Richard Samuel

Richard Herbert Samuel (born March 23, 1900 in Elberfeld , † October 28, 1983 in Melbourne ) was a German-British German studies .

Life and activity

Richard Samuel was a son of the Elberfeld tobacco manufacturer Ernst Samuel (1871–1932) and his wife Clara, b. David (1878-1962). In his youth he attended high school in Elberfeld. From Easter to autumn 1917 he worked in agriculture as part of the Patriotic Aid Service , a (compulsory) work program during the First World War . In November 1918 he was called up for military service, but was no longer served at the front. From 1918 to 1924 he studied German in Münster, Tübingen and Berlin. He completed his training in 1924 with a dissertation supervised by Julius Petersen on the conception of the state of the poet Novalis . From 1924 to 1925 he worked as a trainee lawyer at Rhenish schools and then from 1926 to 1928 as a study assessor in Barmen . From 1930 to 1934 Samuel held a partial position at the Grunewald-Gymnasium in Berlin . At the same time he was from 1931 to 1933 research assistant to Petersen at the German Department of the Berlin University. In his spare time he also gave educational courses for members of the German Engine Drivers Union from 1925 to 1932 . He also worked on the union magazine, Vor , whose supplement, Paths to Knowledge, he directed.

In the wake of the power of commencement of the Nazis in the spring of 1933, Samuel was chosen for its - dismiss Jewish ancestry from the civil service - to Nazi definition. In July 1934 he emigrated to Great Britain, where he found a position as a lecturer (lecturer) at Cambridge University in 1934 . In 1936 he moved to Newcastle University before he was appointed professor in Durham in 1937 . In 1938 he earned a PhD in Cambridge with a dissertation on Heinrich von Kleist . In 1952 he received a complementary Master of Arts degree in Melbourne. In 1939 he returned to Cambridge as a professor.

As an opponent of the National Socialists, Samuel had worked with the social democratic underground movement from 1933 to 1934 and was then in contact with circles around Dietrich Bonhoeffer as an emigrant .

After his emigration, the National Socialist police officers classified Samuel as an enemy of the state: In the spring of 1940, the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin placed him on the special wanted list GB , a list of people who would be succeeded by the occupying forces in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht Special SS commandos were to be identified and arrested with special priority.

During the Second World War , Samuel was a member of the British Army from 1940 to 1945. In 1940 he converted to Protestantism ( Church of England ). From 1945 to 1947, Samuel worked in the research department of the Foreign Office in London.

From 1947 until his retirement in 1968, Samuel taught as Professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Melbourne in Australia, where he emigrated in 1947: From 1947 to 1950 he was an associate professor at this university (nominally he was appointed associate professor there as early as 1941 and then from 1950 to 1968 as a regular professor as head of the department for German language. Samuel's activity in Melbourne was interrupted by visiting professorships at the University of Western Ontario in London / Canada from 1968 to 1969 and in Pittsburgh in 1971.

Samuel was a founding member of the Australian Humanities Research Council (1957), a fellow of the Australian College of Education and a member of the German Academy for Language and Poetry in Darmstadt . From 1962 to 1964 he was President of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association.

Samuel's main area of ​​research was German Romanticism .

family

Since 1939 Samuel was married to Helen Mary, b. Drummond (1916-1999), with whom he had two sons (Peter and Christopher).

Honors

Samuel was a recipient of the Great Federal Cross of Merit (1958) and the Goethe Medal (1958)

Fonts

• The poetic conception of the state and history of Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis): Studies for the romantic philosophy of history , 1925 (dissertation).
• Heinrich von Kleist's participation in the political movements of the years 1805–1809 . Cambridge, 1938.
  • Heinrich von Kleist's participation in the political movements of 1805–1809 . Kleist Memorial and Research Center, Frankfurt (Oder) 1995.
• Expressionism in German Life, Literature and the Theater (1910–1924) , Cambridge 1939. (with RH Thomas)
• Education & Society in Modern Germany , 1949. (with RH Thomas)
• Goethe's Hermann and Dorothea , 1961.
• Selected Writings , 1965.

literature

• Obituary for Richard Samuel. In: Yearbook for International German Studies. Bern 1984, p. VIII.
• Fritz Martini : Richard Samuel in memory . In: German Academy for Language and Poetry, yearbook 1983. Heidelberg 1984.
• Werner Herden: Richard Samuel. German studies beyond conformity . In: Zeitschrift für Germanistik , Vol. 5 (1988), pp. 587-594.
• Who is who? The German Who's Who. 1971, p. 921.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Richard Samuel: Heinrich von Kleist's participation in the political movements of the years 1805-1809 . Kleist Memorial and Research Center, Frankfurt (Oder) 1995, p. 385 (comment by the translator Wolfgang Barthel).
2. ^ Entry on Samuel on the special wanted list GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London) .