User:Youngerpliny/Paul Maas (classical scholar)

Paul Lazarus Maas (18 November 1880 - 15 July 1964) was a classical scholar who specialized in Greek and Byzantine philology. Born in Frankfurt (Germany), he fled from the Nazi regime to Oxford (England) where he spent the last 25 years of his life.

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
Maas, Paul Lazarus (1880–1964), classical scholar and Byzantinist, was born at 49 Niedenau Strasse, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, on 18 November 1880, the eldest of the five children of Dr Maximilian Maas (1852–1923), banker and private scholar, and Henriette, née Oppenheimer-Prins (1856–1940). After school education in Frankfurt and Freiburg-im-Breisgau he studied at Berlin and Munich universities from 1898 and published his prize-winning Munich dissertation Studien zum poetischen Plural bei den Roemern in 1903. As a student he also made his mark by his performance in seminars conducted by the great Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, from whom he occasionally dared to dissent, and by composing at the age of nineteen an article on Greek lyric metre. His subsequent scholarly career was mainly devoted to Greek and Byzantine philology, and when he became Privatdozent in Berlin in 1910 he insisted, with the support of Wilamowitz and Eduard Norden, that his official title should mention both spheres of interest.

After graduating Maas had been able to live on private means and so did not take the then usual step of becoming a schoolmaster before obtaining a position as a university teacher. In 1909 he married Karen Raeder (d. 1960), a Dane, whom he had met through his musical interests (he played the piano, violin, and viola, and enjoyed opera). There were four children, born between 1910 and 1921. During the First World War Maas was a member of the ambulance service, stationed in France and Belgium until June 1916 and thereafter in Turkey. Little is known in detail of his experiences, but he acquired an interest in medicine and it is recorded that while in Istanbul he conducted a concert of Wagner's music given by a German army orchestra. In 1920 he was promoted aussserordentlicher Professor. Some of his most important publications first appeared in the 1920s, in particular his Griechische Metrik (1923, 32 pp.) and Textkritik (1927, 18 pp.); both were later revised and translated into English (as Greek Metre and Textual Criticism). These are works of lasting value, which established Maas's position as one of the leading scholars of his generation; they show an astonishing and unrivalled capacity for concise and exact formulation. It is not surprising that when young he had been tempted to study mathematics. Maas in fact became notorious for the compressed brevity of his style, dubbed by some colleagues illa Maasiana brevitas. Many of his contributions to learned journals occupied one page or less (which did not prevent one of them being referred to as occupying ‘pp. 1ff.’). Occasionally his style was a drawback, when a competent colleague failed to appreciate the full force of an argument. The brevity of Textual Criticism had one curious consequence: the most important review of it, by G. Pasquali in Gnomon, occupied some forty pages and was therefore twice as long. Pasquali was stimulated to write his Storia della tradizione e critica del testo (1934; 2nd edn 1952); every scholar concerned with the transmission of Greek and Latin literature needs to read both Maas and Pasquali.

In 1930, at an age rather above the average by the standards of the time, Maas was appointed to a chair in Königsberg, where he settled happily, being able to pursue the same hobbies, especially gardening, as in Berlin. But though he was and always remained a patriotic German, his Jewish origin led to his dismissal from office in April 1934. A large number of colleagues courageously signed a letter of protest, but to no avail. He continued to live in Königsberg despite the gradually increasing danger; it appears that he was still able to travel and conduct his research with relatively little hindrance until November 1938, when he was arrested and imprisoned for a week at the time of Kristallnacht. In December he applied for permission to emigrate to Oxford, where he had visited Gilbert Murray in 1909, and in that same month J. Enoch Powell visited him, urging him to come at once. But he seems to have been in no hurry to use the visa for entry to Britain that Powell had obtained for him. Only in July 1939 did he get permission to emigrate, and even then delayed departure until 25 August, travelling first to Hamburg. The ferry service from there to English ports had already been suspended and he was tempted to return home; but his host, Bruno Snell, an eminent scholar who bravely resisted the Nazi regime, insisted that he take the next train to Holland, where he managed to find a ferry.

In Oxford, which Maas had revisited for the congress of papyrologists in 1937, he was soon made welcome. Though he never had an official position in the university, a post was created for him at the Clarendon Press thanks to the initiative of Kenneth Sisam; he was a special adviser, reading the submitted manuscripts of numerous learned monographs and helping with the revision of Liddell and Scott's Greek–English lexicon. Since he had a good knowledge of the literature of several European languages he was able to deal with a wide range of material, and in a few publications he ventured to discuss questions of English literature. Like other refugees he was briefly interned on the Isle of Man during the summer of 1940. When asked whether his experience there had been unpleasant he replied ‘It did not matter. I was able to make two emendations in the text of Euripides' Medea’ (private information).

At the end of the war Maas was not greatly tempted by the idea of returning to Germany; he preferred to continue with the scholarly work that the Clarendon Press enabled him to do. In 1949 he was made a member of Balliol College. From time to time he visited Germany in response to invitations to lecture. There is a hint that at one point he contemplated the possibility of going to settle in Israel, but nothing came of this, and he always retained his German citizenship. In 1953 he received compensation from the German government and this enabled his wife, who had survived in Denmark and Sweden during the war, to take up permanent residence with him in Oxford.

The only large volume in Maas's oeuvre is the definitive edition of Romanos, the sixth-century hymnographer whose work—sermons in verse which had musical accompaniment—ranks as one of the outstanding Byzantine literary achievements. Maas had published articles on the subject as far back as 1906, and a provisional text of the edition existed in 1931 (a copy of this, deposited in Athens, was later recovered); but Maas was unable to bring with him to Oxford his more advanced draft, and the project was completed thanks to the good offices of C. A. Trypanis; it appeared in 1963, followed in 1970 by a second volume containing texts of dubious authenticity.

Maas was a striking figure, frequently to be seen riding his cycle, wearing an open-necked shirt; he never had an overcoat even in the coldest weather. In addition to gardening and music he enjoyed swimming until at least the age of seventy, and he adapted well to English life, even to the extent of acquiring a taste for porridge (he once astonished the staff of a Cambridge college by asking for a second helping). He had no general conversation; visitors were asked at once what it was that they had come to discuss. The pursuit of truth was a priority. When taking a visitor round the chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge, in the search for the tomb of Richard Bentley he was undeterred by the fact that a service was in progress. His willingness to help other scholars, young and old, was notable, and he conducted a vigorous correspondence on innumerable postcards. Many eminent scholars acknowledged in their prefaces the value of his advice; among them was Gilbert Murray, to whose house on Boars Hill he was a frequent and congenial visitor. His standing was recognized by election to the British Academy in 1941, by an honorary DLitt from Oxford in 1959, and by the Orden pour le mérite from the German government in 1963; he was then too infirm to travel to the embassy in London, so the German minister, Rudolf Thierfelder, himself the cousin of a classical scholar and direct descendant of the celebrated nineteenth-century German scholar Gottfried Hermann, came to Oxford to perform the ceremony, and the vice-chancellor, Sir Walter Oakeshott, made a point of attending. Maas died shortly afterwards in an Oxford nursing home, on 15 July 1964.

N. G. Wilson Sources

E. Mensching, Über einen verfolgten deutschen Altphilologen: Paul Maas, 1880–1964 (Berlin, 1987) · The Times (17 July 1964) · H. Lloyd-Jones, Gnomon, 37 (1965), 219–21; repr. in H. Lloyd-Jones, Blood for the ghosts (1982), 215–18 · H. Lloyd-Jones, Eikasmos, 4 (1993), 255–61 · private information (2005) [D. Mervyn Jones] Archives

Bodl. Oxf., collations, MSS Gr liturg c.5–7 · Bodl. Oxf., corresp. with Gilbert Murray · Bodl. Oxf., Society for Protection of Science and Learning

Likenesses

E. Stumpp, drawing, 1933, repro. in Mensching, Über einen verfolgten deutschen Altphilologen, 25 · H. Fechenbach, oils, 1941, repro. in Mensching, Über einen verfolgten deutschen Altphilologen, 80 · photograph, c.1960, repro. in P. Maas, Kleine Schriften (Munich, 1973), frontispiece · photograph, 1950, repro. in A select list of the writings of Paul Maas (1951), frontispiece Wealth at death