Der ganze Aristoteles - Wissenschaft und Übersetzen

Abstract

This text presents one of the largest long-term projects of the GDR publishing house Akademie Verlag Berlin - the Aristotle Complete Edition in 20 volumes, which has not yet been completed, but is now supervised and distributed by DeGruyter. The history of the origins of the publishing project and its circumstances, but above all the most important players, are presented, especially the life and work of the first editor, Ernst Grumach, a Germanist and classical philologist from Königsberg, who eked out an existence in the SS-controlled administration of looted books during the Nazi era and sought new fulfilment in academia after the war. As a professor at Berlin's Humboldt University and employee of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR, he initiated the project of the new Aristotle Complete Edition, not coincidentally beginning under post-war conditions with the three volumes on Aristotelian ethics. The project proves to be a truly interwoven co-operation of classical philologists in the German-speaking world. The fundament for the discussion is Mitchel Ash's concept of the interaction between science and politics, where politics plays a greater role in times of upheaval than in times of ‘normal’ science.