Silvae: latin teacher

Wednesday December 18, 2019

Latin teacher

The number of students who choose Latin as a second foreign language is falling, and yet Latin teachers are urgently needed everywhere. You seem to be one endangered species to become. And we urgently need them as guides to the cultures that are the basis of our culture. We simply have to, because we cannot do anything else, because we do not have a more appropriate career path, because we have simply lost our way to other more useful positions, because we have no other means of using our constellation of forces and views to our fellow human beings make the path just indicated. After all, we cannot live for ourselves. Let us do our part to ensure that the young philologists with the necessary skepticism, free of pedantry and overestimation of their subject, act as true promoters of humanistic studies. Soyons de notre siècle, as the French say: a point of view that no one forgets more easily than the real philologist, the classical philologist Friedrich Nietzsche said about his profession.

Latin teacher: you never forget them. I no longer know the names of many of my teachers from my high school here in the photo, but I immediately recognize the six Latin teachers. Back then, it was six years of elementary school in Bremen before you started high school. The American occupiers had demanded that it should promote democratic behavior. Determined it. The high school started for us with the seventh grade. There was the question of fate: Latin or French? I took Latin because I was told that it would be easier to learn French later. As a child you believe everything the adults tell you.

The best way to learn French is in a French woman’s bed, the book says French between the hills of Venus and the loins of Adonis: a language book for love artists is available at Amazon for a small price. It promises us: Those who learn French with the ‘hills and loins’ will soon be able to pass love affairs linguistically. The authors repeatedly point out that learning foreign languages is time-consuming and that no price can be expected without hard work – at least no more differentiated statements on French beaches and in French beds. Maybe I should have given my beautiful bookstore such a book to read on the beach.

There is no such amorous learning aid for Latin. There is a book like Latin for Dummies, but there is no mention of Venus Hills. Is that enough for Virgil omnia vincit amor: et nos cedamus amori to translate? I was lucky that my school experimentally had a reformed upper school, an anticipation of what later became known as the Buxtehuder model. For me that meant three years of French in a tiny group with an excellent teacher. Was maybe better than three years in Brigitte Bardot’s bed (read more about this in the French post). Unfortunately, this reform did not change anything for Latin classes. Nietzsche Soyons de notre siècle, did not occur there. Vocabulary, vocabulary, vocabulary. Shake the words until the sentence makes any sense. A word order like in English, this language does not know. My favorite thing was Hexameter, which I chant when I fall asleep. Or such a beautiful elegiac couplet: Cingere litorea flaventia tempora myrto, Musa, per undenos emodulanda pedes.

My Latin teacher in the first class of high school was also my class teacher. He was one of the best teachers in our school. I’ve mentioned him several times in this blog, most recently in the Birken post. Back then I had a grade one in Latin, which should worsen over the years. It wasn’t because of Latin or about me, it was because of the teachers. My middle school Latin teacher was noble and unapproachable, but had two pretty daughters. Who were out of reach because her father was a Latin teacher.

I met him at my university a decade later, he could not yourself remember me even though I had been sitting in front of his nose for years. He told me that during the summer vacation he always visits an old friend who is a full professor here. When he mentioned the name, I said goodbye politely. His old friend had been a great Nazi, everyone here at the university knew that. That was probably why his son had gone to the RAF. Had been shot by the police a few years earlier. When I recently entered the name of my noble Latin teacher on Google, I was amazed to see that he owned a Wikipedia article. It said that he had been a great Nazi, which probably explained the summer visits to his friend at the university. Latin doesn’t make you a good person. Franz Josef Strauß was also a Latin teacher.

My high school Latin teacher was straight out of the fire tongs punch stumbled into life. On school trips, he wore knickers, a Norfolk jacket with a belt, a beret and a belted leather map pocket. I already mentioned him in the post Adam Oeser, which also deals with Latin classes. That was followed the next day by a post on the topic entitled O tempora, o mores! would have. You can see from this that the Latin lessons left their mark on me. Bad teachers are also a good school. In his book Teacher child – lifelong school playground Bastian Bielendorfer described a type of Latin teacher similar to mine: The Latin teacher lives constantly in the gray area between the self-perceived importance of the Latin language (‘for humanistic education alone’) and the burgeoning awareness that one could also teach deer mating sounds or Klingon. In response to this inner dissonance, the Latin teacher tries to disguise himself in pigeon droppings-dark green in everyday school wear by wearing felt jacket-corduroy combinations and thus simply sitting out the forty years of service in wait for a pebble.

I didn’t really hate my last Latin teacher, I didn’t care, in the end he was a poor pig. Neither did he deprive me of the joy of Latin literature, even if I prefer bilingual texts today. Back then, I wasn’t interested in many subjects at school, I had a completely different goal: I wanted to be through the world literature at twenty-one. When I look at my reading list from 1962, it says a lot of what we call classic. But also a lot of French because I was exi at the time. But Thucydides and Apuleius were also on the list.

We know what French language skills are good for. Around garçon, a bouteille de champagne! to call if we should go out with Carla Bruni. And to understand dirty things a French soccer player says to his coach at the World Cup. But what should we do with dead languages? Why did I learn Latin? So, it hasn’t hurt me until today, on the contrary. And I’m still grateful for the so-called Great Latinum (not this cheap KMK Latinum from 1979), even if I didn’t like my last Latin teacher. Of course you can get through life without knowing Latin or Greek, unless you want to become Pope. William Shakespeare had little Latin and less Greek, as a contemporary said, he became one of the greatest playwrights in English literature.

And, of course, you can fake a classic education by using Büchmanns Winged words learns the Latin phrases by heart and instills them into the conversation from time to time. This process, described in Stephen Potter ‘s ironic and satirical book on the One-upmanship has already been described, is enough to pretend to him that television is a philosopher. Memorize twenty names of philosophers from Aristotle to Foucault or Luhmann and insert these names into every third or fourth sentence! Everyone will think you are a philosopher. Thea Dorn is successful with this.

To express all misery in one word, we are epigones, and we bear the burden that every inheritance and offspring tends to stick to. The great movement in the realm of the spirit, which our fathers undertook from their huts and huts, has brought us a lot of treasures, which are now on all market tables. Without any particular effort, the poor ability to acquire at least the cross-over coin of every art and science is also possible. But it is with borrowed ideas, like with borrowed money, who carelessly does business with someone else’s good things gets poorer and poorer. A very peculiar corruption of the word has arisen from this willingness of the heavenly goddess against every fool. This palladium of mankind, this testimony of our divine origin, has been made a lie, and its virginity has been dishonored. For the windiest glow, for the hollowest opinions, for the emptyest heart, the most witty, richest, strongest sayings can be found everywhere with ease. The old simple: conviction has therefore gone out of style, and people like to talk about views. But even with that you mostly say an untruth, because usually you haven’t even looked at the things you’re talking about and what you pretend to be busy with, writes Karl Immermann in 1836 in The Epigones.

Non scholae, sed vitae discimus, it says so beautifully. But the sentence is pure study council romance. In the original, Seneca says: Latrunculis ludimus. In supervacuis subtilitas teritur: non faciunt bonos ista sed doctos. Apertior res est sapere, immo simplicior: paucis (satis) est ad mentem bonam uti litteris, sed nos ut cetera in supervacuum diffundimus, ita philosophiam ipsam. Quemadmodum omnium rerum, sic litterarum quoque intemperantia laboramus: non vitae sed scholae discimus. What means in German: Children’s games are what we play there. The sharpness and delicacy of thinking dulls from superfluous problems; Such discussions do not help us to live properly, but at best to speak learned. Life wisdom is more obvious than school wisdom; yes, let’s just say it: it would be better if we could gain common sense from our school education. But we, like all our other goods, waste unnecessary luxury, so our greatest good, philosophy, on unnecessary questions. As with excessive addiction to everything else, we suffer from excessive addiction to learning: we learn not for life, but for school.

I don’t think much of Nietzsche, but I have to quote this hateful sentence from him: Winckelmanns and Goethe’s Greeks, V. Hugo’s Orientalien, Wagner’s Edda Personnagen, W. Scott’s Englishman of the 13th century – at some point you will discover the whole comedy: everything was historically wrong, but – modern, true! Lorella Bosco commented on this in her dissertation on German antique pictures: They all bear witness to the same need to determine one’s own historical position in an exemplary age of history, to project one’s own expectations and wishes onto any past as a contrasting foil for the present. One finds oneself in the past, one defines oneself by the past, which is both the other and one’s own.

Everything about all dimensions historically wrong, says Nietzsche, we would have the floor today fake use. Winckelmann has not completed any of his university studies, he has never been to Greece. But we still have this noble simplicity and quiet size in the head, believe that only he would have understood Greek art. This is the terribly beautiful Gorgon head of the classic, which Nietzsche mentioned in About the Personality of Homer, his inaugural speech at the University of Basel in 1869.

The sentence History is bunk, is attributed to Henry Ford. More specifically, he said: History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history that we make today. Donald Trump, who doesn’t speak Latin and doesn’t speak a foreign language other than Twitter, would probably agree with him there. Andrew Jackson was the first American president who couldn’t speak Latin that e pluribus unum it had to be translated in the coat of arms of the United States. For the first time, the commemorative coins that every American president can issue are no longer on the commemorative coins e pluribus unum. That was probably too difficult for Trump. Instead it says: Make America great again.

Not only Rome has perished (probably something like the American painter Thomas Cole painted here), America of the founding fathers also no longer exists. The Americans, like the ancient Romans, have a senate and senators and classicist government buildings, which indicate that America was born from the spirit of classicism, the Need to determine one’s own historical position in an exemplary age of history. But in Donald Trump’s America, these are only stage sets for the American tragedy. Should we quote Petronius again: Si bene calculum ponas, ubique naufragium est?

The last time I met my friend Keith, he wrote ancient Greek words in a vocabulary book, two lexica were on the table next to him. His Bentley was standing outside on the street. Dark green, with light brown leather seats. He has several of them, including Daimlers and an Aston Martin. He had been to a humanistic high school and of course had a large Latinum. But he hadn’t become a philologist, philologists rarely own a Bentley or an Aston Martin, my last Latin teacher had an Opel Kadett. I felt that I was missing something, Keith said when I asked him why he was learning Greek. Apart from an Alvis, someone has all the cars that a car collector dreams of and learns Greek because he has the feeling, that he is missing. Somehow that made me feel that not yet ubique naufragium is. Omnia quae sunt sunt lumina.

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Wednesday December 18, 2019

Latin teacher

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