Woldemar Graf Uxkull-Gyllenband

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Moritz August Woldemar Graf Uxkull-Gyllenband (born April 17, 1898 in Bogliasco ; † May 24, 1939 in Reutlingen ) was a German ancient historian .

life and work

Woldemar Graf Uxkull-Gyllenband was the son of Count Woldemar von Uxkull senior and the writer Lucy Ahrenfeldt . The Uxkull family came from the Baltic nobility. Already at the age of nine, in autumn 1906, Woldemar and his brother Bernhard were "discovered" by Uxkull-Gyllenband on the street by Ernst Morwitz , who was in close contact with the well-known poet Stefan George and was looking for pupils for the George Circle was. The brothers grew up in the Bavarian Quarter in Berlin , where Morwitz taught them privately. Nevertheless, their academic performance fell short of expectations, so that from 1912 they attended the grammar school of the Ilfeld monastery school in the Harz region . According to letters to his brother, he was expelled from school in 1915 after a “serious violation” of the school rules. From 1916 onwards, Woldemar von Uxkull took private courses to prepare for his Abitur; now he was in regular contact with Stefan George himself. In 1917 he passed his Abitur at the Fichtegymnasium in Berlin.

From July 1917 to January 1919, Uxkull was a soldier in an elite unit of the Prussian army (Garde-Schützen-Bataillon Berlin-Lichterfelde), initially as a recruit, and from February 1918 onwards in the front line in Macedonia. After the end of the war, he began studying Classical Studies and Ancient History, first at the University of Munich , then in Berlin and finally in Heidelberg . After having had contact with Stefan George several times before and during the war, Uxkull was introduced to the George Circle at Whitsun 1919 at a meeting in Heidelberg together with Percy Gothein and Erich Boehringer , whom he already knew from their studies . Through the circle he also came into contact in 1919/1920 with Ernst Kantorowicz , who became a close friend and lover - Kantorowicz described him as a “table companion and bed game” - and dedicated his extremely successful book Kaiser Friedrich the Second to him. Both lived for a while in the same house in Heidelberg.

As a student of Alfred von Domaszewski , he received his doctorate in Heidelberg in 1922 on the sources of Plutarch's Kimon biography ( magna cum laude ). 1923/24 Uxkull-Gyllenband stayed in England, where he did research in the British Library in London and attended lectures in Oxford. In 1925 he completed his habilitation in ancient history with Wilhelm Weber in Halle with an investigation into Plutarch and the Greek biography , an extension of his dissertation. After a few professorships, he accepted the chair for Ancient History at the University of Tübingen in 1932 . In 1934 he turned down a call to Kiel . Uxkull died in 1939 as a result of a traffic accident. He is buried in the Tübingen city cemetery.

He was a cousin of Alexander , Berthold and Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg , who had also belonged to the George Circle since the 1920s. Above all Alexander, also an ancient historian, was close to him. In Tübingen, Gyllenband was also close friends with Carlo Schmid . After the takeover of the Nazis on 30 January 1933 Uxkull-Gyllenband fell rapidly under the influence of Nazi ideology . In a speech about George's revolutionary ethos to the Tübingen student body on the occasion of George's 65th birthday in July 1933, he interpreted National Socialism as a fulfillment of Stefan George's visions. As a result, many of his old friends turned away from him. Especially Kantorowicz, who had already been discriminated against as a Jew, and to whom he sent a dedication copy, was appalled. Kantorowicz provided his copy of the script, which he felt as an insult to Secret Germany , with withering marginal remarks: "Totally irresponsible" - "pathetically banal" - "insulting in every degree of exaggeration and poorness". In the same year Uxkull gave the lecture Von Sparta's Downfall as part of Wolfgang Frommel's midnight broadcasts in the Reichssender Berlin , in which he clearly positioned himself against totalitarian Sparta and for the more democratic Athens . This lecture can perhaps be read as an indirect statement against the National Socialist ideology.

Uxkull-Gyllenband's scientific focus was primarily on classical Greece and the papyri as a source for the administrative and legal history of the Roman Empire. His studies on Plutarch's biographies did not find a positive response in the professional world, especially since Felix Jacoby criticized them in a 1929 review as a “strange simplification”. Much more influential was his often praised commentary on the Gnomon of the Idios Logos, which is still considered a standard work today. In contrast to other members of the George Circle (e.g. Ernst Kantorowicz), he mostly held back in his scientific publications with evaluations and heroizations in the sense of the Georgian ideology. An important student of Uxkull-Gyllenband was Karl Friedrich Stroheker .

Fonts

  • Greek teachings of the origins of culture (= Library for Philosophy. Vol. 26, ZDB -ID 956367-2 ). Simion, Berlin 1924.
  • Plutarch and the Greek biography. Studies on Plutarchic biographies of the fifth century. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1927 (at the same time: Halle, university, habilitation paper).
  • The ideal of education and science in antiquity (= public lectures by the University of Tübingen. Its history, task and significance in the present. The university. Vol. 1, 1932/33, ZDB -ID 28131-1 ). Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1933.
  • The revolutionary ethos at Stefan George. (Lecture given on the 65th birthday of the poet in front of the student body at the University of Tübingen). Mohr, Tübingen 1933.
  • The gnomon of the idios logos. Volume 2: Commentary (= Egyptian documents from the State Museums in Berlin. Greek documents. Vol. 5, ZDB -ID 802641-5 ). Weidmann, Berlin 1934.

literature

Web links

Wikisource: Woldemar Graf Uxkull-Gyllenband  - Sources and full texts

Remarks

  1. ↑ See Ernst Morwitz : Commentary on the work by Stefan Georges. 2nd Edition. Küpper formerly Bondi, Düsseldorf / Munich 1969, p. 416. The point in time at the end of 1907 with Kay Ehling : Uxkull-Gyllenband, Woldemar Graf von. In: Peter Kuhlmann , Helmuth Schneider (Hrsg.): History of the ancient sciences. Stuttgart 2012, column 1243.
  2. ^ So Grünewald: Uxkull-Gyllenband, Woldemar. 2012, p. 1723.
  3. ↑ On Uxkull's upbringing and introduction to George cf. Thomas Karlauf : Stefan George. The discovery of the charism. Blessing, Munich 2007, p. 378f.
  4. ↑ Quoted here from Grünewald: Uxkull-Gyllenband, Woldemar. 2012, p. 1726.
  5. ↑ On the Heidelberg meeting cf. about Karlauf: Stefan George . 2007, pp. 485-490, on Uxkull especially pp. 485f .; on Kantorowicz p. 548.
  6. ^ Woldemar Graf Uxkull-Gyllenband: The revolutionary ethos in Stefan George. Mohr, Tübingen 1933. Karlauf: Stefan George . 2007, p. 625f .; Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller : Man for man. Biographical lexicon on the history of love for friends and male sexuality in the German-speaking area. MännerschwarmSkript-Verlag, Hamburg 1998, ISBN 3-928983-65-2 , p. 698.
  7. ↑ Eckhart Grünewald: "Practice murder and richer blooms what blooms!" Ernst Kantorowicz speaks on November 14, 1933 about "Secret Germany". In: Robert L. Benson , Johannes Fried (eds.), Ernst Kantorowicz. Income from the double session. Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt (= Frankfurt historical treatises. Vol. 39). Steiner, Stuttgart 1997, ISBN 3-515-06959-3 , pp. 57-76, here p. 63 with the quotations.
  8. ↑ On this Michael Petrow: The poet as leader? About Stefan George's effect in the “Third Reich”. Tectum-Verlag, Marburg 1995, ISBN 3-929019-69-8 , p. 122f .; Grünewald: Uxkull-Gyllenband, Woldemar. 2012, p. 1725.
  9. ^ Review by Felix Jacoby : Woldemar Graf Uxkull-Gyllenband, Plutarch and the Greek biography. Studies on Plutarchic biographies of the fifth century. Stuttgart, W. Kohlhammer, 1927. 113 pp. 7.20 M. In: Historische Zeitschrift . Vol. 139, H. 1, 1929, pp. 186-187 (review).
  10. ↑ A positive review by Friedrich Oertel : Der Gnomon des Idios Logos. Second part: The commentary by Count Woldemar Uxkull-Gyllenband. In: Historical magazine. Vol. 152, H. 2, 1935, pp. 325-328; Wolfgang Schuller: Classical scholar in the George circle. 2005, p. 212.
  11. ↑ See Wolfgang Schuller: Classical Scientists in the George Circle. 2005, p. 212.
personal data
SURNAME Uxkull-Gyllenband, Woldemar Graf
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Uxkull, Woldemar von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German ancient historian
DATE OF BIRTH April 17, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Bogliasco
DATE OF DEATH May 24, 1939
Place of death Tübingen