Wolfgang Lange (philologist)

Wolfgang Friedrich-Karl Lange (born June 29, 1915 in Friedrichsort ; † July 29, 1984 in Göttingen ) was a German German and Scandinavian Medievalist . He was a professor for Scandinavian studies at the Georg-August University in Göttingen .

Lange passed his A-levels at the Humanistic Gymnasium in Wilhelmshaven in 1934 and served in the labor service and the Wehrmacht . From the winter semester of 1935/36 he studied German, history, philosophy, anthropology, music and art studies in Kiel . His decisive academic teacher for his later career was Otto Höfler, who drew Lange's interest in the field of Germanic and especially Nordic antiquity. When Höfler moved to the LMU in Munich in 1938, he followed his teacher and did his doctorate there under Höfler in 1939 ( rigorosum during a leave from the front), or in 1946 with an old Germanist work “The dragon fight. Myth and Drama in Germanic Tradition ” .

The war and long military service as an officer, his imprisonment in 1945 and subsequent hard labor in Polish mines until 1949, interrupted his academic career and caused irreparable health problems.

On the recommendation of Wolfgang Krause , Lange became assistant to Ulrich Pretzel at the German seminar in Hamburg in 1950 . There, Hans Kuhn (Nordistik Kiel), who was responsible for the Scandinavian studies in Hamburg, had an influence and inspiration on Lange. The habilitation took place in 1955 on the advice of Wolfgang Krause and Eduard Neumann with a Nordic thesis "Studies on Christian Poetry of the North Germans 1000-1200" (printed in 1956), which is considered the standard work on Christian Skaldic poetry. The venia was for "Germanic philology with special consideration of Scandinavian philology". In 1956 he became a dietitian in Göttingen and an associate professor in 1959, after he had turned down a call to Munich for Höfler's chair, for "Germanic and Nordic philology" and director of the seminar for German philology. In 1962 he became a personal professor, in 1963 a full professor. After Wolfgang Krause retired in 1964, he became his successor as director of the Scandinavian seminar.

In terms of self-understanding, Lange naturally taught the entire Germanic antiquity, especially the Old Germanic and Old Norse languages ​​and poetry - therefore he taught German and Scandinavian philology in Göttingen. Logically, in the 1960s he was entrusted by the Winter University Press to revise Rudolf Much's standard work on Germania des Tacitus , to expand it considerably and to publish it as the third edition from 1967 in collaboration with Herbert Jankuhn and Hans Fromm (with the support of Lange's assistant Klaus Düwel ). At the same time, Lange was interested in modern Scandinavian literature and here in the work of Knut Hamsun, to whom he felt connected and who had already given trial lectures on Hamsun's work in 1955. Due to the war ailments, which became much more stressful as he got older, he was prematurely retired in 1977; Living withdrawn, Lange was still connected to the subject, among other things through his editing of the specialist journal Scandinavistik until his death.

literature

• Klaus Düwel: Wolfgang Lange. In: Christoph König (Ed.), With the assistance of Birgit Wägenbaur u. a .: Internationales Germanistenlexikon 1800–1950 . Volume 2: H-Q. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2003, ISBN 3-11-015485-4 , pp. 1053-1054 ( fee required from de Gruyter Online).
• Fritz Paul : Wolfgang Lange (1915–1984) in memoriam. In: Scandinavistik 15, 2 (1985), pp. 157-160.

Web links

• Publications by Wolfgang Lange in the OPAC of the Regesta imperii
• Fritz Paul: On the history of Scandinavian studies at the Georg August University in Göttingen. A preliminary sketch (1985).
• Academic legacy of Wolfgang Lange (University of Göttingen)