Edward Schröder (18 May 1858 – 9 February 1942) was aGermanist andmediaevalist who was a professor at theUniversity of Göttingen and published editions of numerous texts.
Born inWitzenhausen and educated inKassel, Schröder studiedGerman studies at the Universities ofStrasbourg andBerlin and was adocent at the University of Göttingen and then at Berlin. In 1889 he was appointed professor at theUniversity of Marburg and in 1902 at Göttingen, where he spent the rest of his career and died in 1942.[1] His PhD thesis was on the early Middle High GermanAnegenge; his main work for hisHabilitation, which was granted on 20 January 1883, was an unprinted edition of the Legend ofCrescentia from theKaiserchronik;[2] he had been commissioned to edit the entire work for theMonumenta Germaniae Historica.[3]
In 1896, he became a member of theAkademischer Verein für Studierende der neueren Philologie zu Marburg (academic association for students of modern philology at Marburg), a student association later renamed the Marburger Burschenschaft Rheinfranken.[4] From 1891 to 1937, he was either editor or co-editor of theZeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur. From 1908 on, he headed the central collection office for theDeutsches Wörterbuch in Göttingen.[3] In November 1933 he was one of the 300 academics who signed the professorial pledge of allegiance toAdolf Hitler and theNational Socialist State.[5]
In the conflict between the 'Berlin' and 'Leipzig' schools of Germanicphilology, Schröder was an adherent of the Berlin school ofKarl Lachmann and of his teacher,Wilhelm Scherer, and against, for example,Friedrich Kluge. He and his lifelong friendGustav Roethe both appear to have chosen to begin their careers at Göttingen because of its potential as a centre of rigorous Germanic studies scholarship.[2][6] In 1887 Schröder married Gertrud Röthe, Roethe's sister; she died in 1935.[3]
Schröder edited a number of mediaeval German texts, including in addition to theKaiserchronik (1892) a collection of verse tales byKonrad von Würzburg,Zwei altdeutsche Schwänke (1919) andZwei altdeutsche Rittermaeren (1894), containingMoriz von Craûn andPeter von Staufenberg. He worked throughout his life on a book aboutTill Eulenspiegel,Untersuchungen zum Volksbuch von Eulenspiegel, finally published in 1988. He had extremely broad professional interests—fromOld Norse andOld Saxon toKlopstock andGoethe—[3] but loved theHigh Middle Ages best.[7] He also assisted Roethe in completing the revised edition ofJacob Grimm'sDeutsche Grammatik, and after Scherer's death produced the revised edition of hisGeschichte der deutschen Literatur.[3] His studies ofonomastics helped establish the field in Germany.[3] His focus in etymologies was on the inventors of the words, and he sought whenever possible to relate a placename to an event in the life of a person who had originated it.[1][8]
Schröder was a member of the Academies of Sciences ofGöttingen,Prussia,Austria andBavaria and of the Strasburg Scientific Society in Heidelberg, an honorary member of theModern Language Association of America and the Historical Association of Lower Saxony, was appointed aGeheimer Regierungsrat in 1907, and was awarded thePrussian Order of the Crown 3rd class in 1913 and theBavarian Maximilian Order for Science and Art in 1927. He received an honorary doctorate in law from the University of Göttingen in 1931 and was an honorary citizen of Witzenhausen (1925) and Göttingen (1937).[3]
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