Helmut de Boor

Helmut de Boor (born 24 March 1891 in Bonn, died 4 August 1976 in Berlin) was a German medievalist.

Life and career Helmut de Boor was the third child of the Byzantine studies scholar Carl Gotthard de Boor. He was educated in Breslau and attended the Universities of Freiburg, Marburg and Leipzig. He earned his doctorate from Leipzig in 1914 and following service in World War I, his Habilitation from the University of Breslau in 1919,

While working on his Habilitation, he was a tutor in Old Norse at Breslau. He then held academic positions in German Studies at the University of Gothenburg (1919–22), Old Norse at the University of Greifswald (1924–26), and Old Norse at Leipzig (1926–30). From 1930 to 1945, he was professor of German Language and Literature at the University of Bern. He revised Karl Bartsch's standard edition of the Nibelungenlied and co-wrote a widely used grammar of Middle High German, but throughout his career occupied himself with the philology of Old Norse as well as of German. After leaving Switzerland he began work on a complete history of German literature, originally intended as a short handbook for student use; it became a multi-volume work of which he wrote only the first three volumes, dealing with the early Middle Ages and Middle High German poetry.

Under the Nazis De Boor became a member of the Nazi Party in 1937. He regarded Nazism as a natural reaction of the younger generation in Germany which had been most heavily affected by the aftermath of World War I. He was collegial with Jewish faculty at Bern and initially his closest friend there was Fritz Strich, a Jewish scholar, who however cut off contact with him in 1934 on suspicion that de Boor had told his daughter to boycott Strich's lectures on anti-semitic grounds. A file containing his reports on the politics of his university colleagues was found in the furnace room at the embassy in 1945. In December 1945, effective early the following year, he was expelled from Switzerland despite protests from students, colleagues, and acquaintances.

Personal life In 1920 de Boor married Ellen von Unwerth, widowed daughter of Theodor Siebs.

Selected publications Die färöischen Lieder des Nibelungenzyklus. (dissertation, 1914, published 1918) Die färöischen Dvörgamoylieder. (Habilitationsschrift, 1919) Schwedische Literatur. Breslau 1924. "Die religiöse Sprache der Vǫluspá und verwandter Denkmäler". (1930) Das Attilabild in Geschichte, Legende und heroischer Dichtung. Bern 1932. "Zum Althochdeutschen Wortschatz auf dem Gebiet der Weissagung". (1944) "Die nordischen, englischen und deutschen Darstellungen des Afpelschussmotivs". (1947) (with Roswitha Wisniewski) Mittelhochdeutsche Grammatik. Berlin 1956. Geschichte der deutschen Literatur von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart. Volumes 1–3. Munich 1949–1962. (Ed.) Das Nibelungenlied. Ed. Karl Bartsch. 10th and 11th revised editions, 1940, 1949.