Ernst Stadler and the University of Toronto

ERNST STADLER AND THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO ILeonard Forster The first number of the Varsity for the academic year 1914-15 (Wednesday, September 30, 1914) was overshadowed by the outbreak of hostilities between Britain and Germany and the part that the youth of Canadian universities might be required to play in the war. A small paragraph on the third page reported: "George Henry Needler, B.A., Ph.D. (Leipzig), has been promoted to the head of the department of German. Dr. E. Stadler is now an Associate Professor in German." Exactly one month later, Leutnant Ernst Stadler was killed by a British shell near Ypres on October 30, 1914, aged 31, without ever having taken up his appointment. Thus ended prematurely the promising career of a man devoted to an ideal of European culture embracing the great common humane tradition of the worlds of French and German speech, with the Englishspeaking intellectual world as a balancing factor midway between the two. With his energy, humanity, and breadth of interest he had much to give Canada, and doubtless hoped to receive much from the interaction of Canadians and Canadiens. His life had been spent on the frontiers of Germanic and Romance culture; he was born at Colmar in Alsace, had studied in Strasbourg and as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, and until his appointment at Toronto had been professor at the Free University of Brussels. He was one of an important group of young Alsatian intellectuals who in the years before 1914 saw their mission within the German cultural orbit as mediation between the Germanic and Romance worlds.' Among his friends in this group was the pacifist novelist and poet Rene Schickele; among his contemporaries were the sculptor-poet Hans Arp, and Ernst Robert Curtius, the latter devoted to the same ideal as Stadler and enabled by happier fortune to realize it in the form of a life of scholarship of truly European scope. There were men of great literary gifts in this group, but Stadler was generally 12 recognized as being the most promising. His death in Flanders called forth a great number of spontaneous tributes to his memory from those who had known him personally and from many who knew him only through his poetry. He was considered then and is increasingly recognized now as an important poet. It was however as a scholar that the University of Toronto had engaged him, to fill the vacancy caused by the retirement of Professor W. H. Van der Smissen in 1913. Stadler was the author of four scholarly works. His doctoral thesis at the University of Strasbourg in 1906 dealt with the relation between two manuscripts of Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival-a study in mediaeval philology and textual criticism in the best nineteenth-century tradition. His Habilitationsschrift (1908, published 1910), entitling him to the status of Privatdozent at the University of Strasbourg, was on Christoph Martin Wieland's eighteenth-century translation of Shakespeare . This translation was the main source for German knowledge of Shakespeare at precisely the time when his impact on German literature was greatest; Stadler had selected a key work in the field of comparative literature at that very time being opened up by Joseph Texte, Louis Betz, and Femand Baldensperger, the two last Alsatians like himself. Much of the work for this book had been done at Oxford. He continued working in this field for the Oxford B.Lilt. degree and submitted a thesis written in EngliSh, "The History of Literary Criticism of Shakespeare in Germany," which is now lost. In 1910 there appeared the great work of Friedrich Gundolf on this subject, Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist, a landmark in the study of the reception of Shakespeare on the Continent; Stadler was an obvious choice to review it for the Literarisches Echo (XIV, 1911- 12). Meanwhile a co=ittee of the Prussian Academy of Sciences had been producing a collected critical edition of Wieland's works and had entrusted Stadler with the translations from Shakespeare; three volumes of these appeared between 1909 and 1911, excellently introduced and edited. In 1911 he returned to mediaeval studies with a re-edition of a standard Middle High German text...