Hellmut Ritter

Biography

The son of a Protestant minister, his brothers were the conservative historian Gerhard Ritter and the theologist Karl Bernhard Ritter. He was educated at Halle where he studied under Carl Brockelmann and Paul Kahle, then at Strasbourg under Carl Heinrich Becker. He then served as a military interpreter during World War One in Iraq, Palestine and Iran. In 1919 he became a teaching assistant at the University of Hamburg, researching classical Arabic literature and Greek and medieval alchemy. But his academic career in Germany was effectively ended in 1925 when he was convicted for homosexuality.

Being dismissed from his post in early 1926, he went to Istanbul. There he became aware of the moldering literary treasures that lay unregarded in the city's ancient libraries. His access to this wealth of manuscripts enabled his Philologika series of scholarly articles, including the Philologika VII (on Arabic and Persian treatises on profane and mystical love). He also discovered the original text of the fantasy anthology Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange. Despite his effective exile from Germany, he was head of the German Orientalist Society in Istanbul and his scholarly work had some supporters in Germany. This support enabled the funding of his proposed Bibliotheca Islamica series of scholarly monographs from 1929 onwards. In the early 1930s he worked on early Arabic alchemical manuscripts, among others, and also pioneered the understanding of the influence of Ancient Greek literature on Arabic culture and science. The election of the Nazi Party in Germany in 1933 meant that Ritter's contract for work was ended, but friends in the German Orientalist Society quietly managed to find a small amount of funding that enabled his work to continue. Then a new and local opportunity arose, due to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's rapid modernisation of Istanbul and Turkey. Thus the newly improved and re-organised Istanbul University asked Ritter to work as a professor. Despite working on a temporary contract, Ritter was tasked with raising a new generation of Turkish scholars, able to work with rigour on the region's ancient literature. Ritter pursued the work with vigour, making his students learn a new language each year.

After the defeat of the Nazis in World War Two Ritter was able to return to Germany in 1949, and this enabled the completion of his most important work: the encyclopaedic manual on the rituals and beliefs of Islamic mysticism Das Meer der Seele (1955 in German). From 1953 he found work as a teaching assistant at the Frankfurt University Institute of Oriental Studies. But homosexuality in Germany was at that time still criminal, and Ritter returned to Istanbul University in 1956. There he would work with UNESCO to catalogue the scattered ancient poetry manuscripts in the various Istanbul archives.

In 1960 Ritter's early and assiduous sympathies with the mystical orders of Islam proved vital to their survival. In the 1920s he had recorded certain dancing rituals directly from the key dancing masters in Istanbul, just before Ataturk officially banned the rituals. The accurate restoration of the rituals in 1960 depended heavily on Ritter's records and interviews. That Ritter was both a musician and a leading scholar helped to establish his authority in this matter. During the last few years of his life he also discovered a tiny group of elderly refugees who still spoke ancient Aramaic, now considered an endangered language. With them Ritter prepared a five-volume dictionary and guide to the grammar. Ritter returned to Germany in 1969 and died on May 19, 1971 in Oberursel.

A biography of Ritter by Josef Van Ess has been published in German, Im Halbschatten Der Orientalist Hellmut Ritter (1892-1971) (Harrassowitz Verlag, 2013). A good list of his published works in German is available on the website of the German National Library and there is an English translation of his major book The Ocean of the Soul: Men, the World and God in the Stories of Farid Al-Din 'Attar.

Publications