Edward Timms (1937–2018): A Memoir

Abstract

Austrian Studies 27 (2019), 237–45© Modern Humanities Research Association 2019 Edward Timms (1937–2018): A Memoir RITCHIE ROBERTSON University of Oxford Edward Timms died on 21 November 2018 at the age of eighty-one. The twenty-fifth anniversary issue of Austrian Studies contained his account of the founding of the yearbook.1 Here I shall touch on that story only briefly, in order to give a broad overview of Edward’s life, work and character. As an academic he reshaped his discipline by sharply defining two areas, Austrian Studies and, later, German-Jewish Studies, concentrating especially on the lives and works of Jewish exiles in Britain. All who knew him will remember him, above all, as an exceptionally fine human being. His frank and detailed autobiography, Taking Up the Torch (2011), reveals how, in Nietzsche’s phrase, he became who he was.2 Edward Francis Timms was born on 3 July 1937, the third of eight children of the Rev. John Timms, Vicar of Buckfastleigh in Devon, and Joan Timms, née Axford; an older brother later came to light and was welcomed into the family. Like most of his siblings, Edward attended Christ’s Hospital, which admitted children from lower-income families without a fee. In 1956 he started reading Modern Languages (French and German) at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he soon decided to concentrate on German, taught first by E. K. Bennett and then by F. J. Stopp. With Stopp he also took a comparative paper on ‘Satire’, which included early modern texts such as Brant’s Narrenschiff [Ship of Fools] as well as works by Swift, Pope and Pascal; its lasting effect is visible not only in the attention Edward would later pay to ironic techniques and satirical archetypes in Kraus’s writing, but also in a remarkable, much later essay on the possibility of Christian satire.3 After a year teaching in Nuremberg, he began a PhD thesis on Karl Kraus, supervised by the charismatic Peter Stern. Edward would later become the world’s pre-eminent Kraus scholar. How he came to Kraus is recounted in his autobiography. As an undergraduate at 1 Edward Timms, ‘The Founding of Austrian Studies. A Collaborative Enterprise’, Austrian Studies, 25 (2017), 6–11. 2 Edward Timms, Taking up the Torch: English Institutions, German Dialectics and Multicultural Commitments (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2011). 3 ‘The Christian Satirist: A Contradiction in Terms?’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 31 (1995), 101–16. See also ‘Der Satiriker und der Christ — ein unvereinbarer Gegensatz?’, in Akten des VII. Internationalen Germanisten-Kongresses Göttingen 1985, ed. by Albrecht Schöne (Tübingen, 1986), ii, 201–08. Ritchie Robertson 238 Cambridge he had scarcely connected literature with politics. His favourite topic, on which he was fortunately able to write in his final exams, was the depiction of nature by the outwardly placid, though inwardly complex Adalbert Stifter — still a world away from the biting satirist Kraus. After graduating, however, Edward’s experience of modern Germany made him raise questions about the relation between the present and the past. A student teacher he knew in Nuremberg, Hans Keith, responded to his enquiry about critical authors by advising him to read Karl Kraus, along with the Weimar satirist Kurt Tucholsky. Kraus’s opaque and intricate writings provided a challenge which Edward addressed, guided by Peter Stern, who owned a complete set of Kraus’s satirical journal Die Fackel [The Torch]. It is probable that Die Fackel, nowadays available online, was not present at that time in any British library. Undertaking a study of Kraus was adventurous. He still has an uneasy place on the margins of the German canon. Aside from some poetry, he did not write in familiar literary genres. Even his huge anti-war drama, Die letzten Tage der Menschheit [The Last Days of Mankind, 1922], is sui generis, though its use of documentary materials has a partial precedent in Büchner’s Dantons Tod [Danton’s Death, 1834] and successors in post-war documentary dramas by Peter Weiss and Heinar Kipphardt. Most of Kraus’s work, consisting of pamphlets and journalism, is by its nature diffuse and difficult to master. The twenty-volume...