Theodore Joseph Ziolkowski, renowned American Germanist and comparatist, prolific author of 35 books on literature, religion, and culture, died around 6 p.m. on December 5, 2020, in Kirkland Village, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Known as Professor Ziolkowski to thousands of students in his lecture courses and seminars at Princeton University, and as Dean Ziolkowski from his thirteen years at the helm of the Graduate School there, he was Ted to close friends and acquaintances.
Ziolkowski was born on September 30, 1932, in Birmingham, Alabama. His mother, née Cecilia Jankowski, a second-generation Polish-American from the Chicago area, taught piano. His father immigrated to the United States from Poland. A composer and concert pianist who trained at the Stern Conservatory in Berlin and with Ignacy Jan Paderewski, he found security and happiness during the Great Depression as a music professor at the present-day University of Montevallo. In his Americanization, Mieczysław Ziółkowski shed the accents in the spelling of his names and came to be routinely called Professor Z for short.
As a boy, Theodore Ziolkowski (in those days Teddy to almost everyone) excelled scholastically, completing his secondary education at 15. In addition, he starred on the high-school football field and was even offered an athletic scholarship to the University of Alabama. His main extracurricular passion was the trumpet, especially jazz. For many years, he played the brass instrument professionally on most weekends, deriving from it a major source of income until he set the instrument aside in his early thirties. At that juncture he attained a full professorship—and realized that the advent of Elvis Presley would ring the rock-and-roll death knell for his style of trumpeting.
Theodore’s father brought with him all the trappings of an Old World formation. He peppered his heavily accented and colorfully formulated English with proverbs in Latin, German, Polish, and Russian, to mention only four tongues. The lush linguistic texture of the household inspired both his children, Theodore and his much younger brother and future classicist John, to immerse themselves in languages.
Theodore Ziolkowski received his A.B. from Duke University at 18 in 1951 and married Yetta Goldstein, his partner for life, a fellow Alabamian whose father had likewise emigrated from what is today Poland. A year later Ziolkowski earned his A.M. from the same institution, and the young couple had their eldest child, a daughter. In 1957 he took his Ph.D. from Yale University, where he studied under Hermann Weigand, Sterling Professor of German Literature. These busy times witnessed the birth of his first son in 1956, his second in 1958. Also in 1958, Yetta and he forged a friendship in Cologne with Heinrich Böll that would endure until the end of the German novelist’s lifetime.
Ziolkowski’s master’s thesis, focused on the translation of the Iliad by the German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin, gave early evidence of his lifelong preoccupation with the reception of the Classics in later literature. His dissertation, on Hermann Hesse and Novalis, displayed his fascination with the continued vitality of Romanticism in what at that point was still relatively recent German prose: the Nobel prize-winning Hesse did not die until 1962.
After holding short-term appointments for a few years at Yale University, Ziolkowski moved to Columbia University in 1962; but he first attained real permanency when summoned as a full professor to Princeton University in 1964. From the start he taught large lecture courses, especially a perennially popular one on the development of the European novel. In acknowledgment of his teaching and scholarship, in 1969 he was named Class of 1900 Professor of German and Comparative Literature. In administration, his highest and most demanding service extended from 1979 to 1992 as Dean of the Graduate School.
In the 1960s his oeuvre comprised, in longer examinations, one devoted to Hermann Hesse and another tome bearing the title Dimensions of the Modern Novel: German Texts and European Contexts (1969). In the 1970s and 1980s he maintained those areas of attraction but delved ever more into the analysis of literary themes. His most innovative book from this phase may well have been Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus (1972, recipient of the National Book Award). The 1990s saw his range expand yet again, with the far-reaching German Romanticism and Its Institutions (1990), the now-classic Virgil and the Moderns (1993), an exploration of the appearance of legal crises in literature entitled The Mirror of Justice: Literary Reflections of Legal Crises (1997, winner of the Christian Gauss Award from the Phi Beta Kappa Society), a study of the meaning held by towers as an image in literature, and, finally, the first in a series of volumes in German about the cultural role of specific cities in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany.
After supposedly retiring in 2001 from active duty, Ziolkowski embarked upon what proved to be the most remarkably productive period of his life in bookwriting, at the tempo of one annually across two decades. As an emeritus, he was kidded admiringly by his family for behaving like an assistant professor bucking for tenure. Long before retirement, he had earned a quiver of distinctions in North America, such as multiple Fulbrights, a Guggenheim, and a James Russell Lowell Prize, and he had merited recognition from the profession of language-and-literature scholars by election to the presidency of the Modern Language Association. Now his center of gravity was often situated in Europe.
Late in his career Yetta and he were drawn to spend at least a few months each year in Berlin. The devotion to Germany was reciprocated. In due course he was singled out for tribute by his peers there by such honors as the Goethe-Medaille, Jacob-und-Wilhelm-Grimm Preis, Forschungspreis from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and Bundesverdienstkreuz 1. Klasse. On a personal level, he treasured the ties he forged, flanked by his wife, through regular participation in the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung in Darmstadt, and the Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen.
The score of books, mostly in English but sometimes in German, from the past twenty years covers a breathtaking gamut. The final one, just out in 2020, entitled Roman Poets in Modern Guise: The Reception of Roman Poetry since World War I, caps his many explorations of the afterlives that the Greek and Roman Classics have enjoyed from the late eighteenth century until now. But other volumes to attest to his deepening and widening attraction to a host of other topics, especially involving religion and myth, from Gilgamesh down to the present day. Three examples, out of many, are The Sin of Knowledge: Ancient Themes and Modern Variations (2000), Modes of Faith: Secular Surrogates for Lost Religious Belief (2007), and Uses and Abuses of Moses: Literary Representations since the Enlightenment (2016).
Shortly after turning 88, Theodore Ziolkowski entered the advanced stages of heart failure. To the last he retained his gusto for music and poetry. He rhapsodized about Bach, and he recited from memory German verses by Goethe, Hölderlin, and Novalis, especially those relating to particular sites, from the tops of mountains to the bottoms of mines, that he had visited with his wife of nearly seventy years. Often they would take turns in reciting poems, with a special favorite being Goethe’s “Wanderer’s Nightsong II,” with its closing lines “Warte nur, balde / Ruhest du auch,” translated by Longfellow as “Wait; soon like these / Thou too shalt rest.”
No further new books will appear with the letters Theodore Ziolkowski on the title page. No fourth dozen will spill onto another shelf. In the stock formulation of “publish or perish,” he took care to fulfill the first verb before succumbing to the second. That thought would make him happy, since he liked to finish well and to meet deadlines.
He is survived by his beloved wife Yetta Ziolkowski, of Princeton, NJ, and Bethlehem, PA; brother John Ziolkowski, of Arlington, VA; and daughter Margaret Ziolkowski and her husband Robert Thurston, of Miami, OH; elder son Jan and his wife Elizabeth Ziolkowski, of Newton, MA; and younger son Eric Ziolkowski and his wife Lee Upton, of Easton, PA. Also grieving his loss are a grandson and six granddaughters, along with two great-granddaughters and two great-grandsons. Despite his zeal for reading, learning, and writing, Theodore Ziolkowski cared deeply about those he loved and put his values as a humanist into practice as a richly rounded human being.
