One of the unfortunate circumstances of the interdisciplinarity demanded everywhere is that bridge building today rarely takes place on a solid, individual subject foundation.
Harald Weinrich could be seen as a German, even European example that things were different.
Born on September 24, 1927, he had both feet on the ground in linguistics and literature, two "only" linguistic disciplines that are demanding enough;
On top of that, Weinrich confidently served both the Romanic and the Germanic variants.
Weinrich gave these subjects several standard works, most notably "Tempus - Besprochene und narrated Welt" (1964) and the text grammars (one French and one German), but also books on literary history, on lies, even on cheerfulness and forgetting.
In addition to the elegant language, they share one characteristic: as abstract as they may seem at first glance, they can be traced back to a tangible interest in the role of speaker and recipient, a fundamental level on which linguistics and literary studies easily come together.
In addition, one always suspects a well-filled historical-philosophical memory in the background, which feeds the fundamental questions of human consciousness and existence.
Founder of a new subject
How to get there?
Maybe only if you start with Cervantes.
After two and a half years as a prisoner of war, which Weinrich at least taught the French language, he studied Romance studies, German studies, Latin studies and philosophy.
Heinrich Lausberg supervised the dissertation from 1954 on “The Ingenium Don Quijotes” in Münster, as well as his habilitation four years later on “Phonological Studies on Romance Language History”.
Early professorships followed in Kiel and Cologne, but the co-founding of the University of Bielefeld from 1969 and the professorship for "German as a foreign language" at the LMU Munich (from 1978) became really exciting.
Weinrich not only launched an institute, but an entire subject;
this time the Germanic-Romantic double culture was decisive.
The fact that the academic world appreciated his achievements was first proven by American guest professorships and later by an extraordinary honor, namely the chair "Langues et littératures romanes" at the Collège de France (1992 to 1998) - Weinrich was the first German chair holder in the history of the 1530 established institution.
Italy also honored him, with the Galileo Galilei Chair at the Scuola Normale Superiore (Pisa) and membership in the Accademia della Crusca (Florence).
After all, Germany had the Wissenschaftskolleg, the German Academy for Language and Poetry, its Sigmund Freud Prize and numerous prizes and honorary doctorates to offer.
The scientific world was open to the polyglot
An international career, then, which Weinrich, as a polyglot, was also able to cope with linguistically.
Against this background, the unique nature of his European involvement is not surprising.
The question of the democratic unity of the continent is primarily a linguistic one, Weinrich emphasized, and with a view to the history of the language, emphasized: "Multilingualism is the rule, monolingualism is the exception." The dominance of English as the new lingua franca is therefore allowed to European multilingualism not crush - a demand that is more valid than ever.
It can be assumed that a thinker and reader who constantly named Montaigne as his favorite author approached death calmly.
The question of the place arises, because Weinrich said about Wismar: "The Mecklenburg city as the birthplace of a Romanist: I will have to die in Rome to compensate for that." Harald Weinrich died yesterday at the age of 94, but in his study city Muenster.