Hanns Oertel: Kleine Schriften, 2 vols.

• Author: Klein, Jared S.

Despite their title, the volumes under consideration contain, with three exceptions only, the major Indological publications of an important scholar whose academic career was nothing short of bizarre. Born in 1868 in Germany, Oertel spent nearly twenty-eight years, including those of his scholarly formation (1886-1914) in America, then returned to Europe for the last 38 years of his life. His years in the United States were centered about Yale University where, as a student of William Dwight Whitney, among others, he received philological training in Sanskrit and classical languages, culminating in 1890 in a dissertation, written in Latin, on traces of colloquial speech in the Satires of Horace. He worked his way up the academic ladder at Yale, beginning with an instructorship in German in 1891 and culminating in his promotion to Professor of Linguistics and Comparative Philology in 1900, a title he retained (with a five-year stint as Dean of the Yale Graduate School, 1911-16) until his resignation, tendered while on leave in Germany and occasioned by factors relating to World War I, in 1917. But his peregrinations did not end there, as he went first to Basel, as Privatdozent, then briefly to Marburg as Geldner's successor, and finally in 1925 to Munich as successor to Geiger, a chair which he held until his retirement in 1935.

Something of the sweep of Oertel's life (which was coextensive with that of the composer Richard Strauss, four years his senior) and scholarly career may be appreciated when one considers that in his early articles he often cited his then-living teacher and colleague Whitney, and in his later studies he was citing Renou, Thieme, and Minard, the latter two of whom are still alive today. When this reviewer was in kindergarten, Oertel, in the last year of his life, was still editor of KZ.

But undoubtedly the most peculiar feature of Oertel's career was that the bulk of his scholarly production appeared in print when he was at or beyond the age of 60. Thus, of the more than 1600 pages of writings printed in these volumes, 1302 appeared in or following 1928. Oertel's genre of choice was the monograph. Ten of these, all included here, appeared in the Sitzungsberichte der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften between 1934 and 1943. These take up nearly one-thousand pages in the collection. The only major Indological works of Oertel not included are his edition and annotated translation of the Jaiminiya Upanisad Brahmana...