All Scholars

Moriz (or Moritz) Haupt’s career combined his devotion to Latin and to Old German, literature and histories of which he intermixed in both his lectures, and his editorial work. From his youth, when his father translated German hymns into Latin, Haupt felt a sense of pride and patriotism in old German literature. At Leipzig he absorbed the basic principles of text criticism from intense study of Gottfried Hermann’s (1772-1848) edition of the Bacchae. Hermann invited Haupt to join his Societas Graeca (Greek-speaking study group) and the two became close friends and collaborators. Haupt would eventually marry Hermann’s daughter, a not uncommon practice in the day, and after Hermann’s death he edited his two-volume edition of Aeschylus. 

      With his doctoral coursework completed, Haupt returned to Zittau to care for his father, whose ouster from his role as mayor of Zittau had caused him to sink into a deep and dangerous depression. Haupt received his Ph.D. in absentia while in Zittau. In the seven years during which he cared for his father he published his anthology of Medieval German poets and prepared his work on Ovid’s Halieutica. Perhaps of greater significance is the family trip taken in 1834 as his father’s symptoms lightened. In Vienna Haupt met the poet August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben (1798-1874), then professor of literature at Breslau, a student of Old Teutonic literature, and a composer of verse, a portion of which became the German national anthem. They began the two-volume Altdeutsche Blätter (1836-40), which in 1841 Haupt revived as the more comprehensive Zeitschrift für deutsches Alterthum, now the oldest existing journal of Old German studies. The purpose of the journal was to apply the philological principles recently developed for Greek and Roman literature by men such as Hermann and apply them to the literature of medieval Germany. Haupt also visited the Grimm Brothers to consult on their plan for the German dictionary. 

        He had not lost his interest in classical languages. In Berlin he also met Karl Lachmann (1793-1851) who was as significant a figure in Medieval German studies as he was in classics. Lachmann was engaged in applying his principles of text criticism to German classics, principally his edition of the Niebelungen (1826), which he dedicated to the Brothers Grimm. Haupt became, in Wilamowitz’s words, “Lachmann’s staunch and dedicated disciple.” Haupt’s subsequent editions of Latin poets are all models of Lachmann’s methodology from his work on Catullus to his editions of Horace and Virgil. After Lachmann’s death, Haupt gathered up his notes on Old High German poets and some Minnesang texts.

        Whatever texts engaged him, Haupt championed the method of his teacher Hermann and his friend Lachmann. In 1837 Hermann got Haupt a job in Leipzig and when Haupt completed his habilitation in 1841, he was made an extraordinarius. A chair in German was created for him, but he also started a Hermann-like societas Latina. In 1848 Haupt along with Theodor Mommsen and Otto Jahn was arrested for treason because of their association with the liberal political organization, Deutscher Verein. The group had called a public assembly in Leipzig in the year of German democratic revolutions against the conservative government. Haupt, Mommsen, and Jahn were all acquitted in court, but lost their jobs at Leipzig in 1851. Two years later, after much negotiation, Haupt was named Lachmann’s successor at Berlin and was automatically made a full member of the Berlin Academy. He continued to teach German until 1859, when he switched to classics exclusively. Mommsen dedicated the first volume of his Roman history to Haupt in 1854 and saw to the publication of his Kleine Schriften. In his Berlin circle were August Meineke (1790-1870), a scholar of the Hellenistic poets, and the playwright Gustav Freytag (1816-75), whose character Felix Werner in Verlorne Handschrift, was modeled on Haupt.

      A popular and effective teacher, who counted among his students Conrad Bursian (1830-83) and Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1848-1931), the editor of his Kleine Schriften. While his German work involved the publication of many editions of Old German authors, he published comparatively few Latin texts, some derived from Lachmann’s texts or notes; his only Greek text was his work on Hermann’s Aeschylus and Bion and Moschus. His Questiones Catullianae was, in Sandys’ words, “of special importance in connexion with the textual criticism of Catullus.” His text and notes of Tacitus’s Germania at once joined his classical and patriotic interests and was widely used in schools. With Herrman and Lachmann as his methodological models, he preferred to write articles in which he often offered up audacious and seldom-adopted emendations to the texts of various Latin authors, but he was constrained by his extremely high ideals of accuracy and completeness. He resolved confusion over the authorship of poems ascribed to Calpurnius and Nemesianus, which Wilamowitz described as “the model of a triumphantly successful piece of research.” Haupt’s view that the Consolation ad Liviam was a forgery (1849) has not been generally accepted. 

      At length he dropped his scholarly work on Old German. His natural kindness and generosity combined with his erudition and stylistic acuity made him many friends among the highest level of the often contentious world of German classical scholarship. For instance, with the leadership of Mommsen, Adolf Kirchhoff (1826-1908), and Rudolph Hercher (1821078), he was instrumental in the founding of the Berlin journal Hermes in 1866.