MAXIMILIAN FRLEDRICH LIDDELL

A TRIBUTE ON THE OCCASION OF HIS EIGHTIETH BIRTHDAY

ON February sth, 1967, M. F. Liddell, sometime Professor of German in the University of Dublin, celebrated his eightieth birthday and the Editors of Geman Li& and Letters would like to add their tribute to the many messages of congratulations which he received from his former students and colleagues.

M. F. Liddell was a student at Edinburgh and, after graduating, was engaged on post-graduate work in Berlin and spent a further period of four years’ enforced residence in Germany as one of the distinguished company of academics incarcerated in Ruhleben. He then returned to University teaching-he had already been Lector in English at Posen from 1909 to rgrr-fmt to Birmingham as Lecturer in 1920 and then in 1933 as Head of the Department of German and Lecturer in Anglo-Saxon at Trinity College, Dublin, where he stayed for twenty-five years. He earned the affection of his colleagues and students by his integrity and kindness and his exemplary enthusiasm for Germanic studies. Ireland, inevitably, also claimed his attention and his monograph lrlund is a standard work. Retirement in 1958 did not diminish his interest in the many generations of students for whose welfare he deeply cared.

On the occasion of his eightieth birthday we offer him our warmest wishes.

OBITUARY

ROBERT PICK

Born 3 1 . ~ 1 . 1 8 8 5 ; died 2.11.1967

‘WORTE, die vom Herzen kommen, gehen zu Herzen’, a Hebrew proverb assures us, and so, I would like to believe, will the few words I am about to devote to the memory of our departed friend and colleague, Robert Pick. If‘ I have been chosen to express the sorrow we all of us feel so deeply, it is, I suppose, because of the life-long association which has bound us together. For we were both born in that same year 1885, and first met just sixty years ago as ‘&re Semester’ at the k.k. Universitat zu Wien in the Seminars of Hofrath Minor and Jellinek. Like myself,

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Pick was bent on teaching, and our academic careers ran almost parallel. After a brief spell at a Gymnasium he became Professor of English at the Wiener Handels- akademie (I was teaching English at the Handelshochschule in Cologne about this same time). From the first Pick was intent on developing Anglo-German relations. Soon after the First War he started an annual holiday course for English students and so forged those links with British universities which were to stand him-and us!-in such good stead. When in 1938 he was arrested by the Nazis and sent to Dachau, it was through the intervention of his London colleagues that he was released after only three months’ detention and provided with both home and employment over here. On our retirement from active teaching he and I were again joined together and entrusted with the management of our newly-founded Institute of Germanic Studies; and if the Institute has become their chief centre in Great Britain and the Commonwealth this is due almost entirely to Dr Pick’s selfless devotion, infinite patience and unfailing tact, to that Austrian Krtlanz in the face of which every apparently insoluble problem was resolved. Nor did his many duties prevent him from pursuing those scholarly avocations which were so dear to him, and he will long be remembered as the author of many articles dealing with Anglo-German literary relations, as the editor with Dr Luke of a selection in English of Goethe’s Conversations and Encounters, and as compiler and editor of learned compendia such as his Schiller in England and Hofmannsthal in England. His relations with German Life and Letters were close and of long standing, and it was as a well-deserved tribute that a Special Number-with a life-like photograph -was presented to him in October 1961 to celebrate his eightieth birthday. Its Editors now wish to express the sorrow and grief of all of us Germanisten, and to convey to his widow and daughter our deepest sympathy.

Though lost to sight, to memory dear Thou ever wilt remain.

OBITUARY

Das Andenken an ihn wird nicht erloschen. L. A. WILLOUGHBY

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