Walter Henzen

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Walter Henzen (born November 5, 1895 in Brig ; † August 31, 1967 in Bern ; entitled to live in Blatten (Lötschen) ) was a Swiss German studies scholar who was particularly well known for his linguistic publications.

Life

Henzen, born in Valais , grew up as the son of a doctor in Alterswil and Tafers in Freiburg . He passed the Matura examination at the Kollegium St. Michael in Freiburg im Üechtland and then studied German in Zurich , where he received his doctorate in 1920 under Albert Bachmann with a thesis on the south-west Swiss German dialect of the Freiburg Sense - and south-east lake district ( Senslerdeutsch ) (publication 1927) . His habilitation thesis on night vowels in Valais German was published in 1929.

From 1920 to 1945 Henzen worked as a high school teacher in Freiburg and in 1933 became a private lecturer at the University of Freiburg (Switzerland) . Henzen turned down the call to the University of Zurich , which his doctoral supervisor Bachmann, at that time one of the most important dialectologists, had arranged on the occasion of his own retirement in 1934, because he was afraid he would not follow in his teacher's footsteps and, in addition to his university work, also the editor-in-chief of the Swiss Idiotikon in Bachmann's sense, and left the chair to Wilhelm Wiget (from 1944 to 1966, however, Henzen was a member of the executive committee or the board of the association for the Swiss German dictionary). Henzen also turned down the appointment to the University of Freiburg im Breisgau , this time arguing that he had not devoted himself to literary research until now . In 1945 the University of Friborg (Switzerland) appointed him associate professor, but in the same year the University of Bern assigned him the professorship for language, literature and folklore of German-speaking Switzerland, which had been orphaned as a result of Heinrich Baumgartner's death, initially as an associate professor. In 1946, Henzen left this to his colleague Paul Zinsli and became professor of Germanic philology at the same university. He held this office until his retirement in 1965.

In 1940, together with Gottfried Bohnenblust , Rudolf Hotzenköcherle and Heinrich Baumgartner , Henzen founded the "Academic Society of Swiss Germanists" (today the "Swiss Academic Society for German Studies"). In 1947, on the initiative of his colleague Friedrich Ranke from Basel, who came from Lübeck, he supplied German university libraries devastated during World War II with books and writing paper from Switzerland.

After he had resigned from his ordinariate a little early for health reasons, Henzen died of a heart attack in 1967. In the obituaries he is described as a reserved, very self-critical and exceptionally polite person.

Create

Henzen's dissertation on Senslerdeutsche, the dialect of the landscape in which he grew up, went far beyond most of the previous volumes in the " Contributions to Swiss German Grammar " series - and not just in terms of volume, although it was shortened for publication for financial reasons But also because the author not only followed the development of the individual sounds in the young grammatical sense, but also investigated the influences of the neighboring idioms of Franco-Provencal or French and especially Bern-German, as well as the dialectal language change of the present. He was able to characterize the language of the Sense district as the pronounced mixed dialect of a traffic-open language border landscape.

In his habilitation thesis on the weakening of the night onvowels in Höchst Alemannic (1929), Henzen described on the one hand the conditions in the older dialect of the Valais Lötschental and on the other hand addressed the current language change. Two further essays that were important for German dialect research were written during his time in Freiburg , both of which were also devoted to the language of his father's homeland: one article dealt with the various uses of the genitive in Valais German (1932), the other with the survival of the three Old High German weak conjugation classes on -en, -ōn and -ēn in the Lötschental (1941) - both expressions of the high antiquity of these alpine dialects, the leveling of which Henzen also addressed.

After his previous work, in which Henzen had interpreted the highly and highly Alemannic dialects historically and geographically, he now turned to the German-speaking area and wrote the two monographs that have finally established his fame as a linguist: His work on the historical and current relationship between written language and dialects in Germany, Austria and Switzerland (1938, 2nd edition 1954) and especially his standard work on German word formation, which is still indispensable today (1947, 3rd edition 1965).

During his time in Bern, when Henzen was also responsible for the older literature, there were two - less well-known - studies on the ninth book by Wolframs von Eschenbach Parzival (1951) and Chrétiens de Troye's concept of humility (1958). In addition, he explored semantic and philosophical questions. His last, only posthumously published work dealt with the designation of the directional contrast in German (1967). Two other works that he had started - one of them on Swiss poetry from Notker the poet to Niklaus von Flüe  - could no longer be completed because of his untimely death.

On the occasion of his 70th birthday, Henzen was honored for his work with a Festschrift ( Philologia Deutsch, Bern 1965) published by Werner Kohlschmidt and Paul Zinsli .

Selected publications

Monographs

  • The German dialect of Freiburg in the Sense and south-eastern lake districts. Frauenfeld 1927 (=  contributions to Swiss German grammar. Volume XVI).
  • Written language and dialects. An overview of their relationship and their intermediate levels in German. Zurich / Leipzig 1938, 2nd edition 1954.
  • German word formation. Halle on the Saale in 1947; 3rd edition Tübingen 1965 (=  collection of short grammars of Germanic dialects B; supplementary series. Volume 5).
  • The designation of direction and opposite direction in German. Studies on the extent and use of word formation groups combined with adverbs of the direction. Tübingen 1967 (=  Hermaea. German Research. New Series, Volume 23). [With bibliography Walter Henzen.]

Essays

  • To attenuate the night vowels in High Alemannic. In: Teuthonista 5 (1929) 105-156.
  • The genitive in today's Wallis. In: Contributions to the history of the German language and literature 56 (1931) 91–138.
  • The old weak conjugation classes survive in the Lötschental. In: Contributions to the history of the German language and literature 64 (1940) 271–308.
  • ‹Swiss Interruption.› In: Sprachleben der Schweiz [= Festschrift for Rudolf Hotzenköcherle], ed. by Paul Zinsli and others, Bern 1963, pp. 141–155.

literature

Web links

proof

  1. ↑ Swiss German Dictionary. Swiss Idioticon. Report on 1967 (PDF) p. 1.
personal data
SURNAME Henzen, Walter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss Germanist
DATE OF BIRTH November 5, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Brig
DATE OF DEATH August 31, 1967
Place of death Bern