Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl - Biography

Biography

He was born in Großvargula, present-day Thuringia. His family, in which culture and poverty were hereditary, were Protestants who had migrated several generations earlier from Bohemia. Ritschl was fortunate in his school training, at a time when the great reform in the higher schools of Prussia had not yet been thoroughly carried out. His chief teacher, Spitzner, a pupil of Gottfried Hermann, divined the boy's genius and allowed it free growth, applying only so much either of stimulus or of restraint as was absolutely needful. After a wasted year at the University of Leipzig, where Hermann stood at the zenith of his fame, Ritschl passed in 1826 to Halle.

Here he came under the powerful influence of Christian Karl Reisig, a young Hermannianer with exceptional talent, a fascinating personality and a rare gift for instilling into his pupils his own ardour for classical study. The great controversy between the Realists and the Verbalists was then at its height, and Ritschl naturally sided with Hermann against Böckh. The early death of Reisig in 1828 did not sever Ritschl from Halle, where he began his professorial career with a great reputation and brilliant success, but soon hearers fell away, and the pinch of poverty compelled his removal to Breslau, where he reached the rank of ordinary professor in 1834, and held other offices.

The great event of Ritschl's life was a sojourn of nearly a year in Italy (1836–37), spent in libraries and museums, and more particularly in the laborious examination of the Ambrosian palimpsest of Plautus at Milan. The remainder of his life was largely occupied in working out the material then gathered and the ideas then conceived. Bonn, where he moved on his marriage in 1839, and where he remained for twenty-six years, was the great scene of his activity both as scholar and as teacher.

The philological seminary which he controlled, although nominally only joint-director with Welcker, became a veritable officina litterarum, a kind of Isocratean school of classical study; in it were trained many of the foremost scholars of the late 19th century. The names of G. Curtius, Ihne, Schleicher, Bernays, Ribbeck, Lorenz, Vahlen, Hübner, Bücheler, Helbig, Benndorf, Riese, Windisch, and Nietzsche, who were his pupils either at Bonn or at Leipzig, attest his fame and power as a teacher. In 1854 Otto Jahn took the place of the venerable Welcker at Bonn, and after a time succeeded in dividing with Ritschl the empire over the philological school there. The two had been friends, but after gradual estrangement a violent dispute arose between them in 1865, which for many months divided into two hostile forces the universities and the press of Germany. Both sides were steeped in fault, but Ritschl undoubtedly received harsh treatment from the Prussian government, and pressed his resignation. He accepted a call to Leipzig, where he died in harness in 1876.