Niedner, Felix
Felix Niedner was a German philologist and literary historian who was born on April 14, 1859 in Halle/Saale and died in Eberswalde in 1934. After completing his doctorate in 1882, he worked as a high school teacher in Berlin from 1883 to 1907 and was awarded the title of professor in 1902. He also worked regularly as a translator and wrote popular works in the field of Old Norse studies.
His major works are Das deutsche Turnier im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert (1881), Zur Lieder-Edda (1896), Carl Michael Bellman, der schwedische Anakreon (1905) (which was followed by a brilliant translation of Bellman's Fredmans epistlar in 1909), Die Geschichte vom Skalden Egil (1911) and Islands Kultur zur Wikingerzeit (1913). Between 1911 and 1930 he edited the first 24 volumes of the famous collection Thule - Altnordische Dichtung und Prosa, published by Eugen Diederichs in Jena.
Trillmich, Werner
Werner Trillmich was a German historian who was born in Görlitz in 1914 and died in 1985. He achieved particular recognition for his new translation of Thietmar von Merseburg from Latin.
Trillmich studied in Leipzig, Freiburg and Breslau, where he wrote his doctoral thesis in 1938. After returning from internment as a prisoner of war, he first worked in Hamburg and, from 1952 onwards, as an editor for the "Westermann Großer Atlas zur Weltgeschichte".
In 1954 he began working as a university lecturer and in 1970 he was appointed Professor of History and Didactics at the Pedagogical University in Alfeld.
Sudermann, Hermann
Hermann Sudermann was born on 30 September 1857 on the Matzicken estate in the district of Heydekrug (today Šilutė, Lithuania), East Prussia’s northern-most district. His father was a brewer and worked hard all his life to feed his family. His children grew up in poverty. Although Hermann managed to complete his secondary schooling, he was ultimately forced to abandon his studies in Berlin. His initial attempts to establish himself as a writer brought little success but he was able to find work as a journalist and from 1881 to 1882 was co-editor of the Deutsches Reichsblatt. His breakthrough as a writer came in 1889 with the enormous success of his socially critical play Die Ehre (Honor). Over the following decades, Sudermann numbered among the Germany’s most often performed playwrights and was often a target of critics. He wrote a total of some 30 plays, including Sodoms Ende (1890), Heimat (1893) and Johannes (1898). His prose works, particularly the novels Frau Sorge (Dame Care, 1887) and Katzensteg (Cats’ Bridge, 1890) also found a large readership, enabling Sudermann to live as a freelance writer, marry and in 1902 to purchase the Blankensee estate near Berlin as well as a villa in Berlin’s exclusive Grunewald district. He played a prominent role in writers’ associations and, following the outbreak of war in 1914, he was one of the initiators and signatories of the Aufruf an die Kulturwelt (Appeal to the Cultural World / Fulda Manifesto).
Sudermann’s time came to an end with the decline of imperial Germany. In this respect, it is significant that his Litauische Geschichten (Lithuanian Stories) of 1917 marks a withdrawal from the present into a semi-mythic space of asynchronicity. His work attracted little interest in post-war society, although he achieved some success in 1922 with his notably autobiographical work Das Bilderbuch meiner Jugend (Picture Book of my Youth). He died in Berlin on 21 November 1928.
Lepner, Theodor
Volke, Lutz
Lutz Volke was born on 15 February, 1940 in Magdeburg and now lives in Berlin. He studied German and Nordic literature at the University of Greifswald and after completing his studies he worked as a literature editor with the radio broadcaster Berliner Rundfunk. In 1972 he joined the broadcaster Rundfunk der DDR, where he worked as a radio-play dramaturg. He subsequently completed his doctorate at the University of Rostock in 1983 and, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, he worked for Sender Freies Berlin (later: Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg) from 1992 until 2005. He has contributed work to literary-history publications, newspapers, journals and radio and also worked as a reviewer and editor for belletristic publishers. Since 1976 he has also translated a number of Nordic-language works into German, work that won him the translation prize awarded by the Berlin publisher Volk & Welt. He is known particularly for his translations of Klaus Rifbjerg’s novels, stories, poetry and radio plays.
Arndt, Ernst Moritz
Ernst Moritz Arndt was born on 26 December, 1769 on the island of Rügen, which at the time was under Swedish rule. Not long before his son’s birth, Arndt’s father had bought his freedom from serfdom and subsequently achieved prosperity as a large-scale leaseholder and landowner. This prosperity meant that Arndt, after studying theology in Greifswald and Jena, was able to take a one-and-a-half year educational journey through Europe, which he also wrote about (Reisen durch einen Teil Deutschlands, Ungarns, Italiens und Frankreichs in den Jahren 1798 und 1799 - Journeys through a part of Germany, Hungary, Italy and France in 1798 and 1799, published 1804).
After completing his doctorate in Greifswald he became a Privatdozent (associate lecturer) for modern history there and a professor in 1806. His Versuch einer Geschichte der Leibeigenschaft in Pommern und Rügen (A History of Serfdom in Pomerania and Rügen, 1803) provides a critical analysis of the East Elbian feudal system. When Napoleon occupied the region following his victory over Prussia in 1806, Arndt fled to Sweden (1806-1809). His account of this period, Geist der Zeit (Spirit of the Time), was published in Stockholm in two parts, the first in 1806, the second in 1808. In 1812 Arndt responded to the call of the initiator of the Prussian reforms (1807), Karl Freiherr vom Stein, and went to St. Petersburg, where Stein was organizing resistance to Napoleon, who had failed in his attempt to conquer Russia. Accompanied by Russian troops, Stein and his “scribe”, secretary and press officer Arndt went to Königsberg, where they witnessed the beginning of the German Campaign with the deployment of a local militia by the regional parliament. It was the occupation, devastation and plundering of Europe by Napoleon that first radicalized German intellectuals like Arndt and transformed them from adherents of the Enlightenment into nationalists with chauvinistic tendencies. From the beginning of 1813 up until the Battle of Leipzig in October, Arndt published extensively and became widely known through his pamphlets, songs and poems (Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland – What is the German Fatherland). However, the partisan of German freedom soon collided with the leaders of the German restoration: when the fourth part of Geist der Zeit was published in 1818, Arndt was suspended from his new professorship at the newly founded University of Bonn and was not reinstated until 1840. At the age of 80, he made his last appearance on the political stage as a member of the National Assembly in Frankfurt am Main from 1848-49. Arndt died in Bonn on 29 January, 1860.
During the nineteenth century, Arndt’s posthumous fame centered above all on his role as a German patriot and nationalist. However, he was later condemned as a “forerunner of the Third Reich” and as a result was shamefully ignored and all but forgotten after 1945. There is no modern edition of his works. It is only now that a gradual attempt is being made to rediscover the whole Arndt, his deeply emotional commitment to liberty and his early adherence to the values of the Enlightenment, the period from which the text here originates.
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