Julius Petersen

Julius Petersen (5 November 1878 - 22 August 1941) was a German literary scholar and university professor, principally at the Friedrich Wilhelm University (as it was known before 1949) in Berlin. He did much to rediscover the works of Theodor Fontane for twentieth century readers. Petersen himself has been described as one of the most influential academics in the field of German studies during the interwar period, but after 1945 he disappeared from university reading lists. During the 1960s interest in his life and works resurfaced, though it has frequently been on account of evident contradictions in his attitude to National Socialism during the final decade of his own life that he has attracted the interest of more recent commentators.

Life Provenance and early years Julius Petersen was born in Strasbourg, which at that time was the main city in a recently annexed and still semi-detached province of Germany. His father, another Julius Petersen (1835-1909), was a senior lawyer and judge from Landau (Pfalz) who, in addition, served between October 1881 and April 1883 as a member of the German Reichstag (parliament). The younger Julius Petersen attended secondary school at the "Nikolaischule", far away to the east in Leipzig, to where the family had evidently relocated in connection with his father's judicial appointment to the I. Strafsenat" (loosely, "first criminal bench") at the German High Court. though there are indications that almost at once he switched from Munich to Leipzig and was classified by the Munich fraternity as an inactive member, with only very restricted involvement in corps activities. Among Petersen's more illustrious university teachers were Albert Köster at Leipzig University, followed by Wilhelm Dilthey, Heinrich Wölfflin and Erich Schmidt at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin. It was Schmidt who supervised him at Berlin for his doctorate, which he received in 1903 in return for a piece of work concerning "Schiller and the stage". That was followed by three years spent working in Stuttgart with the Cotta’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung publishing house. During 1906/07 he edited the academic supplement of the respected Allgemeine Zeitung (newspaper) which was, by this time, being produced in Munich.

For the next two years, Petersen worked as a "Privatdozent" (tutor). In 1911 he accepted an associate professorship which came with a lectureship in Modern German Philology and Theatre Studies at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin. In 1912, he switched, moving to Yale University at New Haven, Connecticut where, during 1912/13, he taught as a visiting professor. In North America he was also able to deepen his friendship with Kuno Francke at nearby Harvard University, a long established professor of German Culture and History, who is reported greatly to have respected Petersen's academic abilities. His next move, during the second half of 1912 or in 1913, was to the University of Basel.

Frankfurt He transferred again in 1914, this time to the newly opening "Goethe University" at Frankfurt am Main, as an ordinary [i.e. full and permanent] Professor of Modern German Language and Literature. Both university archives and Petersen's own surviving papers are frustratingly short of information on his time at Frankfurt, much of which coincided with the First World War. He seems to have started teaching at the university during 1914, but university records indicate that he was "officially employed" by the university only between 1915 and 1921. Sources are not wholly consistent over timelines. After (probably) three terms of teaching he was called away for military service. There is no indication that he was ever sent to the front line, but in 1915 he was informed that he would be undertaking "garrison duties" for a year. The university managed to have his deployment deferred. It appears that arrangements were implemented, at least initially, for him to undertake his garrison duties with a regiment stationed close to the university, indicating that efforts were made to enable him to undertake his two sets of responsibilities in parallel. As late as February 1916 his personnel file includes a letter from the dean of faculty to the military authorities stressing Petersen's indispensability: "Contrary to our expectations, the number of German Studies students is so large that - as in the case of Classical Philology - that for both disciplines we should be able to provide lectures and student work programmes to the fullest extent possible". Nevertheless, military obligations evidently took Petersen away from the university at least for the winter term of 1916/17. It appears that in his absence his courses were not taught. During 1917 and most of 1918 he was again away, undertaking war duties in his military role as a "junior officer".

During his professorship at Berlin of more than twenty years' duration, Julius Petersen undertook several major overseas lecture tours, at least some of which were undertaken in his capacity as president, between 1926 and 1938, of the Goethe Society. These included visits to Portugal in 1927, the United States and Mexico in 1933, and to England and Estonia in 1935. ("The Yearning for the Third Reich in German sagas and ballads"). The article includes the observation that "belief in the God-given mission of a benevolent saviour and leader becomes a religious certainty". Discussion of whether or not Petersen was a "true believer" can quickly become binary. It seems likely that he became a member of the government backed "Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Dozentenbund" (loosely, "National Socialist Lecturers League") if only in order to retain his job at the university, but there is no indication that he ever joined the party itself. There are plenty of other statements that he came up with that would have made it very easy for the Hitlerites to believe that he was one of their own. On 27 August 1935 Petersen delivered his presidential address to the Goethe Society on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary. He took the opportunity to stress his assessment that Goethe's sense of patriotism corresponded not to quiet contemplation but to "active self-determination to stay true to oneself, self-assertion and the constant striving for self-improvement", and thereby to the "ideology of the Third Reich". During an overseas trip he went on record with the statement that Goethe would have cheered Germany's brown shirted men of power just as he had cheered the Lützow volunteers who fought against the Napoleonic military occupation in 1813/14. By 1945 Petersen was dead, and there was plenty of printed evidence of his stated opinions to ensure that no one came forward at that time to defend his political judgements. When Petersen died in 1941 it was Alewyn, by this time resident in America, who published an obituary in "German Quarterly", a periodical publication produced by the "American Association of Teachers of German", in which he defended his former tutor's integrity and paid tribute to his helpfulness.

Recognition in 1922 Petersen was accepted as an ordinary (full) member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. In 1927 he became, in addition, a corresponding member of its Bavarian equivalent. Despite his efforts to ingratiate himself with the new rulers after 1933, it is not entirely clear that he was able to sustain his links with these prestigious institutions during the Hitler years, however. After 1945, the expression "Berlin school" was used for the philological approach associated with Petersen and his students.