Inside Lights

The department of Germanic languages and literatures at the UI has 
received a gift of $10,000 to endow a fund in memory of UI professor 
emeritus Ernst Alfred Philippson, who died a year ago at age 92.

The gift was made by Philippson's son and daughter, E. Benno Philippson of
Portland, Ore., and Susanne Philippson Curcic of Princeton, N.J.

Income from the endowment, which includes other smaller gifts made in 
Philippson's memory by friends and colleagues, will provide an annual 
award or awards to UI doctoral students in Germanic languages and 
literatures in support of travel and research abroad.

The Philippson children also donated to the department the major part of 
their father's personal library, including more than 2,000 volumes plus 
hundreds of reprints of scholarly essays. The donation, valued at $14,000,
will form the basis of a departmental reading room to be named in 
Philippson's honor.

Philippson, a native of Moenchengladbach, in the Rhineland region of 
Germany, was "an internationally renowned scholar in our field and 
beyond," said James McGlathery, head of the UI department of Germanic 
languages and literatures. 

"His doctoral thesis, published in 1923, is still recognized 70 years 
later as the classic study of the folk-tale type of the haughty princess,"
McGlathery said. Philippson's other books include a study of Germanic 
heathenism among the Anglo-Saxons and a genealogy of the gods in the 
religion, mythology and theology of the Germanic peoples. 

From 1957 to 1971, Philippson was a managing editor of the Journal of 
English and Germanic Philology, "one of the oldest and most respected 
scholarly journals in the United States," McGlathery said. And, from 1956
to 1972, Philippson was the American editor for a series of texts of the 
late Middle Ages and early modern period published in Germany. He also 
co-edited a scholarly edition of a famous anthology of German poetry from
the late 17th and early 18th centuries. 

Philippson earned his doctorate from the University of Cologne in 1922. He
passed the Prussian State Examination for Teachers in Higher Education 
with majors in German, English and History in 1924, and was appointed by 
the University of Cologne to junior faculty standing in English philology
in 1928. In addition, he served in a junior position at the Deutsches 
Seminar of that university from 1923 to 1931, with a year away as lecturer
at the University of Wisconsin in 1928-29. 

In 1931, Philippson, accompanied by his wife, Margarete Josephine, came to
the United States to lecture at The Ohio State University. Because of the
political changes at German universities, he asked for an extended leave 
of absence from Cologne, spending 1933 to 1935 on private research in New
York City and officially resigning from Cologne in 1937. In the meantime,
he had been appointed an assistant professor of German at the University 
of Michigan in 1935, a position he held for 12 years. 

Philippson joined the UI in 1947 and became a full professor in 1951. He 
was an associate member of the university's Center for Advanced Study in 
1965-66. Subsequent to his retirement in 1968, he earned a second doctoral
diploma from the University of Cologne in 1972, the first doctoral alumnus
to be so honored by that university's humanities faculty. 

Contributions to the Ernst Alfred Philippson Graduate Research Travel Fund
may be made payable to "UIF/LAS Annual Development Fund - German" and sent
to the UI Foundation, Harker Hall, MC-386.