Carl Friedrich Lehmann-Haupt: Ein Forscherleben zwischen Orient und Okzident.

• Author: Zimansky, Paul
• Position: Book review

Carl Friedrich Lehmann-Haupt: Ein Forscherleben zwischen Orient und Okzident. Edited by SEBASTIAN FINK; KLAUS EISTERER; ROBERT ROLLINGER; and DIRK RUPNOW. Classica et Orientalia, vol. 11. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ VERLAG, 2015. Pp. vi + 217, illus. [euro]48.

At the time of his death in 1938 nothing suggested that C. F. Lehmann-Haupt's scholarly reputation would generate a fascinating memorial volume decades later. In his specialty, he had given up on finishing a lavish corpus of Urartian inscriptions, his interpretations of the grammar and content of texts in that obscure language challenged at the most fundamental level by a younger generation of scholars. His favorite student and erstwhile heir apparent to his academic post at Innsbruck, Fritz Schachermaeyr, turned his back on him. Klio, the journal Lehmann-Haupt founded in 1901 and edited for decades, did not even honor him with a formal obituary, presumably because of his putative non-Aryan status in post-Anschluss Austria. Yet this book, created from a series of lectures given at the University of Innsbruck in 2013, has far more to offer than updates on the fields in which he worked. The editors are to be praised for producing a book that goes well beyond the reputation of one particular scholar to embrace a whole era of formidable German scholarship and intellectual turmoil.

Carl Friedrich Lehmann, a near contemporary of Sigmund Freud, was born in Hamburg in 1861 and died in his summer home near Innsbruck in July 1938. In 1905 he added the surname of his wife, Therese Haupt (and only coincidentally that of his erstwhile teacher in Assyriology, Paul Haupt), to his own. Initially trained for the law, Lehmann was probably drawn to ancient history and Assyriology by the dynamism of that field in the 1880s and particularly by intellectual giants such as Theodore Mommsen. He studied for a year at Johns Hopkins and completed his dissertation in Berlin, where he also habilitated and held junior academic posts.

Lehmann-Haupt's first full professorial appointment was in Liverpool, which he left after only one year to return to Germany at the outbreak of World War I. For most of the war he held a professorship in Istanbul, but shortly before the end of the hostilities took up his final post in Innsbruck. Officially retired in 1932, he remained in Austria to greet the Anschluss, apparently with enthusiasm, despite the threat it posed to him on account of his partially Jewish ancestry.

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