JOHANN HEINRICH

JOSEPH

See also:

• JOHANN HEINRICH JOSEPH DUNTZER (1813-1901)

DUNTZER (1813-1901)  , German philologist and historian of literature, was born at Cologne on the 12th of July 1813 . After studying philology and especially ancient classics and Sanskrit at Bonn and Berlin (183o-1835), he took the degree of doctor of philosophy and established himself in 1837 at Bonn as Privat docent for classical literature . He had already, in his Goethes Faust in seiner Einheit and Ganzheit (1836) and Goethe als Dramatiker (1837), advocated a new critical method in interpreting the German classics, which he wished to see treated like the ancient classics . He subsequently turned his attention almost exclusively to the poets of the German classical period, notably Goethe and Schiller . Dtintzer's method met with much opposition and he consequently failed to obtain the professorship he coveted . In 1846 he accepted the post of librarian at the Roman Catholicgymnasium in Cologne, where he died on the 16th of December 1901 . Diintzer was a painstaking and accurate critic, but lacking in inspiration and finer literary taste; consequently his work as a biographer and commentator has, to a great extent, been superseded and discredited . Among his philological writings may be mentioned Die Lehre von der lateinischen Wortbildung (1836); Die Deklination der indogermanischen Sprachen (1839) ; Homer and der epische Kyklos (1839) ; Die homerischen Beiworter des Getter- and Menschengeschlechts (1859) . Of his works on the German classical poets, especially Goethe, Schiller and Herder, the following are particularly worthy of note, Erlauterungen zu den deutschen Klassikern (1853–1892) ; Goethes Prometheus and Pandora (185o); Goethes Faust (2 vols., 1850–1851; and ed . 1857) ; Goethes Getz and Egmont (1854) ; Aus Goethes Freundeskreise (1868) ; Abhandlungen zu Goethes Leben and Werken (2 vols., 1885) ; Goethes Tagebucher der sechs ersten weimarischen Jahre (1889); Goethes Leben (188o; 2nd ed . 1883; Engl. trans!. by T . Lyster, London, 1884); Schillers Leben (1881); Schiller and Goethe; 1ibersicht and Erlauterung zum Briefwechsel zwischen Schiller and Goethe (1859) ; Herders Reise nach Italien (1859); Aus Herders Nachlass (3 vols., 1856–1857), and further, Charlotte von Stein (1894) .