Rudolf Keydell

Max Rudolf Keydell (born March 30, 1887 in Cracau near Magdeburg , † May 21, 1982 in Berlin ) was a German classical philologist and librarian.

Life

Rudolf Keydell, the son of the railway operations secretary Carl Keydell and his wife Minna geb. Jungmann, attended the preparatory school in Magdeburg and then the pedagogy for the monastery of our dear women . After graduation (Easter 1905) Keydell studied Classical Philology at the University of Bonn (with Franz Bücheler , August Brinkmann and Georg Loeschcke ). In the autumn of 1906 he moved to the Berlin University , where he was influenced by Eduard Norden , Johannes Vahlen and Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff . In Wilamowitz Keydell in 1911 with a thesis Quaestiones metricae de epicis Graecis recentioribus doctorate . After the state examination (1913) he joined the Royal Library in Berlin as a volunteer . From 1915 to 1918 he took part in the First World War.

After his return from the front, Keydell was appointed assistant librarian at what was now the Prussian State Library and two years later he was promoted to the library council. After the Second World War he moved to West Berlin , where he remained in the service of the State Library of Prussian Cultural Heritage (western part of the State Library) until 1951 . In his retirement, Keydell worked as a lecturer , since 1961 as an honorary professor for classical philology at the Free University of Berlin . It was not until 1973, at the age of 85, that he gave up teaching.

As a researcher, Keydell studied all of Greek literature. His specialty was the epic of Hellenism , the imperial era and late antiquity . In addition to numerous essays, lexicon articles and reviews, he created critical editions of the Dionysiacs des Nonnos (1959) and the Historien des Agathias (1967). In 1967, at the age of eighty, he continued the new edition of Stephanos von Byzantium , which had been started by Felix Jacoby and Ernst Grumach . After his death, Margarethe Billerbeck took over the edition, the first volume of which appeared in 2006.

In recognition of his services as a researcher, the British Academy elected Keydell as a corresponding member in 1973. A commemorative publication was published in his honor on his 90th birthday, the contributions of Hartmut Erbse , Ernst Heitsch , Volkmar Schmidt , Rudolf Kassel , Winfried Bühler , Hans Gärtner , Hugh Lloyd-Jones , Martin Litchfield West , Hans-Georg Beck , Athanasios Kambylis and Werner Peek contained.

Fonts (selection)

• Quaestiones metricae de epicis Graecis recentioribus . Berlin 1911 (dissertation).
• A new lending file . In: Zentralblatt für Bibliothekswesen , vol. 49, 1932, pp. 493–497.
• Nonni Panopolitani Dionysiaca . 2 volumes, Leipzig 1959.
• Agathiae Myrinaei Historiarum libri quinque . Berlin 1967 ( Corpus fontium historiae Byzantinae, Series Berolinensis 2).
• Werner Peek (ed.): Small writings on Hellenistic and late Greek poetry (1911–1976) . Leipzig 1982.

literature

• Hans-Georg Beck, Athanasios Kambylis, Paul Moraux (eds.): Kyklos. Greek and Byzantine. Rudolf Keydell on his ninetieth birthday . Berlin / New York 1978 (with picture, list of publications and short biography).
• Bernd Schneider , Wolfhart Unte : Bibliography Rudolf Keydell . Berlin 1973.

Web links

• Literature by and about Rudolf Keydell in the catalog of the German National Library