All Scholars

Eva Lehmann Fiesel grew up in a talented family. Her father was an eminent professor of law and her mother a famous painter. Her brother, Karl Leo Heinrich Lehmann (1894-1960). When her family moved to Göttingen in 1911, she began her study of classics and linguistics. She married the law professor Ludolf Fiesel (1888-1979) in 1915. During World War I, he served in the army, until November 1918 and Eva served as a nurse. After teaching in secondary schools at Doberan (1919) and Rostock (1920-4), Ludolf moved to Rostock to manage an adult education center. In Munich while serving as a private tutor, Eva took a seminar in the philosophy of language with the Indo-Europeanist and Etruscologist Gustav Herbig (1868-1925). Her Rostock dissertation examined the morphology of likely feminine nouns in inscriptions to determine whether Etruscan had gender classification. Her conclusion showed how Etruscan was gradually assimilated into the Indo-European family. At Munich she studied with Fritz Strich (1882-1963), author of Deutsche Klassik und Romantik (1922, 1928). In the following year she gave birth to a daughter, Ruth (1921-1994) but in 1926 she and Ludolf divorced. Despite this turmoil, she moved from the study of forms and inscriptions to a philosophical approach to language, influenced by the work of her teacher Fritz Strich. Her important work described the perception of the German language in the Romantic period of the 18^th and 19^th centuries. She then returned to her study of Etruscan and indo-European languages by examining Etruscan names in Greek myth, concluding that a western Greek dialect was the source. She contributed a major article on Etruscan, employing her recent findings, to the geschichte der indogermanischen Sprachwissenschaft. She clearly intended to pursue an habilitation, but to support her family she but took a teaching position in 1931 as instructor in Etruscology at the Indo-European Institute. She moved to Munich where she became a privatdozent (1931-3) and published her major work on Etruscan in 1931. Grants from the Notgemeinschafte der Deutschen Wissenschaft, which was founded in part to aid scholars who were disadvantaged by the war, and the Rockefeller Foundation, which allowed her to study manuscripts in Florence in 1933. To supplement the grants she also researched lexical entries for the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae. Though the family professed a Protestant religion, they had Jewish blood, so she and her brother both lost their jobs in 1933, he as director of the archaeological museum in Münster. The Yale linguist Edgar Howard Sturtevant (1875-1952) invited her to America where she served as a research assistant at Yale since there were few departments that could support so rare a specialty as hers. Sturtevant raised monies from colleagues for a special professorship of Etruscan for three years at Bryn Mawr, beginning in 1936 and supplemented by the Rockefeller Foundation. Fiesel hoped to establish a linguistics program at Bryn Mawr and to complete a grammar of Etruscan. Her final article showed that the Etruscan character x, which had previously been taken as a t was in fact a sibilant. Unfortunately she died of liver cancer after teaching only one semester.