"Enveloped by language" is how one former Swarthmore student described Franz Mautner, who taught German language and literature at the College from 1955 to 1972. But he was not simply a Germanist. For Mautner, "Greek and Latin were among the celestial bodies that wandered the heavens of literature."

Born in Vienna, Mautner studied at the University of Heidelberg in Germany and at the University of Vienna, where he received a Ph.D. in German language and literature in 1926. At that time in Austria, Jews were prevented from teaching at the university level, so Mautner and his wife, who were both Jewish, taught at Gymnasia. But within days of Hitler’s occupation of Austria in 1938, both were dismissed from their positions.

Even at that early point in his career, Mautner demonstrated his ability to make strong connections with his students. According to his daughter Johanna Mautner Plaut ’58, one of her father’s Gymnasium students "courageous[ly]" wrote to him not long after his dismissal to thank him for his teaching and for giving him an appreciation of the German language. The letter touched him deeply, and he wrote in his reply:

"Amidst the worries and suffering that have come to me and my fellow teachers, it is a consolation for me that my life’s work—to convey to others my love for the German language—has not been in vain.… But I do not want to burden you with the historical events that have come to you, that must be seen as the intertwined consequences of deep-rooted historical and intellectual developments…. Your letter did me a great deal of good. I, too, will never forget you."

After the war, the student tracked his former professor down through the Red Cross, and they developed a deep friendship.

With the help of his older brother, a bank economist in Amsterdam, Mautner and his family left Europe in July 1938, when daughter Johanna was 1 1/2 years old. He and his family went to the United States, and his mother, other brother, and two sisters went to London. But the brother stayed in Amsterdam. "When Holland was occupied," Plaut says, "my uncle was tragically sent to the camps, first Terezin and then Auschwitz, where he was killed."

After arriving in the United States in 1938, Mautner taught at a number of colleges, including Ohio Wesleyan and Kenyon. In 1955, Plaut’s sophomore year, he arrived at Swarthmore. "It was exactly the right place for him," she says. "In his later years, he would often say how lucky he was to have come. He particularly appreciated Swarthmore’s Quaker values and the quality of the students."

During his distinguished career, Mautner wrote more than 50 articles and six books and edited 10 more, all on German literature. His critical works on three writers in particular—18th-century German physicist and aphorist Georg Lichtenberg; 19th-century Austrian satirical playwright Johann Nestroy; and Karl Kraus, an early 20th-century Austrian satirist—are credited with helping raise them from relative obscurity to prominence in the German-speaking world.

Honors followed, including his election to the German Academy for Language and Literature in 1977, a rare honor for scholars not living in Germany or Austria. He also received the Cross of Honor, First Class, for Merit in Arts and Letters in 1969 from the Austrian government and, later, a silver medal from the City of Vienna. Mautner never commented on the irony.

"My father was a real gentleman, even in his very old age," Plaut says. "He preserved his European chivalry." Thompson Bradley offered an example of this at Mautner’s memorial service at the Swarthmore Friends Meetinghouse. "I learned the word ‘colleague’ from Franz," he says. "When I received tenure, he was the only person who wrote me a letter to congratulate and welcome me as his colleague."

Mautner surely embodied the word. Says Bradley: "He looked and always behaved like the fine, principled, European scholar that he was."

Additional source: Charles A. Miller’s [’59] "A Recollection of Franz H. Mautner, Teacher and Friend" (1995)

 

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