Rudolf Schottlaender

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Rudolf Julius Schottlaender (born August 5, 1900 in Berlin , † January 4, 1988 in East Berlin ) was a German philosopher, classical philologist, translator and political publicist.

biography

Rudolf Schottlaender was of Jewish descent and studied philosophy in Berlin, Heidelberg (with Karl Jaspers and Ernst Hoffmann ), Marburg, Freiburg im Breisgau , with Edmund Husserl , Martin Heidegger and Nicolai Hartmann . There he met Günther Stern (later known as Günther Anders, a well-known philosophical writer, son of the psychologist William Stern ) and his sister Hilde , whom he married shortly afterwards (in the first of three marriages). Despite his lively student interest in phenomenology , Schottlaender referred more to the Stoa and to Spinoza , in whose spirit he had left the Jewish community in 1921. He received his doctorate in Heidelberg in 1923 under Ernst Hoffmann with a thesis on the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle .

During the Weimar Republic , Schottlaender was a private scholar. With his transmission of the first part of “ A la recherche du temps perdu ”, which appeared in 1926 under the title “Der Weg zu Swann” by Die Schmiede , he was the first German Proust translator. However, his translation was so panned by the famous Romanist Ernst Robert Curtius that the publisher, under pressure from the French Proust publishers, let the translation be transferred to other hands. There were also voices of praise, u. a. by Alfred Kerr and Hermann Hesse , who, however, did not publicly defend themselves against Curtius' authority. Most recently hidden in Berlin, Schottlaender survived the Hitler era and the persecution of the Jews.

After 1945 he taught as a teacher of Latin and Greek in West Berlin , at the Goethe School in Lichterfelde West. In the meantime (1947–1949) he taught philosophy at the Technical University of Dresden , but as a militant democrat and humanist came into conflict with the authorities of the Soviet occupation zone . He then went back to West Berlin and worked from autumn 1949 to 1956 as a teacher at the Georg-Herwegh-Oberschule . There he was the victim of a smear campaign because of his efforts to overcome the Cold War and got into professional difficulties. In 1959 he accepted a call to the Humboldt University in East Berlin as a professor of Latin literature with a special focus on Greek (as a non-Marxist he was unable to teach philosophy there because of his experience in Dresden). After the Berlin Wall was built in August 1961, he and his family had to move from West to East Berlin in order to continue doing this work. In 1965 he retired.

In addition to numerous philological and philosophical writings, Schottlaender published brilliant translations ( Sophocles new translation that was very effective on the stage , publication of a Petrarch edition, etc.) and thorough debates on questions of Judaism and anti-Semitism . In his political essays and articles, which he published mainly in the West, he saw himself as a mediator between the systems. Because of his positions critical of the GDR, he was closely observed by the State Security . He inspired leading figures in the emerging GDR opposition .

Schottlaender's son Rainer (born September 16, 1949), together with fellow student Michael Müller, initiated several leaflet campaigns in 1969 and 1970 that called for a boycott of the so-called social science lecture at Humboldt University . This led to one of the largest manhunt campaigns by the Stasi (code name incitator). He was arrested after trying to escape, later ransomed by the FRG and is now an entertainer and private scholar.

Publications (selection)

  • Depths and narrows of the empirical in the theory of goods. The knowledge of value characters, fundamentally discussed and thoroughly analyzed in terms of “calm” and “freedom” (= treatises of the humanities and social science class of the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz. Born in 1955, No. 8).

Literary works

  • Despite everything a German , autobiography, Herder-Verlag 1986
  • Persecuted Berlin Science , Edition Hentrich, Berlin 1988
  • Being German five times different. Memories of an Unadjusted , ed. v. Irene Selle, Moritz Reininghaus, Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg , Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-945256-39-8 .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Date of birth according to Götz Aly Isolated from the main forces of the people - for the 100th birthday of the philosopher Rudolph Schottlaender , Berliner Zeitung, August 5, 2000 and website on Schottlaender and Proust , the Neue Deutsche Biographie (Karin Hartewig) gives April 1st as the date of death .
  2. ↑ Website on the dispute over the Proust translation . Schottlaender also cites a letter from Thomas Mann , who expressed his praise. According to Schottlaender, the text of the translation was only intended as a rough version.
  3. ^ Rudolf Schottlaender, In spite of all this, a German. My path in life since the beginning of the century. Herder, Freiburg, 1986. p. 62
  4. ↑ RBB / Arte documentation: Alone against the Stasi or The most expensive leaflet in the world. 2008
personal data
SURNAME Schottlaender, Rudolf
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schottlaender, Rudolf Julius (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German philosopher, philologist and translator
DATE OF BIRTH 5th August 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH April 1, 1988
Place of death East Berlin