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Document Details :

Title: The Dismissal of Albrecht Goetze (1897-1971) from Marburg University in November 1933 as 'Politically Unreliable' and the Years in Exile until 1946
Author(s): RAUWLING, Peter
Journal: Bibliotheca Orientalis
Volume: 75    Issue: 3-4   Date: 2018   
Pages: 247-272
DOI: 10.2143/BIOR.75.3.3285886

Abstract :
Like many scholars in the 1930s in Germany Albrecht Goetze, one of the founding fathers of Hittitology and Professor for Semitic Languages and Comparative Linguistics in Marburg, became the victim of the ‘Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service’ from 7 April 1933. For his unyielding support of the mathematician and pacifist Emil Gumbel, Goetze was stigmatized as 'politisch unzuverlässig' (politically unreliable) and removed from his chair in November 1933. After several months in Scandinavia, Goetze was invited by the eminent linguist Edgar Sturtevant to teach at Yale. The book under review describes Goetze’s dismissal from Marburg in the context of its political radicalization in the 1920s and 1930s before and after Hitler’s Machtergreifung (seizure of power) on 30 January 1933 and Goetze’s first years in exile. Its main focus lays on the time-span leading to Goetze’s dismissal, analyzing the archival material in the Marburg university library and the Goetze Papers at Yale. Two letters in the Leiden University Library, to and from Franz Böhl regarding Goetze’s expulsion from university are published in this review article for the first time.

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