Word: blanckenhagen
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Professor von Blanckenhagen's attitude toward the classics clearly reflects his cultural background. "I hope that the atmosphere of Harvard will continue to produce classically educated gentlemen of leisure who will not be concerned with money or being men of affairs, but who read the classics for delight, and form a background absolutely necessary for a living university." Anything but a snob, he seems to mean this more as a scholar than as a gentleman...
Although a scholar for most of his life, Professor von Blanckenhagen has through a combination of desire and circumstance begun his teaching career comparatively recently. He entered Hamburg University in 1929 and transferred to Berlin in 1930. Thence he went to Rome for independent study and research, receiving his doctorate from Munich in 1936. As a humanist, he was loath to begin an academic career under the Nazis. His first academic position, as a non-teaching fellow, was with the University of Marburg in 1941, from whence he was appointed to the faculty of Hamburg University in 1946. From...
Professor von Blanckenhagen claims with great pride the honor of being the first German scholar to be admitted to this country after the war. He adds with a slight smile that he finds American students far more stimulating to teach than Germans, although far more demanding because they are less respectful and awe-struck and much more curious and questioning, but he claims that this seems to be more true of the University of Chicago than of Harvard...
...life has been the complexity and meaning of Greek art. This study he feels can only be approached by an extremely mature scholar, and he is only now beginning a book in this field. The opposite of the caricature of the German scholar of minutiae, Professor von Blanckenhagen makes a great effort to expose the general terms and standards which the art of the period expresses--the "image of man" as he calls it--but he insists on a firm discipline in the facts for any flight of fancy or supposition. "Everything of true worth in other periods...
Best described as an eighteenth century gentleman, Professor von Blanckenhagen has the reputation of being a brilliant conversationalist with a ready and sardonic wit, sometimes almost playful. He is an astute critic of his adopted country and is as firm in his standards of political and public behavior as he is in his standards of art. Yet his friends assert that one of the most remarkable things about this rather enigmatic man is his ability to laugh at himself and at the world. With a combination of strictly disciplined yet imaginative logic and endearing generosity, interest and vitality, there...