Ziolkowski THEODOREJOSEPHZIOLKOWSKI 2023

THEODORE JOSEPH ZIOLKOWSKI Author(s): Jan M. Ziolkowski Source: Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society , DECEMBER 2023, Vol. 164, No. 3/4 (DECEMBER 2023), pp. 355-360 Published by: American Philosophical Society Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/48757434 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms American Philosophical Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society This content downloaded from 108.26.210.80 on Wed, 14 Feb 2024 02:05:44 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Photo by Denise Applewhite, Princeton University. THEODORE JOSEPH ZIOLKOWSKI 30 September 1932 . 5 December 2020 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY VOL. 164, NOS. 3–4, DECEMBER 2023 This content downloaded from 108.26.210.80 on Wed, 14 Feb 2024 02:05:44 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 356 biographical memoirs T heodore Joseph Ziolkowski, renowned American Germanist, comparatist, and humanist and a prolific writer of thirty-five books on literature, religion, and culture, died in the early evening of December 5, 2020, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Known as Professor Ziolkowski to thousands of students in his undergraduate lecture courses and graduate seminars at Princeton University, and as Dean Ziolkowski from his thirteen years at the helm of the Graduate School there, he was Ted to close friends and acquaintances. Ziolkowski was born on September 30, 1932, in Birmingham, Alabama. His mother, Cecilia Ziolkowski (née Jankowski), a secondgeneration Polish American from the Chicago area, taught piano. His father immigrated to the United States from Poland. A composer and concert pianist who trained at Berlin’s Stern Conservatory and ultimately in Switzerland with the Polish patriot Ignacy Jan Paderewski, he found security and happiness during the Great Depression on the music faculty of what eventually became the University of Montevallo. In his Americanization, Mieczysław Ziółkowski shed the accents in the spelling of his names and came to be routinely called “Professor Z.” for short. As a boy, Theodore Ziolkowski (in those days “Teddy” to almost everyone) excelled scholastically, completing his secondary education at age fifteen. In addition, he starred in high school football and thanks to his feats on the gridiron was even offered a scholarship to the University of Alabama. For all his enthusiasm for sports, his main extracurricular passion was the trumpet: he acquired local fame for running in his athletic gear (minus the helmet) to join the marching band on the field at halftime. From his mid-teens he played jazz. For many years, he performed professionally on the brass instrument. In fact, weekend gigs later provided a major source of income for his own household until he set the horn aside in his early thirties. Around the time he became a full professor, he realized that the rock and roll of Elvis Presley was ringing the death knell for his style of trumpeting. Accordingly, he resolved to direct his energies outside the classroom and office ever more to his research. Theodore’s father brought with him to the Deep South many exotic trappings of an Old World intellectual formation. Notably, he peppered his thickly accented and colorfully formulated English with proverbs in Latin, German, Russian, and Polish, to mention only four tongues. The lush linguistic texture of the home inspired both his children, Theodore and his younger brother and future classicist John, to immerse themselves in languages. Theodore Ziolkowski received his AB from Duke University at age eighteen in 1951 and married Yetta Goldstein, his partner for life and fellow Alabamian whose father had likewise emigrated from Poland. This content downloaded from 108.26.210.80 on Wed, 14 Feb 2024 02:05:44 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms theodore joseph ziolkowski 357 A year later Ziolkowski earned his AM from the same institution, and the young couple had their eldest child, a daughter. In 1957, he was awarded a PhD from Yale University under the supervision of Hermann Weigand, Sterling Professor of German Literature. These busy years witnessed the birth of a first son in 1956, followed by a second in 1958. Also in 1958, he and Yetta forged a friendship in Cologne with Heinrich Böll, a future Nobel laureate, that would endure until the close of the German novelist’s lifetime. Ziolkowski’s master’s thesis, focused on the Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin’s German translation of the Iliad, was early evidence of his lifelong preoccupation with the impact of the classics on later literature. His dissertation, on Hermann Hesse and the eighteenth-century German polymath known as Novalis, displayed his fascination with the continued vitality of Romanticism in what was, at that point, still relatively recent German prose. After holding short-term postdoctoral appointments at Yale University, Ziolkowski moved to Columbia University in 1962; but he first attained real permanency when recruited as a full professor at Princeton University in 1964. From the start he taught high-enrollment introductory courses, above all a perennially popular one on the development of the European novel. In acknowledgment of his teaching and scholarship, he was named the Class of 1900 Professor of German and Comparative Literature in 1969. In administration, his highest and most demanding service extended from 1979 to 1992 as dean of the Graduate School. During this long spell, he was invited more than once to Washington, DC to testify before the Senate on issues relating to the humanities. His two full-length books from the 1960s were The Novels of Hermann Hesse (1965) and Dimensions of the Modern Novel: German Texts and European Contexts (1969). In the 1970s and 1980s, he delved ever more into the analysis of literary themes. His most innovative title from this phase may well have been Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus (1972). The 1990s saw his range expand yet again, with the far-reaching German Romanticism and Its Institutions (1990), the now-classic Virgil and the Moderns (1993), an exploration entitled The Mirror of Justice (1997) on literary treatments of legal crises, a study of towers as an image in literature (winner of the Christian Gauss Award from the Phi Beta Kappa Society), and, lastly, in German, the first in a series of monographs about the cultural roles filled by specific cities in late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century Germany. Long before retirement, Ziolkowski had acquired many distinctions, including two Fulbrights, a Guggenheim, and the James Russell Lowell Prize. He was also elected president of the Modern Language Association. Later in his career, his center of gravity shifted partly to This content downloaded from 108.26.210.80 on Wed, 14 Feb 2024 02:05:44 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 358 biographical memoirs Europe. He and Yetta spent at least a few months each year in Berlin, where they put down deep roots. His devotion to Germany was reciprocated. In due course, he was singled out for tribute by his peers there with the honor of the GoetheMedaille, Jacob-und-Wilhelm-Grimm Preis, Forschungspreis from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and Bundesverdienstkreuz 1. Klasse. On a personal level, he treasured the connections he and his wife forged through regular participation in such organizations as the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung in Darmstadt and the Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen. On the western side of the Atlantic, they participated fondly in the American Philosophical Society whenever circumstances allowed. After supposedly retiring from active duty in 2001, Ziolkowski embarked upon what proved to be his most remarkably productive period of book writing, at the unbroken tempo of one annually over two entire decades. As an emeritus, he was kidded affectionately and admiringly by his nearest relatives for behaving like a junior colleague bucking for tenure. The score of books, mostly in English but now and again in German, that he published over his last twenty years covers a breathtaking gamut. The culminating one, just released in 2020, Roman Poets in Modern Guise: The Reception of Roman Poetry since World War I, caps his numerous investigations into the afterlives of Greek and Roman classics from the late eighteenth century on. Other volumes attest to his deepening and widening attraction to a host of other topics, especially involving religion and myth, from Gilgamesh down to the present. Three examples out of many are The Sin of Knowledge (2000), Modes of Faith: Secular Surrogates for Lost Religious Belief (2007), and Uses and Abuses of Moses: Literary Representations since the Enlightenment (2016). Shortly after turning eighty-eight, Theodore Ziolkowski succumbed to the terminal stages of heart failure. The disease ruled out the jogging that he had relished through his mid-eighties, on a route along Lake Carnegie that he made an opportunity for counting turtles and cormorants. Eventually his condition likewise ruled out his daily piano sessions, which he had taken up again at age seventy after a half-century hiatus. Still, to the very end he retained his gusto for music and poetry. He rhapsodized about Bach and recited from memory German lyrics by Goethe, Hölderlin, and Novalis. His favorite verses related to sites, from the tops of mountains to the bottoms of mines, that he had visited with Yetta, his constant companion of nearly seventy years. Frequently the pair would take turns reciting poems, with the hands-down favorite being Goethe’s “Wanderer’s Nightsong II,” with its final two This content downloaded from 108.26.210.80 on Wed, 14 Feb 2024 02:05:44 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms theodore joseph ziolkowski 359 lines “Warte nur, balde / Ruhest du auch,” translated by Longfellow as “Wait; soon like these / Thou too shalt rest.” No further new books will appear with Theodore Ziolkowski as author on the dustjacket. No fourth dozen will spill onto another shelf of the bookcase. In the stock formulation of “publish or perish,” he took care to fulfill the first verb before falling prey to the second. That thought would make him happy, since he liked to finish well and to meet deadlines. As a beloved relic from his stint of deaning, he displayed in the living room of his home a slate with the same Latin inscription found on the mantelpiece of Princeton Graduate College’s Procter Hall. The motto, which reads “Bonus intra, melior exi,” signifies “Enter good, depart better.” The first phrase contains a tacit assumption about the innate goodness of people, the second about the necessity of improving upon that quality in living. He has honored the aphorism, since his exit was even better than his entrance—and thanks to his unfailing grace, the lives of those near and dear to him will have been enhanced too. Despite a phenomenal zeal for reading, learning, and writing, and a legendary work ethic that kept him spot welded to typewriters and keyboards, Theodore Ziolkowski had a joie de vivre inseparable from his joie de travailler. In that living he cared deeply about those he loved. As a richly rounded human being, he put into practice his bedrock values as a humanist. One of his favorite mantras was “all together, all the time,” and loss of him has grieved his family, just as vivid memories have brought solace. He is survived by brother John Ziolkowski, of Arlington, Virginia; daughter Margaret Ziolkowski and her husband Robert Thurston, of Oxford, Ohio; elder son Jan and his wife Elizabeth Ziolkowski, of Newton, Massachusetts; and younger son Eric Ziolkowski and his wife Lee Upton, of Easton, Pennsylvania. In successive generations are a grandson and six granddaughters, along with three great-granddaughters and three great-grandsons. His beloved wife Yetta Ziolkowski, of Princeton, New Jersey, and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, died on January 10, 2023. Elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1984 Jan M. Ziolkowski Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Medieval Latin Harvard University This content downloaded from 108.26.210.80 on Wed, 14 Feb 2024 02:05:44 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms This content downloaded from 108.26.210.80 on Wed, 14 Feb 2024 02:05:44 +00:00 All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms