoted practically his entire life to exploring them. He was married to a cousin of María Teresa León Goyri of María Goyri (1873-1954).

In 1902 he was elected a member of the Real Academia Española and was its president from 1929 to 1939 and again from 1948 until his death four months before his hundredth birthday. During the civil war from 1936 to 1939 he stayed in Bordeaux , Cuba , the USA and most recently in Paris .

He became known beyond Spain through his historical study La España del Cid (1929, then revised several times, last published in 1948). The two-volume German edition of the work under the title Das Spanien des Cid appeared in 1936–37.

Menéndez Pidal appeared in 1961 (aged over 90 years) as the most important historical consultant on the production of the known, of Anthony Mann turned history film El Cid (with Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren in the lead roles) with.

Ramón Menéndez Pidal and María Goyri during their honeymoon on the Ruta del Cid (around 1900)

To defend the reputation of Spain, Menéndez Pidal tried in the middle of the twentieth century to prove that the Spanish theologian and writer, the Dominican Bartolomé de Las Casas , his committed and polemical "report" on the cruel treatment and annihilation of the Indians in Central and Eastern Europe South America, through the Spanish Conquista in the 16th century, had a lasting influence on the emergence and consolidation of the negative image of Spain in modern Europe (so-called “ black legend ”), must have been mentally ill, and calls him a “megalomaniac paranoid ”. The sharp conflict between defenders and despizers of the work and the personality of Las Casas has permeated Spanish intellectual history and historiography since his lifetime.

Effect and critical appreciation

Menéndez Pidal at Madrid Airport (1964)

Menéndez Pidal's linguistic and historical work should be critically assessed in the context of recent Spanish history since the fateful year of 1898, which was so important for Spanish self-confidence . With his research he explicitly wanted to make a contribution to the formation of a Spanish national identity. “Even if I am concerned with researching our national past,” Menéndez Pidal said in an interview as early as 1916, “nothing interests me as much as our present and our future” (quoted from Fletcher).

Despite the recognized great care, attention to detail and reliability that characterize his scientific work, his research results and hypotheses in connection with these premises gain a political weight that should not be underestimated and are not free from scientifically not always justifiable evaluations, insofar as he is one of the national thought remains committed to an oriented view of language and history and never questions this starting point. In his investigations he followed the conviction that there have been almost unchangeable characteristics of the Spanish culture and language since the first inhabitants appeared on the Iberian Peninsula . Above all, however, he was convinced of the great importance of medieval Castile in restoring national unity, which had already existed in the Visigothic monarchy and had been lost by the Moorish invasion . He went the furthest here in his work La España del Cid (1929). In it he referred to the Visigoths as "Spaniards" and even admitted the Iberians to "a certain cultural or national unity" ("una cierta unidad cultural o nacional") . As an open opponent of regionalist endeavors, Menéndez Pidal always emphasized the unifying work of Castile, which “created the nation by keeping its thinking openly directed towards Spain as a whole” ( Castilla creó la nación por mantener su pensamiento ensanchado hacia España toda ). Consequently, he called for the "Castilization" ( castellanización ) of Catalonia and the Basque Country , whereby as a linguist he insisted on the thesis that Catalan is an Ibero -Roman language and not a Gallo-Roman language , which today is only with reservations .

Although he was not the first to propound these theses, he based them in his various works on a popular and widely adopted positivist argument. In this sense he formed a larger number of students and followers, for example Tomás Navarro Tomás , Américo Castro , Antonio Tovar , Samuel Gili Gaya or Dámaso Alonso , who also represented this point of view. The authority of Menéndez Pidal contributed to the idea of ​​a nationwide Spanish nation, which was an essential element of the national Spanish ideology and the basis of the language policy under the Franco regime and which to this day stands in opposition to the nationalist aspirations of individual language groups or population groups in Spain, scientifically substantiate and enforce.

Compared with the Franco regime as a political system Menéndez Pidal maintained a critical distance, as the repressive regime was contrary to his own ethical principles. But there were also clear points of contact and similarities, especially in the ideas about Spain as a “Castilian” national state . In a letter to Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz in 1939, the exiled scholar hoped for a victory for Franco , as otherwise the “rights of the Catalans” would have triumphed. He accused the political left of not pursuing militant nationalism. This was her great crime and her great stupidity. It is therefore not surprising that immediately after the civil war, with the support of the magazine Escorial , a Falange propaganda organ , he returned to Francoist Spain.

Honors

Pidal has been a member of the Italian Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei since 1914 , the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1917, the Accademia della Crusca since 1919, the British Academy since 1920 and the Spanish Junta para Ampliación de Estudios and the Real Academia Española . In 1952 he was awarded the Antonio Feltrinelli Prize .

Footnotes

1. ↑ Bartolomé de Las Casas (author), Michael Sievernich (ed.), Ulrich Kunzmann (translator): Brief report on the devastation of the West Indian countries. with an afterword by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main / Leipzig 2006, pp. 168ff.
2. ↑ Referenced article by Ramón López Facal on history lessons ( Memento of the original from September 15, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . 
3. ↑ Reference from: Javier Varela 1999, “La novela de España. Los intelectuales y el problema español “ ( Memento of the original from September 15, 2008 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. . 
4. ^ Es : Escorial (revista) .
5. ↑ Member list of the Crusca
6. ^ Deceased Fellows. British Academy, accessed July 7, 2020 . 

Works

• La España del Cid , Volumes 1 and 2, Ed. Plutarco, Madrid 1929.
  German: The Spain of the Cid , translated by Gerda Henning, Hueber-Verlag, Munich 1936.
• Los españoles en la historia. Cimas y depresiones en la curva de su vida política (preface to volume I of the Historia de España published by Menéndez Pidal , Madrid 1947, 2nd edition 1954, pp. IX-CIII).
  English: The Spaniards in History. Translated by KA Horst, with a foreword by Hermann J. Hüffer. Rinn Verlag, Munich 1955; Reprint: WBG , Darmstadt 1973, ISBN 3-534-05359-1 .
• Kurt Schnelle (ed.), Ulrich Kunzmann (transl.): Poetry and history in Spain. Articles and lectures (= Reclams Universal Library , Volume 963). Philipp Reclam jun. , Leipzig 1984.

literature

• Fletcher, Richard: El Cid. Berlin 1999. ISBN 3-88679-312-5 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Ramón Menéndez Pidal in the catalog of the German National Library