Dominique Charpin

Collège de France

Année 2024-2025

Civilisation mésopotamienne

Conférence - Silvia Alaura : The Anatolian studies during the 1930s through the lens of Albrecht Goetze's correspondence

Silvia Alaura est invitée par l'assemblée du Collège de France sur proposition du Pr Dominique Charpin, chaire Civilisation mésopotamienne.

Résumé

The lecture offers an overview of Anatolian Studies during the 1930s from both archaeological and philological perspectives. The main facts of this momentous years are highlighted by means of the hitherto largely unpublished correspondence of one of the leading scholars of the time: the philologist Albrecht Goetze (1897-1971), who in 1931 was professor of Semitic Languages and Ancient Oriental History at the Philipps-Universität Marburg and in 1933 emigrated to the United States after being dismissed by the Nazi regime, not on racial grounds but because he was deemed politically unreliable.

His extensive correspondence, now kept in the Yale University Archives, includes many letters exchanged with leading scholars involved in the research on preclassical Anatolia (among others, Hans Gustav Güterbock). Particular attention will be paid to Goetze's correspondence with the archaeologist Kurt Bittel, who in 1931 was director of excavations at Boğazköy/Ḫattuša and in 1933 was appointed Referent at the Archäologisches Institut des Deutschen Reiches Istanbul. The personal relationship between Goetze and Bittel provides meaningful insights on the different behaviour of two non-Jewish scholars in the field of Anatolian Studies towards the National Socialist regime.