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.
Professor Emeritus Ed McDonald (Lafayette College)
December 6, 2020 at 4:20 pm
Here is a copy of what I had just sent to my erstwhile colleague Eric prior to reading the detailed and illuminating obituary:
Hello Eric,
I am dismayed by this shocking news informing us that your father has passed away. It was not so long ago when I saw him last — in Kirby Hall where he delivered an exciting presentation on Friedrich Dürrenmatt. During the reception that followed, I enjoyed taking our joint brief walk down memory lane, returning to those days in Columbia University’s Philosophy Hall when we both wore a younger man’s shoes.
As you know, while I was a graduate student there at Columbia, I found inspiration being in his classes, especially in his course on Romanticism. I am also grateful and indebted to him for his patient tutelage while I was in the throes of writing my dissertation.
The academic world has been diminished suddenly by the loss of this scholarly giant’s passing.
My sincerest condolences both to you and your immediate family — Lee and Theodora. I hope that at some time you might pass on my expression of sympathy to your mother, whom I once met during a flurry of introductions following one of your father’s lectures on Hermann Hesse.
Ed McDonald
Alan Keele
December 7, 2020 at 12:13 am
I became a Princeton graduate student of German Language and Literature in the turbulent year of 1968. I had applied for admission at Princeton in no small part because I had researched some of the top programs in my field — in those days long before the advent of the internet — by reading some books and articles written by various scholars at those institutions. I clearly recall being astonished and excited by the stylish writing, clear thinking, and Renaissance- level erudition of one Theodore Ziolkowski of Princeton University. I knew then that I wanted to be his student. As luck would have it, I was accepted and granted a generous fellowship.
At our first meeting during a Departmental social gathering, I was astonished to discover that this towering figure in my field, whom I had expected to be a venerable older scholar, was a man so young and vibrantly energetic — in his 30’s! — that I must have looked a fool, remarking over and over how unbelievably young he looked. I think Ted realized I was genuinely bowled over rather than being some kind of insincere flatterer, and he responded with a kindness and grace I soon learned was native to his character.
As my wife Linda and I eventually had three small children, it wasn’t long before Ted and his most beautiful, charming, and intelligent wife Yetta took a personal loving interest in our little family living in student housing at Butler Tract, not far from their home at the time. Their kids were still young as well, though a decade or so older than ours, so we had the privilege and honor of knowing the Ziolkowski family “von Haus zu Haus” a formulation Ted famously used to send greetings at the end of each letter to us over the next half century of our friendship.
Meanwhile I was greatly honored to be accepted by Ted as his dissertation advisee. Having him as one’s Doktorvater was considered by the students to be a high accomplishment in the department. He kindly talked me out of a fuzzy notion to “do something with Rilke” and suggested a friend of his, the novelist Paul Schallueck, whom he had met in Cologne at the same time he had befriended the later Nobel prize winner Heinrich Boell. This proved to be a brilliant suggestion, allowing me to enter the fascinating world of post-war German literature by a secret side door, as it were, where I was warmly welcomed and assisted in my work.
My training under Ted could not have prepared me more perfectly for a satisfying career as a Germanist. The only problem, which I soon overcame, was that I simply could not write astonishing books as Ted did, and certainly not at the rate of one per year! I console myself with the conviction, however, that the books and articles I did write, and at the rate I wrote them, were all vastly superior to what they would have been without Ted’s remarkable tutelage and example.
Finally, I believe that as a husband and father, I greatly benefitted from the example set for us by Ted and Yetta whose own family life became a model for our own. Even as our daughter Heather succumbed to her struggle with chronic clinical depression, Ted and especially dearest Yetta, could not have been more loving and solicitous in their support for us. Heather passed away exactly five years ago to the day, December 5, of Ted’s death, which also happens to be the day in 1791 when Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart departed this life.
I’d like to think that all three of these great human beings experienced what Goethe imagined in his poem “An Schwager Kronos” (“Ode to Father Time”), whose last stanza calls on Chronos, here a heavenly coachman, to blow on his horn and ride full speed ahead into the world of the dead, so that the god of the underworld, Orcus, perceives that a noble spirit has arrived, and that the mighty ones who’ve preceded him or her, will rise from their seats in her or his honor:
Töne, Schwager, dein Horn,
Rassle den schallenden Trab,
Dass der Orkus vernehme, ein Fürst kommt,
Drunten von ihren Sitzen
Sich die Gewaltigen lüften.
Alan Keele
Professor Emeritus
Brigham Young University
.
Alan Keele
December 7, 2020 at 12:21 am
(Neglected to mention that four years ago our son Jeremy and his wife Amy named their youngest son Theodore, much to my delight! Teddy is the most delightful and beautiful child imaginable.)
Alan Keele
David Dollenmayer
December 8, 2020 at 4:47 pm
Besides being an incredibly prolific scholar, Ted was an inspiring teacher. I was fortunate to be in his courses as both an undergraduate and a graduate student, and he was generous enough to agree to be my Doktorvater. He awakened my interest in German poetry, the modern novel, and perhaps most memorably the elegiac tradition in Germany from Klopstock, Hölderlin, and Goethe to Rilke and Trakl. He was also enormously kind to a young man from California somewhat abashed at finding himself at an august Ivy League institution. I fondly remember one summer when another German major and I were stuck in vacation jobs in steamy Princeton and Ted and Yetta invited us to a lovely lunch. Since leaving Princeton, I have seldom had occasion to return. The last time I saw Ted was at the celebratory party for the Festschrift in his honor, but we frequently exchanged e-mails and he never failed to attach something new he had written, often self-deprecatingly referring to it as a “little jeu d’esprit.” Would that all our jeus might have half as much esprit!
David Dollenmayer
Emeritus Professor of German
Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Kathleen Komar
December 12, 2020 at 6:57 pm
Few people have had a greater impact on my life and career than did Ted Ziolkowski. As a mentor, he was supportive, encouraging, and, above all, wise. He taught me a great deal beyond the analysis of literature. He never declined to give his help and advice when I needed it. And he and Yetta reminded me how crucial it was also to have a life in addition to a career in the academy. We shared a background from Joliet, Illinois, and a love for Novalis, Rilke and Broch. I can’t imagine the literary or scholarly world without him. He was a man of grace and incredible intellect. He had a relentlessly generous spirit. I am sorry I will never get to hear his voice again. I hear it often when making decisions about my academic career. My deepest condolences go out to his family–and to all of us who learned from him. We will all miss him tremendously!
Thanks, Ted, for everything you have done for all of us!
With Love,
Kathleen Komar
Distinguished Professor of Comparative LIterature
UCLA
Laura M DeLuca
September 12, 2021 at 9:23 pm
Ted Ziolkowski was Dean of the Princeton Graduate School when I was hired as the first Graduate College Coordinator in 1990. I was impressed by his discipline and how he inspired graduate students to work hard and make the most of their experience. One of my favorite events is the holiday party that Yetta and he hosted at their home. It made a big impression on me how inclusive they were and remembered to invite all the maintenance, housing and dining staff.
My condolences to his family and especially to Yetta.
Sincerely, Laura DeLuca