Ludwig Bieler

Born:	10-20-1906
Faculty:	Philosophical School
Category:	Expelled teacher

Ludwig BIELER (born on October 20th, 1906 in Vienna, died on May 2nd, 1981 in Dublin) was Pd. for Klassische Philologie at the Philosophical School of the University of Vienna. He was persecuted in times of Nazism because of his political orientation lost his position and was thrown out of the university on February 3rd, 1939. Bieler attended secondary school in Vienna’s third district. After graduation, in the fall of 1925, he began studying classical philology at the Universities of Vienna, Tübingen and Munich under Radermacher, Hauler, Weinreich, Kretschmer and Lehmann and obtained his doctorate in 1929 in Vienna with the dissertation “De vita S. Samsonis questiones tres”. Following this, he received a grant from the Notgemeinschaft der deutschen Wissenschaft (emergency association of German science) and was able to study classical philology, archeology and religious studies in Tübingen and Munich for a semester each. After returning to Vienna and taking the teaching qualification exams for Latin and Greek as main subjects, he worked as a teacher at the Rainer private secondary school in Mauer near Vienna in the school year of 1931/32. During this time he also taught as a probationary teacher at the Jesuit secondary school in Kalksburg. From 1930 until 1938 he was an assistant at the Church Fathers commission of the Academy of Sciences and joined the national library in Vienna in 1932 as a volunteer, where he worked in the manuscript collection until 1938. In the meantime he had passed the subject examination for biology in 1935 and had become a provisional state librarian 2nd class in that same year. One year later he habilitated at the University of Vienna. One month after the “Anschluss”, Bieler sent a letter to the dean’s office of the philosophical faculty, asking for “faculty vacation until the end of this summer semester”. At that time he was on a study trip in Fribourg in Switzerland.[1] The dean’s office approved his request and relieved him of the two-hour course “Lateinischer Stil, Unterstufe” as well as the course “Einführungslehrgang aus Griechisch”.[2] As of April 22nd, 1938, his teaching license was “suspended until further notice”.[3] Even though Bieler was considered “Aryan” under the National Socialist race doctrine, as he had pointed out on April 13th,[4] his partner Eva Uffenheimer - who was Roman Catholic - came from a Jewish family. Thus, any further teaching assignments at the University became impossible. According to a letter from the state commissioner for the Reichsstatthalter (Reich deputy), Otto Wächter, a lawsuit regarding §4 of the career civil servant act was supposed to be initiated against Bieler in his function as state librarian 2nd class. Because of his “meanwhile resignation” this did not come about, however.[5] Since the aforementioned article was used in cases concerning “political” and “ideological” reasons, the National Socialists seemed to regard Bieler as unacceptable for other reasons as well. Together with his partner, he emigrated through Italy and Switzerland to France, where they married. In 1940 they moved on to Dublin, Ireland, where Bieler founded a new school of Latin studies. In some respects, this school continued Viennese traditions, for example regarding patristics, but also “set about to review the local Irish Latinity”.[6] He also intensified his studies of Irish-Latin hagiography, which he had begun in Vienna. From 1940 until 1946 Bieler was a visiting lecturer for paleography and Medieval Latin at the National University of Ireland and held lectures in Dublin, Cork and Galway. Beginning in 1946 he also worked as an archivist at the National Library of Ireland, and then, from 1947 until 1948, as an assistant professor of classics at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, USA. After his return he was a lecturer at the University College in Dublin, where he taught classics and paleography as a permanent member of the classical staff from 1948 until 1959. Meanwhile, he also spent 1954/55 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton as a visiting member. Bieler became professor for Late Latin and paleography in 1959 and accepted an assignment as visiting professor of the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies in Toronto, Canada, ten years later. In the course of 20 years, between 1951 and 1970, he had furthermore traveled to the most important European libraries and had catalogued numerous medieval manuscripts with a connection to Ireland. Among others, he published the book “Irland, Wegbereiter des Mittelalters” in 1961. A return to the University of Vienna or any other Austrian university never came about. Bieler was a life member of the Royal Dublin Society, life member of the Royal Irish Academy, corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, as well as a member of the Medieval Academy of America and the British Academy.