bavarikon4UThe estate of Wilhelm Hertz (1835-1902) - Hertziana
Wilhelm von Hertz (1835-1902) was a German poet and literary historian. He wrote scientific works on literature and folklore of the Middle Ages and translated and rewrote Old French and Middle High German works.
Wilhelm Hertz grew up with his grandparents in Stuttgart and studied literature and philosophy at the Universität Tübingen (University of Tübingen). He attended lectures by Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Adalbert von Keller and especially Ludwig Uhland, who had a crucial influence on the then young student. Hertz completed his studies in 1858 and was awarded a doctorate in philosophy for his dissertation "Die epischen Dichtungen der Engländer im Mittelalter" (The epic poems of the English in the Middle Ages). In the same year he moved to Munich, which was soon to become a centre of early modernism and his main place of work. In 1862 he qualified to lecture with a paper on the werewolf and became a private lecturer for German language and literature at the Universität München (University of Munich). A full professorship at the Technischen Hochschule München (Technical University of Munich) followed in 1878.
Hertz' literary work was greatly appreciated by his contemporaries. He was a member of the Munich poets' society "Die Krokodile" (The Crocodiles) (1857-1883) and was its ideal type as a poet who also pursued an academic profession.
The estate of Wilhelm Hertz contains correspondence with artists from Bohemian Schwabing and beyond. He was in regular exchange with his poet colleagues in the "Krokodile" society and women writers from the Munich bourgeois women's movement. He also maintained correspondence with Hermann Levi, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Lujo Brentano, Henrik Ibsen, Franz Koppel-Ellfeld, Conrad Adolf Fiedler and others.
The estate consists of nine large and 85 small boxes. In addition to lecture manuscripts and letters to Hertz, it contains scholarly collections, particularly on literature and cultural history of the Middle Ages in Germany and France.
The whole collection is open.
>> This estate belongs to the collection of estates from the holdings of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Bavarian State Library).